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Building a code-compliant, owner-occupied home on a vacant lot should be a pretty easy affair. In most of America, it is. In San Francisco, it can be a nightmare.

Ask Troy Kashanipour. He’s been trying to build a home since 2015.

Despite working closely with city planning staff to design a structure that meets the onerous requirements of San Francisco’s zoning code and design guidelines, Kashanipour has been stalled by recalcitrant neighbors claiming injury over everything from excessive shadow to the possible presence of a historic pathway.

Thanks to the labyrinthine nature of San Francisco’s permitting process, these complaints have added years to a project that city staff say would otherwise be getting a rubber stamp.

Ever since Kashanipour first acquired the small lot on Diamond Street, he says, his intention was to buy it and build a home for his family. The lot in question had sat empty for many years, save for a small, overgrown community garden planted in the 1990s. Its unusually small size and triangular shape make it a difficult place to build. For Kashanipour, an architect by trade, those features made it an interesting challenge.

“Building on a small lot takes more creativity,” he tells Reason. “Understanding that you can build rooms that don’t have to be square or rectangular to be functional is an important part of understanding what you can do with a small parcel.”

Kashanipour spent a good deal of time designing a home that would conform to the parcel’s geometry. He also spent time ensuring the structure would conform with San Francisco’s codes. Before even purchasing the lot, Kashanipour worked with officials at the city’s Planning Department to understand what exactly could be done with the property, to ensure he was interpreting the code correctly, and to change his design where needed.

In fall of 2015, confident in the legality of his design, he purchased the property with the expectation that he would have an easy journey through the planning process. That was before his future neighbors got wind of his plan.

San Francisco law requires that any sponsors of new construction projects hold a pre-application meeting to give adjoining property owners and neighborhood groups “the opportunity to express concerns about a project” and “identify issues” early on.

In December 2015, some 40 people attended the pre-application meeting Kashanipour held at the Glenn Park Public Library. The results were explosive.

Even before the meeting, flyers had gone up around the neighborhood claiming Kashanipour planned to build a “monster house” and calling on neighbors to show up and tell him “no you won’t!!!” This passion carried over to the pre-application meeting.

Said Dr. Michelle Birch—an attendee who supported Kashanipour’s development—at a March public hearing, “I was quite appalled when I attended the meeting.”

“The level of aggression toward Mr. Kashanipour at the community meeting was exceptional,” Birch said. “It seemed to me there were no substantive complaints about the building.”

Project opponents don’t deny the meeting became heated, instead arguing that their rage was justified. “People started shouting not because they are rude, but because [Kashanipour] refused to listen,” said one opponent.

Not everyone at the meeting was opposed to the project, with many of the attendees merely expressing curiosity. He also went to great efforts to reach out his soon-to-be neighbors, handing out his contact information and offering to meet with anyone on an individual basis to address concerns.

Opposition to his project continued however. A sign posted on the lot notifying residents of planned public hearings was defaced with graffiti reading “no McMansions here” and simply just “no, no, no.”

Neighbors also sought to use the process against Kashanipour. In October 2016, Jeff Cerf, the owner of the property next door, filed for a Discretionary Review of the project—essentially a request to have the city’s Planning Commission mandate changes or impose conditions that are not otherwise required by the city’s zoning codes. Discretionary Reviews can add months if not years to a project’s timetable. The added time and expense can be used as a cudgel to extract concessions from project sponsors or even stop projects entirely.

This was certainly the expressed hope of some Glenn Park neighbors, who at a March 2017 Planning Commission hearing urged commissioners to approve the Discretionary Review on the grounds that it would allow enough time for the city to stop development by purchasing the property from Kashanipour, using eminent domain if need be.

The same March hearing saw all sorts of complaints levied at Kashanipour’s planned home. A woman who owned a nearby property said she felt Kashanipour’s four-story house would be an undue invasion on her privacy, telling Commissioners that she was an expectant mother looking forward to “lots of summer days in the yard with the baby. I don’t think the occupants of the new building should have such a direct view of our family.”

One claimed that the land was inhabited by endangered garter snakes. Another argued that the roof deck in Kashanipour’s design was “not part of the character of this working-class neighborhood.” Others said that replacing the lot’s current community garden with the home would “take away valuable joy” from passersby. Another neighbor, in emailed comments sent a few days prior, claimed that Kashanipour’s proposed “‘piece of pie’ shaped home, nestled inappropriately where it clearly does not belong,” would be a draw for tourists, worsening traffic congestions.

Supportive neighbors were present as well, arguing that the city needed more housing, that Kashanipour’s design was creative and interesting, and the relocation of his family to Glenn Park would add to the vibrancy of the community.

The city’s Planning Department—which is overseen by the seven-member Planning Commission—likewise recommended that the Discretionary Review be denied and that Kashanipour be allowed to build his home with no additional alternations. This did not sit right with some of the planning commissioners, including Dennis Richards, who said Kashanipour’s design “reminds me of Tokyo.” This was not a compliment, as his elaboration made clear.

“I walked on a street, there’s a footpath, then there’s this gargantuan building with all these rooftop apartments on it. And I just go holy cow, it’s slapping me in the face,” said Richards.

He and the three other commissioners present that day imposed seven conditions on Kashanipour’s project, including requirements to install a lightwell around his neighbor’s windows, reduce the house from four floors to three, change the façade, redesign the windows, and shrink the roof deck.

Says Kashanipour of the Commission’s decision: “I think as a group, they make fair decisions. I think sometimes when all the commissioners are not present, the views get a little skewed toward individual idiosyncrasies.”

Kashanipour appealed that decision to San Francisco Board of Appeals, agreeing to four of the seven conditions but asking that he be allowed to expand his roof deck, ditch the lightwells, and keep the fourth floor.

This appeal sparked another round of backlash from Glenn Park residents, with Cerf demanding that even more conditions be put on Kashanipour’s permits as a punitive measure, saying in a letter to the Board of Appeals that more restrictions “would put future sponsors on notice that appealing their own permit carries significant risk they may want to avoid.”

Others made the case before the Board of Appeals that Kashanipour’s empty lot was deserving of landmark status because a path that exists on it now—which Kashanipour’s planned construction would not touch—was possibly part of the historic El Camino Real, a trail that connected the early Spanish missions in the area.

On February 28, 2018, the Board of Appeals threw out some of the conditions imposed on Kashanipour’s property but kept the prohibition on building a fourth floor.

Both Kashanipour and Cerf have until March 12 to re-appeal this decision. As of March 8, neither has done so.

Should both parties let the decision stand, Kashanipour will have to present new plans to Board of Appeals staff, who would then send them off to the Planning and Building Inspection Departments for another round of approvals, after which he would be allowed to build his home.

A Board of Appeals staffer told Reason there is no set time for how long that can take.

Kashanipour’s planned home did not require any code variances. It will not displace any tenants. It is even exempt from California’s environmental review process. Nevertheless, neighborhood opponents were able to delay the project, dragging it through review by two separate government bodies whose members arbitrarily piled condition after condition onto the permits.

This is how you create a housing shortage.

In The Authoritarian Specter, the Harvard social scientist Robert Altemeyer asked, “Is the ‘authoritarian on the left’ like the Loch Ness Monster: an occasional shadow, but no monster?”

Altemeyer is the man who in 1981 devised the Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale, a test widely used to measure this personality and ideological variable. Social scientists generally report that right-wing authoritarians are conformists who obey established authorities, adhere to conventional social norms, and are hostile to people who flout both. Using such tests, they have argued that conservatives have a higher need for structure, lower attributional complexity, lower openness to experience, and higher perceptions of threat than do liberals—basically, that conservatives are mentally and socially rigid.

Now a new study in the journal Political Psychology claims that left-wing authoritarianism is no mere shadow. “I became interested in left-wing authoritarianism in particular because some people have said it isn’t a very real or likely phenomenon—and yet I know people I would describe as left-wing authoritarians,” the study’s lead author, University of Montana social psychologist Lucian Conway, tells PsyPost. “So I was curious to figure that out.” The researchers set out to test the authoritarianism symmetry hypothesis, which “suggests that the same processes that create authoritarianism in right-wing persons also operate in left-wing persons in essentially equal degrees.”

Conway and his colleagues created a Left-Wing Authoritarianism (LWA) scale by rewriting the RWA to be targeted toward acceptance of liberal authoritarian leaders. For example, an item from the standard RWA scale reads: “It’s always better to trust the judgment of the proper authorities in government and religion than to listen to the noisy rabble-rousers in our society who are trying to create doubts in people’s minds.” In the LWA scale, this was adapted to read: “It’s always better to trust the judgment of the proper authorities in science with respect to issues like global warming and evolution than to listen to the noisy rabble-rousers in our society who are trying to create doubts in people’s minds.”

The researchers then administered their new LWA scale to several hundred college students and to several hundred other people recruited via Mechanical Turk. Participants filled out questionnaires on their political and ideological predilections, measuring among other things their prejudices about religious and racial minorities, their tendency toward dogmatism, and the strength of their convictions.

Once all of the numbers were crunched, the researchers’ results were consistent with the authoritarianism symmetry hypothesis. In fact, after sorting participants into conservatives and liberals based on whether they scored in the top or bottom half of a 10-point conservatism scale, the researchers found that “the highest score for authoritarianism was for liberals on LWA.”

“Our data suggest that average Americans on the political left are just as likely to be dogmatic authoritarians as those on the political right. And those left-wing authoritarians can be just as prejudiced, dogmatic, and extremist as right-wing authoritarians,” Conway tells PsyPost.

What is surprising is that these results are apparently so surprising to many social scientists. After all, what is political correctness other than conforming to established authorities and adhering to conventional social norms with respect to issues like racial, gender, and income inequality, environmental problems, abortion, hate speech, and gun rights, while exhibiting hostility to folks who flout them?

For more background for Conway’s earlier research, see my article, “Liberals Are Simple-Minded.”

Nordic countries beat the United States at a host of measures related to gender equality. But while this is widely believed to be an effect of their social welfare policies, ample data suggest that women in these countries thrive in spite of heavy-handed government policies, not because of them.

“While Nordic societies are indeed role models when it comes to gender equality, this equality stretches back centuries before the modern welfare state and reflects traditional Nordic culture,” writes Nima Sanandaji in the intro to a new look at the “glass ceiling” in Nordic countries.

In analyzing the effects of corporate gender quotas and other popular Nordic policies, Sanandaji—a Kurdish-Swedish policy analyst and the president of the European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform—observes what a good deal of recent scholarship has been showing: that “the rise of the Nordic welfare state has been a double-edged sword” for feminism, “creating some benefits for women’s careers, but also creating barriers to women’s professional progress.”

Nordic countries can trace some of their workforce quirks to their large public sector, which “has been both positive and negative for women,” writes Sanandaji:

It played an important historical role in women’s entry into the labor market because many women entered through the expanding public sector. Public-sector services also facilitated the combination of work and the fulfilment of family responsibilities. The expansion of the public sector partly explains why Nordic nations reached a high employment rate among women earlier than other Western countries and stayed that way. The provision of public daycare was particularly important in this regard.

But labor-force participation is only one measure of female professional success. Another measure is female business ownership. Anita Lignell Du Rietz studied women’s business ownership in Sweden and found that many businesses, including taverns, tailor shops, breweries, and stores were run by women entrepreneurs during the 19th century. Over time, women dominated businesses such as schools and pharmacies.

However, government monopolies crowded out private enterprise as the Swedish welfare state grew during the 20th century. Meanwhile, male-dominated sectors, including manufacturing, mining, and forestry, remained under private control. The transition toward welfare-state monopolies meant that women’s business ownership suffered.

Government monopolies have combined with a strong influence of union wage-setting to undermine incentives for work: wages in the female-dominated public sectors in Nordic countries are flat, and rise based on seniority rather than achievement. Although there are public-sector managerial positions, the opportunities for individualized careers and business ownership are comparatively limited.

Women in Nordic countries are less likely to hold management positions as their U.S. counterparts, according to data from the International Labour Organization, from 15 percent less in Denmark to three percent less in Iceland.

Sanandaji finds that high taxes, mandated paid-leave policies, and the high cost of paid services also impede Nordic women’s professional advancement. Overall, he concludes, “Nordic public-sector monopolies, tax policies, and welfare and family policies, along with ineffective gender quotas, combine to create the Nordic glass ceiling.” (Read the whole paper here.)

In a recent Bloomberg column, Megan McArdle pinpointed another factor that taxes women in certain Nordic countries (who still, like their American counterparts, wind up doing an uneven share of domestic labor and child care): “High Danish wages translate into sky-high costs, especially for services. At a McDonald’s in downtown Copenhagen, a Big Mac meal set me back more than $10.”

McArdle came away from her trip to Denmark noting that Danes’ complaints about their countries are generally, “on the scale of things, reasonably minor problems. They can be fixed. Moreover, there’s some chance that they will be fixed because Denmark’s political culture is remarkably effective at tackling problems that have stymied the rest of the world.” But we can’t import their policy and wind up with the same sense of well-being, suggests McArdle, because much of this comes from Danish social cohesion and “a consensus-based culture founded on trust.”

Again, there are good and bad sides to this. While “Danish social cohesion works great for Danes,” it’s not so great for absorbing outsiders:

In the U.S., the unemployment rate of foreign-born workers is almost a percentage point lower than that of native-born citizens. In Denmark, it’s almost 6 percentage points higher, more than double the native-born rate. And many first-generation immigrants also seem to be having difficulty integrating themselves into the Danish economy.

A combination of factors—including discrimination but also a fetishization of training and education—make it hard for immigrants to get ahead in the Danish economy. As with policies to encourage gender parity, Nordic-style heavyhandedness in employment (and sex) can come with unintended consequences that hit the most vulnerable the hardest.