On this day, 23 May 1946, the largest mass arrest in the history of Rochester, New York, took place when 300 police rounded up 208 municipal workers who were on strike for reinstatement to their jobs and union recognition. In addition to picketers, they arrested a teacher on her way to work, a plumber who was walking by, and even one of the strikers’ dogs. The repression did not deter the workers, however, and the strike spread and was won the following week.
“Didn’t threaten the lives of justices”? Fuck that bullshit.
Justice Blackmun, who wrote the Roe majority opinion, had a bullet shot through his living room window. This after years of receiving letters threatening his life. The bullet occurred right after he had received a particularly concerning letter, and was at the end of a year in which DC-area clinics had been subjected to seven bombings. Not threats, bombings.
Another exquisite example of American NIMBYism - local regulations in a rural town that make illegal any house that is too small from being built on a given property. A lady wants to build a smaller house on her lot so she can build a horse stable on the rest and she just….can’t.
What i like about this story is that a lot of the narrativr around “how did America get so NIMBY” is that it was almost accidental. People wanted to preserve their neighborhood, preserve historic buildings, etc, and were fine with affordable housing conceptually but, ya know, not in their back yard. And its partially true, for sure, for every bad actor manipulating the historical preservation board is a group of willing allies proud to Save Our Heritage.
But that narrative also concedes too much, and this article shows that: this ordinance exists as part of an explicit agreement with the state agencies to “keep property values high”. Because property taxes are what funds local gov, and housing prices fund the resident’s finances. They just say it, openly, no shame, “your house proposal is just too cheap, spend more”! The idea that high property prices is a bad thing is not on the radar.
If you have a policy apparatus built explicitly to increase property values, well, not surprising that it achieves that goal.
I did not read this article and I’m about to be annoying on this post. Sorry.
There’s a missing dimension in this analysis. High-density multi-story housing provides more value per acre to a city than a suburban home or mcmansion ever will because your average mcmansion has a mind-boggling amount of unused vertical and horizontal space (a two story-only design and a full front and back yard nearly halves, if not tithes TVPA), and in many cases the high density inner city housing subsidizes suburban costs, which suburban tax value per acre frequently does not really fully cover. The reason we’re stuck on these local minima and haven’t gone full-hypercompact-organic-mixed-zoning-ultra-walkable-utopia is actually because everything exists to antagonize me personally.
