“The Seattle City Council might have found a clever way around Washington state’s ban on local rent control policies. On Monday, it passed two bills that respectively require landlords to give generous notice to their tenants of any rent increases and to provide relocation expenses to low-income renters who do move in response to large rent hikes.
Current city and state law require landlords to give their tenants 60 days’ notice of any rent increase. One bill passed by the council would increase that notification period to 180 days, likely the longest notification period in the country.
And if a low-income tenant decides to move in response to a rent increase of 10 percent or more, landlords will be obligated to provide them with “economic dislocation relocation assistance” equal to three months’ rent, thanks to another bill passed by the council on Monday.
Both are the handiwork of Councilmember Kshama Sawant, a member of the Socialist Alternative party, who argues the twin bills are needed to protect tenants from a post-pandemic upswing in rents—and from capitalism more generally.
“Today’s victories will benefit tens of thousands of renters in Seattle, who are facing skyrocketing rent increases from profit-hungry corporate landlords and the venture capitalists and big banks who are [fueling] a speculative bubble,” said Sawant after the bills passed.
Landlords were less pleased with the bills’ passage, arguing during public comment that they’d raise their costs of doing business and are, per the Seattle Times, tantamount to rent control.
That latter charge could open up the new bills to legal challenges.
Washington state law preempts municipal governments from enacting laws “which regulate the amount of rent to be charged” and instead reserves that power under the state government.”
“the country has long waxed and waned on whether to require kids to get vaccinated. School vaccine requirements have been with us a long time — nearly as long as public schooling itself. Smallpox vaccination — the only vaccine that existed early in the history of public education — was required for entry into Boston public schools in 1827. But for much of American history, mandates were inconsistently applied across geography and tended to come and go over time. For example, Washington and Wisconsin ended school vaccination requirements in 1919 and 1920, respectively, and during the 1920s, the Utah and North Dakota legislatures passed laws forbidding compulsory vaccination.
But mandates became more of a mainstay in the late 20th century, when a series of school-based measles outbreaks swept the nation in the 1970s — and it quickly became clear that vaccines could help. In Texarkana, a city split by the Texas-Arkansas border, the Arkansas side had a vaccine mandate and fared far better than the Texas side, which had no mandate. By 1980, every state had some kind of compulsory vaccination for school-age children. Annual cases of measles dropped from tens of thousands in the 1970s to fewer than 2,000 by 1983. During the 20th century, measles infected an average of more than 500,000 Americans each year. In 2005, after decades of school vaccine mandates and vaccination rates higher than 90 percent, it infected 66 people. Vaccines reduced the spread of disease, and making the vaccines mandatory all but eliminated it.”
“Anti-Black habits of disinvestment and plunder continue to this day. Government at all levels overinvests in affluent white space and disinvests in Black neighborhoods, with the exception of excessive spending on policing and incarceration. Many current public policies and processes encourage rather than discourage racial segregation. And competition between communities of abundance and communities of need sets up a budgetary politics in which affluent spaces and people usually win out. The end result is more residential sorting: A recent comprehensive analysis by the Othering and Belonging Institute found that 81 percent of metropolitan regions with a population above 200,000 were more segregated in 2019 than they were in 1990.”
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“I have identified three primary processes through which the ‘hood and affluent white space persist: boundary maintenance, opportunity hoarding and stereotype-driven surveillance.
Boundary maintenance consists of intentional state action to create and maintain a racialized physical order. Over a century, it has included racially restrictive covenants, exclusionary zoning that limits where multi-family buildings can be built, urban “renewal” projects that removed Black residents, intentionally segregated public housing, an interstate highway program laid to create racial barriers, endemic redlining, as well as disinvestment in basic services such as schools and sewage in Black neighborhoods.
While not all of these practices continue now, the federal government still invests in segregation.”
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“The federal government also funnels about $10 billion annually through the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program for affordable housing construction. But it mostly results in construction in poor communities that already have more than their fair share of affordable housing. Nationally, only about 17 percent of LIHTC projects are built in high-opportunity neighborhoods with high-performing schools, low crime and easy access to jobs. That keeps those Americans who need affordable housing concentrated in the same low-opportunity areas.
Another program, HUD’s Housing Choice Vouchers, provides rental assistance to low-income tenants, but the program does not disrupt entrenched racial and economic segregation. Most Black and brown voucher holders land in low-opportunity areas, where more than 20 percent of residents are poor, while white voucher holders tend to find rentals in lower-poverty areas.”
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“While the vast majority of white Americans reject segregation in public opinion surveys, in practice their willingness to enter or remain in a neighborhood declines sharply as the percentage of Black neighbors increases, studies have found. The average white person lives in a neighborhood that is 76 percent white. Although most Black Americans no longer live in high-poverty Black neighborhoods, those ‘hoods persist, as does the architecture of segregation. About half of all Black metropolitan residents live in highly segregated neighborhoods.”
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“intentional segregation of Black people in the 20th century shaped development and living patterns for everyone and put in place an infrastructure for promoting and maintaining segregation that lives on. Racial steering by realtors who nudge homebuyers into segregated spaces, discrimination in mortgage lending, exclusionary zoning, a government-subsidized affordable housing industrial complex that concentrates poverty, local school boundaries that encourage segregation, plus continued resistance to integration by many but not all white Americans — all are forms of racial boundary maintenance today.”
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“The segregation of affluence facilitates opportunity hoarding, whereby wealthy neighborhoods enjoy the best public services, environmental quality and private, public and natural amenities, while other communities are left with fewer, poorer-quality resources. Worse, suburban-favored quarters are subsidized by the people they exclude: Through income and other taxes, people of all racial and class backgrounds who live elsewhere help pay for the roads, sewers and other infrastructure that make these low-poverty, resource-rich places possible.
This pattern of overinvestment in exclusionary, predominantly white space and disinvestment or neglect elsewhere is replicated within cities across the country. In her book Segregation by Design, Jessica Trounstine amasses empirical evidence to support her theory that segregation creates a city politics that reproduces inequality — a racial hierarchy of favored and disfavored residents. After local governments deployed land use, slum clearance and other policies to tightly compact Black Americans beginning in the early 20th century, those residents also were denied adequate sewers, roads, garbage collection and public health services. Segregation institutionalized the preferences of white property owners, protecting their property values and giving them exclusive access to high-quality public amenities — a nefarious pattern that continues. Today, business elites bend local government to their will, ensuring that the luxury residential and commercial development they want gets built, regardless of competing community and housing needs.”
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“a 2019 Urban Institute study found that majority-white neighborhoods in Chicago received about three times more public and private investment than majority-Black neighborhoods.”
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“Chicago had closed 70 public schools over eight years by 2012. Then, in 2013, Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed 50 additional public elementary schools — the largest one-time mass school closure in the country. The Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago found that schools with large numbers of Black students had a higher probability of closure than other schools with comparable test scores, locations and utilization rates.
As school infrastructure evaporated in Black ‘hoods, the city invested in new options elsewhere. An investigative report by a local public radio station in 2016 revealed that new school building expansions after the 2013 closures were “overwhelmingly granted” to specialized schools that serve relatively low percentages of low-income and Black students.”
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“The Center for Investigative Reporting released a study in 2018 that analyzed 31 million records revealed by the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and found a disturbing pattern of denials by banks of Black and Latino applicants for traditional mortgages where white applicants with similar qualifications would be accepted. This modern-day redlining persisted in 61 metro areas, from Atlanta to Detroit, Philadelphia to San Antonio. The greater the number of Black or Latino people in a neighborhood, the more likely a loan application would be denied.”
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“A recent study by the Center for Municipal Finance found that cities are taxing owners of low-valued properties at higher rates than they should relative to actual land values, while taxing owners of high-valued properties at lower rates than they should.”
“according to some top environmental economists, we have good reason to believe the true cost of emitting carbon is actually a lot higher than that price tag suggests.
There are a couple of reasons for that. First, until now, the economists who calculated the SCC had barely factored in one of the biggest harms that climate change can cause: human mortality. Second, the way the SCC had been calculated rested on a problematic premise: that damage in the future counts for significantly less than damage in the present.”
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“People do tend to value the present more than the future. You may grab that chocolate chip cookie today, for instance, even though you know it means you’ll have to lean into the diet extra hard tomorrow. But that doesn’t necessarily mean our climate models should follow suit. In fact, some philosophers think baking in people’s rate of pure time preference is a terrible idea.
“We’re basically just measuring a form of human impatience and irrationality, then trying to add it into political decision-making,” Toby Ord, a senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, argued on the 80,000 Hours podcast in 2017. “It doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing that one should be respecting at all. It’s just like finding a cognitive bias that we have, and then adding it back into your economic analysis in order to make your analysis biased in the same way.””
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“Now, that’s not to say the pure rate of time preference should be absolutely zero. As Carleton and Greenstone wrote, “Perhaps the most compelling explanation for a nonzero pure rate of time preference is the possibility of a disaster (e.g., asteroids or nuclear war) that wipes out the population at some point in the future, thus removing the value of any events that happen afterwards.” Ord has made the same argument, suggesting we should discount the future by the extinction risk to humanity, and no more.
Whatever you think about discounting, intellectual honesty requires us to admit that how we choose to answer the question of what we owe to future generations gets baked into the discount rate and thus into the SCC. And any answer to that question will be a subjective moral judgment, not some objective mathematical truth.”
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“even the first purely economic reason to discount the future (society will be wealthier in the future, and damages matter less the wealthier you are) is not some objective truth.”
“the roots of the Democratic divide go back to last November, to the arguments over what happened, and to the way to respond to those results. In those first days after Election Day, Democrats discovered that their hopes for widespread gains were
“The backlog of forest restoration projects suggests that there are issues on public lands that really need to be addressed, but that is not an argument for creating a vast new federal bureaucracy with as many as 1.5 million government employees.”
“This is all wrong. With reasonable design parameters, a welfare state does almost nothing to discourage core potential workers from working. And there’s nothing wrong with a situation in which the elderly, teenagers, parents of very young kids, and people with severe disabilities and their caretakers don’t work. A strong welfare state has big benefits for its recipients, and it helps stabilize the macroeconomy and prevent deep recessions. Last, but by no means least, a strong welfare state creates a situation where regulatory policy questions can be evaluated on the merits with the knowledge that people will be taken care of rather than used as a backdoor to support jobs and incomes.”
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“America’s original cash welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), suffered from very real design flaws that genuinely did discourage work. The best and most natural fix would have been to spend more on the program so benefits didn’t phase out so sharply. But congressional Republicans in the mid-1990s were determined to use the flaws in the program to all but eliminate cash welfare, and after a bit of hemming and hawing, Bill Clinton went along with it and claimed it as a victory. As Dylan Matthews details, that ended up being a disaster for the poorest Americans.
But it did achieve its political objective of opening up space for two other kinds of programs. On the one hand, you have cash assistance programs that are tied to work (Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit). On the other hand, you have programs — Medicaid, SNAP, Section 8 housing vouchers — that don’t require work but also don’t give you cash. There’s also TANF, which is a federal program that gives grants to states to help them organize a cash welfare system whose benefits are only temporary (that’s what the T stands for) and conditioned on finding work within two years. The states are given huge discretion on how to run this program, often using the money for things other than delivering cash benefits.
Then America also has a separate, much more generous welfare state for senior citizens — Social Security and Medicare — and there seems to be a social consensus that the elderly are deserving of help. Stuck somewhere in between are disability programs, which are formally part of the Social Security system but politically speaking seen as “welfare” programs in part because there are always questions about the rigor of the diagnostic criteria.”
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“living in poverty — and especially growing up in poverty — has really bad impacts, and providing assistance can deliver useful long-term benefits.
A recent paper by Manasi Deshpande, for example, shows that when kids lose their SSI benefits, it has a negative long-term impact on their younger siblings’ earnings”
“This is a powerful finding because the younger sibling’s situation is not the target of the program. It’s simply showing that delivering extra financial resources to the family improves the kids’ long-term situation — better nutrition, more focus on school, whatever it is.
A study of the rollout of the SNAP program, similarly, shows that kids whose parents got benefits while they were in utero or up to age five ended up better educated, living in better neighborhoods, and less likely to be disabled as an adult than kids whose parents started getting the benefits when the kid was in their teens. The children also ended up less likely to receive social assistance programs themselves. All of these effects are modest in scale, but the impact on adult receipt of social assistance is large enough that SNAP “pays for itself” in fiscal terms separate from the benefits to the beneficiaries. SNAP benefit availability also appears to reduce obesity and reduce the number of days kids miss school due to illness.
A comprehensive study of one of America’s first cash welfare programs — mothers’ pensions — showed that women who got the benefits lived longer while their sons earned 20 percent more as adults and were less likely to be overweight (they couldn’t track daughters because of name-changing). By the same token, kids whose parents benefit from more generous EITC benefits have higher math scores and are more likely to graduate high school.”
“Medicaid expansion has saved over 20,000 lives since it was enacted. A study of a previous expansion in the 1980s showed that kids who grew up benefitting from expansion paid more in taxes and were less likely to need EITC benefits than those who did not benefit from that Medicaid expansion. A separate study shows that the grandchildren of women who benefitted from that expansion are less likely to have low birth weight. Those kids are not old enough to study adult outcomes yet, but we know that low birth weight kids are likely to have lower IQs and generally worse outcomes in terms of education and income.
Last but by no means least, kids whose families get housing assistance earn more as adults and “childhood participation in assisted housing also reduces the likelihood of adult incarceration for males and females from all household race/ethnicity groups.””
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“The big problem with this patchwork of programs is that it’s so much a patchwork.
Eligibility rules and procedures vary by state. If you move, you might lose benefits which creates a significant disincentive to relocate even when doing so might have other major benefits. The cash programs phase in and phase out in an odd way that delivers too little assistance to the poorest while creating very steep marginal tax rates on somewhat higher-income families.
Social Security, by contrast, is really convenient. You can earn a living in New Jersey and take it with you to Florida when you retire. And the coverage is so broad that it even takes a bite out of child poverty thanks to kids who live with older parents or older relatives and kids who receive the benefit if one of their earning parents dies or becomes disabled.”
“And to the best of my knowledge, there’s no real magic to the means-testing programs. SNAP does a lot to help people and so does housing assistance and so does Medicaid, but basically all for the same reason that cash does — the money is fairly fungible and having more money is helpful.”
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“”Using data from a nationally representative survey of older adults, we find that higher Social Security income significantly improves health outcomes among the elderly. Specifically, we find that increases in annual Social Security benefits led to significant improvements in functional limitations and cognitive function, and that the improvements in cognition function were larger for individuals with better cognition.””
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“In practical terms, there’s nothing wrong with an incremental approach. We should keep fighting to expand Medicaid in the states that haven’t done it yet. We should try to pass Joe Biden’s proposal to make Section 8 vouchers available to everyone who qualifies. We should listen to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and put more money into TANF—it’s 40 percent smaller than it was when it was enacted merely because of inflation. We should also require that states actually use a large share of the grants for cash assistance, instead of for other vaguely-related-to-welfare stuff like abstinence programs.
But in bigger picture terms we ought to do what I advocate in my book One Billion Americans and create what’s basically Social Security for Parents — a truly universal cash allowance for parents of young kids. Michael Bennett and Sherrod Brown have a plan for a child allowance worth $300/month for kids under six and $250/month for kids under 17. It’s a great plan. To be even more ambitious, I would recommend they drop the means testing (theirs phases down to zero for married couples earning over $200,000) and add a one-time baby bonus payment (you could think of it as nine months’ worth of payments during pregnancy). And conceptually, I think you should probably consider eliminating SNAP, Section 8 housing assistance, and weird stuff like LIHEAP and instead just making monthly checks even bigger. You could also scrap the family size adjustment in EITC and turn it into a narrower wage subsidy.
What you’d definitely do is take away the tax code’s backdoor subsidies for parents and instead give middle class — and even wealthy — parents access to this same allowance that everyone gets.
This would massively reduce child poverty with all kinds of ancillary benefits for child development and long-term growth.”