This definitely one of the less well thought out proposals of the Administration, unless the real goal as alleged by the left is to allow rich guys to snap up massive chunks of land at dirt cheap prices. Most federal land is not easily developable because it is remote and lacks access to utilities or is heavily polluted. In either case, it won’t be affordable to develop housing on at all.
Obviously a major culprit in the affordable housing crisis is allowing the population to grow by tens of millions of people above the national growth rate over the last couple of generations. Partially reversing that through deportations will help. The other thing that would help is if the Dems finally got serious about counteracting the worst behaviors of their most prized demographic, whose exuberance has produced an exodus from core urban areas and bid up the price of housing in suburbs that haven’t yet been blessed by their presence. Such locations have a strong incentive to implement development standards that price out 80 percent of the population, something the YIMBY crowd apparently doesn’t understand.
I am getting a kick out of the latest Dem strategy. After spending the last 15 years or so openly discussing how half of the country doesn’t deserve what they already have and scheming to take it away from them, now they are going to try to sell the idea that ackshully all they ever wanted was for them to be fat and happy?
If you want to promote urban population density, which is at the heart of lefty Americans' semi-utopian/Euro-envying/public-transport-dependent vision, ensuring public safety is #1, #2, and #3 (at least) on the to-do list.
Urban density works in Asian cities. It used to work in European cities, because in the past they were generally safe, but now it's being ground down. It hasn't worked in US cities since -- well, it was all the fault of the automobile, of course . . . .
Excellent and true is your analysis. I would add this. When my wife and I married in 1991, the population of America was 250 million. Today it may be as high as 345 million. That's nearly an addition of 95 million people. No wonder house prices have risen so fast. Regarding your one analysis about our exuberant population, I don't see that easily solved. Americans have been running away from the exuberant ones for a century now and I don't see that state of being ending.
I agree for the most part with your last point, but people can exist with it to a large extent so long as it doesn't affect their kids. My city has plenty of decent neighborhoods where you can live without it impacting you but what it doesn't have - like a lot of cities - is enough public schools where it can be avoided. The public school system is all in on equity and the result is that there are a pretty limited number of schools where better off than average parents are willing to send their kids and if you don't win the lottery to get in, then it's either pay for private school or leave. If the school system was willing to separate out students by ability then you could remove a lot of the low performing/poorly behaved kids from the lives of ordinary people. I can afford private school and have stayed put, but if that wasn't the case I would definitely leave. When I was growing up I went to the local public school until HS, but nowadays that's an inconceivable option for my kids.
I went to a 40 % black high school called DuVal. DuVal filtered the students by academic talent. The only classes that I had blacks in them was PE and typing. Almost lily-white otherwise. The football team I played on was fifty-fifty most of the time. Incidentally, one of our valedictorians was a brilliant black youngster named Leonard Strachan. Since I was a comparative idiot when it came to math and science, I never had a class with Strachan. He ended up graduating MIT, earned a PhD at Harvard and is a well-respected astrophysicist today.
You could get a good education at DuVal in the 70s. DuVal has declined since and only about 15 whites go to the school. Hispanics are the largest minority at DuVal these days.
As a percentage, this historical population growth is actually less than for other periods. For example, from 1950 to 1985 the population grew from about 150 million to about 235 million, a 57% rate of growth vs a growth rate of about 37% since 1990.
I think the first question we should ask ourselves is whether things have gotten worse or better in our country? From 1950 to 1985 seems like a golden age as measured by many metrics, but good things have also happened since 1990.
I call it the riffraff tax. Lawrence Auster (RIP) called it the Eloi tax. For most wives and moms (that's who selects the house, after all), $300K is probably the minimum you'll pay for polite, sane neighbors who keep their houses in good order. You can dip lower outside the major metros but not by much.
It's amazing how much of the "affordable housing" crisis is really because we've made it illegal for people to have the ability to select future neighbors.
Voters and most politicians are incapable of systems thinking. All they can manage is to evaluate individual transactions as good or bad. The idea that the sum effect of all these individual judgements could result in the opposite of what they want is, unavailable to them.
The biggest problem is that our most difficult subsets of the population have lost their fear of what might happen to them if everyone else gets tired of their behavior. Taking guardrails off of the least self-regulating people is a recipe for increased disorder and chaos, and half of the left is too idealistic/stupid to recognize this and the other half does and uses it as a weapon.
What's shocking and saddening to me is the white prole and lumpenprole decline. As an online acquaintance put it, they haven't slid into home plate with the black underclass yet, but they're rounding second and sprinting hard. Our elites should be promoting bourgeois values instead of uber-tolerance and egalitarianism (which they cynically do not believe).
In my experience, I have come across three military bases that could be closed and could be made into communities or parks. One is the small naval base just south of Chesapeake Beach, MD. It is right on the bay with beautiful views. From working there forty years ago, all I could see that it contained was a radar station. Watching for Soviet submarines? Then there is the naval base at Dahlgren, a remnant of the Civil War. That part of Virginia is fast becoming part of the outer Washington DC orbit and is right on the Potomac River with splendid views. Why not close Dahlgren down? And then there is Fort AP Hill along Route 301 in Caroline County. Caroline County is famous for being where John Wilkes Booth was killed, Secretariat was born, anti-miscegenation laws were killed and King's Dominion still unfortunately exists. Fort AP Hill is located in the middle of nowhere yet is close to Richmond and Fredericksburg. It is located there because the land presumably was infertile and lightly populated. But what does Fort AP Hill do? Why must it stay open?
From what I could tell, Richmond has an unusual traffic pattern: most commuting is E-W, but through traffic is (fittingly) almost all N-S. I assume exuberance and a stinky, now closed DuPont plant south of downtown caused it.
Richmond's half-beltway on its east side is very convenient. Gets you around places like Cold Harbor and Malvern Hill a lot faster than it took the George McClellan and US Grant.
I used it a few times when they were rebuilding the bridges on I-95. Very relaxed compared to the perilous Petersburg-DC-NE 95 racetrack. I'm sure it's more developed now. Southside I-85 is so boring, it amazes me I never fell asleep and wrecked.
That part of Virginia, so close to Richmond, is very swampy and that is why it not only was difficult for the Union army to maneuver in the 1860s, it hasn't been very developed today. Where there aren't swamps, it is heavily wooded in some of the earliest settled parts of 17th Century Jamestown.
Incidentally, further east is the John Tyler Plantation which is worth a visit. One of Tyler's grandsons owned it until he recently died. Tyler still has a grandson who still lives.
We toured the Carters' Shirley in '80 on the way back from overheating in Williamsburg and Yorktown. I remember the enormous trees behind Carter's Grove. Roads replacing rivers turned them into the edges of civilization. Dad's ancestral 1634 plantation is now the Defense Logistics base at Bellwood thanks to the railroad. The previous owners were massacred in 1622.
They closed/sold a lot of the desirable bases back in the 1990s as part of the cold war dividend, Fort Sheridan on Lake Michigan in the suburbs of Chicago (between Highland Park and Lake Forest) for example. And the Presidio in SF (that might have been later)
During my retirement years I’ve had the opportunity to drive through a lot of US states.
One of the things I’ve noticed is how large a portion of our housing is no longer built to last. Tens of millions of single and double-wides that are not designed to be maintained for multiple generations. Is lack of land the primary reason why housing is so expensive? I see so many abandoned homes.
Anyway, the feds will surely mess-up any land sale by attempting to chase votes for their team.
Lack of land in desirable places with good jobs, that and the fact that people who already have homes in desirable locations don't want anything to change or disrupt their situation.
When San Francisco finally built housing in a formal naval shipyard, the developers were sued by the homeowners for being built over toxic waste. From 2022:
"Settlement Approved For San Francisco Hunters Point Homeowners In Lawsuit Over Alleged Contamination
April 1, 2022 / 1:28 PM PDT / CBS San Francisco
SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) – A federal judge this week approved a settlement between housing developers and homeowners at the San Francisco Shipyard over allegations the homes -- located at the site of a former naval shipyard -- were built over toxic waste.
Back in July 2018, homeowners at the San Francisco Shipyard, a housing development located on the site of the former Hunters Point U.S. Navy shipyard, sued Tetra Tech EC Inc., Lennar Inc., and Lennar's affiliate FivePoint Holdings Inc.
The suit alleged defendants Lennar and FivePoint Holdings developed and sold about 350 homes on a portion of the former naval site for about $1 million each. The suit further alleged that while the homes were marketed to prospective buyers as clean and safe, Tetra Tech EC -- the environmental firm hired by the Navy to clean the site -- failed to properly rid the site of toxic materials."
The whole area of the California coast from Ventura county to Big Sur seems way under developed. Maybe it's the water. Seems to me their should be a San Diego sized city somewhere along there.
“Holiday Affair” (1949) is a retro iSteve-ish movie which stars Janet Leigh as a lonely war widow who runs away with Robert Mitchum, who has been sleeping in flophouses in New York but says he has an offer from a buddy he met in the Big One to work at a shipyard in California. The message seems to be that ambitious women who want high-achieving sons should encourage their husbands to go West for the cheap land and defence industry jobs. Looking it up it was written by Isobel Lennart, an ex-Communist who named names in 1947.
Improvements in battery storage technology and cost a big deal for renewable generation. But at a bit under 1 sq. mile per 100 mw, you’re gonna have to find some land for the solar panels along with those new houses.
This definitely one of the less well thought out proposals of the Administration, unless the real goal as alleged by the left is to allow rich guys to snap up massive chunks of land at dirt cheap prices. Most federal land is not easily developable because it is remote and lacks access to utilities or is heavily polluted. In either case, it won’t be affordable to develop housing on at all.
Obviously a major culprit in the affordable housing crisis is allowing the population to grow by tens of millions of people above the national growth rate over the last couple of generations. Partially reversing that through deportations will help. The other thing that would help is if the Dems finally got serious about counteracting the worst behaviors of their most prized demographic, whose exuberance has produced an exodus from core urban areas and bid up the price of housing in suburbs that haven’t yet been blessed by their presence. Such locations have a strong incentive to implement development standards that price out 80 percent of the population, something the YIMBY crowd apparently doesn’t understand.
Right, if you want ABUNDANCE you need law 'n' order.
I am getting a kick out of the latest Dem strategy. After spending the last 15 years or so openly discussing how half of the country doesn’t deserve what they already have and scheming to take it away from them, now they are going to try to sell the idea that ackshully all they ever wanted was for them to be fat and happy?
If you want to promote urban population density, which is at the heart of lefty Americans' semi-utopian/Euro-envying/public-transport-dependent vision, ensuring public safety is #1, #2, and #3 (at least) on the to-do list.
Urban density works in Asian cities. It used to work in European cities, because in the past they were generally safe, but now it's being ground down. It hasn't worked in US cities since -- well, it was all the fault of the automobile, of course . . . .
Excellent and true is your analysis. I would add this. When my wife and I married in 1991, the population of America was 250 million. Today it may be as high as 345 million. That's nearly an addition of 95 million people. No wonder house prices have risen so fast. Regarding your one analysis about our exuberant population, I don't see that easily solved. Americans have been running away from the exuberant ones for a century now and I don't see that state of being ending.
I agree for the most part with your last point, but people can exist with it to a large extent so long as it doesn't affect their kids. My city has plenty of decent neighborhoods where you can live without it impacting you but what it doesn't have - like a lot of cities - is enough public schools where it can be avoided. The public school system is all in on equity and the result is that there are a pretty limited number of schools where better off than average parents are willing to send their kids and if you don't win the lottery to get in, then it's either pay for private school or leave. If the school system was willing to separate out students by ability then you could remove a lot of the low performing/poorly behaved kids from the lives of ordinary people. I can afford private school and have stayed put, but if that wasn't the case I would definitely leave. When I was growing up I went to the local public school until HS, but nowadays that's an inconceivable option for my kids.
I went to a 40 % black high school called DuVal. DuVal filtered the students by academic talent. The only classes that I had blacks in them was PE and typing. Almost lily-white otherwise. The football team I played on was fifty-fifty most of the time. Incidentally, one of our valedictorians was a brilliant black youngster named Leonard Strachan. Since I was a comparative idiot when it came to math and science, I never had a class with Strachan. He ended up graduating MIT, earned a PhD at Harvard and is a well-respected astrophysicist today.
You could get a good education at DuVal in the 70s. DuVal has declined since and only about 15 whites go to the school. Hispanics are the largest minority at DuVal these days.
As a percentage, this historical population growth is actually less than for other periods. For example, from 1950 to 1985 the population grew from about 150 million to about 235 million, a 57% rate of growth vs a growth rate of about 37% since 1990.
I think the first question we should ask ourselves is whether things have gotten worse or better in our country? From 1950 to 1985 seems like a golden age as measured by many metrics, but good things have also happened since 1990.
I call it the riffraff tax. Lawrence Auster (RIP) called it the Eloi tax. For most wives and moms (that's who selects the house, after all), $300K is probably the minimum you'll pay for polite, sane neighbors who keep their houses in good order. You can dip lower outside the major metros but not by much.
It's amazing how much of the "affordable housing" crisis is really because we've made it illegal for people to have the ability to select future neighbors.
Voters and most politicians are incapable of systems thinking. All they can manage is to evaluate individual transactions as good or bad. The idea that the sum effect of all these individual judgements could result in the opposite of what they want is, unavailable to them.
The biggest problem is that our most difficult subsets of the population have lost their fear of what might happen to them if everyone else gets tired of their behavior. Taking guardrails off of the least self-regulating people is a recipe for increased disorder and chaos, and half of the left is too idealistic/stupid to recognize this and the other half does and uses it as a weapon.
What's shocking and saddening to me is the white prole and lumpenprole decline. As an online acquaintance put it, they haven't slid into home plate with the black underclass yet, but they're rounding second and sprinting hard. Our elites should be promoting bourgeois values instead of uber-tolerance and egalitarianism (which they cynically do not believe).
Amy Wax is being disciplined by Penn for holding this view.
Agree about the population increase. It’s crazy in Canada where there is a massive housing crisis.
But deporting is hard, even when Trump is willing to.
In my experience, I have come across three military bases that could be closed and could be made into communities or parks. One is the small naval base just south of Chesapeake Beach, MD. It is right on the bay with beautiful views. From working there forty years ago, all I could see that it contained was a radar station. Watching for Soviet submarines? Then there is the naval base at Dahlgren, a remnant of the Civil War. That part of Virginia is fast becoming part of the outer Washington DC orbit and is right on the Potomac River with splendid views. Why not close Dahlgren down? And then there is Fort AP Hill along Route 301 in Caroline County. Caroline County is famous for being where John Wilkes Booth was killed, Secretariat was born, anti-miscegenation laws were killed and King's Dominion still unfortunately exists. Fort AP Hill is located in the middle of nowhere yet is close to Richmond and Fredericksburg. It is located there because the land presumably was infertile and lightly populated. But what does Fort AP Hill do? Why must it stay open?
From what I could tell, Richmond has an unusual traffic pattern: most commuting is E-W, but through traffic is (fittingly) almost all N-S. I assume exuberance and a stinky, now closed DuPont plant south of downtown caused it.
Richmond's half-beltway on its east side is very convenient. Gets you around places like Cold Harbor and Malvern Hill a lot faster than it took the George McClellan and US Grant.
I used it a few times when they were rebuilding the bridges on I-95. Very relaxed compared to the perilous Petersburg-DC-NE 95 racetrack. I'm sure it's more developed now. Southside I-85 is so boring, it amazes me I never fell asleep and wrecked.
That part of Virginia, so close to Richmond, is very swampy and that is why it not only was difficult for the Union army to maneuver in the 1860s, it hasn't been very developed today. Where there aren't swamps, it is heavily wooded in some of the earliest settled parts of 17th Century Jamestown.
Incidentally, further east is the John Tyler Plantation which is worth a visit. One of Tyler's grandsons owned it until he recently died. Tyler still has a grandson who still lives.
We toured the Carters' Shirley in '80 on the way back from overheating in Williamsburg and Yorktown. I remember the enormous trees behind Carter's Grove. Roads replacing rivers turned them into the edges of civilization. Dad's ancestral 1634 plantation is now the Defense Logistics base at Bellwood thanks to the railroad. The previous owners were massacred in 1622.
Fascinating history!
They closed/sold a lot of the desirable bases back in the 1990s as part of the cold war dividend, Fort Sheridan on Lake Michigan in the suburbs of Chicago (between Highland Park and Lake Forest) for example. And the Presidio in SF (that might have been later)
"But what does Fort AP Hill do? Why must it stay open?"
Fwiw, it was renamed Fort Walker in 2023. Ambrose Hill was a confed general.
During my retirement years I’ve had the opportunity to drive through a lot of US states.
One of the things I’ve noticed is how large a portion of our housing is no longer built to last. Tens of millions of single and double-wides that are not designed to be maintained for multiple generations. Is lack of land the primary reason why housing is so expensive? I see so many abandoned homes.
Anyway, the feds will surely mess-up any land sale by attempting to chase votes for their team.
Lack of land in desirable places with good jobs, that and the fact that people who already have homes in desirable locations don't want anything to change or disrupt their situation.
They poisoned the groundwater in and around Camp LeJeune, but is that an issue in SoCal?
Any sign of self-deporting?
I am concerned they will try to sell the lands in the Mountain West. Then those states will follow Colorado politically.
Thanks for the Full Metal Jacket fix.
If Camp Pendleton were to be developed, the 405 would have to be double-stacked to handle the traffic.
When San Francisco finally built housing in a formal naval shipyard, the developers were sued by the homeowners for being built over toxic waste. From 2022:
"Settlement Approved For San Francisco Hunters Point Homeowners In Lawsuit Over Alleged Contamination
April 1, 2022 / 1:28 PM PDT / CBS San Francisco
SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) – A federal judge this week approved a settlement between housing developers and homeowners at the San Francisco Shipyard over allegations the homes -- located at the site of a former naval shipyard -- were built over toxic waste.
Back in July 2018, homeowners at the San Francisco Shipyard, a housing development located on the site of the former Hunters Point U.S. Navy shipyard, sued Tetra Tech EC Inc., Lennar Inc., and Lennar's affiliate FivePoint Holdings Inc.
The suit alleged defendants Lennar and FivePoint Holdings developed and sold about 350 homes on a portion of the former naval site for about $1 million each. The suit further alleged that while the homes were marketed to prospective buyers as clean and safe, Tetra Tech EC -- the environmental firm hired by the Navy to clean the site -- failed to properly rid the site of toxic materials."
The whole area of the California coast from Ventura county to Big Sur seems way under developed. Maybe it's the water. Seems to me their should be a San Diego sized city somewhere along there.
“Holiday Affair” (1949) is a retro iSteve-ish movie which stars Janet Leigh as a lonely war widow who runs away with Robert Mitchum, who has been sleeping in flophouses in New York but says he has an offer from a buddy he met in the Big One to work at a shipyard in California. The message seems to be that ambitious women who want high-achieving sons should encourage their husbands to go West for the cheap land and defence industry jobs. Looking it up it was written by Isobel Lennart, an ex-Communist who named names in 1947.
Improvements in battery storage technology and cost a big deal for renewable generation. But at a bit under 1 sq. mile per 100 mw, you’re gonna have to find some land for the solar panels along with those new houses.
Ctrl F "immi" and nothing??