Comment by epistasis
3 days ago
> no laws or enforcement actions that make their opinions actually effective in the world?
How do you come to that conclusion? The people who show up to local planning meetings are clearly very effective at enacting their opinions in the world, and local planning is the place where a tiny number, perhaps 3-5 people, can drastically change the results for an entire area.
The line I quoted from you concerned people who don't consider that renters should be involved in local decision making. I'm asking you what difference it makes what they consider, when they are not actually able to enact any barriers to participating in local decision making? I mean, sure, they make think that renters should stay out of the planning meetings, but if they do not stop them, what difference does it make what they think? Renters vote too ....
If I understand you correctly, you're saying that because renters can vote, they have equal impact on planning decisions, and therefore a bloc of voters that do not consider renters' needs as being valid for the city is OK. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I have two objections to that.
1) Local planning decisions are not made on the basis of democratic votes, they are political decisions made by a tiny number of people that are highly susceptible to influence. In particular, money and local political power has a huge effect on who gets elected, who is paying attention to what happens, and who benefits. There's very little attention paid to these matters except those with highly conflicted interests, which means that highly conflicted decisions are the most common outcome. Which leads to suboptimal results over longer periods of time, as happens in any system that appears to be democratic but is actually corrupt.
2) Even in democracy, one bloc deciding that another bloc's interests can be ignored and don't matter to the functioning of government is an extremely toxic environment which results in awful outcomes. I view any system where there are second-class citizens as a fundamentally un-American idea and counter to the goals of our nation. Those who wish to exclude an entire economic class from their community are trying to create precisely that sort of second-class citizen.
I agree that political decisions are arrived at by imperfect, corruptible processes, and that these tend to favor those with capital interests (e.g. home ownership) in certain outcomes.
However, I do not think there is any reason to require that all voters respect the interest of all other voters, and any system that is predicated on such respect is doomed to fail in worse ways than the one we have.
Democracy is hard work. Good things don't happen by just casting votes. There are almost always other interests at work that are likely to conflict with your own. You can't wish this away, you have to do the work.
The one thing I will say that I think is actually blatantly corrupt is when planning meetings are held at times or in locations that make it challenging or impossible for the people most likely to be renting to attend. And this really does happen, far too much. In spite of this, I think that focusing on the attitude of the voters who oppose the interests of renters is a mistake, and that one should focus on how to fix the process.