Hong Hate Horoscope: Week of September 27, 2021
Ok, no promises about how frequently I’m gonna be sending these out anymore. They’ll just sometimes go out (I should also stop restricting myself to sending them out at the beginning of the week). But, here are a ton of articles that I’ve saved up.
The Lead
Inject this into my veins (emphasis my own):
As a byproduct of this segregation, things which appear new and are visible are treated with immediate suspicion and hostility. People are understandably hostile to an influx of money that they see coinciding with displacement, even if they can’t accurately identify the individuals responsible for this inequity (as was the case with the misdirected tech bus protests). The major capital influx of high income employees bidding up existing housing—because no housing was built where they work—is much harder to attack than a hip coffee shop or a condo…
It takes blame off of the actual gentrifiers. Oftentimes I find these aesthetic gentrification narratives being espoused by people who themselves are gentrifiers. Usually they were part of an earlier gentrification wave or are current wave gentrifiers trying to dissociate themselves. Giving people literal objects of gentrification allows for gentrifiers to deflect self-reflection on their culpability in the housing crisis. They don’t have to think about the ramifications of searching for homes in a housing market where they’re outbidding lower income people of color.
Caricatures like skinny white bike bros or some scooter make convenient distractions away from the longstanding unaffordability that the original gentrifiers often created. Many of the first wave gentrifiers had consumed existing housing back when it was cheap, then made it impossible to add more housing to mitigate additional residents like themselves, thus increasing displacement onto incumbents. Bernal, the Haight, South Berkeley, North Oakland—all these neighborhoods experienced this. “I’m the good one,” the first-wave gentrifier insists. “The neighborhood gentrified only after I got here.”
No, the neighborhood gentrified because you got here…
Status Quoism. If you’re a business owner or a driver with a regressive belief that everybody needs to drive, a great way to left-wash your obviously pro-pollution belief is to accuse any change that may take a parking space away as gentrification. If you’re someone who just rejects any notion that your city should ever look any different from when you got there, there’s plenty motivation to call literally any and every change gentrification. But these suburbanite tendencies run counter to what a city is supposed to be. Cities are dynamically changing places, not suburbs which were built and sold as static environments.
And the partner article here:
It is fine to dislike the way a home looks; not all art is for everyone. But the convergence of aesthetic preferences and physical displacement under the same “gentrification” banner only serves to maintain the current system of housing development, one that has made housing prohibitively expensive for many Americans and displaced people under countless different architectural styles.
The problem with this conflation became clear when I looked into the building depicted in the aforementioned Camden TikTok video. Branch Village isn’t a “gentrification building.” It’s actually an affordable housing project funded in part by low-income housing tax credits. According to the Courier-Post, the project’s second phase included the construction of 75 townhomes, all of which “will be considered affordable, accessible to those making less than 80 percent of the area’s median income.” Per an affordable housing database, the development now has 245 units.
Despite the primary concern of gentrification usually being the displacement of low-income residents, the top two comments on the Camden video, which collectively received 76,000 “likes,” were stylistic complaints: “why is it ALWAYS h&r block green, and “they really had to pick the worst colors didn’t they?”
This is common in gentrification discourse. People want to use a word that evokes visuals of marginalized communities being displaced, either through evictions, rising prices, or even violent displacement. But, after prodding, the actual concern is artistic. The rhetorical sleight of hand is not always intentional. For many, the concepts of “new, modern buildings” and “displacement” have simply become inextricable. But the confusion around how the word gentrification is being used has real policy consequences: If people believe that new buildings work against housing affordability, they will oppose the very policies necessary to solve the nation’s housing affordability crisis.
And in defense of modern architecture:
Disdain for modern architecture isn’t new. In his book The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York, Suleiman Osman traces the recent history of neighborhood change in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. The iconic brownstones and neighborhood design people have fought so hard to preserve, under the philosophy that such older buildings represented something more authentic and removed from the modern and capitalist architecture of Manhattan, were once new and “inauthentic” themselves.
And a quote from a link within a link (I’m sorry, but I’ll do the clickthrough for you):
“Many of these houses were the same, and many were completely identical to each other because they were being built by a single developer,” Mohler says of past urban developments. “At the time, it was criticized for wasting land and all looking the same. Looking identical today means neighborhood character. If it’s old and looks the same, it’s good, but if it’s new and all looks the same, it’s bad.”
What’s the solution? BUILD MORE HOUSING!
It is easy to defend a 100 percent affordable housing development like Branch Village in Camden, New Jersey. But even new buildings that service higher-income people are an anti-displacement tool. When higher-income residents look for housing, they have two options: Either new housing will be built for them or they’ll bid up the price of existing housing, pricing out current residents.
It can feel counterintuitive: People begin to see new entrants and fearing the neighborhood will become too expensive for them to afford, they oppose new buildings, hoping that will stop the changes, but it doesn’t work.
Economist Evan Mast identified “52,000 residents of new multifamily buildings in large cities, their previous address, the current residents of those addresses, and so on for six rounds” in an effort to show “how new market-rate construction loosens the market for lower-quality housing.” He found that such construction projects free up homes in below-median-income neighborhoods, providing for more affordable housing and reducing competition for lower-income residents. The implication is also that many higher-income residents are pricing out lower-income residents because there is an undersupply of market-rate housing.
If you don’t build enough of something, the only people who will get anything are rich people. Reflexively opposing new buildings doesn’t protect neighborhoods from gentrification but actually increases a neighborhood’s exclusivity.
Good journalism/Cool shit
I’m sorry to inform you that I’m writing about Covid again, with Emily Oster’s very good take (emphasis mine):
We are not going to arrive at a point where there is no COVID. The 2019 world in which you’d never heard of COVID-19 and never thought about it will not happen again. I’m not saying this to scare you or make you sad. I say it because if you are waiting for that moment to decide it is over, it makes sense to adjust your framing.
Let’s ask instead: When can I stop obsessing about calculating COVID numbers around every choice I make?
The answer here is: When you decide to. And it will be a conscious decision.
The real pandemic “endgame” at a decision level is to start thinking about COVID the way we think about the flu or other contagious illnesses. There may be some broad adaptations of our behavior to the existence of the risk, but there will also be a point at which COVID is not a part of our everyday calculations about playdates and weddings and birthday parties. And when we get to this point, it will feel more like the “before times,” even if it looks a little different.
Arriving at this endgame requires deciding at what point you feel the COVID-19 risk for your family belongs in this bucket. It means deciding when you feel it is in the space of the other risks you take.
In a sense, there may be some relief in saying that, hey, this is in your control. But at the same time, making that shift will be cognitively challenging. We’ve spent the past 18 months with COVID-19 at the front of our mind, as the most salient risk. It is involved in every decision. That cannot be true forever, and it shouldn’t be once people are vaccinated. But choosing to relegate it to a more conventional risk bucket is going to require actual mental effort, especially at first.
And on our issues with probability:
Feeling protected is not the same as feeling that no one will ever get COVID. I am purposely not linking this to case rates. There will continue to be mild and asymptomatic cases of COVID forever. Vaccines for kids are something I want to take advantage of, but they will not eliminate the risk that kids get COVID. You can feel protected while still accepting the possibility that you will get COVID or your kids will.
One way I see it: when policymakers and the media discuss the low risks of COVID to vaccinated people, they still focus tremendously on numbers, trying to help people understand the low risk with numbers like 1 in 5,000 or 1 in 10,000. We know from psychology that small probabilities like this are hard for people to really understand and think through. Moving forward is going to require accepting that the risk is “small but not zero” but not obsessing about whether it is 1 in 5,000 or 1 in 10,000.
In the end, the message here is that there is no world of “no COVID” and if you are waiting for some external sign that the pandemic is over, you will be waiting forever. Eventually it will move to our everyday risks; our behavior will adapt to its existence, but it will not be top-of-mind all the time.
Why We’re Experiencing So Many Unusually Hot Summer Nights
Really cool graphics from the Times that also explains why DC nights have been absolutely terrible and how climate change can’t just be summed up in a single measure. [New York Times]
There Are Fewer People Behind Bars Now Than 10 Years Ago. Will It Last?
Really good work on incarceration. [Marshall Project]
Sports hot takes
The Cold World of the Extremely Online Liverpool Fan
On the intersection of fandom, the soccer transfer market, and being Extremely Online in a bad way.
One: The first thing you must understand about these fans is that transfers are the barometer by which they believe all footballing achievement must be gauged. Liverpool had a relatively quiet summer on the transfer front this year, but they still solved the most obvious hole in their squad by signing centre back Ibrahima Konate. Of course, that was never going to cut it for fans who deem “winning” the window as the most telling metric on whether or not a club is in good health. It’s fair to say that Liverpool Twitter in the closing days of window was in a state of anarchy…
But this obsession with transfers has grown into something beyond improving the squad—beyond what new players can do for your team on the pitch. It has become a hobby tangential to the sport. For this ideology to work, you have to buy into the idea that the 26 first team players that Liverpool can currently call on have no chance of succeeding this season, but if we had only added number 27, we’d be just fine. For this ideology to work, you must assume that every transfer will be a net positive for the club—that poor transfers frequently make a squad worse is never acknowledged. For this ideology to work, you have to believe that every setback we suffer this season could have been avoided if only we’d made more signings in previous transfer windows. [Dean]
Why the University of Florida gets a ~$20m cut of Gatorade profits every year
A story on Gatorade and trademarks. [The Hustle]
Health, politics, and academia
The U.S. Needs to Stop the Confusion Over Boosters
Sorry Aaron, too late buddy. The key passages:
The biggest issue is that, unlike the efficacy of vaccines in general, the efficacy of boosters is relatively unclear. The data that will be used for the advisory meeting was released on Wednesday. Much of it comes out of Israel, but those data sets are open to a variety of interpretations. People who were vaccinated early tended to be older, richer and more educated, and when you control for those factors, a lot of the evidence for waning immunity from vaccination gets weaker.
Other data released by Kaiser Permanente also point to increased infections among the vaccinated over time. A studypublished in The New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday argued that boosters increased protection against infection and severe disease, but studied only people age 60 and older in Israel, and only for a relatively short period of time.
Another study from Public Health England, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, shows that while protection against infections may wane among people who received the Pfizer vaccine, that problem is mostly limited to people age 65 and older. Protection against severe disease, which is most important, doesn’t appear to decline much. This seems clear even to the F.D.A. scientists who prepared the report released Wednesday. They wrote, “Overall, data indicate that currently U.S.-licensed or authorized Covid-19 vaccines still afford protection against severe Covid-19 disease and death in the United States.” [New York Times]
‘It’s Become Increasingly Hard for Them to Feel Good About Themselves’
I think this is a much more nuanced take on the gender imbalance in colleges (way better than the WSJ article that was going around), backed with actual data. Although the title still sucks. [New York Times]
Hate reading
Stop Calling It a ‘Pandemic of the Unvaccinated’ (ed. note: it is tho)
Counterpoint: nah let’s bully the assholes more. Or more succinctly put (in tweet form):
Uh this is quite the take:
Yet Ms. Holmes is also exceptional for the basic fact that she is a woman. Time and again, we see that the boys’ club that is the tech industry supports and protects its own — even when the costs are huge. And when the door cracks open ever so slightly to let a woman in, the same rules don’t apply. Indeed, as Ms. Holmes’s trial for fraud continues in San Jose, Calif., it’s clear that two things can be true. She should be held accountable for her actions as chief executive of Theranos. And it can be sexist to hold her accountable for alleged serious wrongdoing and not hold an array of men accountable for reports of wrongdoing or bad judgment.
Questionable, unethical, even dangerous behavior has run rampant in the male-dominated world of tech start-ups. Though never charged with crimes, WeWork’s Adam Neumann and Uber’s Travis Kalanick hyped their way into raising over $10 billion for their companies, claiming they would disrupt their stagnant, tired industries.
Ok, let’s be clear here: Elizabeth Holmes is being held up for FRAUD, of which Uber did not commit and you can make a case of WeWork, but it wouldn’t be a good one. You can definitely say that Uber has a toxic work environment and that it should be held liable for harassment, but that’s a WAY tougher argument to make that simple fraud. The Uber guy and a lot of these tech bros suck, don’t get me wrong, we’re just absolutely not comparing apples to apples here. [New York Times]
Music
A seminal album that I felt was always less experimental than people thought. It’s still great. [Stereogum]
The Magnetic Fields' '100,000 Fireflies' Sounds The Way Being Lonely Feels
An essay on a hidden gem of the ‘90s. [NPR]
Recipe of the Week
After a (very) long hiatus, this section is back! Giving you a simple recipe (sorry it’s in video form) for all of your work at home lunch needs!