New Bay City Beacon goodness: Exclusive Suburbs Pit Labor Against Renters in Housing Package Fight.
As for things I’ve been reading, I thought The Alt-Right Is Not Who You Think They Are was worth a read. “To complicate matters further, many people in the alt-right were radicalized while in college. Not only that, but the efforts to inoculate the next generation of America’s social and economic leaders against racism were, in some cases, a catalyst for racist radicalization. Although academic seminars that explain the reality of white privilege may reduce feelings of prejudice among most young whites exposed to them, they have the opposite effect on other young whites. At this point we do not know what percentage of white college students react in such a way, but the number is high enough to warrant additional study.”
AT the end of the day, “The challenges embodied by the violence in Charlottesville are not going to be resolved on their own.”
Don’t miss this:
I enjoyed this, “A Bay Area–based network of wealthy progressives is testing a new model for funding the resistance: Give fast and get out of the way.”
Minor nit in your Beacon article: it’s Forest Hill, singular, not Forest Hills, plural.
I say this as a Forest Hill resident who despairs of convincing most of my neighbors of their error, and vacillates between trying to appeal mildly to their long-term interests and point out how modest the current development proposal is, and calling Bravo et al out for continuing the segregationist tradition in a neighborhood that had a restrictive covenant in living memory. Neither has gotten traction so far.
I had a long discussion last year with a lawyer friend about whether courts could be convinced to apply disparate impact scrutiny to zoning rules, on the imperfect model of voting rights scrutiny. Her conclusion was: no, because under current law housing opportunity does not have the special protected-right status of voting. It would take either fair housing legislation (state or federal) mandating such scrutiny, or a Supreme Court willing to overturn the precedent set in Village of Belle Terre vs Boraas and adopt the (fascinating and IMO remarkably libertarian) logic of Thurgood Marshall’s dissent in that case.
On a slightly related note, an old friend of mine wrote this informative piece some years back (not sure how much of it is still true) about how suburban zoning codes are made and propagated:
https://jacobward.com/2002/06/14/the-everywhere-people/