Thread by @LukewSavage

This week I did some research on Mayor Pete Buttigieg's administration and South Bend. There's a lot more work I need to do on his policies overall, but specifically I looked into his approaches to housing and homelessness - both of which I think both deserve sharp criticism.

As this piece documents, many of the Buttigieg administration's topline numbers create the impression of success (in some cases fairly). huffingtonpost.ca/entry/pete-but…

But its strategy overall seems to have been heavily geared towards attracting private capital & gentrifying the city. Housing & homelessness policy provide two illustrations of how (to put it mildly) *limited* this kind of managerialism is in practice though toxic is more fitting

Let's start with the latter. During Buttigieg's tenure, South Bend has adopted a signage campaign directed against panhandling. That's been coupled with a concerted effort to drive the homeless from underneath the Main Street viaduct.

Unable to actually ban them, Buttigieg's administration has pursued another strategy: scheduling frequent hose cleanings under the viaduct in an effort to make those using it for shelter move - in addition installing surveillance cameras southbendtribune.com/news/local/sou…

The administration, meanwhile, has worked overtime to attract private capital. journalgazette.net/news/local/ind…

southbendtribune.com/news/business/…

Some of these efforts have involved the attempted sale of city parklands to for-profit owners. But they've also involved offering multimillion dollar tax abatements to developers & subsidies for luxury condos.

Great Lakes Capital, which was involved in a major deal incorporating a $9 million tax abatement for an upscale downtown office building, was incidentally a donor to Mayor Pete's 2015 re-election campaign

Onto housing. In 2012 14% of South Bend's housing was sitting vacant. Buttigieg created a task force to identify every relevant property and recommend an overall course of action.

Its conclusion? That the city should slap fines on homeowners to incentivize repairs and empower officials to demolish derelict properties at the owner’s expense.

This task force somehow failed to recognize that the majority of the vacant homes were found in low-income black and Latino neighbourhoods or that some residents had inherited housing from deceased relatives or were simply trapped in zombie mortgages.

As a result of the policy, fines and demolitions ensued. Some residents were forced to pay thousands of dollars for things like failing to mow the grass. The whole incident is documented in detail in this excellent Buzzfeed report: buzzfeednews.com/article/henryg…

South Bend’s eviction rate has also, incidentally, doubled between 2012 (when Buttigieg was first elected) and 2016 and is now three times the national average - according to a study by Princeton's eviction lab abc57.com/news/abc57-inv…

I think the way someone governs a city of 100,000 can potentially tell you a fair bit about their approach to politics and governance overall and the picture this paints for me is this:

Pete Buttigieg is very much as he appears: he's a product of elite education and liberalism's professionalized (and technocratically-minded) political class and governs accordingly.

The style of governance that follows is one which views problems as inherently technical rather than political and tries to broker with private interests, usually wealthy ones, to find "solutions" - which usually involve making life (even) easier for rich people.

This is an inherently constrained and conservative way of doing politics, regardless of its intentions because embedded private interests are so often at the root of political problems.

And just as you can't fix housing issues by penalizing poor people and coddling developers (let alone bankrolling your campaigns with their money) you can't offer universal healthcare to sick people by sitting down with insurance companies.

People's needs and those of private profit are fundamentally at odds. This is an inescapable truth of democratic politics and it's also an antagonism an increasingly white-collar, coastal, and professionalized American liberalism likes to pretend doesn't exist.

Won't go into the details here but much the same can be said about the style of governance Julian Castro brought to San Antonio: he mostly played nice with business, aiming to fuse private social compassion with public goods jacobinmag.com/2019/02/julian…

This has been the strategy of many Democratic administrations up and down the American political landscape - one often dependent on big donors and a compliant party bureaucracy offering an in on the nominal opposition and sacrificing public goods in the process.

Just look at how CAP - the leading Democratic Party think tank - functions in practice. nytimes.com/2019/04/15/us/…

This is why Bernie Sanders and others are pursuing an openly oppositional strategy. The power of these interests, and the mechanisms within the Democratic Party that maintain them, need to be broken. There's simply no possibility of that happening with a conventional Dem nominee.

From South Bend to San Antonio, from New York to Washington, you can pursue the public good or you can broker with powerful, profit-driven private interests. You can't smooth the schism over - you have to pick a side.

And if you pick the latter, it means allowing people to die from preventable illnesses so health insurance shareholders can make a profit; it means bulldozing poor neighbourhoods to create space for developers, and it means spraying under bridges to drive the homeless away. /fin