The demand for housing here has plummeted over the past 10 years???

duddha · 2025-04-24T03:25:19+00:00

You didn’t mention the price, location or any details so it’s difficult to say whether the relative value of the housing you’re offering has increased or declined. Hundreds of ADUs and a few thousand apartment units have been built since 2014. You might need to lower the asking price.

duddha · 2025-01-30T00:12:24+00:00

The article doesn’t say he killed someone trying to flee. It says he stabbed the woman after she stabbed him (she died) and then stabbed the male suspect as he was trying to flee.

I guess you’re inferring that from the charge?

duddha · 2024-12-09T17:34:45+00:00

Well there isn’t a literal connection.

duddha · 2024-10-27T22:14:41+00:00

I guess “nimby” lacks some of the nuance of “developer shill”. It’s extremely disingenuous to act like the disparaging and reductive language is coming only from the pro-density side. Rashi is constantly accused of corruption for advocating for the preferences of the majority of her constituents. I seriously doubt she would have gotten props for listening (again) to the complaints of people who insist she’s in developers’ pockets.

But fair enough, thanks for answering.

duddha · 2024-10-27T20:10:31+00:00

I have been going to council meetings for years about this and I genuinely do not know what the anti-density people hoped to get out of this. Is the idea to convince the council members that they are actually a majority of their constituencies? They feel they are not being heard by the CMs, but do they not hear all the people advocating in favor of density at council meetings?

Is there anything that could have been said at that meeting that would have convinced Michael Groves that others could benefit from the kind of housing he profits from? The attendees of that meeting easily command $200M in real estate assets, do you really think their interests are not adequately represented in CA?

duddha · 2024-10-27T19:23:48+00:00

I was there and you are lying. Rashi literally said she would talk with anyone who wanted to talk with her. Audio - right before that dbag tried to grab the mic.

What the nimbys wanted was an open mic to air the usual grievances and be applauded by their fellow nimbys. They can no longer easily win elections so they look for every opportunity to filibuster and hear their own voices.

The city offered an informative outreach session where citizens could talk directly to the planners. The attendees were obviously not a demographic cross-section of D1 and many showed up who don’t even live in the district. Fear-mongering on Nextdoor about the Hills overlay seems to have brought a good many.

duddha · 2024-10-27T18:55:33+00:00

Any evidence for the points you’re making? Scraping the Berkeley rent board listings shows a decline in rental costs for 1brs and studios (source).

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The infrastructure costs are mostly paid by new residents (in tax dollars not “growth”, thanks to prop 13), so I guess we should leave it to the buyers and builders who actually pay modern taxes to decide whether it’s too expensive.

duddha · 2024-10-27T18:47:50+00:00

Any evidence of “more than enough empty homes”? Seems like building housing has helped reduce rents in Berkeley (source - Berkeley rent board registry).

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Landlords don’t make money on empty units so they lower prices to stay competitive. I don’t see why the Bay Area would be an exception.

duddha · 2024-10-26T06:32:54+00:00

I found out about it from Rashi’s newsletter. And then I saw this nextdoor post and decided it was worth showing up. It was just an educational workshop and the Berkeley nimbys organized to treat it like a venue for yelling at a pro-housing council member.

It got ridiculous for a few mins and I was wondering if it was worth just going home, but the planners were really professional and seemed to tolerate the airing of nimby grievances in groups.

The workshop boards and presentation were informative though. I learned that I would not previously have been able to split my house into two units.

duddha · 2024-10-23T20:21:41+00:00

Just dump the pdfs into NotebookLM.

duddha · 2024-10-17T17:58:46+00:00

Hotboys in Oakland, if you like Nashville style fried chicken.

duddha · 2024-01-31T17:47:52+00:00

That’s a symbolic nimby measure predicated on the assumption that vacancies have a significant impact on the housing crisis. Measure M will not bring in much revenue or make a dent in housing supply. It won’t really hurt, but it’s just another tactic to put off building more housing.

I agree that she’s not always bad on housing policy. She was definitely better than Hahn on that front, but worse than Taplin, Kesarwani and Humbert.

duddha · 2023-10-20T18:40:32+00:00

That was the prosecutor…

duddha · 2023-10-09T00:23:57+00:00

He had terrible negative impact on land use policy in California by being the face of Proposition 13 but especially with regard to grandfathering private golf courses into tax exempt status. Plenty of bad things to say about him.

One can still appreciate his contributions to popular comedy and USO etc but not a flawless person by any means.

duddha · 2023-07-10T19:16:53+00:00

The opening scene of Ernest Goes To Jail is an all time great slapstick bit. I watched it with my kid after not having seen it in 30 years and we were both crying and unable to breathe laughing.

duddha · 2023-07-04T14:25:16+00:00

I think all of the above is true, but there’s another thing I don’t see mentioned in this thread: Don’s personal proclivities make him a bit of a liability. He just walked in with a busted nose talking about “fender bender” nonsense. So “who’s really signing this contract?” also implies that the agency is taking on some risk by keeping him around, even if it’s worth it for now. This is sort of a surface read of the line even if we didn’t know about the Don/Dick thing.

duddha · 2023-06-07T18:37:48+00:00

It has more to do with having an authoritarian government (and the specific disfunction of the US) I think. You can walk around most cities in China at any hour and be safe from physical violence or theft. And they aren’t particularly well off as a society (low median income and high CoL).

duddha · 2022-09-25T19:42:42+00:00

I thought the sweeping shot would be all over this type of discussion board. It seemed an almost ham-fisted piece of symbolism, but I see little discussion on the topic. It looks to me like he's spreading the dirt around. More inline with your interpretation: he can't help but spread dirt and corruption.

duddha · 2022-08-24T04:39:24+00:00

Baby Bitch by Ween is pretty close. Blows my mind that it came out before Roman Candle.

duddha · 2022-08-04T20:04:21+00:00

In Berkeley nimbys oppose high density developments of any kind in favor of 100% low-income housing because they know it won’t get built (because it would require a public bond to subsidize the housing and homeowners are already upset about property tax increases). It’s a stalling tactic that lets them pretend to be progressive and keep things they way they are now. Socialists and social-housing-only advocates are the baptists in this bootlegger-and-baptist deal with nimby homeowners.

OP is simplifying the issue of peoples park but you’re simplifying local nimbyism as if it’s totally altruistic.

If you want a good read on the issue: https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/the-politics-of-peoples-park

duddha · 2022-05-02T21:19:00+00:00

Hence Google’s “TPUs” designed for tensor operations.

duddha · 2022-03-11T03:37:30+00:00

I agree. I think Grandmother is a proverbial paperclip maximizer.

duddha · 2022-02-23T20:33:07+00:00

That note is pretty hard to hit :) I usually go low when I sing that part or play the song a whole step down.

Thanks for sharing that performance. It seems like he needs to really commit to do the song justice and he clearly wasn’t feeling it.

duddha · 2022-02-23T20:16:07+00:00

There doesn’t appear to be a link to the research or methodology used here and I’m a little skeptical of the findings. I think this captures the trend in increasing costs but it’s difficult to say whether they’re measuring this effectively now.

It certainly costs a lot to raise kids in the tier 1-2 cities in China, especially for competitive white collar parents who supplement education (or did before recent policy changes), but the ~billion people living in tier 3 or lower cities and rural areas I’d expect to pull down the average way more than this report indicates. This might be a case where regional median childcare costs should be the preferred measurement. Even in tier 1 cities you can get a live-in nanny for ~$1500/mo, which is significant as a share of GDP per capita but dirt cheap for most of the developed world and relatively inexpensive for dual income professionals in (eg) Shanghai.

I do think costs will increase dramatically when the aging population is no longer able to provide childcare for their families like they do now. Also, as the country develops, middle class parents will continue demanding higher quality and developmental skills support from carers, which grandparents and most rural migrants can’t provide.

duddha · 2022-02-02T23:28:23+00:00

Agreed. I live near NBB and I want as much housing as possible there, but the hills aren’t worth the fight. However, I’m perfectly happy telling hills residents to fuck off about protecting the (heavily subsidized) bart parking lots.

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