Couldn’t agree more. Not a peep about land use reform or even any real action on income inequality. DNC offers nothing and is somehow surprised people rejected inaction.
I mean, I think it's worse than that. I grew up in Austin, and still have family there. The fact that a lefty like me is regularly siding with state Republicans against local Democrats on housing policy is legitimately insane.
Austin is basically the only city with dropping housing prices right now and that's happening in large part in spite of city policy, not because of it. Yes, the Republicans are creating tons of new sprawl there, and that's bad, but it's a crisis, not some long term concern we can fiddle with the knobs over. Obviously, the sustainability parts of me don't like sprawl (especially from a Strong Towns perspective), but it's not like the Dems there are upzoning anything more than a token number of corridors.
I've had a perpetual criticism of my fellow Dems since my days of naive urban-enviornmentalism: as long as "the bus is for other people" we won't have good public transit. The same goes for housing. As long as lefties don't actually want to live in a multi-unit European-style townhouses in walkable neighborhoods, we're not going to actually do anything substantial about housing or climate change, but with token projects we can pretend we will... and proceed to keep failing working people.
That’s because the Dems aren’t so different than the GOP when it comes to a lot of that stuff. They’re still the party of the rich, just a different set of rich. The DMC made it clear in 2016 that it rejected the liberal economic policies when it shut down Bernie (who I think could have beat Trump). And radicals like AOC have been a thorn in the side of Pelosi and her ilk. The Dems try to play it safe, but I think if they embraced the radical side they’d find a base to match the MAGA energy and win. That’s what it’s gonna take.
