When California lawmakers tried earlier this year to force local governments to allow four or more homes on land zoned for single-family residences, fierce pushback from suburban communities stopped the plan in its tracks. For many, the long-standing neighborhood template of a home, backyard and garage on a lot was too intrinsic to the California lifestyle to upend. LA Times, October 10, 2019.

Last night, yet another progressive city — Berkeley — concluded exclusionary zoning isn’t progressive. Huge win in our fight to end a system that causes segregation, makes housing unaffordable & worsens climate change. Will SF also be progressive on housing & take this step? A Tweet by California State Senator Scott Wiener @Scott_WienerCA State Senator. Chair, Housing Committee. Former Chair, Legislative LGBTQ Caucus. Housing/transit/climate/criminal justice reform/health. Democrat. San Francisco, California scottwiener.com

During my working life, which every year seems to fade further into the opaque fog of the past, I worked in the homebuilding industry. Every business, everything, really, is subject to the cyclical swings of the economy but homebuilding is more susceptible than most, everything is leveraged but the leverage that makes it possible to buy a house worth way more than a person’s yearly income also works backward. When interest rates change, house prices also change because, to the average person, it is the monthly payment that governs affordability.

Builders build what they think the greatest number of people want (times sales price, very roughly). That often puts builders at odds with what the city and neighbors want and the zoning requires. In California, at least, Merchant Builders spend a lot of time and effort getting the zoning changed.

As an aside, sometime in the mid to late 1970s, I went to the annual Homebuilders Show in Houston. Most of the people at the Show – all the people I knew anyway – were Merchant Builders. Merchant Builders are builders who build buildings, large groups of houses in our case, for sale, and the Convention was probably like every other convention except that we spent a couple of days driving around the suburbs looking at other people’s new houses. That was almost fifty years ago and I still remember four things. It was raining off and on and every time it rained, the construction crews would stop working, get in their cars or trucks to wait for the rain to stop, and then, when the rain did stop, get out of their cars and start working again. When I was a carpenter in California, on the unusual day that it rained, we just went home. In Houston, we went to one upscale project and I was shocked at how big the houses were, how detailed, with the doors and cabinets even being antiqued, how they had no fences – because nobody spent any time outside – and how the Houston suburbs looked like the San Jose suburbs. The latter was the most surprising because Houston had no zoning. End aside.

San Jose had zoning but the developers were always fighting it. I particularly remember, in 1972, we were building a project in what had been known as East San Jose and was now known as North Valley (because East San Jose was considered a barrio, we merchant builders changed the name to North Valley to class it up). We were building a tract near the corner of Capitol and Hostetter and it was zoned to have two gas stations on Capitol, one on each side of Hostetter and we were trying to get the Zoning changed because we didn’t want gas stations next to our houses. I was the General Superintendent at the time but I remember that we did get the zoning changed. At the time, Shappell spent a lot of time changing the Zoning and I was impressed that Houston, without zoning, ended up looking about the same.

A couple of years later, I started my own development/building company with Sam Berland, and several years after that, Sam died. We had just bought a large piece of land known as Haskins Ranch which is a little bit misleading. Haskins was a grading contractor and his ranch was a place out in the boondocks where he could store his equipment. But, by 1979, it was no longer out in the boondocks, it was across the street from the soon-to-be Blackhawk Shopping Center, and Haskins was selling his property to move further out.

When we bought the property, Jimmy Carter was President, Paul Volcker was the Fed Chairman, and the homebuilding business was booming, but inflation was also booming, especially in housing. I remember a conversation with a fellow builder and he said that, according to his banker, less than one percent of Californians could afford an average new California home (the banker still made the loan). It did not seem like a sustainable situation and, maybe the buyers didn’t think so either, but, every weekend, our sales office was full of buyers clamoring for new homes before the price increased again. Sales outpaced production. People were buying new homes faster than we – the collective we, in this case, being the homebuilding industry – could build them. Two months after Volcker took office, the Fed raised interest rates, and then again, and again until interest rates hit twenty-one percent. One weekend the Sales Office was full, crowd control was the problem, and the next weekend, the Sales Office was empty. Now, anybody who hadn’t Closed Escrow wanted their deposit back, the celebrations turned sour, very sour. And we still owned the empty half of Haskins Ranch.

At the same time, ABAG which stands for the Association of Bay Area Governments and is in large part funded by the Federal Government was pushing the various cities to increase their density. The cities panicked and started making plans to do just that. Then the local people reacted to what they assumed would be a deterioration of their environment and the cities just sort of ignored ABAG (although they were still willing to take ABAG’s money). But during the brief period when cities were still concerned about following ABAG’s directives of increasing density, we brought an application for a revised project to the City Council in Danville, California. We wanted to change the existing R1 Single Family on large lots to a Planned Unit District – PUD, pronounced P, U, D – with smaller lots and duplexes on the street corners. There was a large contingent of NIMBYs, Not In My Back Yard, fighting it, they were concerned that the revised project would bring in “undesirables” from poorer areas which would hurt their property values and expose their children to the wrong element, especially in their schools. I wouldn’t have worded it that way, but our whole plan was to build less expensive housing to make it more affordable to a wider range of buyers.

On her campaign website, AOC talks about her mother moving 40 minutes north of their family home and the Porto Rican community in the Bronx to Westchester County so Sandy Ocasio could get a better education and we expected our smaller homes, especially the duplexes, to enable a similar result. But, like almost everything about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, her move to Westchester was unusual. Most minorities prefer to stay in their communities, something that surprised me then but doesn’t anymore.  Now, here is the kicker, the buyers in the new PUD were roughly the same demographic as the buyers in the bigger, more expensive houses; white, aspiring upper-middle-class, Republicans. The biggest surprise was the buyers of the ten duplexes. There may have been an exception or two, but the buyers were recently divorced women who wanted to keep their kids in the same school district that they had been in pre-divorce or young people wanting to live in the neighborhood they grew up in. All the NIMBYs imagined horrors – and in our case, hopes – of less expensive housing bringing in a different demographic didn’t happen.

That was over forty years ago and, if anything, people are more segregated by race and income than ever. Eliminating the 1 in R1 and allowing an increase in the density of housing in, formally, single-family neighborhoods will increase the housing stock by increasing density but I doubt that it will result in greater diversity.

I always get asked. “Where do you get your confidence?” I think people are well meaning but it is kind of insulting. Because what it means to me is, “You, Mindy Kaling, have all the trappings of a very marginalized person, you’re not skinny, you’re not white, you’re a woman. Why on earth would you feel you’re worth anything?” Mindy Kaling (duh).

This is a strange time. Just as the world was opening, it bogged down, seemingly frozen in aspic*, our plans to go out into the world hanging in limbo. Michele and I were just getting into the habit of seeing people again when the Delta variant raised its ugly head, reinvigorating the waning pandemic and reigniting our fears. We are starting to rethink everything, paralyzed into non-action.

I feel better than I’ve felt in a long time, have more energy, even feeling antsy, but I still don’t know why I am massively anemic. The good news is that the problem doesn’t seem to be with my bone marrow as I do start making red blood cells when I have iron in my system. I’m taking iron pills now but, it seems to me, that is just treating the symptoms. I’m getting another blood test in September and we’ll see what that shows. For now, we are hanging, waiting.

Meanwhile, in our area, the summer weather is spectacular; 80° with soft breezes and blue skies. But, to the north and west of us, summer is a nightmare of fires burning down forests and houses, creating smoke that is making the air toxic as far east as New York. In the morning, I go outside and breathe in the soft air thinking, Well, we lucked out, no fires this year. then I remember this is only the beginning of the fire season.

Rather than travel to National Parks that are filled with unvaccinated people not wearing masks, we are sitting inside watching the Olympics. Watching sports we know little about and will not be able to even remember the winners’ names in a week. Before the Olympics, however, we saw several TV programs that were memorable and even more memorable in the aggregate.

Ugly Delicious is a food program, and to a lesser degree, a travel show, hosted by David Chang. He is a delightful guy and the show is broken down by food category – for lack of a better word – like pizza, tacos, or fried rice. Ugly Delicious, according to Mike Hale in the New York Times, is an extended television essay, in the form of free-associative, globe-trotting conversations about food and culture. If you are interested in food, I would suggest it. Then we saw, Gentrified which follows the Morales’, an extended Mexican family, travails in trying to deal with the gentrification of their neighborhood, Boyle Heights in LA. Finally, late one night, very late, after watching the season finale of Hacks, a generational conflict comedy about a young woman helping revitalize an older woman’s career, we watched the same plot, in Late Night, with Mindy Kaling and Emma Thompson.

What I walked away with was a new realization that – to use a gross collective, minorities, that is not even technically correct here, in Silicon Valley, where Europeans are only about a third of the total population – minorities spend a lot of time thinking about White People. Way more time than we – or I, at least – think of them. And they have to because this is a White Culture with White Rules, and White Standards. It seems to me that the difference between Liberals and Conservatives is that Conservatives don’t want minorities to be full members of our National Club and Liberals do want those same minorities to be full members, as long as they play by the existing rules, which are our White rules. In reflection, the Olympics enforces that impression. I’m not sure if that is good or bad, but it does seem to be.

* a use of the word which I want to credit the great Denise McCluggage 

A Tweet Thread by Bob Wachter @Bob_WachterChair, UCSF Dept of Medicine. Career: What happens when a poli sci major becomes an academic physician. Author: “The Digital Doctor”. Hubby/Dad/Golfer.San Franciscomedicine.ucsf.edu

Covid (@UCSF) Chronicles, Day 495 When I began my tweets 494d ago, it was before we had reliable local, US, or world data. So I focused on data from @UCSFHospitals. Today, we’re awash in data, yet I find my hospital’s data still provides a unique lens into our situation.

So today, a few data points from @UCSF, with my interpretation. They reinforce the case that the combo of Delta & relaxed behavior is leading to a powerful & worrisome upsurge that requires a change in approach. I knew things were bad, but it’s even worse than I thought. What’s particularly noteworthy about @UCSF experience is that it’s in a city w/ the nation’s highest vax rate. And cases are rising fast in our employees, of whom 93% are vaxxed. (Special thanks to Ralph Gonzales, Bob Kosnik & @saramurrayMD for some of the data.)

Here goes:Let’s start w/ context: in SF, 69% of all people (76% >age 12) are fully vaccinated. (Vs CA, 52% of population; U.S. 50%.) So the surge in SF is especially sobering, since it indicates that we’ll need an immunity rate far higher than 70-75% to achieve “local” herd immunity. Let’s look at hospitalizations. On June 1, we had one Covid patient in our ~700-bed @UCSFHospitals (we never quite got to zero); none were in the ICU. Today we have 28 hospitalized pts @UCSFHospitals: 15 on the floor & 13 in the ICU (7 on vents). A staggering increase.

I don’t have the vaccinated/unvaxxed breakdown for today’s census, but it’s been running >90% unvaxxed in recent wks. When we do see vaccinated patients in the hospital, many are immunocompromised (a group in which vaccine’s effect is attenuated – we need a new approach). My interpretation: even in a city with very high vaccination levels, serious cases have skyrocketed, mostly in unvaccinated people. Now think about what will happen in a region in which 60-70% of the population is unvaccinated, not SF’s 25-30%. Really scary stuff.

In April, I wrote @washingtonpost that “this is the most dangerous moment to be unvaccinated.” https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/19/this-is-most-dangerous-moment-be-unvaccinated/…. I was wrong – now is even MORE dangerous since Delta has taken over, caution’s been thrown to the wind, and there’s far more virus around.

How much virus is around? Since early in the pandemic, I’ve used a piece of data available @UCSF to estimate the chances that a person who feels well in SF is carrying the virus. It’s our “asymptomatic test positivity rate” and it comes from the fact that we test all our hospitalized & ED patients who have no Covid symptoms, as well as people undergoing surgeries or procedures like cardiac caths. That fraction was as low as about 0.1% in early June – which was pretty reassuring – it meant that the chances that person near you in a SF store had asymptomatic Covid was ~1-in-1000. Today, it’s 2.14%! So now that asymptomatic person has a ~1-in-50 chance of being positive. (And this % may be an underestimate since our pts are older than avg, a group with a higher vax rate).My interpretation: the risk of getting Covid is related to your vax status, whether you’re taking steps to lower risk (masking, etc), & whether you’re exposed to the virus. Even in highly vaccinated SF, the odds of being exposed have gone up ~ 20-fold since June 1.

The point’s been made that, if everybody’s vaccinated, all infections will be in vaccinated people (even if vax efficacy stays high). Among @UCSF students/employees, we’re not at 100% but we’re close: 32,550 of our 35,018 people (93%) are vaccinated. (Mandate starts 9/1.)Given this vax rate, it shouldn’t surprise that 83% (77/93) of our July cases are in vaccinated folks. This DOESN’T mean vax isn’t working – calculated efficacy from these data is 82%. We’d expect 422 cases in our vaccinated population, not 77, if the vaccine didn’t work.

At least @UCSF, we see no evidence that efficacy is waning: no case uptick in those vaxxed in Dec-Jan vs. more recently. And the vaccines are still >90% effective in preventing severe illness: only 1 these 77 breakthrough infections required a (brief) hospitalization. Taken together, it’s clear that – even in highly vaccinated SF; it’s also a city in which people remained pretty careful despite relaxed rules – we’re experiencing a unmistakable surge. The vaccines work great, but, as we now appreciate, they don’t prevent all infections.

Even w/ surge, we’re not overwhelmed @UCSF, thanks to vaccines. Scary to consider regions where vulnerable % is much higher. I’m glad the U.S. is finally seeing an uptick in vaccination, but it won’t help for a month (since vax efficacy of dose 1 against Delta is so low).

As @DrLeanaWen convincingly argued @washingtonpost, it’s time to add back restrictions, esp. indoor masking. https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/20/pandemic-has-changed-course-again-biden-administration-urgently-needs-do-same/… As for me, it’s back to double-masks indoors & N95s on planes. And sadly, that’s it for indoor dining for a while. None of this pleases me.

.Along with renewed restrictions, it’s clear that gentle persuasion did not achieve the vax rate we need to defeat Covid. Yes, the politics are hard, but dying is worse, as is re-tanking the economy. It’s time for vaccine mandates – nothing else gets us where we need to go.

“Baseball is like church. Many attend few understand.” – Leo Durocher

Last weekend, we watched grandson Auggie play baseball in a tournament at the Twin Creeks Sports Complex in Sunnyvale. He plays on a team – club? – named the FPs, for Future Prospects (which seems to show a sense of ironic humor that I didn’t have at thirteen). Another team was named Cali and, when I asked Auggie where they were from, he answered, “uh, California”. The kids had had four games over two days and were exhausted. They won their first three games and lost their last – which was the only game we saw, but it was great to see Auggie play.

One thing that I was struck by is that baseball played by 13-year olds is much closer to professional baseball than any other sport I can think of. Watch 13-year olds play basketball or football – either kind – and there is a major difference from the pros, but baseball, not so much. That is not to say that baseball is easy, it takes incredible coordination, more so than football and I do not know enough about baseball to catch the nuances but when a kid hits a deep fly ball, it will probably be caught. Early in the game, while Auggie was playing third base, the batter hit a line drive between third and second. Auggie took a big step, caught the ball, and threw the batter out at first. I think I may have been the only one who was impressed.

Next week the team goes to Aspen for another tournament which we will not see (duh!). In the meanwhile, Charlotte spent a week at a surfing camp in southern Mexico. Then, this week, she goes to a Soccer tournament in San Diago.

When I was a teenager, there were no tournaments like this, we had to stay home and entertain ourselves or, in my case, get a summer job after about sixteen. I talk to some people my age and they tend to glorify the entertain yourself aspect and worry, loudly, that kids are losing some sort of ability to self entertain (it goes along with “they use their smartphones too much”). That is not how I remember it. I remember a summer that was pretty boring and definitely could have used some organized sports to spice it up.

Malm observes that, measuring by capacity, 49 percent of the fossil-fuel-burning energy infrastructure now in operation was installed after 2004. Ezra Klein in an opinion piece entitled It Seems Odd That We Would Just Let the World Burn in the New York Times.

We are not in a drought; drought implies, at the very least, that this lack of water is temporary which this isn’t. This is the new normal isn’t really accurate either because this – whatever you want to call it – isn’t stable. It is getting hotter and the climate is changing, almost imperceptibly, every year. The new normal is a moving target. It seems to me that most people, certainly most people in a position to influence policy, are still treating what is happening as an anomaly. This leads us to cheap and temporary solutions – or, often, no solutions because it will get better- rather than long-range solutions that really deal with the problem. And this isn’t just in California, it is the entire West.

Lake Mead is down 140 feet from normal and is only at 35% of full capacity. Last year, the Colorado River basin got about 80% of normal precipitation but only about 30% of normal got to the lake. The rest was lost to parched ground and evaporation due to the increase in heat. For me, the scariest stat I’ve read so far is that the July snowpack in the Sierras is 0% of normal. The population of California is 39.7 million and the land can’t support that. Maybe we will be able to adapt, to change our infrastructure – like building desalination plants and covering reservoirs to start with – in a way that will allow all of us to live here. But so far, nobody seems to be running for office on that.