1,229 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2026
    1. monopolies focus benefits towards governing coalition elites andcore coalition members, away from the broader community.

      private goods for the winning colation, or maybe just selective based on spacial limitations

    2. Nonetheless, the relative distinc-tion between monopolized and nonmonopolized cities remains a centraltheoretical contribution of this work.

      can still learn something by comparing the extremes

    3. hallengingthoseinpowerdifficultifnotimpossible

      Even exogonesley (see daley). Basically, if the status quo was fucking you over the status quo was also repressing your ability to complain

    4. MexicanAmerican,lackedpavedroads,streetlights,sewerage systems, andrepresentationonthe"citycouncil. SanJose’sLatinosenduredpolicebrutalityanddiscrimina.torytreatmentinthejusticesystem,theschool system,andincityhirin

      The losers...

    5. were arrested and incarcer-ated at disproportionate rates, discriminated against in city hiring, andprovided with lower quality city services.

      In part going to be due to the systematic racism going on but also any system with a winner needs a loser too

    6. y abolishing districts and choos-ing at-large elections, reform charters ensured that minority preferences,even those of substantial size, remained unrepresented in the city legis-lature

      Saw this in the other readers, technically fighting machine politics but stisll discriminatory

    7. Daley’s machine relied on creative district linedrawing to ensure that neighborhoods with black and Latino majoritieswere dominated by white, machine-loyal representatives

      Sort of a reformist startagey

    8. In Austin only 37 percent of adults over the age of twenty ue had theright to vote in 1933 because of suffrage restrictions ae the Polltax and literacy test

      how do you gaurentee they are your voter though? jiust whit?

    9. excessive corruption served to undermine a machine’s pow-er if it became too offensive to voters or attracted the attention of higherlevels of government.

      Might also just try to hide it

    10. knewthattheyneededthemachineon theirsidetopassinspec-tions,secureutilityextensions,ignoreclosing laws,sellliquorduringtheprohibition,runlotteries,

      Really was corruption run wild

    11. m‘tionoftheDemocre™”>achinefaction izationwouldtranslatetoalognto voters th any other orga ;ab electing an) _ As a result election outcomes be.of benefits including patronage jobs

      Contingency plan

    12. The lack of party cues to assist voters in the fo,mation of preferences resulted in systems biased in favor of candidatewith independent wealth or fame and incumbents

      both reformers and. machines are trying to confuse voter

    13. In converting electionsto nonpartisan contests, reformers sought to minimize divisions in theelectorate and among elites.

      trying to chnage the rules rather than explot them

    14. city agencies to destroy evidence, provide extended leaves to potentialwitnesses, and otherwise prevent people from cooperating with prosecu-tors

      killing the information cycle

    1. Put simply, the decentralized neighbor-hood control of district elections may trade spatially concen-trated inequalities (new housing units) for a spatially diffuseburden (citywide housing costs)

      But now you aren't paying for a benefit

    2. We find that moving to district elections signifi-cantly decreases the disparity in permitting between whiteand minority neighborhoods.

      The housing is more evenly distributed, one of my main takeaways from this paper is just how unpopular LULUs are. And that affordable housing is a LULU

    3. The positive in-teraction term in both models suggests that the effect of districtelections is smaller and less predictable in cities with larger andless overrepresented majority populations.

      In other words, the backlash in cities with worse representation is considerably stronger

    4. selection into districtelections on the basis of past permitting behavior and pre-emptive changes to housing outcomes in anticipation of elec-toral reform.

      ensures some level of randomness

    5. we interact the treatment in-dicator with an indicator for being in the top or bottom tercileon segregation

      does the effect of district change if you are more or less segregated

    6. that would ultimately switch to districts, that havemore than 50,000 residents, and where there is at least oneunderrepresented minority that comprises more than 20% ofthe population

      Basically the group that is worth studying

    7. Race will become less predictive of a neighbor-hood’s housing burden under district elections com-pared to at-large, all else equal.

      The question is will you be able to see this given that the whole supply will fall

    8. District elections will decrease the permitting ofmultifamily housing in cities where the council ma-jority is significantly overrepresentative of that racialgroup’s population share

      basically theory behind 2+3

    9. District elections will decrease the permitting ofmultifamily housing in cities with low majoritypopulations.

      Similar to hypo 2, just when the balance of power will swing drastically

    10. Next, existing research has found the effect of districtelections on descriptive representation to be greatest in citieswith large shares of minority residents, where majority-minoritydistricts can be more easily drawn

      not just not integrated, but a large population is segregated

    11. District elections will decrease the permitting ofmultifamily housing in residentially segregated cities.

      Because where dumping grounds ounce were will no longer be permitted by the new voting bloc

    12. First, district elections are more likely to improve descrip-tive representation when minorities are segregated enough toform majority-minority districts

      Sure, when the districts are not integrated

    13. Counterintuitively, renters may op-pose new market-rate housing not only because it harms theirquality of life but also because they believe it will attract demandto their neighborhoods, causing rents in their neighborhoods toincrease

      When it would actually cause the rent to go down

    14. finds that a nationwide sample of cities that switchedto district elections between 1980 and 2018 experienced adecline in housing units permitted annually

      Nobody wants the housing

    15. but pricesout those seeking to move to cities with high upward incomemobility, exacerbating long-run income inequality

      The cost of minority representation, voting agaisnt their interests?

    16. endsthe disproportionate channeling of new housing into mi-nority neighborhoods, causing cities to more equally dis-tribute new housing between their majority and minorityconstituencies.

      But this isn't necessarily a good thing

    17. Or, they may be assignedto smaller, single-member districts, with each citizen voting foronly one candidate (district elections).

      This is where political decisions will become more homogenized because voting for one constiuent who will give that distict what they want

    18. Because LULUs are perceived to threatenthe property values, safety, or general quality of life of nearbyresidents, they historically have been channeled into the po-litically weakest areas

      because wealth and political power are equated

    Annotators

      • the american dream involves owning a home, maybe even centered around it
      • the local institutions that shape the american dream are not actually entirely fair
      • while the idea might be that good schools exist everywhere, the fact of the matter is that wealth dictates school to a large degree
      • the quality of schools and home prices are a virtuious/vicous cycle
      • the idea of democracy relies on these local citizens have a say in dicating thier politics, particulry local politics
      • strict inherentences laws make up an aristocracy because they create a clear and infalliable line of where the wealth goes
      • land as the fundermantal basis for democracy (level locke of him)
      • democracy is meant to diffuse liberty and opprotunity widely
      • we can be shaped by these flawed institutions
      • a just system of property would have feedom of opprotinity, people have a fair shot at accessing them
      • in democratic society each citizen is at least in part responsible for the way power is excerisised
      • America is in a capatalist welfare state where the inequality in property is supposedly balanced out by the welfare going downwards
      • even with high redistribution this system fails to provide an equal opprotunity from the get go
      • regards the least well off as objects of charity
      • ideally we would have institituions that are creating equality from the start, not just redistrubitng opprotunity once the gains are unequal
      • current, local instituitions, (maybe especially in cities) are perpeatuaters of the unequal from the start type of vibe
      • local lawas as the facilitators of inequality
      • economic stratification is always on the rise
      • the decentrilazation of government means that school providers (the local gov) are encouraged to attract wealth/tax base
      • self fufilling prohpecy because wealthy schools tend to have more educational advantage atbhome and therefore do better academically
      • even morally and politically egalitaruan homerwoners have a personal incentive to practice the politics of exlusion
      • local gov controls the ability to build and zone, and by extension the oeiple who moce inro the area
      • local governments do not sort based on political preferences (or at least not primarily) they sort on wealth, there is a barried for entry to have the means to mobolize
      • voting with your feet is not an effective way for poor people to hold govt acountable
      • the exit option (only acialiabe for sum) erodes he idea of mixed fate in metropolitan areas
      • zoning out the poor
      • the end of urbanism was also the reintroduction to segregation
      • this limits the ability to socially connect (social contact theory)
      • the ideal of the american dream rationalizes the instituitions that fialk rto deliver on euality
      • maybe the idea of true justice is just incompatible with American ideals
      • the current political system structures the choice of where people live
      • its just real bad, this reading is facsinating but I dont kno hoq ro take notes on it
      • find a way to reduce the concentrations of rich and poor across metro areas
      • ex: making sure that new hosuing requires the building of affordable units
      • maybe require a threshhold of students that are on subsidized lunch
      • suburban homeowners are hugely invested in seperate schoolong and other advantages that flow from segregation

    Annotators

    1. Central to the70democratic experience is contact with difference—other races, other nationalities, other economic classes,other language groups. And, too often, the end of urbanism has undermined that experience by promotingsocial homogeneity within municipalities, leading to the evolution of regional hierarchies in which“purified communities”

      Loss of diversity, breakdown of democracy

    2. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almostunconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforcedby the people themselves.

      Falling apart when the people necessary to this life leave

    3. Even when stategovernment permits a city to impose a particular tax on its residents or property owners, the extent of anyexaction must be carefully limited—lest those most able to pay depart, leaving behind only those least ableto do so. Or consider school integration. If a central city rigorously integrates its schools, and white

      Taxable people are moving to the suburbs

    4. Like any other corporation, cities can lobby in statecapitols for more favorable treatment, but they have no power of their own to set these basic policies, evenas they apply within municipal limits

      Yeah this was true last year working for smiley

    5. but by the will of the legislature asset forth in some statute. The city is not merely the creature of the legislative will, it may be and often isthe helpless victim of legislative caprice.

      Subject to a higher power

    6. A city is the only collective body in America that cannot do something simply because itdecides to do it. Instead, under American law, cities have power only if state governments authorize themto act.

      Less power than its competing institutions

    7. It will allow entrepreneurs to develop firms in endlessvariety and to quickly respond to emerging consumer needs. It will protect residents and visitors alikeagainst crime, disease, and risk of fire. Almost as important, it will protect city people against thedebilitating of crime, epidemic, and fire. It will generate and maintain an appropriate housing stock,fearand infrastructure to support it. It will provide for the education and civilizing of children, and it willprovide relevant indoctrination for newcomers. It will find ways to protect the weak and helpless, althoughit may very well resist making this service to humanity the special and unique role of one municipality inan entire region.

      Lot's of responsibility, and so many factors out of their control

    8. may providelimited illumination of the second question (about governance of what matters most to a city and itspeople).

      The vast institutions that cities create, and the dependence inate to them, means that city governance is inherently slow and hard to be proactive. At the whims of the world

    9. But Ford and hisproduction engineers determined more about New Haven and hundreds of other cities than did anyoneliving in those places at the time

      There was no choice, exogenous

    10. its rotten tenements, its failed sanitation, itsvulnerability to epidemic, its corrupt building inspectors, its clattering factories, its sulphurous chimneys,its manure-strewn avenues, the rudeness of its poor, and the avarice of kleptocratic party bosses.

      All the more happy to watch it fall I imagine

    11. Economic citizenship, expressed as the ownership and active management of enterprise,generally coincided with political citizenship, expressed as local residence and electoralparticipation

      Political interests were representative of the local population

    12. This was driven less by taste than by economic and technological forces thatcompelled those engaged in either industrial work and management, or in the operation of otherenterprises, to live fairly close to the job

      would change the most with cars and electricity

    13. Within a few years, the balance would shift perceptibly toward a44dispersion of residential population, work activities, and commerce—and toward what I will call the end ofurbanism

      Cars and electricity allow people to move away from centralized areas

    14. Their yearly numbers averaged more than 500,000 for the five decades, rising to nearly a35million (994,000) each year from 1904 through 191

      And the abundance of food and infastructure was there to welcome them

    15. The inevitable consequence of this was that industry was concentrated in compact anddensely populated industrial towns, or directly along the waterfront in sea ports.

      Had to be close to the goods

    16. Railway transportoverthrew, for the first time in history, the natural barriers which had hitherto prevented too great aconcentration of industry in any urban center. The great cities of the world up to that date indeed had beenstill built up primarily for political, military, or religious importance rather than their commercial orindustrial functions; from 1830 onwards the latter were to predominate.

      Now you could center a city around its economy

    17. mmigration allowing accelerated growth in thesupply of urban labor; and a delayed and uneven spreading out and implementation ofdistance-compressing technologies such as alternating current (AC) electricity

      more people and only one area with the capacity to house them

    18. In seeking ever fresh forms of production, ever larger markets, ever higher returns oninvestment, capitalism routinely destroys older ways of doing business, older technologies, olderplants—and in so doing profoundly transforms the communities that have formed around them

      Even when those old ways are better

    19. Even as the Depression set in, the city churned out enough demand that a smart kid could find his way intothe money stream on a weekend’s notice

      The height of urbanism

    Annotators

    1. Third, dam removalsare more likely when states are in better fiscal health, willing to innovate inrelated policy areas, and pressured by pro-change advocates

      Generally more liberal and environmental states

    2. While this diffusion has been particularly noticeable insome regions, several outlier states have also pursued significant river res-toration.

      And the regions are very non-contiguous

    3. Secretary of the Interior Babbittnoted that the Quaker Neck removal would stimulate creative thinking atdam sites across the country

      Its funny how uninteresting this is

    4. Such reversals can be so dramatic that theyproduce patterns of political behavior different from those surrounding themore typical adoption of new policy

      More hesitancy

    5. Second, the rate of adoption is more gradual for policy reversals thanfor new policies or less extensive modifications to existing ones.

      Makes sense, most radical change.

    6. using and controlling rivers by building dams to a focus onrestoring rivers' natural conditions by removing or breaching dams

      Especially salient in places where water access is critical, i.e. the west

    7. Diffusion of reversals involves more states outsideof active regions than is seen typically with policy adoption, and reversal diffusionoccurs more gradually than adoption diffusion with many policy innovations

      Because water is public good.

  2. Feb 2026
    1. conversely, that the acquisition of the otherdepartment’s lands would add to the institutional stature of his ownadministration.

      They had political and pragmatic importance which reflected "owners" importance.

    2. Emotion was evident on both sides, of course, but the Interior De-partment produced nothing like The Western Range to support Ickes’sdetermined belief that the forests should be transferred to a new Con-servation Department, which he would lead.

      I mean maybe just illustrates the salience of the issues still

    3. contentions that therange was a critical part of the entire agricultural program, for both theWest and the nation, and that good government required that thoselands be placed with the USDA

      But it read like a basic power grab?

    4. the creation of the grazing district or the is-suance of a permit pursuant to the provisions of this act shall not createany right, title, interest, or estate in or to the lands.

      But in practice

    5. Technically speaking, the permit gave a rancher merely a licenseto use the range, meaning that the rancher’s use of the range was a priv-ilege conferred by the government for a finite period.

      But really a pandoras box situation

    6. Clearly, denying a permit toa rancher would “impair the value of the grazing unit,” and it wouldtherefore be very difficult for the government to do so.

      And so the permits were more or less permanent

    7. that the governing bodies involved in ad-ministering the Taylor lands overlapped considerably with the alreadyorganized stockmen’s association

      And so the power of the federal government was actually quite little

    8. Those lands that could not beplaced in a district would be taken care of some other way— either soldoutright, exchanged with other lands, or leased to individual ranchers,and at least some of the heated politics would focus on what Carpenterand others called the “shot-gun” lands

      ends up enriching farmers like the homesteading act

    9. in setting up an administration that would reduce the un-certainty of their land tenure and bring back the productivity of therange.

      And his overseeing of the pasture creation is going to put more power in the hands of the farmers

    10. This reluctance was the stance that he would take before western live-stock producers, emerging from a genuine belief in “self-governance”and in the ability of ranchers to adjudicate their own local ranges.

      Federal imposition on individuals

    11. Finally, Ickes’s grand language about national duty had roots, ofcourse, in early twentieth-century conservation.

      Sort of emblematic of this fight between the jeffersonian farmer and big government, who does the land belong to?

    12. by which I mean that he sawthat conserving these lands reflected the moral strengths of the nationand the sovereignty of the federal government

      One of which the inhabitants were likely to agree with

    13. The struggles over ForestService grazing fees thus bore legislative fruit for western ranchers, whohad consistently argued that access to public grazing lands formed an in-tegral part of the valuation of their property. The Taylor Grazing Act es-sentially solidified that connection in policy

      Pseudo extension of the property

    14. I am not appearing here in behalf of big cattlemen, big sheep men, or anything of the kind. I am trying to protect thelocal man who pays taxes

      Because really the large farms were the ones who were doing considerable damage

    15. when federal land managers spoke innational terms about the need for unified administrative authority overthe public lands

      As part of a more generalized need for unified government

    Annotators

    1. Many Americans value open space and public lands precisely because they areamong the reasons their families settled where they have and why they stay there

      particularly in the west, they are fundemental

    2. whereasother environmental ballot measures that fared less well, such as legalizing betting on horseracing or creating public commissions, did not impose direct costs on citizens.

      Citizens prioritize public lands even at a personal cost

    3. This point is consistent with the argument scholars made recently regarding civilrights policy wherein they show that content of the specific policy in question is morecrucial to understanding elite behavior than broad characterizations and blanket assertion

      Sort of a boring point

    4. They are also more likely to pass if they involve bonds ratherthan taxes. They are less likely to pass if they are initiatives rather than referendums andif they occur in states with high percentages of public lands.

      Some of this is just tricking voters

    5. Colorado Springs concludedthat local parks raised property values for nearby residents over $500 million and generatedtax revenues over $2.5 million per year

      The west is the king of public land and tourism on that land

    6. citizens in conservativeRocky Mountain states supporting permanent protection for wilderness, parks, and openspaces

      culturally important to these places as well, tied up in how they settled and recreation

    7. protection of natural places draws much higher levels of support from across theideological spectrum than just about any other environmental issue

      Because constituents across the aisle both benefit from it

    8. hunters, conservationists, and outdoor recreation enthusiaststo form coalitions to stop, or at least delay, the proposals

      Coming from multiple party angles, lots of electoral incentives to stop.

    Annotators

    1. Arguing that “anyinvestment made in terminal elevators . . . would be a waste of the people’s money as well as a humiliatingdisappointment to the people of the state,” the committee came out “strongly against the expenditure by thestate of any money for the erection of new terminal elevators.”

      Farmers will not be happy

    Annotators

    1. If you want Congress to protect farm owners, it may be wiseto elect more farm owners. And if you want Congress to stop pro-tecting farmers, it may be wise to stop electing them.

      Kansas isn't just voting against its own interests, it is against that of the country.

    2. Note, however, that the fact that thecoefficient on PAC contributions does not change much with theinclusion of other variables suggest that lobbying has an effect allof its own, i.e., that very little of what it captures is captured by law-maker preferences for agriculture or by electoral incentives

      Scary

    3. awmakers who received more money from farmgroups were more likely to support agriculture in each of the rollcall votes

      Would also be interesting to see the continuous effects

    4. both parties when we examined whichmembers were designated Friends of the Farm Bureau, our mostcomprehensive measure of support for agriculture.

      So there is evidence that time spent working on a farm has some effect

    Annotators