Welcome back to Whatcha Reading! Here’s how we’re kicking off the month of September:
Lara: I’ve totally given in to the impulse to read the rest of the Guild Hunter novels. I’m currently reading Archangel’s Light. ( A | BN | K )This series is big and comforting and cathartic. I’m so thankful to have another quiver to my bow of therapy reads. Good people doing good things, defeating evil and loving each other while they do it. Balm for the soul.
Sarah: I tried that series so many times and the violence was too much for me – which is a wild thing for me to say since the Psy-Changelings are also violent and are among my comfort re-reads. Isn’t that curious.
Lara: I plan to give the Psy-Changeling series a go soon. I read one book randomly late in the series and even though I was confused, I loved it. I’m so excited to have a whole massive series to indulge in at some point
Amanda: A coworker who shares the same reading tastes as me brought me Camera Shy by Kay Cove. ( A | BN ) She specifically mentioned it has some great body positive messaging.
Sarah: I have bounced off so many books my kindle thinks it’s a trampoline. But I just started A Dragon Rider’s Guide to Retirement and so far I’m maintaining a lateral trajectory.
Amanda: Oh that’s a fun title.
Maya: I’m listening to I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Comby Kimberly Lemming. ( A | BN | K | AB ) There are also dinosaurs. I’m obsessed!!
Sarah: Update: The war witch had a hot flash and I am in.
Carrie: I’m almost done with The Wicked Lies of Habren Faireand enjoying the Welsh folklore of it.
Shana: I just finished An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green ( A | BN | K | G | AB ) and really enjoyed it, proving books written by men can occasionally make me happy.
Amanda: I’ve started Willing Prey by Allie Oleander ( A | BN | K | AB ) and it’s a very cute and funny dark-ish romance with characters in their 30s. Really loving it so far.
FBI Director Kash Patel was dining at Rao’s in New York on Wednesday night after the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk, two sources familiar with his whereabouts told NBC News.
Patel had posted on X at 6:21 p.m. ET that the “subject” in Kirk’s killing was “in custody.” Rao’s, a well-known restaurant that is notoriously tough to get into, opens at 7 p.m.
Then, at 7:59 p.m., Patel posted a follow-up post that the “subject in custody has been released after an interrogation by law enforcement.”
The details come amid criticism from multiple former FBI officials of Patel’s handling of the Kirk investigation.
One law enforcement official said that the “horrific event” of Kirk’s killing showcased Patel’s “public inability to meet the moment as a leader.”
Come on, Scorsese was at the next table! You expect him to fly to Utah?
In related news, once it turned out that the murderer wasn’t a trans communist Trump also lost interest:
man they really didn't give a shit about that guy. as soon as it was clear they couldn't use his death to launch a purge they started to treat it like a nothingburger
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – With the prospect of new Iranian nuclear power plants looking dim after Israeli and American bombing of its civilian nuclear enrichment sites, and with a need to export its fossil gas rather than consuming it domestically, the Tehran leadership is at last turning to renewables for electricity generation. President Masoud Pezeshkian, elected July 2024, said this week that Iran has installed 1 gigawatt of solar capacity since he came into office.
Iran is close to China diplomatically, which is making a bid to become the world’s first advanced electrostate, and Tehran imports its solar panels from that country. Iran is choosing Chinese companies to install solar power plants and set up battery energy storage systems (BESS).
Back in the 1950s, when Egypt and Iran wanted help with major electricity installations, they turned to the United States, then the most advanced country in the world. Now, in post-DOGE Trumpworld, the US scientific establishment is being crippled, the US is widely viewed as a backward and pugnacious oppressor, and Middle Eastern states prefer China as their go-to development partner.
Moreover, the Minister of Energy, Abbas Aliabadi, announced that Iran would install 7 gigawatts of new solar by the end of the year. Aliabadi says that currently Iran is installing 100 megawatts of new solar capacity weekly, which would yield about 5 new gigawatts per annum; so he must be planning to increase this rate of installation substantially.
Iran generates about 94 gigawatts of electricity annually from gas, petroleum, hydroelectric and nuclear plants. Some 80% of power plants, however, run on fossil gas. Iran has added 4 gigawatts of gas electricity generation capacity just so far this year.
The third biggest gas producer in the world, Iran produces some 24 billion cubic feet of fossil gas daily, but uses up 65% of it domestically, which is one reason it faces economic constraints. Qatar produces 17 billion cubic feet of gas daily, but exports almost all of it, an so is one of the wealthier countries in the world — with a sovereign wealth fund of $557 billion.
If Iran could make its electricity from solar instead and sell most of its gas abroad, it would be a much wealthier country. Currently Iraq and Turkey take most Iranian fossil gas.
So, 1 gigawatt of solar is only a little more than 1% of the total, but it is a start. If Iran really can put in 7 gigawatts of new solar this year, then it might begin a transition to renewables for domestic electricity production.
Half of electricity generation is in the public sector, and half is private. Aliabadi appears to view a solar revolution as an opportunity for the private sector to expand its role in the electricity market. He pointed to the extremely important role for the private sector and said that anything the public sector is now doing, the private sector could undertake, and would be provided incentives for doing so.وزیر نیرو در ادامه با اشاره به نقش بسیار مهم بخش خصوصی افزود: همه وظایفی که اکنون بر عهده وزارت نیرو است قابلیت انتقال به بخش خصوصی را دارد. It would be a hell of a note if a substantial private solar power sector took off in Iran even as the one in the United States is gutted by Trump.
Aliabadi characterizes the shift to renewables as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Iran has opened a lot of small provincial solar power plants, which might only have a capacity 100 or 200 megawatts. Aliabadi stressed the benefits of this localization of energy production.
He didn’t say so, but I’m wondering if the Iranian government thinks decentralized solar farms serving small towns and cities are more secure from Israeli bombing raids than big centralized power plants. Iranian officials also stress the localized character of BESS or battery storage, which they see as a positive. Moreover small-scale utility solar and rooftop solar, when paired with batteries, can deliver electricity without requiring a further build-out of transmission wires and without requiring that they be upgraded.
ShahraraNews cautions, however, that putting in 7 new gigawatts of solar depends on permitting and on the technical ability to connect solar farms to the grid, which may make the process lengthier than Aliabadi envisions. Still, Iran is apparently installing a gigawatt every 10 weeks at the moment. With Chinese help and advice and imported Chinese panels, which have dropped in price, Iran could easily produce half its electricity from solar within 10 years if it just keeps doing what it is doing. The signs are, however, that Tehran is becoming more ambitious in this arena, in part for reasons of the self-preservation of the regime.
( Middle East Monitor ) – There are moments in history that strip away every illusion we carry about ourselves. Gaza is one such moment. For nearly two years, the world has witnessed a genocide live on its screens. We have seen children pulled from rubble, families starving in tents, hospitals turned to dust. We cannot say we did not know. Every image, every cry, every number has reached us in real time. And yet the killing goes on, the silence goes on, life goes on.
The truth is unbearable but undeniable: we have failed Gaza, and in doing so, we have failed ourselves as human beings.
Frantz Fanon once wrote that colonialism is not a machine but a human reality, and when confronted, it responds with naked violence. Gaza is the purest proof of this truth in our own time. Israel’s colonial war does not speak the language of justice or dialogue; it speaks through bombs, siege, and starvation. Genocide today does not come only with the slogans of hatred but with the bureaucratic jargon of “security,” “collateral damage,” “military necessity.” Western governments supply the bombs while speaking of peace. The United Nations counts the dead while doing nothing to stop the dying. Media outlets repeat official lines while children are buried under rubble.
As Talal Asad reminds us, secular modernity has perfected this art: to kill massively while convincing itself it remains moral. To dress violence in legality, to turn blood into statistics, to make atrocity look like policy. Gaza has become the stage where this moral corruption plays out openly.
Edward Said wrote that Palestine was never just about land, it was about narrative, about who gets to tell the story of suffering. For decades, Palestinians have been denied the right to narrate their own lives, their own deaths. Their pain has always been doubted, reframed, explained away by others. Today, even when Palestinians livestream their own slaughter, the same pattern continues. Their testimony is dismissed, their grief recast as someone else’s security.
Said called this a form of cultural erasure, a silencing that prepares the ground for political violence. Gaza is the ultimate proof of his prophecy: even in their extermination, Palestinians are told their voices are not enough.
Perhaps nothing is more damning than the silence of those who call themselves progressive. The liberal democracies of the West, who preach human rights, tolerance, and justice—are the very powers arming the genocide. Their intellectuals, who fill bookshelves with critiques of racism and climate collapse, suddenly discover “complexity” when asked about Gaza. Universities that issue statements on every global tragedy fall silent when the word “Palestine” is uttered.
This is not an oversight, it is a mask pulled away. Liberal progressivism has always been selective in its empathy, generous to the powerful and cruel to the colonized. Gaza has torn that mask to shreds. What stands revealed is not neutrality but complicity.
The lesson is bitter: liberal progressives were never the guardians of conscience they claimed to be.
But the betrayal is not Western alone. Arab rulers, who built their legitimacy on the cause of Palestine, have abandoned it in full daylight. They sign deals, trade intelligence, buy weapons, and call it “modernization.” They pose with American presidents while Palestinian mothers bury their children. They normalize with Israel while Gaza burns.
Their betrayal cuts deep because it wears the clothes of kinship. They sell it as pragmatism, as necessity, as the future. In truth, it is cowardice, it is profit bought with bloodnd history will remember that while Palestinians starved, Arab leaders signed contracts.
Even the so-called Global South, those nations that wrap themselves in the language of anti-colonial resistance, have too often used Palestine as a symbol while doing little in practice. Statements are made, flags waved, conferences held—but when the time comes to cut trade, boycott, or risk sanctions, silence returns.
Thus, Gaza has exposed not just Western hypocrisy but a global one. North and South, East and West—all are implicated in this moral collapse.
The most unbearable truth is this: Gaza is not only a war on a people but a war on the very idea of innocence. When schools turned into shelters are bombed, when babies die in incubators with no electricity, when thousands of children are buried nameless in shallow graves—something larger than Palestine is being murdered.
Children are the last boundary of humanity, the proof that some values remain sacred. To kill them, knowingly and systematically, is to declare that nothing is sacred anymore. If innocence itself can be destroyed with impunity, then humanity has already destroyed itself.
And yet, amid this horror, Gaza’s children still write poems, still draw pictures in rubble, still dream of tomorrow. Their very survival is an act of defiance. As Mahmoud Darwish wrote, “We suffer from an incurable malady: hope.” That hope itself is resistance, proof that dignity cannot be erased, even under rubble.
There is something grotesque about our time. Billionaires spend fortunes dreaming of colonies on Mars while life on Earth is abandoned. Rockets are designed to explore other planets, drones to deliver packages across cities—yet bread cannot reach starving families in Gaza. We speak of progress, innovation, human genius. But what is progress worth if it coexists with mass graves? What is civilization if it tolerates genocide?
We search for life on Mars while killing life in Gaza. That single sentence captures the sickness of our age.
Conscience is not a possession. It is not something we keep in speeches, laws, or institutions. It is a choice renewed in action. Gaza has been that test, and the world has failed.
To stay silent is to stand with the siege, to weigh words while children starve is to share in the crime, to claim neutrality is to side with power against the powerless, for Gaza has already stripped away every excuse. There is no complexity in bombing hospitals, no neutrality in starving children, no balance in burying entire families.
“Gaza 54,” Digital, Midjourney, 2025
Gaza is not only a tragedy; it is a teacher. It teaches us that evil no longer hides, it wears the clothes of democracy, speaks the language of law, and is applauded by those who claim to be progressive. It teaches us that conscience can collapse globally, under the weight of profit and power. It teaches us that Palestinians, through their sumud, their steadfast refusal to disappear, remain the last keepers of dignity in an age that has lost all shame.
Their endurance is not only a resistance to occupation. It is a resistance to the death of humanity itself.
One day, the bombs will stop, the rubble will be cleared, the dead will be counted. And history will ask us a question more terrifying than any image we have seen: Where were you when Gaza was erased? What did you do?
There will be no excuses left—not silence, not complexity, not neutrality.
The ruins of Gaza will hold the answer: we saw, and we failed.
But perhaps there is still time to understand what Gaza has been telling us all along: Palestine is not only about Palestinians; it is about us. It is about whether the word human still has meaning. To defend Gaza is not charity, it is not politics, it is survival—of conscience, of dignity, of whatever remains of humanity.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.
Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
(The Conversation) – The US and Israel have sparked international condemnation over their leaked vision for the reconstruction of a shattered Gaza. The urban development plan seems to have evolved since its emergence earlier in the year. It now includes economic drivers such as blockchain-based trade initiatives, data centres and “world-class resorts”.
And its alignment to the proposed regional logistical network, the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor (Imec) aims to put it at the centre of a pro-American regional architecture.
The images and details that have emerged in the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation (Great) Trust blueprint indicate a vision that clearly pays homage to Gulf urbanism. Similar mega-projects, towers and speculative real estate ventures have driven the transformation of Dubai and other Gulf cities since the 1980s.
The 38-page document, initially published in the Washington Post, is an architectural fantasy of a hyper-modern, coastal enclave. Its planning origins seem twofold. First, it’s rooted in the libertarian ideologies of what’s known as a charter city – urban development spaces with different laws and institutions than the jurisdiction they sit within, such as Prospera in Honduras.
Second, it appears to take inspiration from the authoritarian control of oil-rich monarchies such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia. These states are now intimately aligned with US president Donald Trump and Israel itself.
The plan was reportedly aided by the Boston Consulting Group, with staff from the Tony Blair Institute apparently privy to previous discussions. Boston Consulting Group has since said that two of its former partners took part in the work without its knowledge. The Tony Blair Institute has also distanced itself, saying it has never “authored, developed or endorsed” plans to relocate residents from Gaza.
The US$100 billion (£74 billion) investor-led plan has all the standard ingredients of a new city. This includes prestige waterfront developments for the international elite. It envisages apartment blocks owned by international real estate developers, whether Saudi state-owned funds or US corporate trusts.
Special economic zones with favourable tax conditions supposedly promise advanced manufacturing potential. And various kinds of green and sustainable technologies are also proposed – potentially greenwashing the massive carbon footprint of the conflict.
Gaza is unlikely to be the next Dubai though. The plan includes massive Israeli security buffer zones, suggesting the likelihood of resistance from Palestinian militant groups to occupation. In all likelihood, it would also finally extinguish any prospect of a two-state solution.
The risks for financial investors will be massive. These include possible legal liabilities around land theft and potential incorporation into court proceedings on genocide at the International Court of Justice should these happen. It’s no wonder the plan has been described as “insane” by a senior associate at the Royal United Services Institute think tank, and opposed by some parts of the Israeli media.
Understanding the urban dimensions of the “Gaza Riviera” plan needs more than a planning lens though. It involves placing its development within the wider history and geography of Palestine. Doing so arguably positions the initiative less as a reconstruction effort and more as the next step towards the erasure of the Palestinian presence in the territory.
Scholars of settler colonialism have shown that its logic is one of elimination. This, it’s explained, is to enable territorial control and to establish a new settler society on the land. As Theodor Herzl, founding father of Zionism and held in high regard by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, argued: “If I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct.”
Israel has previously asserted territorial control over Gaza, including the forced transfer of Palestinians to the territory in 1948, which they refer to as the Nakba (the catastrophe), as well as with illegal settlements between 1967 and 2005, and the blockade of the strip from 2007. All these forms of control should be understood within the logic of elimination. The most recent military onslaught in Gaza demonstrates the latest phase in this process.
The plan is reliant on two on-the-ground factors beyond the financial and geo-political – urbicide and expulsion. First, establishing this new society involves demolishing centuries of historical built environment and the support networks of urban life. This urbicide of Gaza is the deliberate destruction of its civil infrastructure, built environment, roads and hospitals, removing its physical character and functionality as a settlement.
What the plan would mean for Palestinians
Forensic Architecture is a group of researchers who use architectural techniques to investigate state violence and human rights abuses. Its Cartography of Genocide database has documented that the Israel Defense Forces’ spatial violence has been nearly complete in many areas of Gaza. This sets the necessary conditions for the plan to proceed.
The plan has little space for the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza. There are reports of residents being offered up to US$5,000 to make way for the “Riviera”, supposedly on a temporary basis.
Meanwhile the Israeli military continues killing Palestinian civilians and pushing massive displacement within Gaza itself, while far-right Israeli politicians make public their desire to remove Palestinians from the territory.
Claims that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza – including from the International Association of Genocide Scholars – are becoming more widespread. Israel’s actions have resulted in death and injury to tens of thousands of Palestinians. The plan for the redevelopment of Gaza can also be understood within this settler colonial logic: an urban idea that, in order to be achieved, necessitates the erasure of all that stood before through the expulsion of the population and urbicide of the built environment.
I didn't realize it had been that long. So what have I been doing? Always a fair question.
Being unemployed. With no interviews. And a sick cat who hanging on enough that I have to work remotely since hiring my catsitter multiple times a week plus commuting costs so I can hang out and experience a germ-laden cube farm has lost any appeal it ever had for me. Alternatively, I'm not killing my cat so some dweeb can watch me in person instead of online. Plus, I am still absolutely crispy.
What am I doing instead? I have registered for an online Data Analytics Certification program at the University of Minnesota. It starts next month and doesn't look too painful. It's also not industry-specific in case I want to get out of healthcare. I am also dutifully signing up with contracting companies, lining up references, checking in with colleagues and all that.
I'll be vetting grants again in November for a small stipend.
I need to get a list of Jana's remaining fine bindings to show to her former boss. He's looking into getting some institutional support for a couple of artists and wants to include her work. On the one hand, not much budget out there. On the other, the man is a Macarthur Genius Award winner so that my well help.
I'm starting up a Ko-fi store for things you can purchase off me, like hour long consultations on things I know a lot about, some of my classes, Jana's handmade boxes (there are a lot) and fiction and nonfiction that isn't readily available elsewhere or under contract. At the moment, I'm trying to get a buffer by raising funds to pay down some not huge debts while I try to spin up some editing and writing gigs. Please consider bookmarking it, hiring me, throw a coin to your Witcher and all that. I'm managing, but if things go sideways, it will be unpleasant.
I have spun up a couple of writing gigs in progress.
Queen of Swords Press news! We just signed a reprint (gay vampires!) by author M.Christian (due out end of October) and a new collection of sapphic fantasy tales set in Southeast Asia by Joyce Chng (due out in February, if all goes well). Hoping to pull off an ebook box set of the Astreiant Series around Christmas.
Adding lots of events because for the first time in almost 9 years, Queen of Swords Press is actually covering my royalties! I'm parsing out old royalties by quarter so we don't run into cash shortages, but it is pretty fun to be collecting my dues on my books once again.
I have been to the State Fair, a couple of movies, tea in Anoka, MN, to see sundry museum exhibits, been out with friends, had friends over, started patching concrete around the house, begun fixing small things I can figure out by watching YouTube (I managed to trip the safety on the furnace on one such endeavor, which necessitated a tech visit today, but other things have gone a bit better).
I have signed up for lots of free trainings and entrepreneur stuff that the city and county offer.
I am writing again. Fiction and nonfiction. Slow and disorganized, but there's stuff on the page once more.
So lots of activity, none of which pays a living wage or close to it. If I can patch enough stuff together, to hang on until the end of March, I can apply for Social Security, if it still exists, and go from there.
During the Battle of Waterloo, a cannon shot struck the right leg of Henry Paget, Second Earl of Uxbridge, prompting this quintessentially British exchange:
The single most British conversation in the history of human civilization, in my judgment, took place on the Upper Nile in 1899, when starving explorer Ewart Grogan stumbled out of the bush and surprised one Captain Dunn, medical officer of a British exploratory expedition:
Dunn: How do you do?
Grogan: Oh, very fit thanks; how are you? Had any sport?
Dunn: Oh pretty fair, but there is nothing much here. Have a drink? You must be hungry; I’ll hurry on lunch.
“It was not until the two men had almost finished the meal that Dunn thought it excusable to enquire about the identity and provenance of his guest.”
A loan estimate for an Atlanta home purchased by Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve governor accused of mortgage fraud by the Trump administration, shows that Cook had declared the property as a “vacation home,” according to a document reviewed by Reuters.
The document, dated May 28, 2021, was issued to Cook by her credit union in the weeks before she completed the purchase and shows that she had told the lender that the Atlanta property wouldn’t be her primary residence. The document appears to counter other documentation that Cook’s critics have cited in support of their claims that she committed mortgage fraud by reporting two different homes as her primary residence, two independent real-estate experts said.
Reuters was unable to reach Cook for comment. She has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing regarding her properties, which also include a home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and an investment property in Massachusetts.
Administration officials led by Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, have used mortgage documents from her Atlanta and Michigan properties to accuse Cook of claiming both as her “primary residence.” The allegedly false claims of residence, which could improve mortgage and tax implications for a homeowner, led Pulte to refer the matter to the Department of Justice, prompting a federal investigation and an order by President Donald Trump to dismiss her.
Not that this would be adequate cause to have fired her even if it was true, but this means that Trump may force the Roberts Court to fully acquiesce to his ending the independence of the Federal Reserve without even a fig leaf.
(1) LIVE AND DIRECT. [Item by N.] Nintendo livestreamed an hour-long Nintendo Direct today, featuring announcements and trailers for video games and DLC coming to the new Switch 2 console, including the sequel to the Hugo-winning Hades, breaking out of … Continue reading →
The bill, among the most controversial housing proposals in recent memory, overcame opposition from local governments, organized labor unions and many legislative Democrats.
California lawmakers just laid the groundwork for a highly targeted building boom.
Senate Bill 79, authored by San Francisco Democrat Sen. Scott Wiener, would “upzone” neighborhoods immediately surrounding train, light rail and subway stations in many of the state’s most populous metro areas. That means apartment developers will be able to construct residential buildings — some as tall as 75 feet — regardless of what local zoning maps, elected officials or density-averse neighbors say.
In a legislative year teeming with controversialhousingbills designed to kick-start more construction in California, SB 79 has been among the most controversial. Because it would override the planning decisions of local governments, the bill had to overcome opposition from a host of city governments and their defenders in the Legislature, while fracturing the Capitol’s reigning Democratic Party over questions of affordability, labor standards and who ultimately has the final say over what gets built where.
The bill now heads to Gov. Gavin Newsom who supporters expect will sign it.
Wiener’s bill is meant to address two crises at once: The state’s long-term housing shortage and the financial precarity of its public transit agencies. By allowing taller and denser development, the legislation is meant to pave the way for more apartment developments in areas closest to jobs and services. By centering that development around public transit stations, it’s meant to steer more people away from cars and towards buses and trains.
“Decades of overly restrictive policies have driven housing costs to astronomical levels, forcing millions of people away from jobs and transit and into long commutes from the suburbs,” Wiener said in a statement after Friday’s vote. “Today’s vote is a dramatic step forward to undo these decades of harm, reduce our most severe costs, and slash traffic congestion and air pollution in our state.”
SB 79 would also give transit agencies the ability to develop their own land, giving them another potential revenue source — a financial model common across East Asian metros.
Making it easier to build on and around public transit stops has been a career-spanning effort for Wiener, who first introduced a version of the idea in 2018. That measure died in its first committee hearing. Wiener tried again in 2019 and 2020, but was never able to push the idea out of the Senate.
That’s all helped to bestow the proposal with a kind of mythic status in California’s legislative housing wars. Its success at last slaps a symbolic bow on a year marked by the state Legislature’s unprecedented appetite for pro-development bills. Earlier this year lawmakers made national news in exempting most urban apartment projects from the state’s premier environmental review law.
California YIMBY, one of the sponsors of the bill and a vocal force in the Capitol for pro-construction legislation, was quick to take a victory lap after the final vote in the Senate this afternoon.
“Today, California YIMBY achieved one of its founding goals — legalizing apartments and condos near train stations,” said the organization’s CEO Brian Hanlon in a written statement. “We won many victories over the past eight years, but the dream of passing a robust, transit-oriented development program has long eluded us, until now.”
For opponents of state-imposed density measures, the vote marks an equally weighty defeat.
Susan Kirsch, founder of Catalysts for Local Control, a nonprofit that advocates for the preservation of municipal authority over housing policy, predicted that the legislation would have a “devastating impact” on California’s low-rise neighborhoods, describing “extreme seven-story buildings next to single-family homes with nothing that the community can do about it.”
Amended to victory
The secret to Wiener’s success this year after so many past failures may be his willingness to whittle the bill down.
Over the course of the year, the proposal underwent 13 rounds of amendments — more than any other policy bill. Many of those changes were made to convince powerful interest groups to drop their opposition. That often meant reducing the bill’s scope.
The legislation would only apply to counties with at least 15 passenger rail stations. According to its sponsors, just eight counties fit the bill: Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange, Santa Clara, Alameda, Sacramento, San Francisco and San Mateo.
That’s a concession that likely softened opposition from rural and suburban legislators.
Rather than applying to every major bus line in the state, as the 2018 iteration did, SB 79 only targets homes within a half mile of train stations, subway stops and “high-frequency” light rail and commuter rail stops. Buildings within the nearest quarter mile of Amtrak stations, Bay Area Rapid Transit stops and Los Angeles subway stations can top out at roughly seven stories. But parcels further out or surrounding less-trafficked light rail stations would be capped at more modest heights.
A BART train heads south towards the Fruitvale station in Oakland on Sept. 15, 2022. Photo by Jose Carlos Fajardo, Bay Area News Group
The legislation also comes with asterisks about the kinds of projects that can make use of its provisions. Developers, in select cases, must hire unionized construction workers — a provision that convinced the powerful State Building and Construction Trades Council to drop its opposition.
Projects must also set aside a modest share of homes for lower-income residents (at least 7%) and replace any rent-controlled units that are destroyed during construction. Lower-income neighborhoods also have more time to plan for the rezoning with the new rules not taking effect until at least 2032. That compromise led a number of tenant rights,“housing justice” advocacy groups and other affordability advocates to stand down earlier this week.
In a fig leaf to ticked off local governments, the bill also allows cities that are already planning for transit-oriented apartment buildings at a significant scale, such as San Francisco and Sacramento, to stick with those plans rather than abide by the full scope of the new law.
“If you look at the bill and you read the bill, I actually view it as a thoughtful, relatively narrow-in-scope bill,” Oakland Democratic Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, a Democrat from Oakland and frequent political ally of Wiener’s on housing matters, said on the Assembly floor Thursday.
Reshaping the American Dream
Many of her fellow legislators, Democratic and Republican alike, disagreed.
The Senate ultimately passed the bill by the narrowest possible margin, with Wiener only claiming his final vote from Bakersfield GOP Sen. Shannon Grove after a few tense minutes. The Assembly vote was equally close, with just 43 of the chamber’s 80 members supporting it.
“This blunt, one-size-fits-all bill will not work for a district like mine,” said Assemblymember Rick Chavez-Zbur, a Los Angeles Democrat who represents portions of Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and Hollywood. “For many Californians, living in a single-family neighborhood fulfills a lifelong dream — the American Dream.”
Placing apartment blocks in those neighborhoods “has the potential to fundamentally reshape my district without the benefit of careful land-use planning,’ he said.
Zbur was partially channeling opposition from his counterparts in local government. Last month, a narrow majority on the Los Angeles City Council voted to oppose SB 79, which members characterized as a Sacramento power grab and a giveaway to real estate developers. The city is one of dozens of municipalities that came out against the measure.
Learn more about legislators mentioned in this story.
Supporters counter that deferring to local governments on land use decisions has resulted in a chronic undersupply of new housing, as local elected officials have historically catered to the interests of change-averse homeowners.
Marc Vukcevich, a policy director for the LA-based transit and pedestrian advocacy group Streets For All, a co-sponsor of the bill, said he didn’t think the city of Los Angeles’ opposition to the measure carried much weight.
“The Legislature knows that LA is a deeply unserious actor when it comes to housing,” he said.
Most significant housing bill ever?
For all the concessions Wiener made along the way, backers of the bill are still calling the proposal historic.
“It’s by far the biggest housing bill the California Legislature has passed,” said Matthew Lewis, a spokesperson for California YIMBY. “There’s more to do, but it’s a major, major step. And honestly, I feel like as people start to see what is actually going to happen, the politics will start to change too.”
“The fear is Hong Kong. I think the reality is going to be something closer to Copenhagen — not everyone is going to build the maximum demand,” he said.
Whether homeowners in Palo Alto, mid-city San Diego and the San Fernando Valley ultimately come to appreciate the new apartment developments in their communities will depend on whether any get built in the first place.
Past upzoning efforts in California have proven to be more ambitious on paper than in practice. In 2021, state lawmakers passed Senate Bill 9, a measure that both supporters and opponents said would end single-family zoning in California by allowing homeowners to build up to four units on their property. Four years in, the law has resulted in precious few units. Housing advocates point to costly requirements and loopholes that made the law difficult for property owners to actually use.
Simon Büchler, an economist at the Miami University in Ohio who has studied the results of different upzoning policies, said developers are generally keen to build around public transportation stations, making SB 79 a promising approach.
“The success of upzoning depends crucially on where it happens,” he said in an email. “Ideally, you want to upzone in high-demand areas with strong transit connections, since those are the places where added density will translate into meaningful increases in supply.”
In any case, the changes will be gradual. “Supply increases take time (often many years) to materialize, even in the right places, so these policies are far from an overnight solution,” he said.
Cobbling together enough single-family homes in a desirable transit-adjacent neighborhood is easier said than done, said Mott Smith, a developer and board member of the California Infill Builders Association. Land values are steep. Finding enough sufficiently large land all in one place requires a fair bit of luck. Both make it hard to profitably build a six-story apartment building.
“We will probably see in the next five years 20 to 30 SB 79 projects around the state, that’s my wild guess,” he said. “Both the opponents and the proponents of the bill are probably overstating how much this is going to change the built environment in California.”
That could be especially true in the current economic climate. Tariffs on building goods, immigration crackdowns targeting construction workers and high interest rates show no sign of abating, factors that make it hard to build — close to a train station or not.
Ten Dem Senators are calling for a congressional hearing over JPMorgan Chase’s decision to keep Jeffrey Epstein as a bank client for about 15 years. Via The Wall Street Journal:
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, said JPMorgan Chief Executive Jamie Dimon and other executives should testify under oath about what they knew about Epstein’s crimes and if they ignored red flags about his activities.
Epstein had dozens of accounts at JPMorgan’s private bank and communicated often with bank executives, connecting them to his wealthy contacts, ties The Wall Street Journal first reported in 2023 to be deeper than understood. Epstein was a JPMorgan client before and after he was convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution in 2008 and forced to register as a sex offender.
He was arrested in 2019, accused of orchestrating a scheme to traffic and sexually abuse girls, and died in jail of what has been ruled a suicide.
“The American people deserve to know what happened at JPMorgan and other banks that financed Mr. Epstein,” the senators wrote to Sen. Tim Scott (R., S.C.), chair of the Senate Banking Committee.
A spokeswoman for JPMorgan said that it was a mistake to have any association with Epstein and that it regrets its association with him.
On Monday, The New York Times correctly reported that Donald Trump’s known signatures “closely match” the “Donald” signature on the lewd birthday card to Jeffrey Epstein.
That so enraged the Ketchup-Thrower-in-Chief that his lawyer threatened to sue The Times for $10 billion if it did not retract and apologize for that article as well as an earlier one debunking Trump’s lie that he doesn’t “draw pictures.”
Fortunately, The Times is not about to roll over and play dead, as CBS and ABC have. At least not yet.
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Welcome back to Whatcha Reading! Here’s how we’re kicking off the month of September:
