Category: reason

Plans to build an apartment complex on a vacant lot in Berkeley have attracted heated opposition from neighbors and from city zoning officials. They suggest that the proposed building is too large, that it will block out needed sunlight, and that it resembles the genocide of the Native Americans.

For nearly two decades, a series of developers has tried to put up multi-family housing on a site boarding Shattuck Avenue in this California town. All of those efforts have come to naught. Building permits were granted in 2001 and 2007 for smaller 16-unit and 21-unit projects, respectively, but those withered on the vine and were never built. In 2013, zoning officials shot down a proposal for a 67-unit micro-apartment complex on the grounds that it was much too large and out of character for the neighborhood.

Now a fourth developer—identified as 2701 Shattuck Berkeley, LLC—is taking a crack at the cursed lot. Last Thursday, Shattuck representative Stuart Gruendl presented plans to the zoning board for a 57-unit apartment building comprised mostly of small, 350-square-foot studio apartments, with space reserved for retail business on the ground floor.

The latest design is an “intelligent smart-growth project on a major transit line,” said Gruendl, who described the proposed building as “affordable-by-design,” with five units reserved for very-low-income renters (defined as individuals making $40,700 or less) and the rest rented out for $5 a square foot.

Now, $1,500 a month for a 300-square-foot studio apartment is hardly a bargain in most of the country. But in Berkeley, where the average rent is roughly $3,100 and the average studio rental is $2,200, this is practically a steal.

Far from jumping at the opportunity to approve new housing in their high-priced community, members of the zoning board reacted to Gruendl’s presentation as though he had proposed a zombie apocalypse.

“One of the very first comments I made on the first project on this site I’ll repeat again tonight because it’s still the same problem,” said Board Member Carrie Olson. “You all seen the movie Rear Window? This is an insane invasion of privacy for the folks who live next door. This is not how we do things in Berkeley.”

Other members seconded this view, complaining that building’s size had still not been reduced enough from the 2013 project they rejected.

“The points of denial [for the 2013 project] in substance apply to this project as well,” said Board Member Patrick Sheahan. “It’s simply too big, too large.”

For Substitute Board Member Toni Mester, the building was not just too large; it was in the wrong place. “It’s on the wrong side of the street. If it were on the other side of the street, we wouldn’t have the same issues.” The problem, apparently, was the sunlight the building would block. “Berkleyeans depend on the afternoon sun. It’s what we live for.”

Some of the neighbors seemed perturbed too.

“Berkeley needs to prioritize a livable, sustainable environment for people who already live here,” said Todd Darling, who owns a property next to the proposed development. “Yes, 40 percent of midwestern college graduates want to move to California. But we are not obligated to sacrifice what is best about Berkeley to build dorm rooms for them.”

Darling preemptively dismissed arguments that building more housing would make housing more affordable, saying that the “Pilgrims used the same arguments against the natives in Massachusetts.” And we all know how that story ended!

The 2701 Shattuck development is hardly the only multi-family housing project to attract the ire of Berkeley townspeople. It’s not even the only project on Shattuck Avenue to do so.

Earlier in July, Berkeley’s zoning board shot down a proposal to construct a 23-unit apartment building at 3000 Shattuck. As Berkeleyside reports, similar concerns about that building’s size, dormitory-like interior design, and lack of below-market units persuaded the zoning board to vote against the project, 7–2.

Despite the persistent opposition to the 2701 Shattuck development, the project might yet succeed where others have failed. The state’s Density Bonus law overrides some local zoning restrictions in exchange for renting out some units at below-market rates. And a 2017 amendment to California’s Housing Accountability Act similarly bars local governments from rejecting density bonus projects on the size of the project alone. This limits what Berkeley’s zoning board mostly to demanding aesthetic changes to the project, a fact that clearly frustrated board members at last Thursday’s meeting.

But there is a still a lot of wiggle room for bureaucrats to grind the project to a halt, so the 2701 Shattuck project is hardly over the finish line yet. And even if it succeeds, it will be a drop in the bucket compared to the housing California communities need to build to start bring rental prices down.

Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano sits down with Reason‘s Nick Gillespie to talk about the late food critic Jonathan Gold, political correctness in cuisine, and why food may be the best way to learn about a culture different from your own. Watch above and click here for text and downloadable versions.

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Legislators in Massachusetts forgot to pass a bill to keep horse racing legal, and hundreds of people could be out of work as a result.

Last night was a late one for the state’s lawmakers, who worked into the early hours of the morning before the end of this year’s formal legislative session. But they did not address the imminent expiration of a law that kept live-and-simulcast horse racing legal through July 31.

Bill H.4809, an “emergency law” that essentially extends the expiring legislation, had already passed both houses of the state legislature. But lawmakers went home without taking up needed procedural votes on the bill, the Associated Press reports.

Horse racing is now technically banned in the state, and roughly 290 people employed in the industry could be out of work. “It looks like hundreds of peoples’ jobs fell victim to the clock here,” Chip Tuttle, chief operating officer of the Suffolk Downs racetrack in Boston, tells WGBH. “Our options…seem pretty dire for now.”

With the Massachusetts legislature adjourned for the year, the only short-term solution is for lawmakers to pass the bill during tomorrow’s informal session.

Kid sets up a lemonade stand outside his home, which happens to be next door to the Saratoga County Fair in Ballston Spa, New York. Vendors at the fair call state health officials to complain. State health officials show up, determine the kid doesn’t have a permit, and shut him down.

In case anybody needs a reminder of why a lemonade brand actually produced a marketing campaign in which it funded kids so they could legally operate lemonade stands, there you go. It’s also a helpful reminder that while we’re told that permitting and licensing programs are all about public safety, they are frequently used as bludgeons to keep competitors out of the marketplace.

And what a stupid fight this was. The Albany Times Union has the details. Vendors were selling fresh lemonade inside the fair for $7 a cup. Brendan Mulvaney, 7, was selling premixed lemonade from his family’s porch for 75 cents a cup. Four separate vendors called state health officials to complain and ask if Mulvaney had a permit. He did not. So a health inspector actually came to the family home over the weekend and shut the lemonade stand down.

According to Mulvaney’s dad, officials initially apologized after they realized they were just shutting down some kid’s stand, not somebody trying to undercut the vendors inside the fair. But on Monday, officials from the state’s Health Department said the boy would have to get a $30 temporary food permit, which is good for a year and comes with all sorts of rules.

Politicians are now falling all over themselves to get publicity for supporting the boy. Republican state Senator James Tedisco showed up at the kid’s stand after it made the news and complained, “These kids are trying to give people sweet lemonade and learn some important business skills but the overzealous state bureaucrats in the administration just keep giving taxpayers lemons.” Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (facing re-election in November) offered to pay the kid’s permit fees.

Perhaps these politicians can direct some attention to the state’s burdensome occupational licensing and training programs that do the same thing to adults that the health department did to a 7-year-old. The Institute for Justice notes that becoming a barber in New York State requires two and a half years of professional training. Becoming a child care worker requires a year of training, more than in any other state besides New Jersey.

Sadly, not enough people make the connection between these lemonade crackdowns and the broader ways licensing and permitting laws restrict people’s ability to earn a living. They see stories like this as an outrageous abuse of authority, but they often don’t question the authority itself. They really should.

Manhattan’s district attorney (DA) office will no longer prosecute criminal cases based on no more than possessing or smoking marijuana, effective August 1. The new policy, which was announced in a press release, is expected to reduce marijuana prosecution by 96 percent.

The DA will still prosecute cases involving the sale of marijuana or demonstrated threats to public safety.

“Every day I ask our prosecutors to keep Manhattan safe and make our justice system more equal and fair,” said DA Cyrus Vance in the press release. Vance touted a study on marijuana and public safety, which he said found “virtually no public safety rationale for the ongoing arrest and prosecution of marijuana smoking, and no moral justification for the intolerable racial disparities that underlie enforcement.”

The study revealed that in 2017, black and Hispanic New Yorkers made up 86 percent of marijuana possession arrests; just 9 percent were white. The study also found racial disparities in police responses to marijuana complaints—disparities that it said “become all the more intolerable in light of the fact that they produce no meaningful criminal justice outcome.”

“Tomorrow, our Office will exit a system wherein smoking a joint can ruin your job, your college application, or your immigration status, but our advocacy will continue,” Vance concluded. “I urge New York lawmakers to legalize and regulate marijuana once and for all.”

Vance’s office is also working with public defense organizations to seal past marijuana convictions this fall. As with an expungement, sealing a record will make its contents unavailable to the public. Unlike an expungement, which removes a criminal record altogether, the contents of a sealed record are still accessible by court order.

Federal, state, and local governments could save billions of dollars by doing nothing—that is, by ending drug prohibition and no longer spending money fighting the war on drugs.

So says a new study from Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard economist and the director of economic studies at the Cato Institute. Drug prohibition is enormously expensive, and Miron finds that full legalization could leave over $106 billion in the government’s coffers. State and local governments spend $29.37 billion on prohibition efforts, and the federal government spends another $18.47 billion. Meanwhile, Miron calculates that a legal drug trade could bring in additional tax revenues of $58.81 billion.

If anything, that understates the potential economic gains. There’s more to the economy than government budgets, after all. About 789,800 Americans are currently locked up for drug-related offenses. Putting those people back into the workforce would surely catalyze economic growth.

The tide has already turned on pot prohibition. A Pew poll this year showed that 61 percent of America now supports the legalization of marijuana, up from 16 percent just three decades ago. But the “majority of budgetary gains,” writes Miron, “would likely come from legalizing heroin and cocaine.” The war on drugs involves much more than marijuana, and we can’t stop with cannabis. Drug prohibition doesn’t just lead to unquantifiable amounts of injustice—it’s simply too expensive to continue.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) says he will unveil a bill this week that will let workers finance parental leave by delaying retirement.

“Falling rates of marriage and childbirth, coupled with the loss of stable, good-paying employment in a rapidly shifting global economy are making young families socially and financially insecure,” Rubio and Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.) write in a USA Today op-ed published today. (Wagner will be introducing similar legislation in the House.) “Today, having a child can be an income shock matched only by college tuition or a down payment on a home,” the lawmakers add.

Rubio’s legislation, dubbed the Economic Security for New Parents Act, doesn’t force employers to pay for their workers’ time off. Rather, it allows mothers and fathers to pay their expenses while on leave using their future Social Security benefits. “Parents taking the option would receive monthly payments that will help cover costs like rent, groceries and new baby supplies during a time of significant income constraints,” the lawmakers write. In return, parents must put off retirement for three to six months.

Rubio and Wagner say the tradeoff is more than fair. “The financial constraints workers face in the first few weeks after having a child and those after turning 65 years old are not equal,” they write. “Our proposal would be a consistent application of Social Security’s original principle—to provide assistance to dependents in our care—to the challenges of today.”

It’s a clever idea, but it has problems. Social Security is already going bankrupt, so it’s not like there’s lots of extra cash lying around for people who haven’t hit retirement age. And as Reason‘s Shikha Dalmia notes,

Just because employers don’t have to fund the program doesn’t mean there would be no cost to them. The scheme will incentivize more workers to take off and for longer periods of time. This will be especially disruptive for small businesses and start-ups that operate on a shoestring budget and can’t spread the responsibilities of the absent workers across a large workforce. They will inevitably shy away from hiring young women of childbearing age. This will diminish these women’s job options.

Many employers can afford to let workers take the time off, of course—and as the Cato Institute’s Vanessa Brown Calder points out, a lot of them already offer paid family leave. “In a national study, 63 percent of working mothers said their employer provided paid maternity leave benefits,” Calder writes. Lawmakers should let the market work this out instead of introducing new incentives that could leave small businesses and job-seeking women worse off.

Jay Austin, 29, was killed along with his girlfriend and two others while cycling across Tajikistan. ISIS has claimed credit for the attacks. Austin was the eponymous subject of Jay Austin’s Beautiful, Illegal Tiny House, a video I produced for Reason in 2014.

According to the U.S. embassy in Tajikistan, a car slammed into a group of seven cyclists. Assailants exited the car and stabbed and shot the survivors. Three other cyclists were also injured. Euronews published amateur video that purports to show the attack.

Authorities tracked down the car during a search operation. After a chase, one suspect was arrested and four were killed. The U.S. embassy praised the swift response by the Tajik government.

I found Austin a pleasure to interview and I admired his independent ways. When I first met him in 2014, he had been working at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for four years. He understood the nuts and bolts of housing policy and harbored a strong sense of disenchantment with the federal bureaucracy, calling public housing “a failed experiment” and HUD “The Death Star.”

Austin resisted HUD’s stodgy, institutional culture. He wore chucks and jeans at the office, in defiance of the standard suit and tie worn by other federal employees. “I’m going to be myself or I’m not going to work here,” he said he told his employer. They kept him on.

A few months after meeting him, Austin began traveling, taking leaves of absence for months at a time. Two years after that, he quit HUD, leaving behind the 145-square-foot tiny house he built and the community of tiny houses he co-founded to become a full-time traveler. He lived frugally, often backpacking alone through remote parts of the globe, and he blogged and Instagrammed his adventures enthusiastically.

“Everyone should try it at some point in their life,” Austin told me while sipping his favorite St. Germain cocktail in the hot tub behind his tiny house on a snowy winter’s day. “A month, a half-year, a week without a structure, without a stable place to call home.”

Austin was keenly aware how his upbringing in foster care shaped his outlook on life. He learned self sufficiency at an early age; by the time he was in middle school, he felt like an adult. “As a ward of the state,” he said, “I was an inherent non-conformist.”

Jay Austin, you are missed.

You got papers to purchase that banana, ma’am? Speaking at a rally in Florida yesterday, President Donald Trump tried to drum up support for voter identification laws by making a little comparison. If you have to show identification “to buy groceries,” said the president, why shouldn’t you have to show identification in order to vote?

Of course, Americans aren’t (yet) required to prove their citizenship, identity, or anything else before purchasing food. As Peter Suderman points out, Trump’s ignorance on this fact kinda makes previous presidential privilege gaffes look quaint.

Remember when George HW Bush was castigated as clueless because he didn’t know the price of milk? It all seems so quaint. https://t.co/uhpv1DCXyk

— Peter Suderman (@petersuderman) August 1, 2018

The Tuesday-night rally in Tampa also served as a coming out party for “QAnon” believers. This is the group, seeded on forums like 8chan, that is convinced that a federal agent named “Q” has been feeding them dirt on all sorts of Deep State shenanigans: an international pedophilic sex-trafficking ring, a Hillary Clinton/George Soros coup plot, the Rothschilds’ satanic cult, etc. Trump is supposedly aware of all this and in the midst of his own counter-plans.

QAnon supporters “were front and center at the Florida State Fairgrounds Expo Hall, where Trump came to stump for Republican candidates,” reports The Washington Post. “As the president spoke, a sign rose from the audience. ‘We are Q,’ it read. Another poster displayed text arranged in a ‘Q’ pattern: ‘Where we go one we go all.'”

The letter Q also showed up prominently on rally goers t-shirts and in their tweets, as did references to the murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich.

I poured through a few pages of Tampa rally photos on Newscom, to make sure this wasn’t just a couple of folks getting blown out of proportion, and I spotted distinct QAnon signs throughout photos of different parts of the crowd.

The right wing conspiracy QAnon very well represented at #trumptampa pic.twitter.com/mkuDQsBhH9

— Adam Smith (@adamsmithtimes) July 31, 2018

The QAnon believers were a relatively small but (deliberately) conspicuous contingent at the rally, as was a small group of protesters (the Washington Examiner reports that there were three) who had gotten inside. The few pictures I could find show a woman in a head scarf engaged in some sort of shouting match with a man in a cowboy hat, and then others, as a woman in a Trump cap takes a selfie with the fracas in the background.

“One person, and tomorrow the headlines will be, ‘Massive protests,'” Trump said as the protesters were esecorted out. (So far, no such headlines have materialized.)

In case you’re curious, here’s how Trump’s perennial-punching-bag CNN described the “rowdy” rally:

“It’s a lot easier to act presidential than to do what I do. Anybody can act presidential!” Trump declared, before tottering across the stage in a parody of a presidential walk, mocking the Oval Office conventions he has shredded since his inauguration, and admitting he likes to be a “little wild, have a little fun” at rallies.

It was an anarchical moment that highlighted the comedy that is an underestimated ingredient of Trump’s demagogic technique. It helps bind him to supporters who feel bitter about Washington institutions they believe have cast them cruelly aside. But it was also a flash of self-awareness by an idiosyncratic politician who intimately understands his own method as one of the great political entertainers, whose skill at fanning resentments is fundamental to his appeal for a large chunk of voters.

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Y’all understand that the 3D printed gun issue is a First Amendment issue and not Second Amendment one, right?

Unless you want to ban the Anarchist’s Cookbook and other ‘dangerous literature’, you might want to rethink your position.

— Jonathan Blanks (@BlanksSlate) August 1, 2018

More on the 3D-printed gun debacle here.

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A new kind of mining town comes to Texas.

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BIG: Michigan’s Supreme Court will allow an anti-gerrymandering measure on the ballot. State GOP/Chamber of Commerce had fought hard to keep it off. https://t.co/qTuhAsGPSe

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) August 1, 2018

• A federal judge has ordered federal immigration agents to stop forcibly drugging migrant children.
• The word Russia apparently wasn’t spoken once as the trial of Paul Manafort, former Trump campaign manager and frenemy of Russian oligarchs, got started yesterday.
• “Decades of fearmongering almost got porn addiction added to the International Classification of Diseases,” notes Slate. “Thankfully, the World Health Organization got it right.”

Senate Dems are calling out the Trump administration for approving the online publication of 3D gun blueprints so that people can print guns at home.

“Why buy them if you can print them at home instead?” Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) said. “This is Trump’s chance to stand up to the NRA” pic.twitter.com/qbkMrR8YWG

— Marianna Sotomayor (@MariannaNBCNews) July 31, 2018

• Why the gun industry isn’t worried about 3D-printed firearms.
• According to the Washington Post‘s Fact Checker database, Trump has made “an average of nearly 7.6 [misleading or false] claims a day” since taking office.

ketchup packets are the new straws https://t.co/lTHe7FGkNF

— Elizabeth Nolan Brown (@ENBrown) August 1, 2018

Union protestors and celebrity advocates have decided that waiters’ tips aren’t big enough, writes John Stossel. They are upset that in 43 states, tipped workers can be paid a lower minimum wage, as low as $2.13 an hour. Unfortunately, Stossel observes, these activists want to “protect” restaurant workers right out of their jobs.

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