The Henry George Program

It's easy to take highway funding and construction as a natural and unavoidable fact, but in reality it's *people* behind it. In Clayton Nall's book "The Road to Inequality: How the Federal Highway Program Polarized America and Undermined Cities", the nitty-gritty of what this did to our politics is explored in depth. We are joined with Alex Baca, who explores the relationship of highway funding to the viability of the left in America.

SB50 is stalled for a year, but we recorded this *just* before, as we see efforts to block it underway by our favorite Palo Alto NIMBYs, aided by ostensibly woke anti-gentrification groups in direct coordination with homeowners. But mostly, about Lydia Kou being bad on twitter.

Lenny Siegel served on the Mountain View City Council from 2014-2018, serving one term as mayor, and has been a lifelong activist for progressive causes. How has Mountain View been able to address equitable solutions for housing better than its neighbors, and how can it do more? We also debate the contentious issue of local control, with Pardis Beikzadeh and David Watson of South Bay YIMBY saying that state intervention is necessary, and Lenny saying that other (perhaps bigger) solutions are needed.

Sasha Perigo is co-chair of the Homelessness Working Group for SF DSA, and has worked in the past for fair housing in Marin County. What can we learn from sharing this perspective with Darrell Owens's activism in the East Bay, as well as a view from Silicon Valley, where the show is recorded? Plenty to talk about regional issues, as well as tenant solidarity as well as other socialists views on housing justice.

What's mightier, redistributing land vs building more housing? Are these ideologies necessarily at ends, and what's their respective roles in the current housing scene? Sonja Trauss of SFBARF/SF YIMBY/CaRLA makes the case that georgists are too focused on taxing the land to see that zoning needs reformed. Other topics are broached, from property rights, political orgs, and whether sweeping wealth redistribution is needed (we quickly agree it is).

It's been about a year since the Stanford land-use/housing justice activism group SCoPE 2035 (Stanford Coalition for Planning an Equitable 2035) has been on, and there's a lot to catch up on: campus protests against university lawsuits, more challenges for housing Stanford employees, university dealings with Palo Alto, and more; we hear all about the challenges and advantages of being a group made out of current (overworked) Stanford students.

Holly Balcom tells us how, compared to the Bay Area, Portland, Oregon does so many things better: better cooperation between land-use groups and tenant groups, coherent regional government, an anti-sprawl Urban Growth Boundary, and even the exploration of land taxes. However, pushing back against suburban conformity and exclusion, NIMBYism, and unaffordability is very much an active challenge, and Holly lets us know about what's been going well, and what still needs attention in Portland.

Chris Beiser runs the facebook meme group "Georgist Memes for Land Value Taxation Teens", and comments both upon the modern phenomenon of Image Macros as a way to spread ideas, as well as the functional value of ideology, the implications of modern technology with the evolution of ideology, and the special role of Georgism to navigate ideological rifts in the modern landscape.

We continue the CASA talk by talking about the infighting, the disappointments, and most importantly, the cartoonish villainry we've seen. Rants about the CAA, Realtors, ranking NIMBY cities into a hierarchy of awfulness, and picking apart why some YIMBYs can't figure out how to get onboard with tenants rights.

The CASA Compact is the "grand bargain" that could transform housing and tenant protections throughout the Bay Area. But what are the details? We pick apart the ten pillars and anticipate some of what we'll see in Part II of this series: CASA, the Drama.