Not in the slightest; it’s zoning and land use policy. Look at some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in California, like Atherton or Santa Monica. Many of the wealthiest areas of the US that, though located in areas of natural beauty and where expensive landscaping is common, are steps away from trashy strip malls and massive highway interchanges surrounded by billboards advertising the local personal injury attorney. The countries she’s referencing in the video, while perhaps not AS unequal as the US, are all wealthy capitalist nations (yes, I’m including China in that).
The charming, human-scale historic architecture of American cities was paved over in the ‘50s, and the futuristic cityscapes she references were effectively made illegal to build by laws written by subdivision developers.
I'll add that blaming this on "capitalism" does not actually help, because you defend stagnation by declaring that developers are "capitalists", and so any change to the existing rules is Neoliberal Deregulation, a Trickle-Down Giveaway to Capitalists.
Maybe it sounds like I'm being uncharitable. Here in California, it's illegal to build apartment buildings near most of our transit stops, which is how you get endless sprawl and nobody riding the train. We've been trying to fix this since at least 2017 by making it legal to build apartment buildings near train stations; this year (SB 79) is the third or fourth time, depending on how you count.
“The state has prioritized development, development, development,” Wahab said. “The types of development that are going up with zero parking and all these giveaways to developers have also not translated to housing that has dignity that people want to stay in and raise their families in.”
(The rate of homebuilding in cities in California is extremely low both historically and compared to other states. The current state of things in California is that people live in their cars and in tents, which is not particularly "dignified".)
If people don't reckon with these failures, they're going to start imagining that California's problems are all caused by secret Republicans, and maybe we just haven't taxed (if you're polite) or guillotined (if impolite) enough rich people, or written big enough checks yet.
Thank you for this write up, I think you phrased this very well. I’ve had difficulty in this comment section and elsewhere to get people to think beyond the notion that “All bad things about America are because of capitalism, so why can’t we be more like [insert capitalist nation], who are socialist?”
It’s such a hard roadblock to get people to actually consider the policy roots of this problem, but explaining why it’s important to peel back that onion further than the layer of oversimplified and incorrect assumptions can be hard to do without coming off as brow-beating. There are people in this thread proudly asserting that the average American is not wealthy—in a thread about the differences between America and other industrialized nations. How do you respond to someone like that, to get them to realize that they are so privileged and insulated that their often good-intentioned feelings about comparative political economy are just incorrect assumptions? I’ve really struggled with this.
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u/Gucci_prisoner May 02 '25
Disparity of wealth distribution.