Mayor Karen Bass is such a disgrace to Los Angeles. The state of California is FINALLY close to doing SOMETHING to make progress on the housing crisis through SB 79, and she's publicly asking Gavin Newsom to veto it. SB 79 would legalize the building of midrise apartments near public transit stops (which would be huge since it's currently illegal to build multifamily housing in most of LA) and she's trying to kill it. She promised to fight homelessness but would die before allowing a house to be built in LA. She's anti-housing, anti-transit, anti-environment, and anti-Los Angeles.
Blatantly Partisan Party Review XXI (federal 2025): Sustainable Australia–Universal Basic Income
Running where: all states and territories for the Senate (no House candidates)
Prior reviews (under many variations on their name): federal 2013, federal 2016, VIC 2018, NSW 2019, federal 2019, federal 2022, VIC 2022, NSW 2023, WA 2025
What I said before: “I am aware of some well-meaning people in this party with centrist or centre-left environmental views, but the overall thrust is NIMBY and anti-immigration and I cannot in good faith offer any endorsement.” (NSW 2023)
What I think this year: Personally, I would be embarrassed to stand for a party with so few principles that it modifies its registered name to include a slogan to lure in low-info voters. SusAus, however, have fewer scruples. To lightly plagiarise my WA 2025 state election review, SusAus is the party that has never had a name it didn’t want to change. Starting life as the Stable Population Party, the federal party rebadged from “Sustainable Australia Party–Stop Overdevelopment/Corruption” to “Sustainable Australia Party–Universal Basic Income” in November 2023. If they could stop tacking slogans or policy principles onto their name, that would be grand.
SusAus have adopted a policy to provide a Universal Basic Income (UBI) of $500 per week to Australian citizens. I have noticed pronouncements in favour of a UBI have been spreading among some minor parties and candidates over the last couple of electoral cycles, and not always from the left. Whether promoting a UBI this prominently will win SusAus much of the vote remains to be seen. What strikes me is that they position a UBI as an environmental measure as part of a degrowth mindset to reduce demand and consumption, i.e. people will need to work less (and thus produce less) if they have a guaranteed $500 per week. This makes it tremendously ironic, then, that SusAus’s page on a UBI has a summary from ChatGPT. No, I’m not just saying it looks like a ChatGPT summary; it is headed “We asked ChatGPT to summarise the below article and this was the result”. Yes, ChatGPT, an environmentally destructive technology with a gluttonous demand for electricity and water. Perhaps SusAus needs to reflect on their own practices before lecturing anybody else about consumption and waste.
Beyond this, SusAus is what SusAus has always been: an anti-immigration party of NIMBYs. Their supposed solution to Australia’s housing crisis is merely to reduce demand by slashing immigration. They have a completely outlandish claim on their website that “SAP is a pro-immigration party. As part of our plan, we simply support returning Australia's annual permanent immigration program from around 200,000pa to the normal Twentieth Century average level of 70,000pa.” Folks, please. If you want fewer people to come here, you are anti-immigration by definition. Slashing migration to just 35% of its current level is quite obviously an anti-immigration stance. Moreover, the twentieth-century average needs to be calibrated with respect to the population of the time: i.e. if 70,000 people migrated to Australia in 1925, proportionally that is a much bigger intake than today, as the population a century ago was about 5.94 million, less than 22% the current population of roughly 27.31 million.
Moreover, a steep reduction in future immigration does not solve housing problems for everybody already here, nor does it address the serious effects of suburban sprawl, but SusAus seem quite happy with sprawl because they also want to “stop overdevelopment” (until recently so important it was part of their name), which is code for apartments. Heaven forbid we have compact cities that support active and public transport and where car use is unnecessary or undesirable for most purposes. You won’t find SusAus advocating for that.
To echo what I said in my WA 2025 review, “To be honest, I am not terribly interested in engaging with the rest of their policies because their core principles are discrediting.” If you are an environmentalist but you share One Nation’s attitudes on migration, this is the party for you. Everybody else, look elsewhere.
Recommendation: Give Sustainable Australia–Universal Basic Income a weak or no preference. In terms of parties that might have a superficial appeal for left-wing voters but about which I have serious reservations, I suggest that SusAus be placed below Fusion, except in Queensland where Fusion’s lead Senate candidate is affiliated with Democracy First.
Re zoning regulation reform: could you go into detail as what that would look like in terms of wiping the slate clean. I feel like it would be better to go the houston route and just be zoning free
You do not want to go the Houston route.
Houston may claim to be "zoning-free" - and to be fair, it doesn't have some of the more common regulations on land use, or density, or height restrictions (more on this in a minute) - but the reality is far more complicated and the status quo is not one that's friendly to the interests of working-class and poor residents, or to the possibility of sustainable urbanism.
The answer to NIMBYism isn't to abolish all regulations and let the free market rip, it's to surgically target zoning, planning, and litigation that is used against affordable housing, public/social housing, mass transit, clean energy, and walkable neighborhoods, and to replace it with new forms of regulation that encourage these forms of development.
So let's take take these categories in order.
Zoning
As I tell my Urban Studies students, zoning is both one of the most subtle and yet comprehensive ways in which the state shapes the urban environment - but historically it has been used almost exclusively in the interests of racism and classism. Reforming zoning requires going over the code with a fine-toothed comb to single out all the many ways in which zoning is used to make affordable housing impossible:
The most important one to tackle first is density zoning and building heights limitations. The former directly limits how many buildings you can have per unit of land (usually per acre), while the latter limits how big the buildings can be (expressed either as the number of stories or the number of feet, or as both). Closely associated with these zoning regulations are minimum lot size regulations (which regulate how much land each individual parcel of real estate has to cover, and thus how many how many housing units can be built in a given area), and lot coverage, setbacks, and minimum yard requirements (which limit how much square footage of a lot can be built on, and what kinds of structures you can build).
the other big one is use zoning. To begin with, we need to phase out "single use" zoning that designates certain areas as exclusively residential or commercial or industrial (a major factor that drives car-centric development, makes walkable neighborhoods impossible, and discourages the "insula" style apartment building that has been the core of urbanism since Ancient Rome) in favor of "mixed use" zoning that allows for neighborhoods that combine residential and commercial uses. Equally importantly, we need to eliminate single-family zoning and adopt zoning rules that allow for a mix of different kinds of housing (ADUs, duplexes and triplexes, rowhouses/terraced houses, apartment buildings).
finally, the most insidious zoning requirements are seemingly incidental regulations. For example, mandatory parking minimums not only prioitize car-dependent versus transit-oriented development but also eat up huge amounts of space per lot. The most nakedly classist is "unrelated persons" zoning, which is used to prevent poorer people from subdividing houses into apartments, which zaps young people who are looking to be roommates and older people looking to finance their retirements by running boarding houses or taking in lodgers, as well as landlords looking to convert houses from owner-occupied to rental properties.
So I would argue that the goal of reform should be not to eliminate zoning, but rather to establish model zoning codes that have been stripped of the historical legacies of racism and classism.
Planning
Similar to how zoning shouldn't be abolished but reformed, the correct approach to planning isn't to abolish planning departments wholesale, but to streamline the planning process - because the problem is that right now the planning process is too slow, which raises the costs of all kinds of development (we're focusing on housing right now, but the same holds true for clean energy projects), and it allows NIMBY groups to abuse the public hearings and environmental review process to block projects that are good for the environment and working-class and poor people but bad for affluent homeowners.
As those Ezra Klein interviews indicate, this is beginning to change due to a combination of reforms at both the state and federal level to speed up the CEQA and EPA environmental review process in a number of ways. For example, one change that's being made is to require planning agencies and environmental agencies to report on the environmental impact of not doing a project as well, to shift the discussion away from petty complaints about noise and traffic and "neighborhood character" (i.e, coded racism and classism) and towards real discussions of social and environmental justice.
At the same time, more is needed - especially to reform the public hearing process. While originally intended by Jane Jacobs and other activists in the 1970s as a democratic reform that would give local communities a voice in the planning process, "participatory planning" has become a way for special interests to exercise an unaccountable veto power over development. Because younger, poorer and more working class, and communities of color often don't have time to attend public hearing sessions during the workday, these meetings become dominated by older, whiter, and richer residents who claim to speak for the whole of the community.
Moreover, because community boards are appointed rather than elected and public hearings operate on a first-come-first-serve basis, an unrepresentative minority can create a false impression of community opposition by "stacking the mike" and dialing up their level of militancy and aggression in the face of elected officials and civil servants who want to avoid controversy. (It's a classic case of diffuse versus concentrated interests, something that I spend a lot of classroom time making sure that my students learn.)
Again, the point shouldn't be to eliminate public hearings and other forms of participatory planning, but to reform them so that they're more representative (shifting public hearings to weekends and allowing people to comment via Zoom and other online forums, conducting surveys of community opinion, using a progressive stack and requiring equal time between pro and anti speakers, etc.) and to streamline the review process for model projects in categories like affordable housing, clean energy, mass transit, etc.
Litigation
Alongside the main planning process, there is also a need to reform the litigation process around development. In addition to traditional tort lawsuits from property owners claiming damage to their property from development, a lot of planning and environemntal legislation allows for private groups to sue over a host of issues - whether the agency followed the correct procedures, whether it took into account concerns about this impact or that impact, and so forth.
As we saw with the case of Berkeley NIMBYs who used CEQA to block student housing projects over environmental impacts around "noise," this process can be used to either block projects outright, or even if the NIMBYs eventually lose in court, to draw out the process until projects fall apart due to lack of funding or the proponents simply lose their patience and give up.
This is why we're starting to see significant reforms to both state and federal legislation to streamline the litigation process. The categorical exemptions from review that I discussed above also have implications for litigation - you can't sue over reviews that didn't happen - but there are also efforts to speed up the litigation process through reducing what counts as "administrative record" or by putting a nine-month cap on court proceedings.
Again, this is an area where you have to be very surgical in your changes. Especially when the politics of the issue divide environmental groups and create odd coalitions between labor, business, climate change activists, and anti-regulation conservatives, you have to be careful that the changes you are making benefit affordable housing, clean energy, mass transit and the like, not oil pipelines and suburban sprawl.
Rich assholes would love for you to believe that anything that is good for them is definitionally good for the economy. This is not true, in case you were wondering. Rent seekers gonna rent seek.
After a lifetime of hearing this line, many people are understandably skeptical of rhetoric that something is "good for the economy", since that often is just a euphemism for "good for jet ski dealership owners and/or billionaires".
Perversely, this has led some lefty folks to argue that all sorts of policies that are objectively economically bad must actually be economically good, since in their minds "good for the economy" = "good for rich assholes" = "bad".
This is both a tactical and substantive mistake. If you manage to convince normies that a particular policy is bad for the economy (which in your clique may mean 'good for humanity'), you have actually just convinced them that it is bad, full stop. If you manage to convince normies that something is good for the economy (which to you means 'horrible and bad'), all you've done is convince them that it's good, full stop. Stop shooting yourself in the dick please.
Also, like, the economy is good. Producing goods and services is good. The means of fucking production? You're supposed to want to seize them, for christ sake. This seems like such an easy mistake to avoid making if you're a leftist. "Rich people are selfishly pursuing policies that benefit them but are disastrous in aggregate" is a Marxist slam dunk.
(post about local Seattle politics, feel free to skip)
In the category of “extremely un-woke people cynically trying to use wokeness to trick the dimwitted into supporting them”, you can add the editorial board of the Seattle Times. They and their comment section just threw a fit that the City Council voted unanimously to upzone a bunch of neighborhoods (fucking finally), and their arguments are just so transparently disingenuous.
I’d actually have a lot more respect for these people if they just told the truth. “We got our houses first, and we don’t want anyone else moving in and threatening our property values”. But they know that won’t fly in Seattle, so they have to flail around looking for progressive-sounding reasons to keep policy favoring wealthy landowners at the expense of everyone else. Here’s the best they could come up with:
“One of Seattle’s greatest assets is its diversity of neighborhoods providing residents an opportunity to own houses near employment centers.Even with high prices, they continue to provide working-class residents and immigrants opportunities to build equity and enter the middle class.” - I’m a programmer making six figures and I can’t afford to buy a house here, but working-class residents and immigrants can build equity that way? Please. (And you do know that you can buy condos and that counts as equity, yes?)
“They help companies recruit employees fleeing apartment-centric, less affordable cities like San Francisco and New York.” - Employees are fleeing San Francisco precisely because people like you are in firmly in charge there, and they won’t build any damn housing. I am eternally grateful that, whatever its faults, Seattle’s government is nowhere near as dysfunctional and has managed to keep you on the sidelines.
“But it will make the rich richer, by helping developers and pushing Seattle toward a future as a city of forever renters.” - The problem with trying to frame this as “the people against Wall Street” is that Kshama Sawant and The Stranger both fully endorsed upzoning. It’s reeeeally hard to claim you’re opposing big business interests when the freaking Socialist and the far-left newspaper are both opposing you. And we’re already a city of forever-renters. The single-family housing stock is gone, and there’s no more land to make more.
Anyway, rant aside, I’m not that upset because these are the of the sour grapes of the losing side. We finally got some good policy around here and it rules.
