Seattle Times - Pictures of the Year 2025
Showing posts with label Cities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cities. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 18, 2026
Seattle Times - Pictures of the Year 2025
Seattle Times - Pictures of the Year 2025
‘Millionaires Tax’ Finds Seattle is Far Richer Than Anyone Knew
Seattle’s new mayor was speaking to a roomful of supporters the other day when she dropped a rather blunt assessment of our city.
“You know what?” Katie Wilson said. “This city is filthy rich.”
The crowd laughed a bit. Can you say that when you’re mayor? Should you say that?
It bears some examination, because of what was announced next.
The city’s new social housing tax, levied on lofty pay packages to pay for public housing, was due Jan. 31. The startling news was that it blew the projections out of the water.
When the 5% tax on salaries and compensation above $1 million passed a year ago, its backers estimated it would bring in $50 million annually. Later the city’s finance department used state employment data for a more rigorous finding, and came up with $65.8 million.
But it looked precarious.
“The increase to the payroll expense tax … could cause businesses to change their hiring behavior to avoid taxation — such as moving existing employees to locations outside Seattle,” a report to the City Council said.
Conclusion: There’s “a large amount of uncertainty,” said the office of economic and revenue forecasts. The tax could collect anywhere from $39.2 million to $80 million, “but even larger variance cannot be ruled out.”
“Larger variance” is once again the story of just how rich we are. Because tax collections came in at $115 million — 75% higher than the estimate. And 44% over the top of the range.
It means several things about our city — all of which inform the debates currently raging about tax-the-rich efforts in our state.
One is that Seattle’s plutocrats are wealthier than anyone imagines. This keeps getting revealed, where a scheme is developed to tax wealth, and then the amounts the tax brings in wildly overshoot even the most optimistic forecasts...
Another thing is that Seattle businesses obviously did not flee.
This is interesting because the social housing tax should be one of the easier taxes to avoid. You only have to work at least half the time outside the city — in an office across the lake in Bellevue, for example.
If you make, say, $1.1 million, the social housing tax paid by your company would be $5,000 (5% of the $100,000 above $1 million). It’s probably not worth moving an executive due to five grand.
But one making $10 million? The tax on that is $450,000. $30 million? The tax hits $1.45 million.
As I wrote last year, it’d be cheaper for Amazon to fly its top execs to Bellevue in a helicopter three days a week.
They did not take me up on this strategic advice, apparently. In fact, the 5% tax is being paid by 170 Seattle companies, according to the social housing agency. (The tax is paid by companies, not individual workers.)
So are the rich set to bolt the city or the state to get away from tax-the-rich schemes? Last week at a hearing on a proposed state “millionaires income tax,” Redmond hedge fund manager Brian Heywood, who himself fled California’s taxes, testified he knows of “about 50 couples who are already in the process of, or soon to be changing, their domicile, out of this state.”
That is a lot. I’m not sure I know 50 couples period, let alone 50 couples capable of taking such decisive action. Another way the rich are different than you or me.
The press has been filled with anecdotes of wealthy people decamping. Yet someone’s got to be hanging on here paying all these taxes — the totals of which keep racking up dramatically higher than expected.
One tech exec finally emerged to argue the fleeing-from-Seattle talk is bogus.
“The math doesn’t math,” wrote Jacob Colker, a Seattle AI venture capitalist. “Should we be thoughtful about tax policy? Heck yeah. Should it be tied to better stewardship of spending? Darn right. But the breathless narrative that Seattle is one bill from collapse is not serious analysis.”
My sense is taxes work when rates are reasonable. Single digits, like the 5% social housing tax, are not killer rates. Maybe the rich say “ugh, I don’t like it but oh well, it’s not worth uprooting my life.” So far, it hasn’t been worth even driving across the bridge.
On the other hand, Democrats last year jacked the top estate tax rate for the super-wealthy, to a gouging 35% for wealth north of $12 million. Some of those are said to be fleeing Washington, and who can blame them? There’s no good to come from fleecing people. This extreme rate situation has set off enough alarms that state Democrats now have a “tail between their legs” bill to unwind that rate back to where it was set for years, 20%.
Point is, keep it cool, lawmakers, and the rich can abide.
“What people I think are failing to recognize is that tipping-point scenario,” he said, which would lead the state to lose the entrepreneurial advantages that have led to the growth of companies like Amazon, T-Mobile and Starbucks.
“You know what?” Katie Wilson said. “This city is filthy rich.”
The crowd laughed a bit. Can you say that when you’re mayor? Should you say that?
The city’s new social housing tax, levied on lofty pay packages to pay for public housing, was due Jan. 31. The startling news was that it blew the projections out of the water.
When the 5% tax on salaries and compensation above $1 million passed a year ago, its backers estimated it would bring in $50 million annually. Later the city’s finance department used state employment data for a more rigorous finding, and came up with $65.8 million.
But it looked precarious.
“The increase to the payroll expense tax … could cause businesses to change their hiring behavior to avoid taxation — such as moving existing employees to locations outside Seattle,” a report to the City Council said.
Conclusion: There’s “a large amount of uncertainty,” said the office of economic and revenue forecasts. The tax could collect anywhere from $39.2 million to $80 million, “but even larger variance cannot be ruled out.”
“Larger variance” is once again the story of just how rich we are. Because tax collections came in at $115 million — 75% higher than the estimate. And 44% over the top of the range.
It means several things about our city — all of which inform the debates currently raging about tax-the-rich efforts in our state.
One is that Seattle’s plutocrats are wealthier than anyone imagines. This keeps getting revealed, where a scheme is developed to tax wealth, and then the amounts the tax brings in wildly overshoot even the most optimistic forecasts...
Another thing is that Seattle businesses obviously did not flee.
This is interesting because the social housing tax should be one of the easier taxes to avoid. You only have to work at least half the time outside the city — in an office across the lake in Bellevue, for example.
If you make, say, $1.1 million, the social housing tax paid by your company would be $5,000 (5% of the $100,000 above $1 million). It’s probably not worth moving an executive due to five grand.
But one making $10 million? The tax on that is $450,000. $30 million? The tax hits $1.45 million.
As I wrote last year, it’d be cheaper for Amazon to fly its top execs to Bellevue in a helicopter three days a week.
They did not take me up on this strategic advice, apparently. In fact, the 5% tax is being paid by 170 Seattle companies, according to the social housing agency. (The tax is paid by companies, not individual workers.)
So are the rich set to bolt the city or the state to get away from tax-the-rich schemes? Last week at a hearing on a proposed state “millionaires income tax,” Redmond hedge fund manager Brian Heywood, who himself fled California’s taxes, testified he knows of “about 50 couples who are already in the process of, or soon to be changing, their domicile, out of this state.”
That is a lot. I’m not sure I know 50 couples period, let alone 50 couples capable of taking such decisive action. Another way the rich are different than you or me.
The press has been filled with anecdotes of wealthy people decamping. Yet someone’s got to be hanging on here paying all these taxes — the totals of which keep racking up dramatically higher than expected.
One tech exec finally emerged to argue the fleeing-from-Seattle talk is bogus.
“The math doesn’t math,” wrote Jacob Colker, a Seattle AI venture capitalist. “Should we be thoughtful about tax policy? Heck yeah. Should it be tied to better stewardship of spending? Darn right. But the breathless narrative that Seattle is one bill from collapse is not serious analysis.”
My sense is taxes work when rates are reasonable. Single digits, like the 5% social housing tax, are not killer rates. Maybe the rich say “ugh, I don’t like it but oh well, it’s not worth uprooting my life.” So far, it hasn’t been worth even driving across the bridge.
On the other hand, Democrats last year jacked the top estate tax rate for the super-wealthy, to a gouging 35% for wealth north of $12 million. Some of those are said to be fleeing Washington, and who can blame them? There’s no good to come from fleecing people. This extreme rate situation has set off enough alarms that state Democrats now have a “tail between their legs” bill to unwind that rate back to where it was set for years, 20%.
Point is, keep it cool, lawmakers, and the rich can abide.
by Danny Westneat, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Dean Rutz
[ed. I'm all for taxing the super rich, but c'mon, get serious liberals. The solution to every problem is not taxing everyone and everything in sight (or immediately jumping to extremes on public issues, like 'Defund the Police' - one of the dumbest initiatives imaginable). Washington is one of the taxingest states in country, mitigated only by the fact that there's no state income tax (although there's continual chattering about 'fixing' that), with some of the most regressive sales taxes in the country as well. Fortunately, some people seem to be coming to their senses - see also: WA Democrats consider retreat on estate tax, fearing wealth exodus (ST):]
Democrats in the state Legislature have generally dismissed warnings that new taxes on the very wealthy might lead multimillionaires to flee to lower-tax states.
But some are now acknowledging that one tax-the-rich policy they approved last year — a big increase in Washington’s top estate tax rates — may have backfired...
The problem for Washington isn’t just a single shift like the estate tax, Carlyle said, but an “aggregation of taxes” adopted swiftly in recent years, including new business and payroll taxes.
Democrats in the state Legislature have generally dismissed warnings that new taxes on the very wealthy might lead multimillionaires to flee to lower-tax states.
But some are now acknowledging that one tax-the-rich policy they approved last year — a big increase in Washington’s top estate tax rates — may have backfired...
The problem for Washington isn’t just a single shift like the estate tax, Carlyle said, but an “aggregation of taxes” adopted swiftly in recent years, including new business and payroll taxes.
“What people I think are failing to recognize is that tipping-point scenario,” he said, which would lead the state to lose the entrepreneurial advantages that have led to the growth of companies like Amazon, T-Mobile and Starbucks.
Monday, February 16, 2026
Life at the Frontlines of Demographic Collapse
Nagoro, a depopulated village in Japan where residents are replaced by dolls.
In 1960, Yubari, a former coal-mining city on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido, had roughly 110,000 residents. Today, fewer than 7,000 remain. The share of those over 65 is 54%. The local train stopped running in 2019. Seven elementary schools and four junior high schools have been consolidated into just two buildings. Public swimming pools have closed. Parks are not maintained. Even the public toilets at the train station were shut down to save money.
Much has been written about the economic consequences of aging and shrinking populations. Fewer workers supporting more retirees will make pension systems buckle. Living standards will decline. Healthcare will get harder to provide. But that’s dry theory. A numbers game. It doesn’t tell you what life actually looks like at ground zero.
Germany took a similar approach with its Stadtumbau Ost, a federal program launched after reunification to address the exodus from East to West, as young people moved west for work, leaving behind more than a million vacant apartments. It paid to demolish nearly 300,000 housing units. The idea was not to lure people back but to stabilize what was left: reduce the housing surplus, concentrate investment in viable neighborhoods, and stop the downward spiral of vacancy breeding more vacancy. It was not a happy solution, but it was a workable one.
Yet this approach is politically toxic. Try campaigning not on an optimistic message of turning the tide and making the future as bright as it once used to be, but rather by telling voters that their neighborhood is going to be abandoned, that the bus won’t run anymore and that all the investment is going to go to a different district. Try telling the few remaining inhabitants of a valley that you can’t justify spending money on their flood defenses. [...]
*** So what is being done about these problems?
Take the case of infrastructure and services degradation. The solution is obvious: manage the decline by concentrating the population.
In 2014, the Japanese government initiated Location Normalization Plans to designate areas for concentrating hospitals, government offices, and commerce in walkable downtown cores. Tax incentives and housing subsidies were offered to attract residents. By 2020, dozens of Tokyo-area municipalities had adopted these plans.
Cities like Toyama built light rail transit and tried to concentrate development along the line, offering housing subsidies within 500 meters of stations. The results are modest: between 2005 and 2013, the percentage of Toyama residents living in the city center increased from 28% to 32%. Meanwhile, the city’s overall population continued to decline, and suburban sprawl persisted beyond the plan’s reach.
What about the water pipes? In theory, they can be decommissioned and consolidated, when people move out of some neighborhoods. At places, they can possibly be replaced with smaller-diameter pipes. Engineers can even open hydrants periodically to keep water flowing. But the most efficient of these measures were probably easier to implement in the recently post-totalitarian East Germany, with its still-docile population accustomed to state directives, than in democratic Japan.
In 1960, Yubari, a former coal-mining city on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido, had roughly 110,000 residents. Today, fewer than 7,000 remain. The share of those over 65 is 54%. The local train stopped running in 2019. Seven elementary schools and four junior high schools have been consolidated into just two buildings. Public swimming pools have closed. Parks are not maintained. Even the public toilets at the train station were shut down to save money.
And it’s not all straightforward. Consider water pipes. Abandoned houses are photogenic. It’s the first image that comes to mind when you picture a shrinking city. But as the population declines, ever fewer people live in the same housing stock and water consumption declines. The water sits in oversized pipes. It stagnates and chlorine dissipates. Bacteria move in, creating health risks. You can tear down an abandoned house in a week. But you cannot easily downsize a city’s pipe network. The infrastructure is buried under streets and buildings. The cost of ripping it out and replacing it with smaller pipes would bankrupt a city that is already bleeding residents and tax revenue. As the population shrinks, problems like this become ubiquitous.
The common instinct is to fight decline with growth. Launch a tourism campaign. Build a theme park or a tech incubator. Offer subsidies and tax breaks to young families willing to move in. Subsidize childcare. Sell houses for €1, as some Italian towns do.
Well, Yubari tried this. After the coal mines closed, the city pivoted to tourism, opening a coal-themed amusement park, a fossil museum, and a ski resort. They organized a film festival. Celebrities came and left. None of it worked. By 2007 the city went bankrupt. The festival was canceled and the winners from years past never got their prize money.
Or, to get a different perspective, consider someone who moved to a shrinking Italian town, lured by a €1 house offer: They are about to retire. They want to live in the country. So they buy the house, go through all the paperwork. Then they renovate it. More paperwork. They don't speak Italian. That sucks. But finally everything works out. They move in. The house is nice. There's grapevine climbing the front wall. Out of the window they see the rolling hills of Sicily. In the evenings, they hears dogs barking in the distance. It looks exactly like the paradise they'd imagined. But then they start noticing their elderly neighbors getting sick and being taken away to hospital, never to return. They see them dying alone in their half-abandoned houses. And as the night closes in, they can't escape the thought: "When's my turn?" Maybe they shouldn't have come at all.
The instinctive approach, that vain attempt to grow and repopulate, is often counterproductive. It leads to building infrastructure, literal bridges to nowhere, waiting for people that will never come. Subsidies quietly fizzle out, leaving behind nothing but dilapidated billboards advertising the amazing attractions of the town, attractions that closed their gates a decade ago.
The alternative is not to fight the decline, but to manage it. To accept that the population is not coming back and ask a different question: how do you make a smaller city livable for those who remain? In Yubari, the current mayor has stopped talking about attracting new residents. The new goal is consolidation. Relocating the remaining population closer to the city center, where services can be still delivered, where the pipes are still the right size, where neighbors are close enough to check on each other.
The common instinct is to fight decline with growth. Launch a tourism campaign. Build a theme park or a tech incubator. Offer subsidies and tax breaks to young families willing to move in. Subsidize childcare. Sell houses for €1, as some Italian towns do.
Well, Yubari tried this. After the coal mines closed, the city pivoted to tourism, opening a coal-themed amusement park, a fossil museum, and a ski resort. They organized a film festival. Celebrities came and left. None of it worked. By 2007 the city went bankrupt. The festival was canceled and the winners from years past never got their prize money.
Or, to get a different perspective, consider someone who moved to a shrinking Italian town, lured by a €1 house offer: They are about to retire. They want to live in the country. So they buy the house, go through all the paperwork. Then they renovate it. More paperwork. They don't speak Italian. That sucks. But finally everything works out. They move in. The house is nice. There's grapevine climbing the front wall. Out of the window they see the rolling hills of Sicily. In the evenings, they hears dogs barking in the distance. It looks exactly like the paradise they'd imagined. But then they start noticing their elderly neighbors getting sick and being taken away to hospital, never to return. They see them dying alone in their half-abandoned houses. And as the night closes in, they can't escape the thought: "When's my turn?" Maybe they shouldn't have come at all.
***
The alternative is not to fight the decline, but to manage it. To accept that the population is not coming back and ask a different question: how do you make a smaller city livable for those who remain? In Yubari, the current mayor has stopped talking about attracting new residents. The new goal is consolidation. Relocating the remaining population closer to the city center, where services can be still delivered, where the pipes are still the right size, where neighbors are close enough to check on each other.
Yet this approach is politically toxic. Try campaigning not on an optimistic message of turning the tide and making the future as bright as it once used to be, but rather by telling voters that their neighborhood is going to be abandoned, that the bus won’t run anymore and that all the investment is going to go to a different district. Try telling the few remaining inhabitants of a valley that you can’t justify spending money on their flood defenses. [...]
*** So what is being done about these problems?
Take the case of infrastructure and services degradation. The solution is obvious: manage the decline by concentrating the population.
In 2014, the Japanese government initiated Location Normalization Plans to designate areas for concentrating hospitals, government offices, and commerce in walkable downtown cores. Tax incentives and housing subsidies were offered to attract residents. By 2020, dozens of Tokyo-area municipalities had adopted these plans.
Cities like Toyama built light rail transit and tried to concentrate development along the line, offering housing subsidies within 500 meters of stations. The results are modest: between 2005 and 2013, the percentage of Toyama residents living in the city center increased from 28% to 32%. Meanwhile, the city’s overall population continued to decline, and suburban sprawl persisted beyond the plan’s reach.
What about the water pipes? In theory, they can be decommissioned and consolidated, when people move out of some neighborhoods. At places, they can possibly be replaced with smaller-diameter pipes. Engineers can even open hydrants periodically to keep water flowing. But the most efficient of these measures were probably easier to implement in the recently post-totalitarian East Germany, with its still-docile population accustomed to state directives, than in democratic Japan.
***
And then there’s the problem of abandoned houses.
The arithmetic is brutal: you inherit a rural house valued at ¥5 million on the cadastral registry and pay inheritance tax of 55%, only to discover that the actual market value is ¥0. Nobody wants property in a village hemorrhaging population. But wait! If the municipality formally designates it a “vacant house,” your property tax increases sixfold. Now you face half a million yen in fines for non-compliance, and administrative demolition costs that average ¥2 million. You are now over ¥5 million in debt for a property you never wanted and cannot sell.
It gets more bizarre: When you renounce the inheritance, it passes to the next tier of relatives. If children renounce, it goes to parents. If parents renounce, it goes to siblings. If siblings renounce, it goes to nieces and nephews. By renouncing a property, you create an unpleasant surprise for your relatives.
Finally, when every possible relative renounces, the family court appoints an administrator to manage the estate. Their task is to search for other potential heirs, such as "persons with special connection," i.e. those who cared for the deceased, worked closely with them and so on. Lucky them, the friends and colleagues!
Obviously, this gets tricky and that’s exactly the reason why a new system was introduced to allows a property to be passed to the state. But there are many limitations placed on the property — essentially, the state will only accept land that has some value.
In the end, it's a hot potato problem. The legal system was designed in the era when all property had value and implicitly assumed that people wanted it. Now that many properties have negative value, the framework misfires, creates misaligned incentives and recent fixes all too often make the problem worse.
The arithmetic is brutal: you inherit a rural house valued at ¥5 million on the cadastral registry and pay inheritance tax of 55%, only to discover that the actual market value is ¥0. Nobody wants property in a village hemorrhaging population. But wait! If the municipality formally designates it a “vacant house,” your property tax increases sixfold. Now you face half a million yen in fines for non-compliance, and administrative demolition costs that average ¥2 million. You are now over ¥5 million in debt for a property you never wanted and cannot sell.
It gets more bizarre: When you renounce the inheritance, it passes to the next tier of relatives. If children renounce, it goes to parents. If parents renounce, it goes to siblings. If siblings renounce, it goes to nieces and nephews. By renouncing a property, you create an unpleasant surprise for your relatives.
Finally, when every possible relative renounces, the family court appoints an administrator to manage the estate. Their task is to search for other potential heirs, such as "persons with special connection," i.e. those who cared for the deceased, worked closely with them and so on. Lucky them, the friends and colleagues!
Obviously, this gets tricky and that’s exactly the reason why a new system was introduced to allows a property to be passed to the state. But there are many limitations placed on the property — essentially, the state will only accept land that has some value.
In the end, it's a hot potato problem. The legal system was designed in the era when all property had value and implicitly assumed that people wanted it. Now that many properties have negative value, the framework misfires, creates misaligned incentives and recent fixes all too often make the problem worse.
by Martin Sustrik, Less Wrong | Read more:
Image:Vimeo/uncredited
Image:Vimeo/uncredited
Friday, February 13, 2026
Something Surprising Happens When Bus Rides Are Free
Free buses? Really? Of all the promises that Zohran Mamdani made during his New York City mayoral campaign, that one struck some skeptics as the most frivolous leftist fantasy. Unlike housing, groceries and child care, which weigh heavily on New Yorkers’ finances, a bus ride is just a few bucks. Is it really worth the huge effort to spare people that tiny outlay?
As a lawyer, I feel most strongly about the least-discussed benefit: Eliminating bus fares can clear junk cases out of our court system, lowering the crushing caseloads that prevent our judges, prosecutors and public defenders from focusing their attention where it’s most needed.
It is. Far beyond just saving riders money, free buses deliver a cascade of benefits, from easing traffic to promoting public safety. Just look at Boston; Chapel Hill, N.C.; Richmond, Va.; Kansas City, Mo.; and even New York itself, all of which have tried it to excellent effect. And it doesn’t have to be costly — in fact, it can come out just about even.
I was a public defender, and in one of my first cases I was asked to represent a woman who was not a robber or a drug dealer — she was someone who had failed to pay the fare on public transit. Precious resources had been spent arresting, processing, prosecuting and trying her, all for the loss of a few dollars. This is a daily feature of how we criminalize poverty in America.
Unless a person has spent real time in the bowels of a courthouse, it’s hard to imagine how many of the matters clogging criminal courts across the country originate from a lack of transit. Some of those cases result in fines; many result in defendants being ordered to attend community service or further court dates. But if the person can’t afford the fare to get to those appointments and can’t get a ride, their only options — jump a turnstile or flout a judge’s order — expose them to re-arrest. Then they may face jail time, which adds significant pressure to our already overcrowded facilities. Is this really what we want the courts spending time on?
Free buses can unclog our streets, too. In Boston, eliminating the need for riders to pay fares or punch tickets cut boarding time by as much as 23 percent, which made everyone’s trip faster. Better, cheaper, faster bus rides give automobile owners an incentive to leave their cars at home, which makes the journey faster still — for those onboard as well as those who still prefer to drive.
How much should a government be willing to pay to achieve those outcomes? How about nothing? When Washington State’s public transit systems stopped charging riders, in many municipalities the state came out more or less even — because the money lost on fares was balanced out by the enormous savings that ensued.
Fare evasion was one of the factors that prompted Mayor Eric Adams to flood New York City public transit with police officers. New Yorkers went from shelling out $4 million for overtime in 2022 to $155 million in 2024. What did it get them? In September 2024, officers drew their guns to shoot a fare beater — pause for a moment to think about that — and two innocent bystanders ended up with bullet wounds, the kind of accident that’s all but inevitable in such a crowded setting.
New York City tried a free bus pilot program in 2023 and 2024 and, as predicted, ridership increased — by 30 percent on weekdays and 38 percent on weekends, striking figures that could make a meaningful dent in New York’s chronic traffic problem (and, by extension, air and noise pollution). Something else happened that was surprising: Assaults on bus operators dropped 39 percent. Call it the opposite of the Adams strategy: Lowering barriers to access made for fewer tense law enforcement encounters, fewer acts of desperation and a safer city overall.
by Emily Galvin Almanza, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Brian Blomerth
Unless a person has spent real time in the bowels of a courthouse, it’s hard to imagine how many of the matters clogging criminal courts across the country originate from a lack of transit. Some of those cases result in fines; many result in defendants being ordered to attend community service or further court dates. But if the person can’t afford the fare to get to those appointments and can’t get a ride, their only options — jump a turnstile or flout a judge’s order — expose them to re-arrest. Then they may face jail time, which adds significant pressure to our already overcrowded facilities. Is this really what we want the courts spending time on?
Free buses can unclog our streets, too. In Boston, eliminating the need for riders to pay fares or punch tickets cut boarding time by as much as 23 percent, which made everyone’s trip faster. Better, cheaper, faster bus rides give automobile owners an incentive to leave their cars at home, which makes the journey faster still — for those onboard as well as those who still prefer to drive.
How much should a government be willing to pay to achieve those outcomes? How about nothing? When Washington State’s public transit systems stopped charging riders, in many municipalities the state came out more or less even — because the money lost on fares was balanced out by the enormous savings that ensued.
Fare evasion was one of the factors that prompted Mayor Eric Adams to flood New York City public transit with police officers. New Yorkers went from shelling out $4 million for overtime in 2022 to $155 million in 2024. What did it get them? In September 2024, officers drew their guns to shoot a fare beater — pause for a moment to think about that — and two innocent bystanders ended up with bullet wounds, the kind of accident that’s all but inevitable in such a crowded setting.
New York City tried a free bus pilot program in 2023 and 2024 and, as predicted, ridership increased — by 30 percent on weekdays and 38 percent on weekends, striking figures that could make a meaningful dent in New York’s chronic traffic problem (and, by extension, air and noise pollution). Something else happened that was surprising: Assaults on bus operators dropped 39 percent. Call it the opposite of the Adams strategy: Lowering barriers to access made for fewer tense law enforcement encounters, fewer acts of desperation and a safer city overall.
by Emily Galvin Almanza, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Brian Blomerth
Wednesday, February 4, 2026
In Praise of Urban Disorder
In his essay “Planning for an Unplanned City,” Jason Thorne, Toronto’s chief planner, poses a pair of provocative questions to his colleagues. “Have our rules and regulations squeezed too much of the life out of our cities?” he asks. “But also how do you plan and design a city that is safe and functional while also leaving room for spontaneity and serendipity?”
This premise — that urban planning’s efforts to impose order risk editing out the culture, character, complexity and creative friction that makes cities cities — is a guiding theme in Messy Cities: Why We Can’t Plan Everything, a collection of essays, including Thorne’s, gathered by Toronto-based editors Zahra Ebrahim, Leslie Woo, Dylan Reid and John Lorinc. In it, they argue that “messiness is an essential element of the city.” Case studies from around the world show how imperfection can be embraced, created and preserved, from the informal street eateries of East Los Angeles to the sports facilities carved out of derelict spaces in Mumbai.
Embracing urban disorder might seem like an unlikely cause. But Woo, an urban planner and chief executive officer of the Toronto-based nonprofit CivicAction, and Reid, executive editor of Spacing magazine, offer up a series of questions that get at the heart of debates surrounding messy urbanism. In an essay about street art, they ask, “Is it ugly or creative? Does it bring disruption or diversity? Should it be left to emerge from below or be managed from above? Is it permanent or ephemeral? Does it benefit communities or just individuals? Does it create opportunity or discomfort? Are there limits around it and if so can they be effective?”
Bloomberg CityLab caught up with Woo and Ebrahim, cofounder of the public interest design studio Monumental, about why messiness in cities can be worth advocating for, and how to let the healthy kind flourish. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
You intentionally don’t give a specific definition for messy urbanism in the book, making the case that to do so would be antithetical to the idea itself. But if you were to give a general overview of the qualities and attributes you’d ascribe to messy cities, what would they be?
Leslie Woo: All of the authors included in the book brought to it some form of two things — wanting to have a sense of belonging in the places they live and trying to understand how they can have agency in their community. And what comes out of that are acts of defiance that manifest both as tiny and intimate experiences and as big gestures in cities.
Zahra Ebrahim: I think of it as where institutions end and people begin. It’s about agency. So much of the “messy” defiance is people trying to live within their cultures and identities in ways that cities don’t always create space for. We’re not trying to fetishize messiness, but we do want to acknowledge that when people feel that agency, cities become more vibrant, spontaneous and delightful.
LW: I think of the story urban planning professor Nina-Marie Lister, director of Toronto’s Ecological Design Lab, tells about fighting to keep her wild front yard habitat garden after being ordered to cut it down by the city. There was a bylaw in place intended by the municipality to control what it deemed “noxious vegetation” on private property. Lister ended up doing a public advocacy campaign to get the bylaw updated.
The phrase “messy cities” could be construed negatively but it seems like a real term of affection for the editors and authors of this book. What does it represent to you?
ZE: You can see it represented in the Bloordale neighborhood of Toronto. During lockdown in 2020, a group of local residents came together and turned a large, gravel-filled site of a demolished school into an unexpected shared space for social distancing. With handmade signage, they cheekily named the site “Bloordale Beach.” Over weeks, they and others in the community organically and spontaneously brought this imagined, landlocked beach to life, adding beach chairs, “swimming guidelines” around the puddle that had formed after a storm, even a “barkour” area for local dogs. It was both a “messy” community art project and third space, but also a place for residents to demonstrate their agency and find joy in an uncertain and difficult time.
LW: The thing that is delightful about this topic is many of these efforts are exercises in reimagining cities. Individuals and groups see a space and approach it in a different way with a spirit and ingenuity that we don’t see enough of. It’s an exercise in thinking about how we want to live. I also want to make the point that we aren’t advocating for more chaos and confusion but rather showing how these groups are attempting to make sense of where they live.
ZE: Messiness has become a wedge issue — a way to pronounce and lean into existing political cleavages. Across the world we see politicians pointing to the challenges cities face — housing affordability, transit accessibility, access to employment — and wrongfully blame or attribute these urban “messes” to specific populations and groups. We see this in the rising anti-immigrant rhetoric we hear all over the world. As an editing team, I think there was a shared understanding that multicultural and diverse societies are more successful and that when we have to navigate shared social and cultural space, it’s better for society.
This is also not all about the failure of institutions to serve the needs of the public. Some of this is about groups responding to failures of the present and shaping a better future. And some of what we’re talking about is people seeing opportunities to make the type of “mess” that would support their community to thrive, like putting a pop-up market and third space in a strip mall parking lot, and creating a space for people to come together.
You and the rest of the editors are based in Toronto and the city comes up recurrently in the book. What makes the city such an interesting case study in messy urbanism?
ZE: Toronto is what a local journalist, Doug Saunders, calls an “arrival city” — one in three newcomers in Canada land in Toronto. These waves of migration are encoded in our city’s DNA. I think of a place like Kensington Market, where there have been successive arrivals of immigrants each decade, from Jewish and Eastern European and Italian immigrants in the early 1900s to Caribbean and Chinese immigrants in the 1960s and ’70s.
Kensington continues to be one of the most vibrant urban spaces in the city. You’ve got the market, food vendors, shops and semi-informal commercial activity, cultural venues and jazz bars. In so many parts of Toronto you can’t see the history on the street but in Kensington you can see the palimpsest and layers of change it’s lived through. There is development pressure in every direction and major retailers opening nearby but it remains this vibrant representation of different eras of newcomers in Toronto and what they needed — socially, culturally and commercially. It’s a great example of where the formal and informal, the planned and unplanned meet. Every nook and cranny is filled with a story, with locals making a “mess,” but really just expressing their agency.
LW: This messy urbanism can also be seen in Toronto’s apartment tower communities that were built in the 1960s. These buildings have experienced periods of neglect and changes in ownership. But today when moving from floor to floor, it feels like traveling around the entire world; you can move from the Caribbean to continental Africa to the Middle East. These are aerial cities in and of themselves. They’re a great example of people taking a place where the conditions aren’t ideal and telling their own different story — it’s everything from the music to the food to the languages.
You didn’t include any case studies or essays from Europe in the book. Why did you make that choice, and what does an overreliance on looking to cities like Copenhagen do to the way we think of and plan for cities?
LW: When I trained as an urban planner and architect, all the pedagogy was very Eurocentric — it was Spain, France and Greece. But if we want to reframe how we think about cities, we need to reframe our points of reference.
ZE: During our editorial meetings we talked about how the commonly accepted ideas about urban order that we know are Eurocentric by design, and don’t represent the multitude of people that live in cities and what “order” may mean to them. Again, it’s not to celebrate chaos but rather to say there are different mental models of what orderliness and messiness can look like.
Go to a place like Delhi and look at the way traffic roundabouts function. There are pedestrians and cars and everybody is moving in the direction they need to move in, it’s like a river of mobility. If you’re sitting in the back of a taxi coming from North America, it looks like chaos, but to the people that live there it’s just how the city moves.
In a chapter about Mexico City’s apartment architecture, Daniel Gordon talks about what it can teach us about how to create interesting streets and neighborhoods by becoming less attached to overly prescriptive planning and instead embracing a mix of ground-floor uses and buildings with varying materials and color palettes, setbacks and heights. He argues that design guidelines can negate creativity and expression in the built environment.
In another chapter, urban geography professor Andre Sorensen talks about Tokyo, which despite being perceived as a spontaneously messy city actually operates under one of the strictest zoning systems in the world. Built forms are highly regulated, but land use mix and subdivision controls aren’t. It’s yet another example of how different urban cultures and regulatory systems work to different sets of values and conceptions of order and disorder. We tried to pay closer attention to case studies that expanded the aperture of what North American urbanism typically covers.
by Rebecca Greenwald, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image:Alfredo Martinez/Getty Images
This premise — that urban planning’s efforts to impose order risk editing out the culture, character, complexity and creative friction that makes cities cities — is a guiding theme in Messy Cities: Why We Can’t Plan Everything, a collection of essays, including Thorne’s, gathered by Toronto-based editors Zahra Ebrahim, Leslie Woo, Dylan Reid and John Lorinc. In it, they argue that “messiness is an essential element of the city.” Case studies from around the world show how imperfection can be embraced, created and preserved, from the informal street eateries of East Los Angeles to the sports facilities carved out of derelict spaces in Mumbai.
Bloomberg CityLab caught up with Woo and Ebrahim, cofounder of the public interest design studio Monumental, about why messiness in cities can be worth advocating for, and how to let the healthy kind flourish. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
You intentionally don’t give a specific definition for messy urbanism in the book, making the case that to do so would be antithetical to the idea itself. But if you were to give a general overview of the qualities and attributes you’d ascribe to messy cities, what would they be?
Leslie Woo: All of the authors included in the book brought to it some form of two things — wanting to have a sense of belonging in the places they live and trying to understand how they can have agency in their community. And what comes out of that are acts of defiance that manifest both as tiny and intimate experiences and as big gestures in cities.
Zahra Ebrahim: I think of it as where institutions end and people begin. It’s about agency. So much of the “messy” defiance is people trying to live within their cultures and identities in ways that cities don’t always create space for. We’re not trying to fetishize messiness, but we do want to acknowledge that when people feel that agency, cities become more vibrant, spontaneous and delightful.
LW: I think of the story urban planning professor Nina-Marie Lister, director of Toronto’s Ecological Design Lab, tells about fighting to keep her wild front yard habitat garden after being ordered to cut it down by the city. There was a bylaw in place intended by the municipality to control what it deemed “noxious vegetation” on private property. Lister ended up doing a public advocacy campaign to get the bylaw updated.
The phrase “messy cities” could be construed negatively but it seems like a real term of affection for the editors and authors of this book. What does it represent to you?
ZE: You can see it represented in the Bloordale neighborhood of Toronto. During lockdown in 2020, a group of local residents came together and turned a large, gravel-filled site of a demolished school into an unexpected shared space for social distancing. With handmade signage, they cheekily named the site “Bloordale Beach.” Over weeks, they and others in the community organically and spontaneously brought this imagined, landlocked beach to life, adding beach chairs, “swimming guidelines” around the puddle that had formed after a storm, even a “barkour” area for local dogs. It was both a “messy” community art project and third space, but also a place for residents to demonstrate their agency and find joy in an uncertain and difficult time.
LW: The thing that is delightful about this topic is many of these efforts are exercises in reimagining cities. Individuals and groups see a space and approach it in a different way with a spirit and ingenuity that we don’t see enough of. It’s an exercise in thinking about how we want to live. I also want to make the point that we aren’t advocating for more chaos and confusion but rather showing how these groups are attempting to make sense of where they live.
ZE: Messiness has become a wedge issue — a way to pronounce and lean into existing political cleavages. Across the world we see politicians pointing to the challenges cities face — housing affordability, transit accessibility, access to employment — and wrongfully blame or attribute these urban “messes” to specific populations and groups. We see this in the rising anti-immigrant rhetoric we hear all over the world. As an editing team, I think there was a shared understanding that multicultural and diverse societies are more successful and that when we have to navigate shared social and cultural space, it’s better for society.
This is also not all about the failure of institutions to serve the needs of the public. Some of this is about groups responding to failures of the present and shaping a better future. And some of what we’re talking about is people seeing opportunities to make the type of “mess” that would support their community to thrive, like putting a pop-up market and third space in a strip mall parking lot, and creating a space for people to come together.
You and the rest of the editors are based in Toronto and the city comes up recurrently in the book. What makes the city such an interesting case study in messy urbanism?
ZE: Toronto is what a local journalist, Doug Saunders, calls an “arrival city” — one in three newcomers in Canada land in Toronto. These waves of migration are encoded in our city’s DNA. I think of a place like Kensington Market, where there have been successive arrivals of immigrants each decade, from Jewish and Eastern European and Italian immigrants in the early 1900s to Caribbean and Chinese immigrants in the 1960s and ’70s.
Kensington continues to be one of the most vibrant urban spaces in the city. You’ve got the market, food vendors, shops and semi-informal commercial activity, cultural venues and jazz bars. In so many parts of Toronto you can’t see the history on the street but in Kensington you can see the palimpsest and layers of change it’s lived through. There is development pressure in every direction and major retailers opening nearby but it remains this vibrant representation of different eras of newcomers in Toronto and what they needed — socially, culturally and commercially. It’s a great example of where the formal and informal, the planned and unplanned meet. Every nook and cranny is filled with a story, with locals making a “mess,” but really just expressing their agency.
LW: This messy urbanism can also be seen in Toronto’s apartment tower communities that were built in the 1960s. These buildings have experienced periods of neglect and changes in ownership. But today when moving from floor to floor, it feels like traveling around the entire world; you can move from the Caribbean to continental Africa to the Middle East. These are aerial cities in and of themselves. They’re a great example of people taking a place where the conditions aren’t ideal and telling their own different story — it’s everything from the music to the food to the languages.
You didn’t include any case studies or essays from Europe in the book. Why did you make that choice, and what does an overreliance on looking to cities like Copenhagen do to the way we think of and plan for cities?
LW: When I trained as an urban planner and architect, all the pedagogy was very Eurocentric — it was Spain, France and Greece. But if we want to reframe how we think about cities, we need to reframe our points of reference.
ZE: During our editorial meetings we talked about how the commonly accepted ideas about urban order that we know are Eurocentric by design, and don’t represent the multitude of people that live in cities and what “order” may mean to them. Again, it’s not to celebrate chaos but rather to say there are different mental models of what orderliness and messiness can look like.
Go to a place like Delhi and look at the way traffic roundabouts function. There are pedestrians and cars and everybody is moving in the direction they need to move in, it’s like a river of mobility. If you’re sitting in the back of a taxi coming from North America, it looks like chaos, but to the people that live there it’s just how the city moves.
In a chapter about Mexico City’s apartment architecture, Daniel Gordon talks about what it can teach us about how to create interesting streets and neighborhoods by becoming less attached to overly prescriptive planning and instead embracing a mix of ground-floor uses and buildings with varying materials and color palettes, setbacks and heights. He argues that design guidelines can negate creativity and expression in the built environment.
In another chapter, urban geography professor Andre Sorensen talks about Tokyo, which despite being perceived as a spontaneously messy city actually operates under one of the strictest zoning systems in the world. Built forms are highly regulated, but land use mix and subdivision controls aren’t. It’s yet another example of how different urban cultures and regulatory systems work to different sets of values and conceptions of order and disorder. We tried to pay closer attention to case studies that expanded the aperture of what North American urbanism typically covers.
by Rebecca Greenwald, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image:Alfredo Martinez/Getty Images
[ed. Give me a messy city any day, or at least one with a few messy parts.]
Tuesday, February 3, 2026
These Four States Are in Denial Over a Looming Water Crisis
Lake Mead is two-thirds empty. Lake Powell is even emptier.
Not for the first time, the seven Western states that rely on the Colorado River are fighting over how to keep these reservoirs from crashing — an event that could spur water shortages from Denver to Las Vegas to Los Angeles.
The tens of millions of people who rely on the Colorado River have weathered such crises before, even amid a stubborn quarter-century megadrought fueled by climate change. The states have always struck deals to use less water, overcoming their political differences to avert “dead pool” at Mead and Powell, meaning that water could no longer flow downstream.
This time, a deal may not be possible. And it’s clear who’s to blame.
Not the farmers who grow alfalfa and other feed for animals, despite the fact that they use one-third of all water in the Colorado River basin. Not California, even though the Golden State uses more river water than any of its neighbors. Not even the Trump administration, which has done a lousy job pressing the states to compromise.
No, the Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming have emerged as the main obstacles to a fair deal. They’ve gummed up negotiations by refusing to accept mandatory cuts of any amount — unlike the Lower Basin states, which have spent years slashing water use.
Upper Basin leaders have long harbored ambitions of using more water to fuel economic development, especially in cities. “There’s this notion of keeping the dream of growth alive,” said John Fleck, a researcher at the University of New Mexico. “It’s difficult for people to reckon with the reality that they can’t keep that dream alive anymore.”
Federal officials have set a Feb. 14 deadline for the seven states to reach consensus, although negotiators blew past a November deadline with no consequence. The real cutoff is the end of 2026, when longstanding rules for assigning cuts to avoid shortages will expire.
Low snowpack levels across the Western United States this winter are raising the stakes. In some ways, though, the conflict is a century in the making.
Since 1922, the states have divvied up water under the Colorado River Compact, which gave 7.5 million acre-feet annually to the Lower Basin and 7.5 million acre-feet to the Upper Basin. Most water originates as Rocky Mountain snowmelt before flowing downstream to Lake Powell near the Utah-Arizona border. Once released from Powell, it flows through the Grand Canyon to Lake Mead, near Las Vegas.
But even though the two groups of states agreed to split the water evenly, Los Angeles and Phoenix grew bigger and faster than Denver and Salt Lake City, gobbling up more water. Lower Basin farmers and ranchers, too, used far more water than their Upper Basin counterparts — especially growers in California’s Imperial Valley, who staked out some of the river’s oldest and thus highest-priority water rights.
Global warming had other plans, too. There was never as much water in the river as negotiators assumed even back in 1922 — a fact that scientists knew at the time. The states spent decades outrunning that original sin by finding creative ways to conserve water when drought struck. But deal-making was easier when the river averaged, say, 13 million acre-feet. Over the past six years, as the effects of burning fossil fuels have mounted, flows averaged just 10.8 million acre-feet. That means the states will need to make much deeper cuts.
So far, no luck. The Upper and Lower Basins have spent several years at fierce loggerheads, with some negotiators growing vitriolic. State officials are still talking, most recently at a Jan. 30 meeting convened by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. But after two decades of collaborative problem-solving, longtime observers say they’ve never seen so much animosity.
Lower Basin officials largely blame Colorado, the de facto leader of the Upper Basin. They say Colorado won’t budge from what they consider the extreme legal position that the Upper Basin bears no responsibility for delivering water downstream from Powell to Mead for the Lower Basin’s use. They also fault Colorado for demanding that mandatory cuts fall entirely on the Lower Basin.
Upper Basin officials tell a different story. They insist that California and Arizona have been overconsuming water — and by their reading of the compact, that means it’s not their job to keep replenishing the Lower Basin’s savings account at Lake Mead. They also say it would be unfair to force them to cut back when California and Arizona are the real water hogs.
On the one hand, the numbers don’t lie: The Lower Basin states used nearly 6.1 million acre-feet in 2024, compared with the Upper Basin’s nearly 4.5 million, according to the federal government. The Imperial Irrigation District — which supplies farmers who grow alfalfa, broccoli, onions and other crops — used more water than the entire state of Colorado.
On the other hand, the Lower Basin has done far more to cut back than the Upper Basin. Los Angeles and Las Vegas residents have torn out grass lawns en masse; Vegas has water cops to police excessive water use by sprinkler systems. Farmers in Arizona and California are leaving fields dry, sometimes aided by federal incentive programs. California is investing in expensive wastewater recycling to reduce its dependence on imported water.
Mr. Fleck projected that the Lower Basin’s Colorado River consumption in 2025 would be its lowest since 1983. Imperial’s consumption would be its lowest since at least 1941.
California, Arizona and Nevada still waste plenty of water, but they’re prepared to go further. They’ve told the Upper Basin that as part of a post-2026 deal, they’re willing to reduce consumption by an additional 1.25 million acre-feet of water — but only if the Upper Basin shares the pain of further cuts during especially dry years.
Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming do not want to share the pain — at least not through mandatory cuts. They say they already cut back voluntarily during drought years, although independent experts are skeptical. They also say the Lower Basin states use more water than federal data show — something like 10 million acre-feet.
When I asked Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s lead negotiator, if her state plans to keep growing, she responded with an alarming comparison to the Lower Basin, musing that the Upper Basin would probably never use 10 million acre-feet. Thank goodness, because that kind of growth would more than bankrupt the Colorado River.
But even as she acknowledged that the Upper Basin states “have to live within hydrology,” she suggested they have a right to use more water.
“The compact gave us the protection to grow and develop at our own pace,” she said.
by Sammy Roth, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jim Morgan
[ed. Hard to feel sorry for Arizona and Nevada who've been building like crazy over the last few decades.]
Not for the first time, the seven Western states that rely on the Colorado River are fighting over how to keep these reservoirs from crashing — an event that could spur water shortages from Denver to Las Vegas to Los Angeles.
The tens of millions of people who rely on the Colorado River have weathered such crises before, even amid a stubborn quarter-century megadrought fueled by climate change. The states have always struck deals to use less water, overcoming their political differences to avert “dead pool” at Mead and Powell, meaning that water could no longer flow downstream.
Not the farmers who grow alfalfa and other feed for animals, despite the fact that they use one-third of all water in the Colorado River basin. Not California, even though the Golden State uses more river water than any of its neighbors. Not even the Trump administration, which has done a lousy job pressing the states to compromise.
No, the Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming have emerged as the main obstacles to a fair deal. They’ve gummed up negotiations by refusing to accept mandatory cuts of any amount — unlike the Lower Basin states, which have spent years slashing water use.
Upper Basin leaders have long harbored ambitions of using more water to fuel economic development, especially in cities. “There’s this notion of keeping the dream of growth alive,” said John Fleck, a researcher at the University of New Mexico. “It’s difficult for people to reckon with the reality that they can’t keep that dream alive anymore.”
Federal officials have set a Feb. 14 deadline for the seven states to reach consensus, although negotiators blew past a November deadline with no consequence. The real cutoff is the end of 2026, when longstanding rules for assigning cuts to avoid shortages will expire.
Low snowpack levels across the Western United States this winter are raising the stakes. In some ways, though, the conflict is a century in the making.
Since 1922, the states have divvied up water under the Colorado River Compact, which gave 7.5 million acre-feet annually to the Lower Basin and 7.5 million acre-feet to the Upper Basin. Most water originates as Rocky Mountain snowmelt before flowing downstream to Lake Powell near the Utah-Arizona border. Once released from Powell, it flows through the Grand Canyon to Lake Mead, near Las Vegas.
But even though the two groups of states agreed to split the water evenly, Los Angeles and Phoenix grew bigger and faster than Denver and Salt Lake City, gobbling up more water. Lower Basin farmers and ranchers, too, used far more water than their Upper Basin counterparts — especially growers in California’s Imperial Valley, who staked out some of the river’s oldest and thus highest-priority water rights.
Global warming had other plans, too. There was never as much water in the river as negotiators assumed even back in 1922 — a fact that scientists knew at the time. The states spent decades outrunning that original sin by finding creative ways to conserve water when drought struck. But deal-making was easier when the river averaged, say, 13 million acre-feet. Over the past six years, as the effects of burning fossil fuels have mounted, flows averaged just 10.8 million acre-feet. That means the states will need to make much deeper cuts.
So far, no luck. The Upper and Lower Basins have spent several years at fierce loggerheads, with some negotiators growing vitriolic. State officials are still talking, most recently at a Jan. 30 meeting convened by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. But after two decades of collaborative problem-solving, longtime observers say they’ve never seen so much animosity.
Lower Basin officials largely blame Colorado, the de facto leader of the Upper Basin. They say Colorado won’t budge from what they consider the extreme legal position that the Upper Basin bears no responsibility for delivering water downstream from Powell to Mead for the Lower Basin’s use. They also fault Colorado for demanding that mandatory cuts fall entirely on the Lower Basin.
Upper Basin officials tell a different story. They insist that California and Arizona have been overconsuming water — and by their reading of the compact, that means it’s not their job to keep replenishing the Lower Basin’s savings account at Lake Mead. They also say it would be unfair to force them to cut back when California and Arizona are the real water hogs.
On the one hand, the numbers don’t lie: The Lower Basin states used nearly 6.1 million acre-feet in 2024, compared with the Upper Basin’s nearly 4.5 million, according to the federal government. The Imperial Irrigation District — which supplies farmers who grow alfalfa, broccoli, onions and other crops — used more water than the entire state of Colorado.
On the other hand, the Lower Basin has done far more to cut back than the Upper Basin. Los Angeles and Las Vegas residents have torn out grass lawns en masse; Vegas has water cops to police excessive water use by sprinkler systems. Farmers in Arizona and California are leaving fields dry, sometimes aided by federal incentive programs. California is investing in expensive wastewater recycling to reduce its dependence on imported water.
Mr. Fleck projected that the Lower Basin’s Colorado River consumption in 2025 would be its lowest since 1983. Imperial’s consumption would be its lowest since at least 1941.
California, Arizona and Nevada still waste plenty of water, but they’re prepared to go further. They’ve told the Upper Basin that as part of a post-2026 deal, they’re willing to reduce consumption by an additional 1.25 million acre-feet of water — but only if the Upper Basin shares the pain of further cuts during especially dry years.
Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming do not want to share the pain — at least not through mandatory cuts. They say they already cut back voluntarily during drought years, although independent experts are skeptical. They also say the Lower Basin states use more water than federal data show — something like 10 million acre-feet.
When I asked Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s lead negotiator, if her state plans to keep growing, she responded with an alarming comparison to the Lower Basin, musing that the Upper Basin would probably never use 10 million acre-feet. Thank goodness, because that kind of growth would more than bankrupt the Colorado River.
But even as she acknowledged that the Upper Basin states “have to live within hydrology,” she suggested they have a right to use more water.
“The compact gave us the protection to grow and develop at our own pace,” she said.
by Sammy Roth, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jim Morgan
[ed. Hard to feel sorry for Arizona and Nevada who've been building like crazy over the last few decades.]
Friday, January 30, 2026
Hawaiʻi Could See Nation’s Highest Drop In High School Graduates
Hawaiʻi is expected to see the greatest decline in high school graduates in the nation over the next several years, raising concerns from lawmakers and Department of Education officials about the future of small schools in shrinking communities.
Between 2023 and 2041, Hawaiʻi could see a 33% drop in the number of students graduating from high school, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. The nation as a whole is projected to see a 10% drop in graduates, according to the commission’s most recent report, published at the end of 2024.
Image: Chart: Megan Tagami/Civil BeatSource: Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education
Monday, January 26, 2026
Three Columnists on ICE in Minneapolis
Matthew Rose, an Opinion editorial director, hosted an online conversation with three Opinion columnists.
Matthew Rose: On Saturday, agents from the border patrol in Minneapolis shot and killed Alex Pretti, an American citizen. We don’t have a full accounting of what happened, but the available video evidence shows he was filming the agents with his phone, as many locals have done since the full weight of federal immigration enforcement descended on the city.
Lydia, you’ve been to Minneapolis recently. Tell us what you saw and give us some context for what just happened.
Lydia Polgreen: I have never been a fan of the conceit of American journalists covering the United States as if it were a backwater foreign nation, but in Minneapolis last week I could not shake the impulse to compare my experiences in a city I know so well (I spent a chunk of my childhood in the Twin Cities, and my father is from Minneapolis) with my experiences covering civil wars in places like Congo, Sudan, Sri Lanka and more. Watching the video of Pretti’s killing, I thought: If this was happening on the streets of any of those places, I would not hesitate to call it an extrajudicial execution by security forces. This is where we are: armed agents of the state killing civilians with an apparent belief in their total impunity.
Lydia, you’ve been to Minneapolis recently. Tell us what you saw and give us some context for what just happened.
I left before Pretti was gunned down, apparently in the back while he was on his knees. What I saw was so reminiscent of other conflicts — civilians doing their very best to protect themselves and their neighbors from seemingly random violence meted out by state agents. Those agents, masked and heavily armed, are roaming the streets and picking up and assaulting people for having the wrong skin color or accent, or being engaged in the constitutionally protected acts of filming, observing or protesting their presence. Anyone who knows me knows that I am allergic to hyperbole, but sometimes you need to simply call a spade a spade. This is a lawless operation.
David French: We are witnessing the total breakdown of any meaningful system of accountability for federal officials. The combination of President Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons, his ongoing campaign of pardoning friends and allies, his politicized prosecutions and now his administration’s assurances that federal officers have immunity are creating a new legal reality in the United States. The national government is becoming functionally lawless, and the legal system is struggling to contain his corruption.
We’re tasting the bitter fruit of Trump’s dreadful policies, to be sure, but it’s worse than that. He’s exploiting years of legal developments that have helped insulate federal officials from both criminal and civil accountability. It’s as if we engineered a legal system premised on the idea that federal officials are almost always honest, and the citizens who critique them are almost always wrong. We’ve tilted the legal playing field against citizens and in favor of the government.
The Trump administration breaks the law, and also ruthlessly exploits all the immunities it’s granted by law. The situation is unsustainable for a constitutional republic.
Michelle Goldberg: The administration is very consciously reinforcing that sense of impunity. First there was Stephen Miller addressing the security forces after one of them killed Renee Good: “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.” On Sunday, Greg Bovino, the self-consciously villainous border patrol commander, praised the agents who executed Pretti.
I wish people weren’t allowed to carry guns in public. But they are, and after watching Republicans bring semiautomatic weapons to protest Covid closures and make a hero of Kyle Rittenhouse, it’s wild to hear the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Kash Patel, say, on Fox News, “You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines, to any sort of protest that you want.” The point here isn’t hypocrisy; it’s them nakedly asserting that constitutional rights are for us, not you.
Rose: David, I wanted to pick up on your description of the federal government as lawless. As you’ve written, we seem to be in the world described by the Nazi-era Jewish labor lawyer Ernst Fraenkel and what he called “the dual state.” There is one we live in, where we pay taxes and go to work, and life seems to work according to common rules, and the other where the rules no longer apply. Is this what we’re experiencing?
French: We’re living in a version of the dual state. Not to the same extent as the Nazis, of course, but Fraenkel’s framing is still relevant. The Nazis didn’t create their totalitarian state immediately. Instead, they were able to lull much of the population to sleep just by keeping their lives relatively normal. As you say, they went to work, paid their taxes, entered into contracts and did all the things you normally do in a functioning nation. But if you crossed the government, then you passed into a different state entirely, where you would feel the full weight of fascist power — regardless of the rule of law.
One of the saddest things about the killings of Good and Pretti is that you could tell that neither of them seemed to know the danger until it was too late. They believed they were operating in some version of the normal state (what Fraenkel called the “normative state”) where the police usually respond with discipline and restraint.
Good and Pretti both had calm demeanors. They may have been annoying federal officers, but nothing about their posture indicated the slightest threat. Good even said, “I’m not mad” to the man who would gun her down seconds later. Pretti was filming with his phone in one hand and he had the other hand in the air as he was pepper-sprayed and tackled.
The officers, however, were in that different state, what Fraenkel called the “prerogative state,” where the government is a law unto itself. The officers acted violently, with impunity, and the government immediately acted to defend them and slander their victims. As the prerogative state expands, the normative state shrinks, and our lives often change before we can grasp what happened. (...)
Rose: With immigration enforcement in Trump’s second term, we have a quasi-military force, backed by more funding than most countries give their actual militaries, deployed for the most part to enforce civil, not criminal law. Should we instead think about this as spectacle? Caitlin Dickerson of The Atlantic, interviewed by our colleague Ezra Klein, argued that immigration enforcement under Trump is being implemented for maximum visual impact.
Goldberg: That’s increasingly the critique of conservatives who don’t want to break with Trump, but also are having a hard time rationalizing ICE’s violence in Minneapolis. Erick Erickson blames what’s happening in Minnesota on the D.H.S. secretary, Kristi Noem, marginalizing Tom Homan, the border czar, in favor of Greg Bovino from Customs and Border Protection, who clearly relishes street-level confrontation.
And the administration obviously wants to make a spectacle. We don’t know why the guy who shot Renee Good was filming, but it could well have been to feed their insatiable demand for content, which in turn is feeding their recruiting efforts. Did any of you see the clip where one of the agents shooting tear gas at protesters can be heard saying, “It’s like ‘Call of Duty.’ So cool, huh?”
I’m glad that some people on the right have at least concluded that this looks bad for their side, since it could create political pressure on Trump to pull back. At the same time, I don’t think you can divorce the policy from the spectacle. Both are meant to terrorize their enemies.
Polgreen: There is no question that spectacle is the goal here. Michelle just mentioned Bovino — he has been swanning about Minnesota in a long, green wool coat that lends him a distinctly fascist look. The way these officers are kitted out is nuts. Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, described it to me as “full battle rattle.” There is also a cartoonish aspect to the whole thing — social media is replete with videos of agents slipping on ice and falling, ass over teakettle, onto the frozen ground. You look at the videos of the shootings and there is an air of incompetence to the whole thing, even amid the horror. It is almost as if you can’t believe how amateurish and unprofessional these guys are.
Elliott Payne, the president of the Minneapolis City Council, told me about one encounter with an agent armed with a Taser. The guy held it sideways, like some kind of gangbanger, menacing Payne and other city officials as they tried to ask questions about why a man at a bus stop was being detained. Payne told me it was something out of a bad movie. No trained law enforcement officer would ever hold a weapon that way. It would be comical if it weren’t so utterly terrifying. (...)
Rose: ... when people ask you what they can do, what’s your advice?
French: This is a crucial moment in American history. I think about it like this: When we learn about our family histories, we often ask what our ancestors were doing. Did they serve in World War II? Did they serve in Vietnam? Where did they stand during the civil rights movement?
This is a moment important enough that our grandchildren and even great-grandchildren might ask: What did you know? What did you do? Think hard about what you want your answer to be. Think hard about what you can do that will stand the test of time — whether it be peacefully protesting (including peaceful civil disobedience), volunteering for a political campaign, providing meals and clothing for immigrant families or anything else that protects the vulnerable and defends human dignity.
One of the worst answers, however, would be to look a curious grandchild in the face and say: Well, I posted a lot on social media.
Polgreen: I read so much about how we live in an atomized society, glued to our phones and social media but untethered from our communities and neighbors. Minnesota is demonstrating how quickly and fearlessly communities can come together in spite of the political and technological forces seeking to keep us divided. They also built on their past experience — many of these networks of support began during the George Floyd protests. Some were groups that wanted to march against the Minneapolis cops, and others wanted to protect neighborhoods from property damage. Now they have been reactivated to work together to help one another. A lot of us formed these kinds of networks during Covid. This would be a great time to reconnect with them. Be prepared to protect the people around you. (...)
David French: We are witnessing the total breakdown of any meaningful system of accountability for federal officials. The combination of President Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons, his ongoing campaign of pardoning friends and allies, his politicized prosecutions and now his administration’s assurances that federal officers have immunity are creating a new legal reality in the United States. The national government is becoming functionally lawless, and the legal system is struggling to contain his corruption.
We’re tasting the bitter fruit of Trump’s dreadful policies, to be sure, but it’s worse than that. He’s exploiting years of legal developments that have helped insulate federal officials from both criminal and civil accountability. It’s as if we engineered a legal system premised on the idea that federal officials are almost always honest, and the citizens who critique them are almost always wrong. We’ve tilted the legal playing field against citizens and in favor of the government.
The Trump administration breaks the law, and also ruthlessly exploits all the immunities it’s granted by law. The situation is unsustainable for a constitutional republic.
Michelle Goldberg: The administration is very consciously reinforcing that sense of impunity. First there was Stephen Miller addressing the security forces after one of them killed Renee Good: “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.” On Sunday, Greg Bovino, the self-consciously villainous border patrol commander, praised the agents who executed Pretti.
I wish people weren’t allowed to carry guns in public. But they are, and after watching Republicans bring semiautomatic weapons to protest Covid closures and make a hero of Kyle Rittenhouse, it’s wild to hear the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Kash Patel, say, on Fox News, “You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines, to any sort of protest that you want.” The point here isn’t hypocrisy; it’s them nakedly asserting that constitutional rights are for us, not you.
Rose: David, I wanted to pick up on your description of the federal government as lawless. As you’ve written, we seem to be in the world described by the Nazi-era Jewish labor lawyer Ernst Fraenkel and what he called “the dual state.” There is one we live in, where we pay taxes and go to work, and life seems to work according to common rules, and the other where the rules no longer apply. Is this what we’re experiencing?
French: We’re living in a version of the dual state. Not to the same extent as the Nazis, of course, but Fraenkel’s framing is still relevant. The Nazis didn’t create their totalitarian state immediately. Instead, they were able to lull much of the population to sleep just by keeping their lives relatively normal. As you say, they went to work, paid their taxes, entered into contracts and did all the things you normally do in a functioning nation. But if you crossed the government, then you passed into a different state entirely, where you would feel the full weight of fascist power — regardless of the rule of law.
One of the saddest things about the killings of Good and Pretti is that you could tell that neither of them seemed to know the danger until it was too late. They believed they were operating in some version of the normal state (what Fraenkel called the “normative state”) where the police usually respond with discipline and restraint.
Good and Pretti both had calm demeanors. They may have been annoying federal officers, but nothing about their posture indicated the slightest threat. Good even said, “I’m not mad” to the man who would gun her down seconds later. Pretti was filming with his phone in one hand and he had the other hand in the air as he was pepper-sprayed and tackled.
The officers, however, were in that different state, what Fraenkel called the “prerogative state,” where the government is a law unto itself. The officers acted violently, with impunity, and the government immediately acted to defend them and slander their victims. As the prerogative state expands, the normative state shrinks, and our lives often change before we can grasp what happened. (...)
Rose: With immigration enforcement in Trump’s second term, we have a quasi-military force, backed by more funding than most countries give their actual militaries, deployed for the most part to enforce civil, not criminal law. Should we instead think about this as spectacle? Caitlin Dickerson of The Atlantic, interviewed by our colleague Ezra Klein, argued that immigration enforcement under Trump is being implemented for maximum visual impact.
Goldberg: That’s increasingly the critique of conservatives who don’t want to break with Trump, but also are having a hard time rationalizing ICE’s violence in Minneapolis. Erick Erickson blames what’s happening in Minnesota on the D.H.S. secretary, Kristi Noem, marginalizing Tom Homan, the border czar, in favor of Greg Bovino from Customs and Border Protection, who clearly relishes street-level confrontation.
And the administration obviously wants to make a spectacle. We don’t know why the guy who shot Renee Good was filming, but it could well have been to feed their insatiable demand for content, which in turn is feeding their recruiting efforts. Did any of you see the clip where one of the agents shooting tear gas at protesters can be heard saying, “It’s like ‘Call of Duty.’ So cool, huh?”
I’m glad that some people on the right have at least concluded that this looks bad for their side, since it could create political pressure on Trump to pull back. At the same time, I don’t think you can divorce the policy from the spectacle. Both are meant to terrorize their enemies.
Polgreen: There is no question that spectacle is the goal here. Michelle just mentioned Bovino — he has been swanning about Minnesota in a long, green wool coat that lends him a distinctly fascist look. The way these officers are kitted out is nuts. Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, described it to me as “full battle rattle.” There is also a cartoonish aspect to the whole thing — social media is replete with videos of agents slipping on ice and falling, ass over teakettle, onto the frozen ground. You look at the videos of the shootings and there is an air of incompetence to the whole thing, even amid the horror. It is almost as if you can’t believe how amateurish and unprofessional these guys are.
Elliott Payne, the president of the Minneapolis City Council, told me about one encounter with an agent armed with a Taser. The guy held it sideways, like some kind of gangbanger, menacing Payne and other city officials as they tried to ask questions about why a man at a bus stop was being detained. Payne told me it was something out of a bad movie. No trained law enforcement officer would ever hold a weapon that way. It would be comical if it weren’t so utterly terrifying. (...)
Rose: ... when people ask you what they can do, what’s your advice?
French: This is a crucial moment in American history. I think about it like this: When we learn about our family histories, we often ask what our ancestors were doing. Did they serve in World War II? Did they serve in Vietnam? Where did they stand during the civil rights movement?
This is a moment important enough that our grandchildren and even great-grandchildren might ask: What did you know? What did you do? Think hard about what you want your answer to be. Think hard about what you can do that will stand the test of time — whether it be peacefully protesting (including peaceful civil disobedience), volunteering for a political campaign, providing meals and clothing for immigrant families or anything else that protects the vulnerable and defends human dignity.
One of the worst answers, however, would be to look a curious grandchild in the face and say: Well, I posted a lot on social media.
Polgreen: I read so much about how we live in an atomized society, glued to our phones and social media but untethered from our communities and neighbors. Minnesota is demonstrating how quickly and fearlessly communities can come together in spite of the political and technological forces seeking to keep us divided. They also built on their past experience — many of these networks of support began during the George Floyd protests. Some were groups that wanted to march against the Minneapolis cops, and others wanted to protect neighborhoods from property damage. Now they have been reactivated to work together to help one another. A lot of us formed these kinds of networks during Covid. This would be a great time to reconnect with them. Be prepared to protect the people around you. (...)
French: I’ll be completely honest. It’s a little harder for me to have hope when I know that the core political support for Trump’s aggression is coming from my own community. Without the lock step (and seemingly unconditional) support of so many millions of evangelicals, Trump’s administration would crumble overnight. So I keep looking for signs of softening hearts and opening minds in Trump’s base — among the people who helped raise me, who taught me about faith, and who told me in no uncertain terms that politicians must demonstrate high character before they can earn your support. I feel a pervasive sadness about this moment.
That’s what is so grievous about civil strife. You often find yourself in opposition not to some hated, distant foe, but rather in opposition to people you’ve loved your whole life — whom you still love.
But there is hope. It’s a mistake to believe that the G.O.P. and its Christian supporters have crossed a Rubicon, never to return. And it’s a mistake to believe — even for the most hardhearted — that their aggression is a sign of their strength. They are masking weakness, and courage is their kryptonite.
by Matthew Rose, Lydia Polgreen, David French and Michelle Goldberg, NY Times | Read more:
That’s what is so grievous about civil strife. You often find yourself in opposition not to some hated, distant foe, but rather in opposition to people you’ve loved your whole life — whom you still love.
But there is hope. It’s a mistake to believe that the G.O.P. and its Christian supporters have crossed a Rubicon, never to return. And it’s a mistake to believe — even for the most hardhearted — that their aggression is a sign of their strength. They are masking weakness, and courage is their kryptonite.
by Matthew Rose, Lydia Polgreen, David French and Michelle Goldberg, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Mark Peterson/Redux
Monday, January 19, 2026
The Boring Reason We Don't Have $7 Rideshares
New York, Baltimore, and DC have a rideshare app called Empower that charges 20-40% less than Uber. Drivers like it too because they keep 100% of the fare. Drivers pay a monthly fee instead.
The most common fare I’ve paid on Empower over the last six months is $7.65.
For a recent trip from downtown to the airport, Uber wanted $32. Empower wanted $17.25.
I use it constantly, and so do a lot of car-less people I know. That price difference is a pretty big deal!
For many, it can be the difference between getting to the clinic or skipping an appointment. Between getting a ride after a night shift or walking home alone after buses stop running.
DC is trying to shut Empower down, primarily over liability insurance. DC law requires $1 million in coverage per ride.
The $1 million requirement isn’t sized to typical accidents. When $100,000 is the limit available for an insurance claim, 96% of personal auto claims settle below $100,000.
The high ceiling shifts incentives: plaintiffs' attorneys have reason to pursue cases they'd otherwise drop and push for larger settlements. Fraud rings have emerged to exploit these policies. The American Transit Insurance Company, which focuses on NY rideshare insurance, estimates 60-70 percent of its claims are fraudulent. Uber recently filed racketeering lawsuits against networks of law firms and clinics allegedly staging fake accidents in New York, Florida, and California.
That $1 million requirement traces back to Uber’s early days. When the company was fighting for legality across America, taxi commissions called ridesharing dangerous. To win over skeptical politicians, Uber proposed $1 million in coverage, matching limousine services and interstate charter bus companies, not taxis. It became the national template. Had Uber aimed to match taxi limits, the mandates would be $100,000 to $300,000.
Now Uber is advocating to lower the $1 million mandates. The company (and its drivers) complain that insurance is around 30% of fares, particularly in states like California, New Jersey, and New York which also require additional $1 million uninsured motorist coverage and/or no-fault insurance. Even in DC, with very strong anti-fraud protections, the base $1 million requirement makes up about 5% of every fare—roughly a quarter of Empower’s advertised price advantage. (...)
Empower shows people want options. The app doesn’t let you schedule rides in advance, store multiple cards, or earn airline miles. Drivers don’t always turn off their music. Empower’s not trying to target the same audience as Uber. But the New York Times estimates Empower handles 10% of DC’s ride share market. People are comfortable with the rideshare industry’s scrappy options.
I think the core question is: now that society has accepted rideshare, should we revisit the rules that helped us get there?
People now trust and rely on this mode of transportation. Ridesharing has become pseudo-infrastructure for car-less Americans and a tool against drunk driving. In areas of Houston where rideshare first rolled out, drunk driving incidents appear to have dropped 38%.
We should want rideshare to remain affordable, especially as we build the excellent public transit we need.
The most common fare I’ve paid on Empower over the last six months is $7.65.
For a recent trip from downtown to the airport, Uber wanted $32. Empower wanted $17.25.
I use it constantly, and so do a lot of car-less people I know. That price difference is a pretty big deal!
For many, it can be the difference between getting to the clinic or skipping an appointment. Between getting a ride after a night shift or walking home alone after buses stop running.
DC is trying to shut Empower down, primarily over liability insurance. DC law requires $1 million in coverage per ride.
The $1 million requirement isn’t sized to typical accidents. When $100,000 is the limit available for an insurance claim, 96% of personal auto claims settle below $100,000.
The high ceiling shifts incentives: plaintiffs' attorneys have reason to pursue cases they'd otherwise drop and push for larger settlements. Fraud rings have emerged to exploit these policies. The American Transit Insurance Company, which focuses on NY rideshare insurance, estimates 60-70 percent of its claims are fraudulent. Uber recently filed racketeering lawsuits against networks of law firms and clinics allegedly staging fake accidents in New York, Florida, and California.
That $1 million requirement traces back to Uber’s early days. When the company was fighting for legality across America, taxi commissions called ridesharing dangerous. To win over skeptical politicians, Uber proposed $1 million in coverage, matching limousine services and interstate charter bus companies, not taxis. It became the national template. Had Uber aimed to match taxi limits, the mandates would be $100,000 to $300,000.
Now Uber is advocating to lower the $1 million mandates. The company (and its drivers) complain that insurance is around 30% of fares, particularly in states like California, New Jersey, and New York which also require additional $1 million uninsured motorist coverage and/or no-fault insurance. Even in DC, with very strong anti-fraud protections, the base $1 million requirement makes up about 5% of every fare—roughly a quarter of Empower’s advertised price advantage. (...)
Empower shows people want options. The app doesn’t let you schedule rides in advance, store multiple cards, or earn airline miles. Drivers don’t always turn off their music. Empower’s not trying to target the same audience as Uber. But the New York Times estimates Empower handles 10% of DC’s ride share market. People are comfortable with the rideshare industry’s scrappy options.
I think the core question is: now that society has accepted rideshare, should we revisit the rules that helped us get there?
Coverage of the potential shutdown rarely focuses on who stands to lose most: price-sensitive riders. Most coverage focuses on Empower’s lack of commercial insurance without explaining that the mandate is three to ten times higher than what taxis carry. Few explore whether or how Empower’s model actually differs: drivers can set their own prices. Drivers fund the platform through monthly fees rather than a cut of each fare. Drivers who get commercial insurance can also use it for private clients.
People now trust and rely on this mode of transportation. Ridesharing has become pseudo-infrastructure for car-less Americans and a tool against drunk driving. In areas of Houston where rideshare first rolled out, drunk driving incidents appear to have dropped 38%.
We should want rideshare to remain affordable, especially as we build the excellent public transit we need.
by Abi Olivera, Positive Sum | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Learn something new every day. I'll certainly look into this new company. The pricing of Uber is getting crazy (I've never used Lyft). Unfortunately, expansion won't be easy. As noted: High mandates also act as a moat. In DC, becoming a licensed rideshare company requires a $5,000 application fee, a $250,000 security fee, and infrastructure for that $1 million coverage. You have to be well-capitalized before you serve your first rider. This is likely why we see few bare-bones apps or local competitors to turn to when Lyft and Uber are surging.]
So You Want to Abolish Property Taxes
A lot of people in the Republican party have been talking about abolishing property taxes lately. This is a bad idea with unintended consequences, and they shouldn’t do it.
Doing so would undermine economic growth and housing affordability gains certain red states have recently seen. Worse, we’ve already run this experiment and know where it leads: a California-style de-growth death spiral that slams the door in the faces of young working families.
I begin by explaining why property tax elimination is a bad idea:
1. States will never actually do it
The first reason eliminating property taxes is bad is that local politicians don’t have the guts to actually pull the trigger. As soon as it’s time for implementation, intra-party fighting overwhelms the legislative process, causing lawmakers to throw up their hands, slap on a band-aid, declare victory, and go home.
Why you can’t eliminate property taxes
In my home state of Texas, Republicans have tried and failed twice in back-to-back legislative sessions to eliminate property taxes. This is despite the fact that Texas has been under complete Republican domination for over twenty years.
First, it’s just too expensive. In 2024, the legislative budget board found that replacing property taxes would cost $81.5 billion dollars, more than the annual state budget of $72 billion. Read here:
Property taxes are less hated than you think
At least according to recent polling, the #1 most hated tax is not the property tax, but the Federal Income tax: [...]
Note the change in the last two decades: a net 20 percentage point swing in most-hated status between property tax and federal income tax. The large drop in housing affordability over that time period has surely contributed towards that change in sentiment...
Also, if property taxes are so desperately hated, why do states keep voting to keep them in place?
Every single state has some form of state or local property tax. Meanwhile, over a quarter of states opt out of at least one of sales, corporate, or income taxes.
In short, while it is often claimed that property taxes are the least popular tax by stated preferences, if we look at revealed preferences, they could actually be the most popular local tax. Perhaps this is why every time a red state tries to abolish property taxes, strident opposition crops up from unexpected places: [video]
But maybe you don’t care. In that case, pick an alternative.
2. The Alternatives are worse
An OECD report ranks different taxes by which are the most harmful to growth:
In conservative states like Texas, raising income and corporate taxes is already dead in the water (if not explicitly banned in the state constitution), which just leaves sales taxes. Since people say they hate property taxes more, shouldn’t we just bite the bullet and go all in on sales taxes?
The problem with this line of thinking is that the polling is based on sales taxes at current rates. The highest sales taxes in the nation cap out at 10%—rates as high as 19% are completely unprecedented. Even worse, the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association found that at those levels you start triggering tax avoidance, so you will inevitably have to raise the rate even higher to compensate, pushing it well past 20%.
We don’t even need to argue about whether this is popular or not because this exact proposal has been proposed twice already in Texas and it’s failed twice. Texans do not want to replace all property taxes with 20% state-imposed inflation on goods and services.
Ironically, reducing property taxes might actually be hardest in red states like Texas, precisely because the state is so anti-tax that there just aren’t many alternatives left. It’s no surprise then that the most famous instances of states that have “succeeded” in undermining property taxes are blue states.
The results have not been good.
3. Blue state experiences serve as a warning
Don’t California my Texas
One anti-property tax measure is not to lower tax rates so much as to completely undermine the entire system of property valuation itself, and there is no example more infamous than California’s Proposition 13. This 70’s-era reform fell far short of abolishing the property tax, settling for simply unleashing one of the most wildly unequal and unfair taxation schemes in the nation instead.
Prop 13 works like this:
The results have been an absolute disaster for both housing affordability and any semblance of basic fairness. Side-by-side houses have wildly unequal property assessments (source):
Again, complete property tax elimination never actually arrives. What arrives instead is special treatment for one class at the expense of everyone else in the state. But that’s not all; on top of the much higher property tax burdens young working families face for the audacious crime of moving in last year, the state has extra treats in store (source):
Honestly, the fact that it’s taken this long for California to start to bleed population really shows you what an incredible natural advantage California has long held over every other location in the United States. Even though the game has always been California’s to lose, if you spend multiple decades repeatedly punching yourself in the face, the crown eventually slips from your head.
NOTE: as much fun as it is to get high huffing California schadenfreude, Republicans would do well to remember that Prop 13 was pushed for in large part by members of their own party.
Unfortunately, California isn’t the only blue state with gorgeous weather and Edenic geography that’s been steadily sending its children into exile.
Aloha ‘Oe
The state with the lowest property taxes in the nation, at an effective tax rate of 0.27%, is Hawaii. Incidentally, Hawaii has the second highest top income tax rate at 11%. It also has the third highest net domestic outmigration rate of all US states between 2020-2024.
Even worse, the overall population “natural change” (births minus deaths) is steadily shrinking:
What’s not shrinking is the size of billionaire landholdings. Just 37 billionaires own more than 218,000 acres of Hawaii, roughly 5.3% of all land in the state, a figure equal to 11.1% of all privately held land.
Just one of those billionaires owns more than 1.27% of the entire state—Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, who owns 98% of the entire island of Lānaʻi.
Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan have seen their landholdings in Kaua’i more than triple, from 700+ acres in 2014 to over 2,300 acres today over the last ten years. Oprah Winfrey now owns over 1,000 acres on Maui after a recent purchase, the same island on which Jeff Bezos owns 14 acres. But what Jeff lacks in quantity, he makes up for in quality: he paid $78M for his land in La Perouse Bay, a full $13M more than Zuck paid for his 1,000-acre Kawai’i purchase in 2025.
As a quick aside, this underscores another problem with rock-bottom property taxes: it turns real estate into the perfect speculative financial asset in which to park money. When so little cost to hold it, real estate becomes an attractive passive investment, and over time tends to take up an ever-increasing share of bank loans, as expertly illustrated in the paper The Great Mortgaging, by Jordà, Schularick, and Taylor. This has a double-whammy effect on the economy: real estate sucks up all the loans, bidding up its price, while leaving all other sectors (like actually providing productive jobs) with less investment...
Making real estate the perfect speculative asset for the ultra-rich is never a good idea, but Hawaii faces other problems too: the top reasons cited for leaving the state include high cost of living, limited economic opportunities, housing challenges, quality of life concerns, and education. That last one is exacerbated by chronically underfunded public schools.
Hawaii’s high income taxes and low property taxes have done little to curb the island state’s steady transformation into a paradise for the rich, but a port of exile for the young working families its future depends on.
Five thousand miles away, on the cold and distant far shore of the mainland, another blue state grapples with a similar challenge. [ed. hint: New York]:
In any case, whether it’s Texas, Florida, Hawaii, California, New York, or any of the other forty-five of these great United States, there’s a solution out there that meets everybody’s needs.
It delivers meaningful property tax relief to the median homeowner, without excluding renters and businesses or pitting seniors against young working families, all while driving overall economic efficiency and setting the state up for a pro-growth flywheel that keeps the budget balanced and taxes competitive.
That policy is Universal Building Exemption.
3. Universal Building Exemption is better
There is a problem with property taxes: it’s a good tax combined with a bad tax. The bad part of the tax is the portion of the tax that falls on buildings and improvements. We’re in a housing crisis, so why are we taxing houses? We’re in an age of rising unemployment, so why are we taxing workplaces? We want more construction, not less.
A universal building exemption fixes this by shifting the tax off of buildings and onto the unimproved value of land. Crucially, it’s revenue-neutral: it raises the same amount of property tax dollars as before, so it doesn’t break the budget.
Here’s why it’s the solution to the property tax debate:
Economists and key conservative thinkers support it
Okay, but am I just talking my own book here, coming up with a tax shift that will just personally benefit me, a middle class Texas homeowner and father of three?
No, because the beauty of universal building exemption is that the biggest losers are the ones holding the most valuable downtown urban land out of use, and the chief beneficiaries are everybody else.
Who are the losers? The big losers are surface parking lots and vacant land, particularly those situated downtown next to skyscrapers. This shifts the tax burden off of locations people actually live in, to massively valuable locations where nobody lives.
This isn’t just a handout to homeowners, developers, and landlords, either—it’s a carrot and a stick. The carrot of building exemption rewards everybody who actually contributes more of what contributes to growth in our society—namely, homes, neighborhoods, and jobs—a category which includes the best kinds of property managers and builders. The stick of a higher effective tax rate on land pokes everyone in the butt who is sitting on the most valuable locations—which includes the worst kinds of slumlords and land-banking “developers”— to either build something already, or sell it to someone who will.
Doing so would undermine economic growth and housing affordability gains certain red states have recently seen. Worse, we’ve already run this experiment and know where it leads: a California-style de-growth death spiral that slams the door in the faces of young working families.
I begin by explaining why property tax elimination is a bad idea:
1. States will never actually do itThen, I conclude by showing how to pragmatically reform property taxes in a way that delivers both meaningful tax relief and the sustainable pro-growth, pro-family, results craved by red and blue states alike.
2. The alternatives are worse
3. Blue state experiences serve as a warning
1. States will never actually do it
The first reason eliminating property taxes is bad is that local politicians don’t have the guts to actually pull the trigger. As soon as it’s time for implementation, intra-party fighting overwhelms the legislative process, causing lawmakers to throw up their hands, slap on a band-aid, declare victory, and go home.
Why you can’t eliminate property taxes
In my home state of Texas, Republicans have tried and failed twice in back-to-back legislative sessions to eliminate property taxes. This is despite the fact that Texas has been under complete Republican domination for over twenty years.
First, it’s just too expensive. In 2024, the legislative budget board found that replacing property taxes would cost $81.5 billion dollars, more than the annual state budget of $72 billion. Read here:
“This is not something that you can find $81 billion on a per-year basis and not have a major impact on the remaining sales tax rates, because that is a huge amount of money to be able to replicate,” said state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican and [Lt. Governor Dan] Patrick’s chief lieutenant on property taxes.Second, replacing all property taxes with sales taxes would require raising the sales tax rate to over 19%, according to the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association. Just in case state leaders don’t think prices on everyday goods have risen high enough yet, they should note that inflation is the number one most important issue1 among Republicans. [...]
Property taxes are less hated than you think
At least according to recent polling, the #1 most hated tax is not the property tax, but the Federal Income tax: [...]
Note the change in the last two decades: a net 20 percentage point swing in most-hated status between property tax and federal income tax. The large drop in housing affordability over that time period has surely contributed towards that change in sentiment...
Also, if property taxes are so desperately hated, why do states keep voting to keep them in place?
Every single state has some form of state or local property tax. Meanwhile, over a quarter of states opt out of at least one of sales, corporate, or income taxes.
In short, while it is often claimed that property taxes are the least popular tax by stated preferences, if we look at revealed preferences, they could actually be the most popular local tax. Perhaps this is why every time a red state tries to abolish property taxes, strident opposition crops up from unexpected places: [video]
But maybe you don’t care. In that case, pick an alternative.
2. The Alternatives are worse
An OECD report ranks different taxes by which are the most harmful to growth:
1. Corporate taxes (worst)Overly high corporate taxes cause investment to flow to other states instead, and sufficiently high income taxes are a commonly cited driver of outmigration from blue states to red states. Modest sales taxes are the least distortionary of the three, but they’re still worse for growth overall than a well run property tax.
2. Personal income taxes
3. Consumption/sales taxes
4. Property taxes (best)
In conservative states like Texas, raising income and corporate taxes is already dead in the water (if not explicitly banned in the state constitution), which just leaves sales taxes. Since people say they hate property taxes more, shouldn’t we just bite the bullet and go all in on sales taxes?
The problem with this line of thinking is that the polling is based on sales taxes at current rates. The highest sales taxes in the nation cap out at 10%—rates as high as 19% are completely unprecedented. Even worse, the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association found that at those levels you start triggering tax avoidance, so you will inevitably have to raise the rate even higher to compensate, pushing it well past 20%.
We don’t even need to argue about whether this is popular or not because this exact proposal has been proposed twice already in Texas and it’s failed twice. Texans do not want to replace all property taxes with 20% state-imposed inflation on goods and services.
Ironically, reducing property taxes might actually be hardest in red states like Texas, precisely because the state is so anti-tax that there just aren’t many alternatives left. It’s no surprise then that the most famous instances of states that have “succeeded” in undermining property taxes are blue states.
The results have not been good.
3. Blue state experiences serve as a warning
Don’t California my Texas
One anti-property tax measure is not to lower tax rates so much as to completely undermine the entire system of property valuation itself, and there is no example more infamous than California’s Proposition 13. This 70’s-era reform fell far short of abolishing the property tax, settling for simply unleashing one of the most wildly unequal and unfair taxation schemes in the nation instead.
Prop 13 works like this:
- Assessed values are frozen at their 1976 valuations
- The tax rate is limited to 1%
- Increases in assessed values are limited to 2% a year
- New reassessments are allowed only for new construction or when property changes hands
The results have been an absolute disaster for both housing affordability and any semblance of basic fairness. Side-by-side houses have wildly unequal property assessments (source):
Again, complete property tax elimination never actually arrives. What arrives instead is special treatment for one class at the expense of everyone else in the state. But that’s not all; on top of the much higher property tax burdens young working families face for the audacious crime of moving in last year, the state has extra treats in store (source):
The state’s top marginal individual income tax rate of 13.3 percent is compounded by a 1.1 percent newly uncapped payroll tax, bringing the all-in top rate to 14.4 percent. Additionally, nonresidents must file income taxes if they work even a single day in the state, and California is one of only four states to still impose an alternative minimum tax.Don’t forget that California also has among the highest corporate taxes in the nation as well, just in case you were thinking of starting a business, or investing in one.
Honestly, the fact that it’s taken this long for California to start to bleed population really shows you what an incredible natural advantage California has long held over every other location in the United States. Even though the game has always been California’s to lose, if you spend multiple decades repeatedly punching yourself in the face, the crown eventually slips from your head.
NOTE: as much fun as it is to get high huffing California schadenfreude, Republicans would do well to remember that Prop 13 was pushed for in large part by members of their own party.
Unfortunately, California isn’t the only blue state with gorgeous weather and Edenic geography that’s been steadily sending its children into exile.
Aloha ‘Oe
The state with the lowest property taxes in the nation, at an effective tax rate of 0.27%, is Hawaii. Incidentally, Hawaii has the second highest top income tax rate at 11%. It also has the third highest net domestic outmigration rate of all US states between 2020-2024.
Even worse, the overall population “natural change” (births minus deaths) is steadily shrinking:
What’s not shrinking is the size of billionaire landholdings. Just 37 billionaires own more than 218,000 acres of Hawaii, roughly 5.3% of all land in the state, a figure equal to 11.1% of all privately held land.
Just one of those billionaires owns more than 1.27% of the entire state—Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, who owns 98% of the entire island of Lānaʻi.
Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan have seen their landholdings in Kaua’i more than triple, from 700+ acres in 2014 to over 2,300 acres today over the last ten years. Oprah Winfrey now owns over 1,000 acres on Maui after a recent purchase, the same island on which Jeff Bezos owns 14 acres. But what Jeff lacks in quantity, he makes up for in quality: he paid $78M for his land in La Perouse Bay, a full $13M more than Zuck paid for his 1,000-acre Kawai’i purchase in 2025.
As a quick aside, this underscores another problem with rock-bottom property taxes: it turns real estate into the perfect speculative financial asset in which to park money. When so little cost to hold it, real estate becomes an attractive passive investment, and over time tends to take up an ever-increasing share of bank loans, as expertly illustrated in the paper The Great Mortgaging, by Jordà, Schularick, and Taylor. This has a double-whammy effect on the economy: real estate sucks up all the loans, bidding up its price, while leaving all other sectors (like actually providing productive jobs) with less investment...
Making real estate the perfect speculative asset for the ultra-rich is never a good idea, but Hawaii faces other problems too: the top reasons cited for leaving the state include high cost of living, limited economic opportunities, housing challenges, quality of life concerns, and education. That last one is exacerbated by chronically underfunded public schools.
Hawaii’s high income taxes and low property taxes have done little to curb the island state’s steady transformation into a paradise for the rich, but a port of exile for the young working families its future depends on.
Five thousand miles away, on the cold and distant far shore of the mainland, another blue state grapples with a similar challenge. [ed. hint: New York]:
In any case, whether it’s Texas, Florida, Hawaii, California, New York, or any of the other forty-five of these great United States, there’s a solution out there that meets everybody’s needs.
It delivers meaningful property tax relief to the median homeowner, without excluding renters and businesses or pitting seniors against young working families, all while driving overall economic efficiency and setting the state up for a pro-growth flywheel that keeps the budget balanced and taxes competitive.
That policy is Universal Building Exemption.
3. Universal Building Exemption is better
There is a problem with property taxes: it’s a good tax combined with a bad tax. The bad part of the tax is the portion of the tax that falls on buildings and improvements. We’re in a housing crisis, so why are we taxing houses? We’re in an age of rising unemployment, so why are we taxing workplaces? We want more construction, not less.
A universal building exemption fixes this by shifting the tax off of buildings and onto the unimproved value of land. Crucially, it’s revenue-neutral: it raises the same amount of property tax dollars as before, so it doesn’t break the budget.
Here’s why it’s the solution to the property tax debate:
Economists and key conservative thinkers support it
1. It balances the budget
2. It’s pro-growth and pro-natal
3. It’s better than the homestead exemption
4. It’s politically viable
[specific details...]
No, because the beauty of universal building exemption is that the biggest losers are the ones holding the most valuable downtown urban land out of use, and the chief beneficiaries are everybody else.
Who are the losers? The big losers are surface parking lots and vacant land, particularly those situated downtown next to skyscrapers. This shifts the tax burden off of locations people actually live in, to massively valuable locations where nobody lives.
This isn’t just a handout to homeowners, developers, and landlords, either—it’s a carrot and a stick. The carrot of building exemption rewards everybody who actually contributes more of what contributes to growth in our society—namely, homes, neighborhoods, and jobs—a category which includes the best kinds of property managers and builders. The stick of a higher effective tax rate on land pokes everyone in the butt who is sitting on the most valuable locations—which includes the worst kinds of slumlords and land-banking “developers”— to either build something already, or sell it to someone who will.
Lars Doucet, Progress and Poverty | Read more:
Images: uncredited/Gallup/James Medlock
[ed. Agree 100%. There should be some kind of penalty for developers holding dead land and letting it appreciate through scarcity and the sacrifice of their more productive neighbors. Also, the California Prop 13 issue is insane. Didn't know that's how it all played out. For a new way of taxing property (and easing the tax burden on productive businesses), see this video (and transcript) of LVT (land value taxes) that encourage more building and less vacant land speculation here.]
Saturday, January 17, 2026
The Great Replacement
“What if you knew her and/ Found her dead on the ground/ How can you run when you know” — Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
I am neither a forensic expert nor a jury member, but it sure looks to me like an ICE agent shot and killed a woman who wasn’t threatening his life. We have video of the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis on January 7th, and the Washington Post has a detailed blow-by-blow analysis of the video: [...]
The Vice President’s claim that the shots were fired from the front of the car is pretty clearly false. He also repeatedly talked about ICE agents “going door to door” to deport illegal immigrants — pretty clearly ignoring the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures”.
Vance’s reception on social media — even from the kind of “tech right” types that are usually his fans — was largely negative.
Two days is probably far too early for the killing of Good to have shifted national opinion radically. The negative drift in views toward ICE is probably due to their consistent record of brutality, aggression, dubious legality, and unprofessionalism in Trump’s second term.
Here’s a video of ICE agents in Arkansas beating up an unarmed U.S. citizen. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting two U.S. citizens in a Target. Here’s a story about a similar arrest. Here’s a video of an ICE agent brandishing a gun in the face of a protester. Here’s the story of ICE agents arresting a pastor who complained about an arrest he saw. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting an American citizen and punching him repeatedly. Here’s a video of ICE agents threatening a bystander who complained about their reckless driving. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting a man for yelling at them from his own front porch. Here’s a video of ICE agents making a particularly brutal arrest while pointing their weapons at unarmed civilians nearby. Here’s a story about another ICE killing, this one in Maryland, under dubious circumstances. Here’s a video of ICE agents savagely beating and arresting a legal immigrant. Here’s a video of ICE agents storming a private home without a warrant. Here’s a video of ICE agents pulling a disabled woman out of a car when she’s just trying to get to the doctor.
These are all things I noticed on X within just the last two days. There has been a pretty constant stream of these for months. Here’s a roundup of some others, by Jeremiah Johnson:
The Wall Street Journal also reviewed some other videos and other records of ICE shootings, and found a similar pattern to the Renee Good killing:
Perhaps this is unsurprising, given the ultra-low standards for recruitment and training of ICE agents under Trump:
A number of Republican politicians have defended ICE’s actions with rhetoric that sounds downright authoritarian. Texas Representative Wesley Hunt said: “The bottom line is this: when a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life.” Florida Representative Randy Fine said: “If you get in the way of the government repelling a foreign invasion, you’re going to end up just like that lady did.”
Is this America now? A country where unaccountable and poorly trained government agents go door to door, arresting and beating people on pure suspicion, and shooting people who don’t obey their every order or who try to get away? “When a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life” is a perfect description of an authoritarian police state. None of this is Constitutional, every bit of it is deeply antithetical to the American values we grew up taking for granted.
This tweet really seems to sum it up:
Why is this happening? Part of it is because of the mistakes of the Biden administration. For the first three years of his presidency, Biden allowed a massive, disorderly flood of border-hopping asylum seekers and quasi-legal migrants of all types to pour into the country, and as a result, Americans got really, really mad. That made immigration into a major issue in the 2024 election, helped Trump get elected, and provided political cover for a dramatic expansion of deportations. Now, probably thanks to ICE’s brutality and the administration’s lawlessness, support for immigrants and disapproval of Trump’s immigration policies are rising again. But the administration still has what it considers a mandate to act with impunity.
The deeper reason, though, is the ideology of the MAGA movement. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that most Trump supporters view immigration as a literal invasion of the United States — not a figurative “invasion”, but a literal attempted conquest of America by foreigners.
And a substantial percentage of these folks believe that the purpose of this “invasion” is to “replace” the existing American population. This is from a PRRI poll from late 2024:
100 million is far more than the total number of immigrants in the United States (which is estimated at around 52 million). Instead, it’s close to the total number of nonwhite people in the country. So the idea of “100 million deportations” clearly goes well beyond the idea of deporting illegal immigrants, and well beyond the idea of deporting all immigrants, into the territory of ethnic cleansing.
The DHS is posting these memes as a recruitment tactic, and polls about the “Great Replacement” show that there’s a large pool of potential recruits to whom this rhetoric is likely to appeal. In other words, many of the ICE agents now going around kicking in doors, beating up and threatening protesters, arresting citizens on pure suspicion, and occasionally shooting people believe that they are engaged in a race war. [...]
To be fair, the Great Replacement ideology didn’t arise out of nowhere. It’s an irrational and panicky overreaction that will lead America down the road to disaster — it’s full of hate and lies, it’s inherently divisive, it’s associated with some of history’s most horrible regimes, and it’s being promoted by some very bad actors. But it has also been egged on by a progressive movement that has made anti-white discrimination in hiring a pillar of its approach to racial equity, and has normalized anti-white rhetoric in the public sphere. This was an unforced error by the left — one of many over the past decade.
But whoever started America’s stupid race war, the real question is who will stand up and end it. The GOP, and the MAGA movement specifically, was offered a golden off-ramp from this dark path. In 2020 and 2024, Hispanic Americans, along with some Asian and Black Americans, shifted strongly toward Trump and the GOP. This was a perfect opportunity for the GOP to make itself, in the words of Marco Rubio, a “multiracial working-class” party. This would have been similar to how Nixon and Reagan expanded the GOP coalition to include “white ethnics” that the GOP had spurned in the early 20th century. But instead, MAGA took the victory handed to them by nonwhite voters and used it to act like exactly the kind of white-nationalist race warriors that liberals had always insisted they were. [...]
But Trump is an old man, and the younger generation was raised not on mid-20th-century nationalist rhetoric but on right-wing social media and memes. When Trump is gone, the MAGA movement will cease to be defined by his personal charisma, and will start being defined by the ideology of the Great Replacement — the same ideology that is now motivating many of the ICE agents acting like thugs in the streets of America.
And it’s increasingly clear that JD Vance, understanding that he lacks Trump’s cult of personality, has decided to make himself the leader, voice, and avatar of the “Great Replacement” movement — even if this arouses the disgust of many traditional conservatives and some figures in the tech right. With the disarray of the Democrats and the weakness of other GOP factions, Vance’s move may be a smart political bet, even if it comes at the expense of American freedom and stability.
[ed. Oh for simpler times when a political break-in was considered the height of lawless government. Never thought I'd say this, but these days, and with this government, I'd vote for Nixon in a heartbeat:]
I am neither a forensic expert nor a jury member, but it sure looks to me like an ICE agent shot and killed a woman who wasn’t threatening his life. We have video of the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis on January 7th, and the Washington Post has a detailed blow-by-blow analysis of the video: [...]
The Vice President’s claim that the shots were fired from the front of the car is pretty clearly false. He also repeatedly talked about ICE agents “going door to door” to deport illegal immigrants — pretty clearly ignoring the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures”.
Two days is probably far too early for the killing of Good to have shifted national opinion radically. The negative drift in views toward ICE is probably due to their consistent record of brutality, aggression, dubious legality, and unprofessionalism in Trump’s second term.
Here’s a video of ICE agents in Arkansas beating up an unarmed U.S. citizen. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting two U.S. citizens in a Target. Here’s a story about a similar arrest. Here’s a video of an ICE agent brandishing a gun in the face of a protester. Here’s the story of ICE agents arresting a pastor who complained about an arrest he saw. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting an American citizen and punching him repeatedly. Here’s a video of ICE agents threatening a bystander who complained about their reckless driving. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting a man for yelling at them from his own front porch. Here’s a video of ICE agents making a particularly brutal arrest while pointing their weapons at unarmed civilians nearby. Here’s a story about another ICE killing, this one in Maryland, under dubious circumstances. Here’s a video of ICE agents savagely beating and arresting a legal immigrant. Here’s a video of ICE agents storming a private home without a warrant. Here’s a video of ICE agents pulling a disabled woman out of a car when she’s just trying to get to the doctor.
These are all things I noticed on X within just the last two days. There has been a pretty constant stream of these for months. Here’s a roundup of some others, by Jeremiah Johnson:
For the past year, ICE has been involved in a series of escalating incidents that rarely result in repercussions for anyone involved. ICE agents have recklessly caused traffic accidents and then, in one incident, arrested the person whose car they hit. They’ve tear-gassed a veteran, arrested him, and denied him access to medical care and an attorney. They have attacked protesters merely for filming them in public. They’ve pepper-sprayed a fleeing onlooker in the eyes from a foot away. They’ve pointed guns at a 6-year-old. They’ve knelt on top of a pregnant woman while they arrested her. They have arrested another pregnant woman, then kept her separated from her newborn while she languished in custody. They have repeatedly arrested American citizens, and they’ve even reportedly deported a citizen, directly contradicting court orders.These are anecdotes, but there have also been careful, systematic reports about ICE arrests and mistreatment of U.S. citizens and poor conditions in ICE detention centers.
The Wall Street Journal also reviewed some other videos and other records of ICE shootings, and found a similar pattern to the Renee Good killing:
The Wall Street Journal has identified 13 instances of agents firing at or into civilian vehicles since July, leaving at least eight people shot with two confirmed dead…The Journal reviewed public records—court documents, agency press releases and gun-violence databases—of vehicle shootings involving immigration agents, though video is only publicly available for four of them…The Minneapolis shooting shares characteristics with others the Journal reviewed: Agents box in a vehicle, try to remove an individual, block attempts to flee, then fire.Instead of causing ICE agents to pause in consternation, the killing of Renee Good appears to have made many even more aggressive. Here’s a video of an ICE agent in Minnesota telling a protester “Have y’all not learned from the past coupla days?”. Here’s a video of an ICE agent kicking over candles at a memorial for Renee Good.
Perhaps this is unsurprising, given the ultra-low standards for recruitment and training of ICE agents under Trump:
A deadly shooting in Minneapolis at the hands of a federal immigration officer comes weeks after a bombshell report on President Donald Trump’s desperate drive to rush 10,000 deportation officers onto the payroll by the end of 2025.Jeremiah Johnson has more:
The explosive Daily Mail report found that the administration's $50,000 signing bonus attracted droves of unqualified recruits — high school grads who can "barely read or write," overweight candidates with doctor's notes saying they're unfit, and even applicants with pending criminal charges…[O]ne Department of Homeland Security official [said]: "We have people failing open-book tests and we have folks that can barely read or write English."
Reporting shows that ICE is filled with substandard agents. Its aggressive push to hire more agents uses charged rhetoric that appeals to far-right groups, but the agency has run into problems with recruits unable to pass background checks or meet minimum standards for academic background, personal fitness, or drug usage. One career ICE agent called new recruits “pathetic,” according to The Atlantic, and a current Department of Homeland Security official told NBC News that “There is absolutely concern that some people are slipping through the cracks,” and being inadvertently hired.It’s worth noting, though, that Jonathan Ross himself is well-trained, with plenty of experience in law enforcement and military combat operations. So it’s not always a matter of poor training.
A number of Republican politicians have defended ICE’s actions with rhetoric that sounds downright authoritarian. Texas Representative Wesley Hunt said: “The bottom line is this: when a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life.” Florida Representative Randy Fine said: “If you get in the way of the government repelling a foreign invasion, you’re going to end up just like that lady did.”
Is this America now? A country where unaccountable and poorly trained government agents go door to door, arresting and beating people on pure suspicion, and shooting people who don’t obey their every order or who try to get away? “When a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life” is a perfect description of an authoritarian police state. None of this is Constitutional, every bit of it is deeply antithetical to the American values we grew up taking for granted.
This tweet really seems to sum it up:
Why is this happening? Part of it is because of the mistakes of the Biden administration. For the first three years of his presidency, Biden allowed a massive, disorderly flood of border-hopping asylum seekers and quasi-legal migrants of all types to pour into the country, and as a result, Americans got really, really mad. That made immigration into a major issue in the 2024 election, helped Trump get elected, and provided political cover for a dramatic expansion of deportations. Now, probably thanks to ICE’s brutality and the administration’s lawlessness, support for immigrants and disapproval of Trump’s immigration policies are rising again. But the administration still has what it considers a mandate to act with impunity.
The deeper reason, though, is the ideology of the MAGA movement. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that most Trump supporters view immigration as a literal invasion of the United States — not a figurative “invasion”, but a literal attempted conquest of America by foreigners.
And a substantial percentage of these folks believe that the purpose of this “invasion” is to “replace” the existing American population. This is from a PRRI poll from late 2024:
One-third of Americans (33%) agree with the “Great Replacement Theory,” or the idea that immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background. The majority of Americans (62%) disagree with this theory. Agreement with this theory has decreased by 3 percentage points from 36% in 2019…Six in ten Republicans (60%) agree with the “Great Replacement Theory,” compared with 30% of independents and 14% of Democrats. Among Republicans, those who hold a favorable view of Trump are more likely than those who hold an unfavorable view to agree that immigrants are invading our country (68% vs. 32%).Perhaps some think that this “Great Replacement” is only cultural or partisan/political — the DHS recruits agents with a call to “Defend your culture!” — but many clearly think it’s racial in nature. The DHS recently posted this image:
100 million is far more than the total number of immigrants in the United States (which is estimated at around 52 million). Instead, it’s close to the total number of nonwhite people in the country. So the idea of “100 million deportations” clearly goes well beyond the idea of deporting illegal immigrants, and well beyond the idea of deporting all immigrants, into the territory of ethnic cleansing.
The DHS is posting these memes as a recruitment tactic, and polls about the “Great Replacement” show that there’s a large pool of potential recruits to whom this rhetoric is likely to appeal. In other words, many of the ICE agents now going around kicking in doors, beating up and threatening protesters, arresting citizens on pure suspicion, and occasionally shooting people believe that they are engaged in a race war. [...]
To be fair, the Great Replacement ideology didn’t arise out of nowhere. It’s an irrational and panicky overreaction that will lead America down the road to disaster — it’s full of hate and lies, it’s inherently divisive, it’s associated with some of history’s most horrible regimes, and it’s being promoted by some very bad actors. But it has also been egged on by a progressive movement that has made anti-white discrimination in hiring a pillar of its approach to racial equity, and has normalized anti-white rhetoric in the public sphere. This was an unforced error by the left — one of many over the past decade.
But whoever started America’s stupid race war, the real question is who will stand up and end it. The GOP, and the MAGA movement specifically, was offered a golden off-ramp from this dark path. In 2020 and 2024, Hispanic Americans, along with some Asian and Black Americans, shifted strongly toward Trump and the GOP. This was a perfect opportunity for the GOP to make itself, in the words of Marco Rubio, a “multiracial working-class” party. This would have been similar to how Nixon and Reagan expanded the GOP coalition to include “white ethnics” that the GOP had spurned in the early 20th century. But instead, MAGA took the victory handed to them by nonwhite voters and used it to act like exactly the kind of white-nationalist race warriors that liberals had always insisted they were. [...]
But Trump is an old man, and the younger generation was raised not on mid-20th-century nationalist rhetoric but on right-wing social media and memes. When Trump is gone, the MAGA movement will cease to be defined by his personal charisma, and will start being defined by the ideology of the Great Replacement — the same ideology that is now motivating many of the ICE agents acting like thugs in the streets of America.
And it’s increasingly clear that JD Vance, understanding that he lacks Trump’s cult of personality, has decided to make himself the leader, voice, and avatar of the “Great Replacement” movement — even if this arouses the disgust of many traditional conservatives and some figures in the tech right. With the disarray of the Democrats and the weakness of other GOP factions, Vance’s move may be a smart political bet, even if it comes at the expense of American freedom and stability.
by Noah Smith, Noahpinion | Read more:
Images: X/DHS
***
He covertly aided Pakistan during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971 and ended American combat involvement in Vietnam in 1973, and the military draft the same year. His visit to China in 1972 led to diplomatic relations between the two nations, and he finalized the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union. During the course of his first term, he enacted many progressive environmental policy shifts, such as creating the Environmental Protection Agency and passing laws, including the Endangered Species and Clean Air Acts. In addition to implementing the Twenty-sixth Amendment that lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, he ended the direct international convertibility of the U.S. dollar to gold in 1971, effectively taking the United States off the gold standard. He also imposed wage and price controls for 90 days, launched the Wars on Cancer and Drugs, passed the Controlled Substances Act, and presided over the end of the Space Race by overseeing the Apollo 11 Moon landing. ~ Wikipedia
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