Category: reason

Earlier this month, Chinese ruler Xi Jinping declared war on food waste. “Waste is shameful and thriftiness is honorable,” Xi said, calling for a combination of “legislation, supervision, and long-term measures” to rein in waste under a “Clean Plate Campaign.” Xi also warned China was facing a “crisis” of food security.

China’s national legislature is expected to introduce a series of anti-food waste laws soon. If early steps are any indication, the campaign is likely to trample on individual rights.

Food waste, as I explain in my book Biting the Hands that Feed Us—quoting a U.N. report—refers to “food that completes the food supply chain up to a final product, of good quality and fit for consumption, but still does not get consumed because it is discarded, whether or not after it is left to spoil.”

It’s a remarkably and troublingly common problem across the globe. Roughly 40% of the food Americans produce goes to waste. Food security, on the other hand, refers to a person’s access to sufficient food.

China has generally been considered to be food-secure—roughly on par with Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Argentina. But food waste is a massive problem in the country. “Chinese cities produce 25 percent of the world’s municipal solid waste, most of it food,” Earth.org reported in April. It’s also a problem the government has been combating for several years. 

Reports suggest several factors have contributed to China’s mushrooming food-waste crisis, including supply-chain disruptions caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, trade tensions, low food prices that discourage future plantings, overreliance on imported food, and devastating floods that have inundated cropland in the country. Other reports cite additional factors, from droughts and pestilence to higher grain prices.

Given that most of these factors have little or nothing to do with waste, I wonder if the “Clean Plate Campaign” is really about fighting food waste, or it’s instead a response to growing food insecurity in the country? China expert Gordon Chang tweeted last week that Xi’s campaign signaled that China “is facing a severe food shortage.” And a tweet this week from a Hong Kong pro-democracy group claimed China has banned use of words such as “hunger” and “starving” from its anti-food waste campaign.

We should fight food waste. Decomposing food waste releases billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year. And that’s just one part of the problem.

“Consider that food that goes to waste still used all of the resources needed to produce the food—including any combination of water and fertilizer (to grow crops), pesticides (to keep them free of pests), farmland (often converted from wildlands and tilled, both of which release stored carbon), and oil (to power plows and harvesters),” I explain in Biting the Hands that Feed Us. “Those resources are all used up whether a food is eaten or is left to rot in a field or landfill.”

Thankfully, there are countless ways to reduce food waste—most of which don’t require government to do more. For example, if we were to stop using taxpayer funds to subsidize farmers to grow way more food than consumers demand, we’d save money and waste less food.

Private efforts to fight food waste—some “highly profitable“—already exist in China. But rather than expanding those efforts, Xi sees more government as the answer.

To be fair, some changes enacted in the wake of Xi’s announcement, such as renewed efforts to encourage diners to take their leftovers home, are smart and relatively nonintrusive.

But others are anything but. Spurred by Xi’s plan and criticism from state media, for example, China’s tightly monitored media outlets, including social media giant Sina Weibo, have vowed to crack down on food programming that shows “excessive eating and drinking,” including ones that feature actual or feigned competitive eating.

Elsewhere, at least one restaurant in China has drawn customers’ ire by placing scales near its entrance and urging “diners to weigh themselves and then order food accordingly.” The restaurant, which had “recommended that women under 40kg (90lbs) should order no more than two dishes—with suggestions including sautéed beef and steamed fish head—while men weighing 70-80kg could have up to three” dishes, was forced to reverse course after a backlash.

But those women and men who could order up to two or three dishes might be the lucky ones. Since Xi’s announcement, many restaurants have urged consumers to order one fewer dish than the number of people seated at a table. So, for example, four diners eating together should share three dishes. (Solo diners might be out of luck.) One local government agency took Xi’s guidance to heart, vowing to “establish a frugal consumption reminder system” and “supervise consumers to eat frugally.” Sounds lovely. Food-delivery services are also urging customers to order smaller portion sizes. One hotel restaurant is fining diners who waste food from the restaurant buffet.

Critics of Xi’s plans, The Guardian reported, were quick to push back against the new guidelines, with many urging government officials and other wealthy diners to put up or shut up.

Some critics of the plan, reports CGTN, “are calling for boundaries to the campaign, asking if leftovers at restaurants are really such a crime.“

The South China Morning Post reported this week that another obstacle Xi’s plan faces is “long-held attitudes towards entertaining” in China, where sharing a bounty with guests is considered “a symbol of hospitality and social standing.“

Still, China’s crackdown does have its supporters. One self-avowed Marxist chided The Guardian for expressing mild discomfort about China’s oppressive anti-food waste campaign.

Food waste is a problem around the world. Combating it must be a goal. But achieving that goal shouldn’t come at the expense of individual rights—in China or anywhere else.

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From the four-Justice majority opinion (written by Justice Richard Gabriel, joined by Chief Justice Nathan Coats and Justices William Hood and Carlos Samour) in Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood v. Wagner, decided by the Colorado Supreme Court in June; the case arose from a shooting that killed three (including one inside the building) and injured nine at a Colorado Springs abortion clinic:

Here, the plaintiffs introduced substantial evidence showing that PPRM [Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains] knew for many years that there was a risk of violence against its facilities. In fact, PPRM warned all new physicians that “there is an inherent risk associated with working [at PPRM],” and it provided them with training on how to protect themselves. PPRM even offered to provide all of these physicians with custom-fitted bulletproof vests, free of charge.

The plaintiffs also presented evidence tending to demonstrate that PPRM knew that the level of threats of violence and criminal activity directed against Planned Parenthood facilities increased exponentially in the aftermath of the release of the inflammatory “baby body parts” videos. In fact, after the videos were released, the Medical Director of PPRM personally reported the level of increased threats and more invasive actions to both the president and chief executive officer and the chief operating officer of PPRM, as well as to the president and chief executive officer of PPFA.

In addition to the foregoing, the plaintiffs presented evidence that, despite this awareness, PPRM did not take adequate precautions at the Colorado Springs facility. For example, the plaintiffs offered evidence to show that although PPRM had hired an armed security guard, that guard was on duty only three days per week and only for about four hours each day (until 11:00 a.m. or 12:00 noon), despite the fact that the facility remained open (and doctors were performing abortions there) after the guard had ended his shift. Indeed, the guard had been at work on the day of the shooting but left at 11:00 a.m., shortly before Dear started his shooting rampage at approximately 11:35 a.m. Similarly, the plaintiffs offered evidence that PPRM did not erect a perimeter fence around the Colorado Springs facility, although it had done so at its Denver location, and it did not replace its tempered glass entry door with a steel or otherwise bullet-resistant door, which allowed Dear to shoot through the door to gain entry and continue his rampage.

Finally, the plaintiffs presented a lengthy and detailed affidavit from Lance Foster, an expert in premises security. In his affidavit, Mr. Foster opined, in pertinent part, that (1) the lack of security at the PPRM Colorado Springs facility made it a more likely target and placed it at a much higher risk for an event like that which ensued; (2) fencing would likely have prevented Dear from gaining entry onto the facility’s property in the first place; (3) had the security guard been on duty, the shootings would likely have been prevented; and (4) had steel doors been installed and electronic lock down measures been employed, Dear would not likely have been able to enter the clinic itself. Based on the foregoing, Mr. Foster opined that the shootings at issue “were reasonably preventable and the injurious effects could have been mitigated.”

In light of this evidence, and cognizant of the settled principle that summary judgment is a drastic remedy, we conclude that on the evidence presented in the summary judgment record here, a reasonable juror could find that Dear was not the predominant cause of the plaintiffs’ injuries and that therefore PPRM’s action or inaction was a substantial factor in causing those injuries. Accordingly, we further conclude that PPRM was not entitled to the entry of summary judgment in this case….

We hasten to say that in ruling as we do, we offer no view as to the merits of the plaintiffs’ claims. Nor should our opinion be read to suggest either (1) that different rules apply to what may be deemed “politically neutral” sites, on the one hand, and potentially “incendiary” sites such as a women’s health clinic, on the other, or (2) that given the risk that a mass shooting could happen virtually anywhere, potential targets—even those that are sadly sometimes attractive to the deranged or sadistic, or those with sociopathic notions of political motivation—must build fortresses to protect against any possible risk.

To the contrary, our ruling is limited to the specific facts of this case, based on the summary judgment record before us. And we do not intend to suggest that summary judgment is never appropriate in a case such as this, although we are likewise unwilling to say … that summary judgment is required in virtually every case involving a mass shooting because the shooter’s actions will almost always be the predominant cause of the victims’ injuries. We say no more than that, on the summary judgment record here, we do not believe that a court can properly decide the predominant cause issue as a matter of law.

Three Justices dissented, in an opinion written by Justice Melissa Hart, joined by Justices Monica Marquez and Brian Boatright:

[T]he majority makes “proximate cause” a determination solely of the foreseeability of a particular event—in this case a mass shooting—occurring at a particular location. The dangerous consequence of this move is to subject a landowner to liability for the irrational actions of a mass murderer, who has no concern about detection or death. And, while the majority asserts that its approach does not turn on the politically controversial nature of the landowner’s business, I fear that in fact the majority is creating the equivalent of a heckler’s veto—if a business owner receives threats of violence because of the nature of his business, the business owner will be subject to a risk of liability that could render his business uninsurable or require impossibly expensive fortifications….

On one hand, we expect all public-facing businesses—including women’s health clinics—to incur the costs of security measures that are reasonably proportionate to the potential risk of harm to their patients. But, because mass shooters are not animated by reason or cost/benefit analysis, it is irrational to ask businesses—or jurors—to engage in the cost/benefit analysis of determining what sorts of preventative measures are sufficient to prevent or mitigate the harm caused by a shooter’s senseless acts of violence….

I fully grant that “‘the concept of foreseeability is central to establishing proximate cause’ and that foreseeability acts ‘as a guidepost to delineate the extent to which a defendant may be held legally responsible for a plaintiff’s injury.'” And unfortunately, Planned Parenthood has suffered a “long history of violent direct attacks, killings and threats” against its various facilities.

But the reason for such threats, largely unacknowledged by the majority, is the well-known fact that PPRM provides abortions—a service fraught with political controversy and heated cultural divide. While the majority asserts that its analysis does not turn on whether a mass shooter’s attack is on a politically controversial business, I fear that the consequence of the court’s approach is that certain businesses and activities will face entirely different risks of liability than others will.

It bears emphasizing that our proximate cause analysis has never, and should not now, turn on how controversial the goods or services offered by a landowner are. But the majority’s approach creates a perverse incentive: Knowing that women’s health clinics are more threat-prone than other public-facing businesses, and that such clinics may be found liable for their failure to mitigate or prevent mass shootings, abortion opponents can increase the frequency and severity of their threats of violence in order to force women’s health clinics to fortify their facilities to extreme levels. This, in turn, makes women’s health clinics both prohibitively expensive to operate and virtually impossible to insure….

Moreover, this risk is not one that will be faced only by women’s health clinics that provide abortion services. After today’s decision, antisemitic fanatics can impose additional costs on synagogues, and White supremacists can inflict the same on Black churches or businesses. Threats of violence often precede acts of violence in these locations, as they did at PPRM.

I fear that the consequences of today’s decision will be felt well beyond this litigation. The majority’s analysis, by focusing so exclusively on foreseeability, significantly changes our proximate cause jurisprudence. In doing so, it ties the liability of the landowner to the nature of its business and ignores the reality that the overwhelming—the predominant—cause of harm to victims of mass shootings is the maniacal determination of the shooter himself.

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8/22/1998: On August 22, 1998, Barry Black led a Ku Klux Klan rally in Carroll County, Virginia. The Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of his prosecution for cross burning in Virginia v. Black (2003).

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There’s a scene in the HBO drama The Wire where several Baltimore homicide detectives come to the realization that the murderous gangster they’ve been chasing for the better part of three seasons might have moved on to a new profession.

“Seems that Stringer Bell is worse than a drug dealer,” says one. “He’s a developer,” finishes another.

The line is a joke, but it’s also an important piece of exposition: The money from Baltimore’s drug trade is fueling a corrupt redevelopment of the city that will wipe away what little is left of deeply rooted (but deeply troubled) communities.

The Wire was a groundbreaking show in many ways. Its casting of land developers in the role of shadowy villains is the most ordinary thing about it. In Hollywood, a developer is almost always a bad guy.

Throughout television and film, property mongers are deployed again and again as antagonists whose schemes to build a new condo or supermarket must be defeated at all costs. The trope transcends genre boundaries, giving a work’s protagonists someone to fight against and something to fight for. Developers menace characters in goofy comedies and serious serial dramas. They appear in dark horror movies, children’s cartoons, and blockbuster sci-fi flicks. Whether it’s a gentle animated feature like Up or an alien war film like Avatar, a comedy like Barber Shop 2 or an absurdist musical like The Blues Brothers, chances are someone trying to build something somewhere is the threat that sets the whole plot in motion.

The trend is pervasive enough that there’s a whole blog, Evil Developer Movies, cataloging bad-guy builders. The website TV Tropes has labeled this particular cliché “saving the orphanage”—alternatively known as “saving the community center” or “saving the home”—and finds examples of it in everything from anime to professional wrestling. In the movies and on television, evil developers are everywhere.

Common bad guy types such as mob bosses, drug dealers, and even terrorists have earned some level of on-screen atonement, or at least gained some personal depth, as compelling, complicated antiheros. But the scumbags trying to finance new apartment buildings and shopping malls haven’t been so lucky. Perhaps that’s too much to expect when those few moviegoers who do care about land-use policy spend their time outside the theater petitioning for increasingly restrictive zoning codes and protesting new construction in their neighborhoods (and, in the time of coronavirus, refusing to pay rent on units that have already been built).

It’s a pop-culture paradox: Even as demand for homes has skyrocketed across the country, the people who actually build them are consistently portrayed as jerks. The more housing we need, the less we like the people who provide it.

The big question is: Why? Why is the developer always cast as the slimy, unscrupulous, corner-cutting, occasionally genocidal villain?

One reason is Hollywood’s traditional bias against businessmen. Popular movies are, not surprisingly, populist. Audiences never seem to tire of rooting against wealthy evildoers concerned only with growing their stacks. The rock-bottom reputation of developers in real life, colored by the often sleazy, occasionally corrupt nature of their industry, certainly does nothing to endear their fictional avatars to moviegoers.

Meanwhile, conventional movie plots demand clear-cut heroes and villains and succinct, easy-to-visualize resolutions. This leads filmmakers to emphasize the destructive aspects of the development business while burying the considerable benefits it provides in the form of new homes, shopfronts, and offices that allow people, businesses, and whole communities to grow and thrive. Characters who have to unite to defeat an outside threat are characters viewers can root for. Sometimes that threat is an alien invasion. Other times it’s an alien-looking condo building. Unlike new construction’s potential to stabilize rents and provide a wider array of housing options, the immediate threat of destruction to an idyllic small town is easy to see, and thus easy to put on film.

The consistent on-screen portrayal of developers as villains tells us about more than movies. Politics is about spinning compelling narratives too. The easy typecasting of people who build as bad guys might help explain why NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) interests are often able to win the policy battles over urban growth and development, if not the actual arguments.

‘A Complicated and Ugly Process’

Understanding the evil-developer trope requires understanding its history. One place to start would be with the Depression-era movies of Frank Capra.

Capra directed two of the first major films with an evil-developer antagonist: 1938’s You Can’t Take It With You and the 1946 Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life. The former involves an unscrupulous arms manufacturer whose plan to buy up the land near his factory is thwarted by a holdout homeowner. The latter gives us one of the most iconic rich-guy villains in movie history: Mr. Potter.

Potter, the cold-hearted and exploitative slumlord of Bedford Falls, engages in everything from attempted bribery to outright theft in an effort to stop the saintly George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, from providing Potter’s tenants with the option of affordable, quality suburban housing. That message surely meshed well with moviegoers of the ’40s, who had suffered through a prolonged Depression commonly believed to have been caused by capitalist risk taking. The collective deprivation during World War II probably made Potter’s single-minded pursuit of wealth seem all the more crass and selfish.

This early iteration of developer-as-villain is complicated by the fact that Bailey himself is also basically a developer. The conflict in the film is therefore between two rival businessmen—and, ultimately, within Bailey himself as he struggles to appraise his own value in the world. Yet the main takeaway from the film is that the generosity and open-heartedness that contribute to Bailey’s professional failures are also what make him an asset to his family and community—someone worthy, in the end, of redemption. The implied flip side of this story’s moral is that being a good developer requires being a bad person.

In a 2017 dissection of Capra’s influence on the evil-developer formula for CityLab, Mark Hogan writes that “George Bailey, for all his other virtues, isn’t much of a businessperson. His bank needs to be bailed out twice over the course of the film. The holiday lesson here: If you want to make money, you need to be Mr. Potter.”

According to Hogan, a more perfected version of this trope didn’t arrive until a few decades later. “The heyday of the evil developer movie was the 1980s,” he writes. Treating real estate developers as villains fit well with the supposed dog-eat-dog capitalism of the time. “This was the era of the yuppie, when factories closed and Donald Trump thrived. It was also a time of real-life economic swings, from the high inflation and interest rates of the early 1980s—followed by a recession—to the Savings and Loan Crisis of the last part of the decade.”

One need not agree with Hogan’s characterization of the ’80s-era economy to see how such a view could color the attitudes of film producers and watchers, making them hungry for tales where the Reaganite capitalists are portrayed as soulless profit seekers. This obviously extends beyond developers to other creatures of finance: your Gordon Geckos and Patrick Batemans, wealthy Wall Street workers who loudly and explicitly tout the productive aspects of greed and free enterprise while bringing nothing but destruction to the people around them.

Yet evil developers in this era show up in everything from horror movies like Poltergeist to comedies like The Goonies to horror-comedies like People Under the Stairs (technically not an ’80s film, as it was released in 1991). The sheer frequency suggests there’s something special about this particular wealthy antagonist that goes beyond Hollywood’s baseline loathing of Big Business.

One explanation might be that developers are easy to cast as shady villains in fiction because they’re often shady in reality. The business of real estate development, after all, is a mess of red tape, regulation, and crony-dominated approval processes.

“From zoning permits to eminent domain to tax abatement, urban development as it exists today is a complicated and ugly process unintentionally designed to benefit developers with the fewest qualms about greasing palms and buying off opposition,” researcher Nolan Gray writes at Market Urbanism. As Michael Manville and Paavo Monkkonen, two urban planning professors at UCLA, put it in their 2018 study of anti-development attitudes, “a combination of high land costs and complex regulations often makes development difficult. These circumstances could select for developers who are both affluent and out-of-step with conventional ways of behaving: only deep-pocketed, hard-charging and confrontational people will be willing and able to lobby elected officials and get rules changed in order to build.” It’s a system that’s practically designed to reward the Potters of the world while squeezing out the Baileys.

With developers’ real-life reputations so low, is it any wonder that audiences would be receptive to fictional portrayals of them doing awful things—and that we would be primed to root for their downfall? This explanation fits neatly with a common formula for bad-guy-developer movies: the one where an antagonist crafts some truly heinous scheme to prop up his real estate investment.

Probably the most obvious example of this, as Hogan notes, is 1978’s Superman, a story in which Lex Luther plots to sink the entire West Coast into the Pacific Ocean as part of a plan to turn his otherwise valueless holdings of desert land into prime beachfront property. In a 2006 Superman reboot heavily indebted to the ’70s movie, Luther doubles down on his evil schemes by trying to create entirely new virgin landmasses ripe for development. Unfortunately, the land is to come at the expense of existing continents and the people who live on them. In both portrayals, the developer is literally a comic-book supervillain whose development strategy is a form of profit-driven mass murder.

There’s a similar dynamic in the best-forgotten 1990 movie Darkman, a comic book–like film from the future director of 2002’s Spider-Man in which a mobbed-up developer tries to kill Liam Neeson (playing a scientist) to conceal the fact that he bribed the zoning commission to secure permission for his redevelopment of the city’s dilapidated waterfront. Unfortunately for the bad guy—and, frankly, for the waterfront—Neeson is only maimed in the attempted hit. He spends the rest of the movie on a rampage of revenge.

The message for audiences is clear: The benefits of new development accrue solely to annoying and often malevolent characters. The new spaces they create for people to live, work, and play are at best an accidental byproduct of the villain’s usually violent schemes for self-enrichment. The buildings themselves are mere inanimate objects, little more than MacGuffins. The actual people who might inhabit them and enjoy their amenities are never shown.

No Corruption Required

As compelling as this explanation is, it’s also incomplete. It’s true that a lot of opposition to new development is motivated by a not-totally-unfounded view of developers as crony capitalists. But a lot of it isn’t. NIMBYs rarely have qualms about opposing new projects that didn’t receive special favors—sometimes projects whose developers bent over backward to hand out concessions and community benefits.

A lot of movies make the developers bad guys even when no corruption or murder is involved. Their role as villains stems entirely from their attempts to build something new rather than any misdeeds they carried out to make their project happen.

New development almost always requires an element of creative destruction. To build a fancy new building, it’s often necessary to knock down the old one that stood in its place. On some level, we all accept this process as necessary and beneficial. At the same time, the long-run, dispersed benefits of change are a hard thing for our brains to really grasp. We focus on the most obvious effects happening around us, which often means focusing more on the immediate destruction and less on the later creation.

This is why, in real life, it’s easy to get a bunch of angry residents to show up at a city council meeting to protest the redevelopment of a neighborhood business and hard to get anyone to defend the new apartment building that will replace it. It’s a narrative that audiences are prone to accept in the fiction they consume as well, particularly in the time-constrained medium of film, where there’s less room to dwell on long-run effects and unseen benefits.

That fact helps explain the most common formula for an evil-developer film: the quirky yet tight-knit ensemble cast of characters pitted against a real estate tycoon threatening to destroy their beloved home or hangout, and with it our heroes’ sense of community and place. The Goonies—a movie in which a misfit band of kids tries to prevent the foreclosure and redevelopment of their families’ houses into a golf course by recovering a long-lost pirate treasure—is one example of this phenomenon. But there are many, many more, from One Crazy Summer to The Country Bears, that fit the bill.

Sometimes in this formula the developer is corrupt or homicidal, but that’s hardly a requirement. More often, he’s just obnoxious. And sometimes he’s secretly the good guy, even if neither filmmakers nor audiences quite realize it. Take 2005’s Rent, adapted from a 1993 musical of the same name. The movie features a crew of supposedly lovable bohemians squaring off against their former roommate and current landlord, who is trying to evict them in order to redevelop their rundown building.

That might seem like a crummy thing to do to your friends. Yet the reason these characters are being evicted is that they’ve refused to pay rent for a whole year despite several of them having the means to do so. (One is a talented filmmaker with wealthy parents; another is a successful stripper.) The owner’s plans for the building are hardly soulless either. His goal is to redevelop the property into pricey condos, the proceeds from which will be used to finance the creation of an art studio. Nonetheless, viewers are clearly supposed to identify with and root for the nonpaying residents.

This dynamic shows how biased film is in favor of narratives about communities fighting against change from the outside. When counterprogramming touting the values of growth and dynamism does appear in these movies, it’s often put in the mouths of cynical characters who clearly don’t believe it (and whose words do little to win the audience over). When Strack, the evil developer in Darkman, tries to explain away his corruption by arguing that his City of the Future project will result in “acres of riverfront reclaimed from decay” and “thousands of jobs created,” we’re none too convinced by his good intentions. It doesn’t help that he delivers these lines while staring lustfully at a model of his proposed development as ominous music plays in the background. Strack is evil, and thus his plan to build new, usable space and create jobs must be evil too.

Development and its Discontents

“Change is good” is the oft-repeated line of Sheck, the bad-guy developer in the film-length adaption of Nickelodeon’s Hey Arnold! That’s often true, but it’s much easier to sympathize with the protagonists in the movie who are resisting his attempts to bulldoze their neighborhood and who ask in response, “What’s wrong with leaving things the way they are?” Discounting the benefits of change, or treating them as tainted by the motivations of the villains who would bring them about, aligns the message of these works with the exclusionary preferences and politics of NIMBYs in real life—interests that care little for the wealth and opportunities new development might bring other people.

The ubiquity of anti-development narratives creates a revolving door between fact and fiction. Hollywood has given the country’s NIMBYs a lot of reasons to see themselves as the good guys. In turn, their fights against new construction come to mirror the ones we see on screen, occasionally to an absurd degree. The characters in the Hey Arnold! movie, for instance, end up saving their block from destruction by uncovering a document proving that it was the site of a famous flashpoint in the Revolutionary War (the “Tomato Incident”). This is a silly cartoon plot. But it isn’t too far from what happened in San Francisco in 2018, when a group of neighbors showed up to a real-life Board of Appeals hearing to argue that a vacant lot in their neighborhood couldn’t be turned into housing because a dirt path that ran through it—per their own amateur history work—had been used by early Spanish explorers in the region. Unlike the kids in Hey Arnold!, these neighbors were never able to prove their claim. The developer was allowed to build his project, albeit a slightly smaller one than what he’d originally proposed.

At the heart of all these portrayals is a fantasy of a world without tradeoffs or even annoyances, one in which the only spaces anyone needs or wants are the ones they already have. It’s wishful thinking that works from the assumption that housing just exists without having to be provided. Embedded in this worldview is a denial of the fact that preventing development and change means some people inevitably have to go without, while politically connected interest groups profit from higher rents and home values. The politicians who make this all possible are in turn rewarded with campaign donations and easy reelection. The bias is toward the status quo, and a corrupt one at that.

Surely someone would have liked to stop the initial creation of the working-class neighborhood where the characters in Hey Arnold! live. We, the audience, see only its most recent iteration, watching as its current inhabitants claim the moral high ground while desperately fighting any further change. The characters in Rent, meanwhile, assert that they shouldn’t have to pay their bills in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic—which isn’t too far from contemporary tenant activists arguing that COVID-19 obviates their own obligation to pay rent.

The ease with which we buy the evil-developer storyline is bad news, and not just for those of us hungry for a little more originality in filmmaking. Too many of America’s cities face shortages of housing, giving rise to unaffordable rents, unbearable commutes, and scandalous numbers of homeless people. The irony is that many of these problems originate with policies—from environmental review laws to density restrictions—intended to help “save the neighborhood.”

Chances are many of these policies would exist with or without the surfeit of movies and TV shows about crooked landowners. But the trope has clearly shaped our cultural script about development and its discontents, and little if any effort has been made to create a popular counternarrative.

The evil-developer trope gets the story backward. By championing anti-development, anti-growth policies, activists and politicians have made housing less available and less affordable, often while enriching themselves through the creation of artificial scarcity. Those few developers who are allowed to build get to share in these ill-gotten gains while doing irreparable harm to the reputation of an essential industry. The NIMBYs of the world may have benefited from Hollywood’s persistently negative portrayal of developers—but in real life, it’s clear that the NIMBYs are the villains.

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On August 7, an Eighth Circuit panel found that of that Chief Justice Roberts’s concurrence in June Medical was controlling. As a result, the panel concluded, there are now five votes to reject Whole Woman’s Health‘s benefit/burden framework. Now, Judge Willettt (5th Circuit) reached the same conclusion.

The Texas Attorney General sought a stay in the long-running Whole Woman’s Health case. The majority (Judges Stewart and Dennis) denied the motion for a stay pending appeal. Judge Willett dissented, and would have granted the motion. He agreed with Justice Kavanaugh, and the Eighth Circuit, that there are five votes to overrule WWH. In light of the Marks rule, he called that case a “now-invalid legal standard.”

I would grant the State of Texas’s motion to stay the injunction.

The Supreme Court recently divided 4-1-4 in June Medical Services LLC v. Russo, 140 S. Ct. 2103 (2020). The opinions are splintered, but the takeaway seems clear: The three-year-old injunction issued by the district court in this case rests upon a now-invalid legal standard. See Hopkins v. Jegley, No. 17-2879, 2020 WL 4557687, at *1-2 (8th Cir. Aug. 7, 2020) (explaining that June Medical upended the previous cost-benefit balancing test for reviewing the constitutionality of abortion restrictions); June Med. Servs., 140 S. Ct. at 2182 (Kavanaugh, J., dissenting) (“Today, five Members of the Court reject the Whole Woman’s Health cost-benefit standard.”).

Judge Willett would have remanded the case so the district court can consider the effect of June Medical, which he called the “now-governing standard.” The Supreme Court took this same approach in Box v. Planned Parenthood.

I would grant the motion to stay. Additionally, I would remand the underlying merits appeal to the district court for reconsideration under the now-governing legal standard. See Box v. Planned Parenthood of Ind. & Ky., Inc., No. 19-816, 2020 WL 3578672, at *1 (U.S. July 2, 2020) and Box v. Planned Parenthood of Ind. & Ky., Inc., No. 18-1019, 2020 WL 3578669 (U.S. July 2, 2020) (remanding “for further consideration in light of June Medical“).

WWH drew a very favorable panel for the Fifth Circuit. It is unclear if this motions panel will also be the merits panel.

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Keep in mind that this is naturally biased in favor of larger countries, and doesn’t necessarily reflect the per capita death rate (which is of course the better measure of the impact of the disease on the nation). Only one of these five countries is in the top 5 by death rate, even if one sets aside tiny San Marino and Andorra.

Also, keep in mind that different countries may have different reporting practices, both in what counts as a COVID-19 death, and more generally in how many deaths are properly categorized and reported.

The answers are here.

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