A coalition of NIMBYs living in an expensive apartment building near Logan Circle are upset about a proposed plan to increase business activity in their neighborhood:

It’s worth looking at the costs and benefits here. If Tortilla Coast opens, it will presumably be employing people. That’s a good thing for those people, and at the margin in general it’s good for the earnings prospects of working class people in Washington, DC. What’s more, both the income earned by the workers at Tortilla Coast and the sales generated by Tortilla Coast will be taxed by the DC government. That will allow more generous social services or lower tax rates throughout the District of Columbia. And note that the magnitude of these impacts is directly related to the question of how late Tortilla Coast is allowed to stay open, and to whether or not it’s allowed to operate an outdoor cafe. Both longer hours and more seats will increase the number of customers Tortilla Coast is able to serve, and thereby will increase the overall volume of employment and sales generated by Tortilla Coast. These are citywide impacts, with citywide implications and it’s perverse that the conventional policymaking dynamic treats the question of Tortilla Coast’s operating hours as a purely local concern.

Of course it’s true that the people living on the block will be more directly impacted by the rest of us. But there’s a problem of citywide aggregation here. After all, any proposed new business has to be located somewhere in particular. And even though we might all want less business activity directly outside our doors, we also might all want more business activity citywide. Certainly I think we all claim to want lower unemployment, higher incomes, more generous social services, and lower tax rates and it’s difficult to achieve those things without more business activity.

Another thing to consider from a citywide policy framework is that if a noisy Mexican restaurant opens on the corner of 15th and P and people find it unpleasant, it’s hardly as if the block is going to become a desolate wasteland. A 1,300 square foot condo on the block in question is currently selling for $780,000. Under the circumstances, introducing a noisy Mexican restaurant to the neighborhood might be considered affordable housing policy. Certainly it’s not obvious to me why, as a matter of citywide policy, we would want to put a high weight on protecting the investments of wealthy real estate owners. Progressives have become very interested over the past decade in the ways in which the political system exacerbates inequality but are often a bit negligent when it comes to identifying precise mechanisms. But what we have here on a small scale is an effort to reduce the demand for working class labor in order to maintain elevated asset price values.

Gallup poll has some bad news for Mitt Romney:

Though the vast majority of Americans say they would vote for their party’s nominee for president in 2012 if that person happens to be a Mormon, 22% say they would not, a figure largely unchanged since 1967.

There’s some reason to think that these numbers would move if Romney became the GOP nominee. Gallup adduces evidence from the 1960 campaign to show that anti-Catholic bias declined rapidly over the course of JFK running for president. And as you can see, back when it looked like Romney might win in 2008 people seemed to suddenly become more Mormon friendly. But this is hardly the only research indicating that a substantial swathe of voters doesn’t like Mormons. They’re better off than atheists (poor us) but it’s not ideal from an electability standpoint.

Of course one issue here is identity-motivated voting is a two-way street. JFK not only lost votes to Nixon from anti-Catholic voters, he presumably benefitted from enthusiasm for his candidacy from Catholics. Barack Obama probably lost votes in 2008 to anti-black prejudice, but also secured 95% of the African-American vote and boosted black turnout. Romney could, similarly, plausibly benefit from larger-than-normal performance among Mormon voters. That’s not a large demographic nationally speaking, but could be important in Nevada.

Via James Fallows, a great exhibit from the French National Library of prints from 1910 depicting the utopian lifestyle of 2000. A lot of them involve weird air travel, but my favorite is this idea of using dangerous nuclear isotopes to replace your fireplace (“chauffage au radium”):

It’s particularly interesting when you consider that France is, in fact, the world leader in the use of nuclear energy.

Stephanie McCrummen’s report on people in unlikely places taking on Section 8 tenants mostly puts it in the context of the nationwide housing slump, but I’d say a relative shift in preferences about neighborhood locations is also a big part of the story:

It was clear that Liza Jackson’s luck had changed when she drove her pearl-white Dodge sedan, the one with the huge pink plastic eyelashes over the headlights, into Pinebrook, an eight-year-old subdivision where residents tend to notice cars with huge pink eyelashes.

“There goes the neighborhood,” one homeowner said when she heard that her potential new neighbor had a federal housing voucher known as a Section 8. [...] From Jackson’s point of view, the dismal housing market appeared as a glorious reversal of fortune: Fresh swaths of suburbia were opening up to the very people it has so often excluded.

I think this is an undersold point. There are two things that are bad about declining home sale prices. One is that the decline is associated with a decline in construction activity and construction employment. But over the long term, if the population rises the construction industry will exist. The other is that the decline has left many households unsustainably indebted. If you borrow $200,000 to buy what turns out to be only $100,000 worth of house, you have a real problem on your hands. But I think the right way to think of this problem is as a problem of debt—the price was too high in the past—rather than as a problem of current home values. In principle, an equilibrium where homes are cheap is preferable to ones where they’re expensive. Cheap homes mean that women like Liza Jackson can acquire higher living standards. And cheap homes mean that you wouldn’t need to take out giant loans to buy them in the first place, so the issue of debt-overhang would be moot.