NIMBYism as Segregationism

African American residents in Berkeley, California: Year (Decennial Census) Number of African-Americans Percent of Berkeley Population 1970 27,421 23.5% 1980 20,671 20.0% 1990 19,309 18.8% 2000 14,007 13.6% 2010 11,241 10.0% 2020 9,812 7.9% sources: http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/cities/Berkeley.htm , https://data.census.gov/table In 1963, James Baldwin remarked about redevelopment specifically in San Francisco: “urban renewal equals Negro removal.” In […]

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Housing in California: the need to accommodate refugees

This week in America the main news is about how the right-wing majority of Supreme Court justices intend to overturn Roe v. Wade and allow states to make abortion completely illegal under all circumstances. The newfangled ‘originalist’ reasoning of Samuel Alito discards 50 years of precedent in Roe—and indeed anything beyond the Tenth Amendment—by attempting

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Where to Resettle Californians?

We need to enable major densification of selected California cities to accommodate our own climate refugees. Yesterday I pointed out that there are many cities and towns in the Coast Range and Sierra Nevada that will eventually have to be evacuated due to a permanent rise in fire risk. The State Insurance Commissioner can soften

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The fight over the past: the politics of official history

One of the peculiar traits of modern nation-states is that they try to collapse together a variety of things into one, politically-effective bundle: 1. The population is reframed as the ‘body politic,’ which Hobbes portrayed as a literal metaphor in 1651. 2. The spatial territory is considered an integral part of the ‘nation.’ Symbolically, the

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The regime is…us

In my Cities in a Global Society course, I have been pressing the point that we need to rethink organized political power. The classic English/German worldview is that there is a thing called “the state,” which is separate from “the people.” This is effective rhetoric for elections, especially for candidates who want to portray themselves

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