In an extremely unbalanced market where sellers may get several offers well above asking price, they have the to choose between similar bids with non-price metrics, for instance how much they like the buyers (often based on a personal cover letter).
Hobart, a lawyer who lives in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, relayed to me how weird it was to do this as he looked for a house with his wife last year:
We were "trying to have some way of standing out by saying that we’re nice, normal people" in our cover letter.
But "nice, normal people" is of course incredibly subjective. And @nardotrealtor even warned last year against using these "buyer love letters".
Homeowners are disproportionately wealthy and disproportionately white. If they are allowed to pick who they feel most comfortable with that could easily replicate their existing biases.
Biden and Klobuchar had two separate zoning proposals in April. Now @kristoncapps reports that the Biden team is just adopting Klobuchar's idea (and abandoning their original one?)
This is weird because they were complementary plans!
Biden's original plan was to require cities to act before getting the funding and Klobuchar's plan was to help them get there!
Neither of them would completely fix the problem of course but it would be helpful to have multiple bites of the apple here.
Here's my article on Biden's plan and Klobuchar's plan as well as @kristoncapps' article from this AM!
New >> @JohnFPfaff helps me think through how accountability and justice can be at odd with each other and how that might play out following the conviction of Derek Chauvin.
Following the conviction we heard Rep. Jim Jordan call it proof that "the system works". He's not alone in thinking that.
Then we talked about something I know a lot of criminal justice reform advocates struggle with. Advocating against mass incarceration means shorter sentences for violent criminals. So how should we think about what an appropriate sentence is for someone like Chauvin?
While Biden's recently announced grant program will provide $$ to localities who remove exclusionary zoning policies, Klobuchar's program helps them get there.
There are localities that are interested in figuring out how to upzone, but don't have the in-house resources to do it. Klobuchar's grant program would give them the ability to hire or contract seasoned planners who can develop a plan for them.
New >> A new study found a significant decline (15-20%) in police homicides in places that saw BLM protests from 2014-2019.
The flipside? The study shows that places that saw BLM protests also experienced a 10% rise in murders over 2014-2019. vox.com/22360290/black…
Thanks to Travis Campbell at UMass Amherst (who smartly doesn't appear to be on twitter) for walking me through your research and h/t to @owasow for flagging this piece of research and talking me through the underlying protest literature. vox.com/22360290/black…
First, on the good news. Not only did BLM protests correlate with a significant decline in police homicides. The larger and more frequent the protests were, the bigger the decline.
The decrease is also persistent, widening 14 percentage points from year 0 to year 4 of protests.
To eliminate exclusionary zoning, reducing opposition to new multi-family construction is key.
I asked @DataProgress to message test an economic and racial justice case for reforming zoning laws and the former performed **10 percentage points better**.
Republican voters net support rises **14 points** when presented with an economic case relative to the racial justice arguments.
This is just one poll and I think the best argument is what works for your community. But I've yet to see compelling evidence that making the racial justice case gets you more voters than just making the economic one.
51 years after the Fair Housing Act, it's never been seriously enforced. It's time to change that.
First things first, Biden has work to do to convince whoever can be convinced that there is a racial, environmental, and economic imperative to undo residential segregation.