The housing take that aged me

I went to Madison’s marketplace of ideas and all I got was this reactionary op-ed column.

At this point writing feels inadequate. The better format for addressing this week’s main-character display of Madison NIMBYism in the form of yet another Paul Fanlund Screed would be to just invite everyone to grouse about it over drinks—three to nine million bajillion of them. 

We are dealing with something beyond mere civic debate. We are grappling with the exhausting madness of living in a city that really doesn’t know how to talk about itself and its challenges—a dynamic that’s on clear display in the opinion pages of the city’s papers of record.

Even when the reporters at a Madison legacy outlet are doing great work (and they often are!), chances are that same outlet’s marquee commentators are crop-dusting the discourse with serial acts of editorial malpractice. They bang on unceasingly about their crusade for a State Street “promenade,” bloviate about elections without bothering to find out who is running in them, end up issuing unnecessary apologies to local Taco bell franchisees, publish cartoons so insultingly bad they provoke literal penis curses, and just generally choose the worst hills to die on. Over at WisPolitics, there’s even a recurring commentary segment featuring two guys who used to be state legislators, but aren’t anymore because a major corruption scandal in the early aughts ended their political careers. 

And in The Cap Times, of course, publisher Paul Fanlund’s weekly column has stirred from its years-long torpor (bland political takes, letting local rich people pat him on the head, third-grade book reports on the article he read on the computer this week, etc.), only to embody and embolden the wrath of affluent west-side homeowners. Zoning and transit changes are coming to Madison’s west side. If Fanlund keeps going at this rate, people will one day speak of University Hill Farms the way they speak of Ruby Ridge. 

In his March 25 diatribe on Madison’s housing debate, Fanlund charges critics of his previous housing-related diatribes with ageism. He pits “traditionally liberal, longtime residents who have supported the city with open pocketbooks for decades” against “younger political activists—presumably newer to the city—who wish to make over Madison with a vision they prefer.” He claims that newer residents discount the legacy of longtime former mayor Paul Soglin because “gosh, Soglin is old. At least that seemed to be an undercurrent.” (Lots of qualifiers throughout this piece—”presumably,” “at least that seemed,” “I am told”—should make any editor wonder how much work the writer has actually done to back up his arguments, find out facts, understand the viewpoints he is countering, etc.) Fanlund also pays back the alleged ageism in kind, lamenting the loss, on local elected bodies, of “life experience in Madison and Dane County.” 

The “life experience” of younger people facing contemporary economic obstacles is so clearly, severely lacking at all levels of government in this country. So is the life experience of older adults who’ve missed out on the dream of Boomer prosperity. Really, the blind spot here isn’t simply young people, but people of any age who have struggled with a negative bank balance or scrambled to pay rent within the last five or 10 years. Our local economy is built around a large university that brings in students and faculty from all over the world, and around private employers who famously depend on an influx of newer (I am told! It seems!) residents. We actually need to enact at least some of “a vision they prefer” in order to thrive.

Settling in and buying a home that you stay in for decades is all well and good, but hardly the universal experience in a majority-renter city. To treat it as the default around which local government should revolve is a massive political distortion that cannot hold. Fanlund hints darkly that homeowners might push back against future property-tax hikes. This elides the fact that renters share the burden of paying property taxes, and that renters in Madison are more likely than homeowners to struggle to pay their housing costs. If we were all gathered around a table with the eight trillion beers we need, I’d ask for a show of hands: Who here has had a landlord tell them the rent is going up because something something property taxes? (This would be, I am told, a number of hands.) I wonder how many of Fanlund’s neighbors own “income properties.” How much of the wealth embodied in Madison’s single-family-home neighborhoods comes from other parts of the city in the form of rent? The math would (I presume!) be extremely tangled but revealing.

Short-term Madisonians contribute a lot, too. Seeing them come and go is bittersweet, but they make things interesting and they do often actually care about this place. Fanlund should remember that his own industry depends heavily on young people, many of them overworked and underpaid. He also wrote in June 2023 that Madison should “celebrate” (his word choice!) its growing Gen Z population. Perhaps the young are welcome to work and spend money here, but not to question the wisdom of their betters? That’s certainly in line with the attitude of many landlords and business owners around Madison. 

The way Fanlund carves up all this is particularly galling if you are approaching middle age in Madison. It’s hard enough to figure out what the next few years will look like as we navigate a local housing crisis. It’s harder still to imagine growing old here—if climate change, fascism, overwork, and/or disease don’t take us out first. For now I’ve lucked into a good housing situation on the north side. It feels like I’m getting away with something. When and if that ends, I’ll be weighing some pretty lousy options. If I wanted to have the privilege of living in a crummy one-bedroom somewhere in this part of town, my monthly rent would likely double. And even if I keep lucking out, how many of my friends and colleagues will be able to stick around for the long haul?

Not long ago I would have greeted a misguided piece like this with a sickos dot jpeg level of glee and had a field day with it. Pointing out its flaws and distortions could be a delightful turkey shoot—something to cackle about with like-minded Madisonians over a few quintillion beers. Now I just feel tired. 

Consider that there are plenty of elderly adults who struggle with housing costs. Consider that a lot of younger adults have a more precarious place in the housing market thanks to a  decades-long project of austerity that collided with the 2008 financial crash to downgrade life for entire generations of Americans. And perhaps we’d have more long-term residents in Madison if we didn’t drive so many people away with an environment that is stubbornly unresponsive to their needs. Consider that there are plenty of younger adults in Madison who have children, contribute to their communities, and, yes, despite the odds, buy homes. Consider that all of these “longtime residents” were at one point “presumably newer to the city,” unless they are somehow defying the very fabric of space-time. 

Consider that if you are signing a lease or a mortgage in the housing market of today, not the housing market of decades ago, your pocketbook is going to be pried wide open whether you like it or not. If you’re looking to buy a starter home, congratulations on your rich and vivid inner life. If you’re renting, you will face not only rising rents but all sorts of bullshit nickel-and-diming—it’s common to pay application/credit check fees just to ask for the chance to rent a place, and some landlords even charge you an extra fee now to pay rent electronically. Plus, a lot of financial headaches add up when you have to move every year or two, like coming up with a new security deposit before you’ve gotten the old one back (minus whatever deductions the landlord takes out), renting trucks or storage space, cleaning supplies, switching over utilities. You end up spending a lot so that other people can profit from their investments. 

The renters who shoulder these burdens still don’t have the voice they should have in local politics. But don’t let that get in the way of affluent homeowners’ tales of victimhood and persecution. A lot like former mayor and Isthmus-column phoner-inner Dave Cieslewicz, Fanlund takes it as an article of faith now that “far left” forces are crowding moderates out of local politics. This is simply not true. It betrays an intellectual laziness for Fanlund to paint the opposing side of the housing/urbanism debate with one far-left brush. Certainly a lot of actual left-wingers in Madison are pushing for more housing and density. But the shape of the debate is, as always, far larger and more complex than the light shining from the fundament of Madison’s commentariat can fully illuminate. 

The ascendant YIMBY movement, for one, takes in a broad span of ideologies. YIMBYs—mostly liberal activists who say “Yes in my backyard” to new developments—advocate for housing density, yes, but they often place way too much faith in market forces. They show too little appetite for substantial policy interventions in the housing problem—rent control, massive new commitments to public housing, fighting back against the goddamn preemption laws already, and actually holding private developers and landlords to account. In a recent piece for The New Republic, journalist Michael Friedrich notes that speakers at a recent YIMBY conference included “Montana Governor Greg Gianforte, a Republican who appeared virtually at the conference to advocate ‘red-state YIMBYism.'” Gianforte is best known for physically assaulting a reporter who was trying to cover his 2017 Congressional campaign. Far from being radical or ideologically pure, YIMBYism is, if anything, too big a tent. House everyone, but don’t make fascist bullies feel at home in your movement. (And stop jumping for joy every time someone proposes another crappy apartment building. You sound like fucking rubes.)

For all the flaws of the YIMBY movement, it has provided a useful counterweight to the entrenched power of single-family homeowners and neighborhood associations. When I attend city meetings and hear public comment about development issues, the pro-density/pro-transit folks (some of whom own single-family homes themselves!) generally come prepared to make their case. They seem to accept that the process of governing is a contested process where you try to inform and persuade people to support your desired outcome, that you cannot simply take said outcome for granted because you’re used to getting your way or because you believe so strongly in it. The opposition’s tendency toward yelling, fearmongering, red-baiting, and just generally crappy behavior does half of the YIMBYs’ work for them. 

Fanlund complains in broad terms about the stances of the pro-density crowd: “They appear to think that making driving and parking ever more difficult is a splendid idea. And they seem to never have met a bike path or bike lane proposal they couldn’t embrace.” That said, if you read through this whole piece, you never actually get a substantive explanation of why, specifically, he thinks the plan for more density and transit is actually the wrong way to go. He’s skeptical of profit-driven developers (fair enough) and claims the city is running roughshod over homeowners (I think this is an overreaction to the always-messy process of trying to balance different interests in government). But in his missives on the housing and transit debate, he never actually addresses the problems he perceives—from helping communities feel “heard” to correcting for the city’s pro-developer bias. 

Worse yet, he comes off as unwilling to even recognize the deeper challenges our city faces—namely, Madison’s critical lack of housing, not to mention affordable units. He acknowledges the need for more housing, just not the urgency of the problem. One of his previous pieces put the term “housing crisis” in scare quotes (does he read his own paper?), and another puts the phrase “future residents” in scare quotes (Dane County is in fact growing). Also go through all three of these pieces and CTRL + F things like “climate” and “affordabi”—ah, forget it.

Pull back a bit, and this piece is really about how grateful younger Madisonians should be for the already-progressive-enough-ness that previous generations have so selflessly handed down. It’s about the narratives of progressivism, good government, and high quality of life we’ve so desperately tried to maintain while struggling to solve our problems—a very expensive scaffold around an increasingly uninhabitable house. 

In one segment of this article, Fanlund mentions both “our progressive police department” and “an enlightened police department.” That’s right, both! Again, he doesn’t do anything to back up or justify that characterization of the Madison Police Department. I’ve given the “progressive cops” narrative some thought over the years. It really has little to do with the concerns and criticisms people have leveled at MPD in recent years, or with the busted accountability mechanisms that surround MPD, or with, you know, the more egregious things MPD officers and leaders have done to members of the community. Fanlund’s column also grouses in passing about people who advocate “[reducing] the size of the police force” and who opposed building a new Dane County Jail. But, once again, he doesn’t take the time to actually rebut the arguments that any of these people are making. Why, specifically, does he think the people he is arguing with are wrong? 

Fanlund chides Paul Soglin’s critics that “what likely drew them to Madison was in some part owing to Soglin’s work as mayor over 22 years.” True enough—much as we like to roast good ol’ Soggy around here, there is no denying his profound impact, much of it beneficial. And that is ultimately irrelevant if city government doesn’t tackle the problems we face today, for the sake of current and, yes, future residents. The examples he cites of Soglin’s legacy: 

• “an enlightened police department” (see above) 
• “the State Street Mall” (fair, with the qualifier that State Street is getting less affordable for actual locally owned businesses, and simply isn’t the center of the known universe for a lot of Madisonians… I’m not sure why anyone would need to explain that to a west sider but let’s move on) 
• “distinctive neighborhoods” (come on, that’s a lot to attribute to one mayor, even if he served a great many years)
• “a central city he protected from willy-nilly overdevelopment” (I’m sorry, but I’m old enough to remember people building a lot of expensive shit during Soglin’s most recent terms, and I’m old enough to remember people raising concerns about the city’s relationships with developers during that time too)
• “the Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center, and the Overture Center for the Arts, built on the site of a Soglin-led civic center” (Our own reporting has revealed that Overture does a poor job of accounting for its use of public funds, and things like convention centers and arts centers have their place but do not require particularly visionary leadership)

This column takes place in a universe where the accomplishments of the past magically overshadow the problems of the present. Fanlund is right to ask, in the column’s headline, whether Madison is “becoming two cities.” Really, it’s been far more fragmented than that for a very long time. Still, you could divide it up into two broad populations: People who can afford to rest on some very crusty progressive-city laurels, and people who are wondering whether they have a future here at all.

When it comes to commentary and opinion, Madison media outlets suffer from a plague of Guys Who Get To Do Whatever. They are not just an unfortunate sideshow. They occupy the real plum spots, or what passes for them here. They can beclown themselves infinitely, yet never enough to trigger self-reflection or cost them a platform. The strange, near-inexplicable inertia of Madison’s public life shields them not only from any sort of backlash, but also from having to make any effort to maintain their credibility (if they have any in the first place). And so they curdle from hothouse milquetoast liberalism to complacency to reactionary grievance. Keeping up with their wrongheadedness could be a full-time job and would require the consumption of [TK, need access to a supercomputer to spit out a number big enough—ed.] beers.

Leave aside for a second whether or not you agree with their opinions. The real problem is that these people have little of substance to say. They come off as remarkably incurious about the subject matter of any given piece. They don’t really bother arguing persuasively for their positions or engaging substantively with opposing viewpoints. They treat their own underlying assumptions as more or less self-evident, perhaps because they’re used to seeing those assumptions reflected in the political mainstream. This means they don’t really try, which means they don’t often deliver the kinds of compelling arguments or perspective-shifting insights that can make it worthwhile to listen to opposing or even objectionable viewpoints. 

That’s a disservice to Madisonians—and it certainly won’t put a roof over anyone’s head.