At the beginning of the year I got an email asking me to "join" an exciting new political action committee. They meant "donate to" but I knew that request would come later in the email. This bold (and unsolicited) endeavor invited me to rise up! For moderation! For too long, the message claimed, Seattle's politics have rocked between two extremes. But now we finally have a chance to stand up for what's right: the middle.

“We believe collaboration and dialogue beat purity tests and echo chambers every time,” the email said. In a followup email, the PAC's founder wrote:

"In simple terms, moderate is rational. It means starting with evidence, tradeoffs, and limits, not ideology. Moderates believe progress comes from testing ideas, fixing what doesn’t work and scaling up what does, rather than jumping to moral certainty or sweeping solutions. We believe in working within constitutional boundaries toward incremental reform. We favor pluralism, rather than purity and wisdom over outrage."

Right off the bat: moderates can't claim the concept of scientific inquiry solely for themselves. Who doesn't take in the evidence around them to make the decisions they think are right? There are also plenty of qualifiers in the sentences above. Staying within constitutional boundaries. Choosing only incremental reforms. They will fix what "doesn't work" without explaining how or why they should be the ones to do so. They don't ask who has tried to fix things in the past and what (or whom) kept them from succeeding. They don't consider why we should be forever duty-bound to a centuries-old document written by slaveholders.

This PAC isn't the only entity that claims a centrist righteousness. Third-party presidential candidates often put themselves between the parties' two extremes. Bill Clinton may have risen to the white house with his centrist Third Way-inspired campaign. Democrats in red states often push a moderate approach to governance. When two people argue about something, someone will stand between them and claim to be right.

who's in the middle?

Moderates pride themselves on having a flexible ideology. But it can be hard to know what about their views will flex and what won't. They express being open to idea and dialogue, but that can come with unspoken constraints. What is and isn't off the table? The decisions they make are rational in their minds. But even people we disagree with consider themselves to be rational. Each of us, not just moderates, filter what we perceive through the values we hold.

Moderates claim that neither side of an issue is "right"—the truth must lie somewhere between. It's convenient to believe that the best course of action is one that neither extreme wants. They push compromises where neither side gets what they want. Only the moderate does. By staking themselves somewhere along a spectrum, they get to decide what is the middle. But the middle ground isn't fixed. The Overton window is malleable to public pressure and shifts often. Sometimes that's for no reason, other times it's because of heavy lobbying and ad buys.

In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr. had this to say about moderates:

"First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."

The appeal of moderation comes down to one thing: power. Moderates are rational. They with cooler heads get to decide what doesn't affect them. Moderates are neutral. They seek to "moderate" the gulf between the oppressor and the oppressed. But moderates aren't neutral. They have biases and privileges like we all do. They choose this power because they can dictate terms that benefit them the most and harm them the least. To paraphrase Dr. King, moderates can say they agree with you and still act against you. As I like to say, racist folks in the south will tell you if they're racist. Everywhere else, you have to figure it out on your own.

What the moderate doesn't seem to want is a true discourse of ideas. Instead they crave the position of correctness. While those of us slug it out with our ideas and hopes and dreams and visions, the moderate rests. They "hear" ideas that align with their own sense of morality. Then they declare a winner.

you're not a moderate

I don’t believe people can "be" moderates. There is no clear middle between two extremes. The extremes aren't fixed. They're limited to our own worldviews and thoughts about an issue. No matter what position we hold, it isn't a moderate one any more than it's a natural one.

We all have skin in the game. We all have a point of view. Moderates can't call themselves the only rational thinkers across the entire political spectrum. Moderates in the halls of congress face huge public opposition. We see what one party is trying to get away with. We can't meet with compromise the destination they want to take us to.

If you consider yourself a person whose politics straddle two extremes, decide where you stand. Describe your values, what you believe in, what you want the world to be like. Be honest about your goals and the experiences that shape them. Claim your positions without claiming the higher ground by default. Most of us believe we’re being rational. Almost all of us consider evidence, tradeoffs, and limits. But we’re not politicians. We don’t need to take a middle road with our opinions. If you have something to say, say it. But don’t call it the moderate position. And don’t expect everyone else to agree that it’s moderate.

“Moderate” is as vague a description as “liberal” or “right-wing” is. That’s because the values underneath each of those descriptions change. Humans are malleable, persuadable, even when we think we’re not. Garfield teaches us that no one is immune from propaganda!

I too make decisions intending to be rational and thoughtful. I agree that collaboration and dialogue are essential to whatever we do together. But I'm not a moderate. Nobody is.

I grew up in Springfield, Oregon, not Portland (though I was born there). One thing that has happened here (I am here now) is that as housing prices have skyrocketed, even in this working class town, is that the large backyards created when this area was developed shortly after World War II are increasingly being divided up and turned into multi-plex housing, especially when the original house was falling apart and needed to be torn down (quite common around where I grew up). So I think this is an important story, focusing on Portland in this context:

Not so long ago, the house that Laurel Moffat owns in Portland, Oregon, would have been illegal.

Moffat’s 900-square-foot space is part of a duplex, sharing a wall with another home. And the two homes are both in the backyard of an older house.

“I’d been looking on and off for three years. I was frustrated. Homes in Portland are really expensive,” said Moffat, 30, a health policy analyst for the state of Oregon.

She could afford a house above $400,000, around her county’s median home price. But in that price range, she mostly found fixer-uppers and condos with high fees, until she discovered her duplex. “I could afford a much higher-quality house as a first-time home buyer. … For a new build, that wasn’t possible except for these infill homes.”

As the housing cost crunch has spread from coastal cities to nearly every town in America, and consensus has coalesced around the idea that an undersupply of housing is to blame, many communities have changed their laws to allow more “middle” or “infill” housing in existing neighborhoods. This makes for denser living than a single-family house on a lot, but far less dense than a big apartment building.

Portland now has duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and six-plexes. Townhouses that stack one behind another, going deep into a lot, rather than all facing the street. Houses in backyards and on wheels. “Cottage clusters” of tiny homes.

While other cities, counties and states have allowed these housing options, Portland has done more than most to create incentives for their construction.

“You can legalize any kind of housing that you want in your city. But whether or not it gets built depends on if it’s a financeable and sellable product,” said Francis Torres, a housing expert at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Portland determined that the key factor was square footage, specifically a measure known as “floor-area ratio.”

In most of the city, the updated regulations limit thesize of a single-family house to half the square footage of its lot — so on a typical 5,000-square-foot lot, the house can be a maximum of 2,500 square feet.

But if developers build something with multiple housing units, they are allowed to go bigger. On that same lot, a duplex could be 3,000 square feet, or a triplex could be 3,500 square feet, or a fourplex could be 4,000 square feet. And developers can count on making more money from those multiple units collectively than from a single-family home.

It seems to have worked: In the first year after the rules went into effect in 2021, 88 percent of new building permits were for middle housing and accessory dwelling units, far outpacing single-family homes. And fourplexes were three times as popular as duplexes and triplexes. The city said last year that it had permitted 1,400 of the denser homes in three years.

Anyone who opposes this is just flat out wrong. No one needs gigantic back yards. Build the housing!

The post Fourplexes appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

You’ve been wanting to read a comic about the intersection of New York’s matching fund program and the comptroller’s race, haven’t you? Admit it.

Well, now you can!

In Theory is a new semi-regular column in which Andy Cush takes a close look at the compositional underpinnings of songs new and old in search of a deeper understanding of how and why they move us.

Back in January, I published a piece I’d had on my mind for awhile about the Diana Ross disco anthem “Upside Down,” which involved a bit of analysis of the song’s unusual chords. “Upside Down” has always seemed to me a little stranger, spookier even, than its dancefloor-filling jubilance initially lets on, and I wanted to talk about why.

The Psychological Horror of Diana Ross’ “Upside Down”

A close look at the mysterious underpinnings of a disco classic.

Hearing ThingsAndy Cush

I didn’t intend to make this sort of writing a regular thing, but the response to the Diana Ross piece was so enthusiastic that I decided to keep at it. For days after I published it, people were responding on Twitter to say they’ve always wanted to read this sort of criticism, in which concepts from music theory are presented in terms that non-musicians can understand, and used to raise questions and possible answers about how and why songs make us feel the way they do. Or else they were writing to quibble with aspects of my analysis, usually with well-reasoned arguments, but with a few insults to my musical intelligence thrown in. All of these responses seemed encouraging. 

Next up in this newly inaugurated column, which I'm calling In Theory, is Townes Van Zandt’s “I’ll Be Here in the Morning,” prompted by the late Texas songwriting legend’s birthday last weekend. As with “Upside Down,” I’m interested in the way “I’ll Be Here in the Morning” uses its harmony to create emotional subtext that wouldn’t necessarily be apparent from the words on the page. I don’t know exactly what else I’ll get into as the column progresses, but I suspect this will be an ongoing theme: looking at how words and music interact to create effects more powerful and richly complex than either could convey on its own. And though, as with "Upside Down," I’m using harmonic analysis to suggest a somewhat counterintuitive reading of the song, I truly believe a listener without a musical background might come to the same conclusions, just based on how the music feels. This is important: For me, this sort of analysis is only meaningful if it is descriptive rather than prescriptive—that is, if it helps to elucidate some aspect of the music that is already apparent from simply hearing it, rather than lording the theory over you as a way of telling you what to think. 

“I’ll Be Here in the Morning” first appeared on For the Sake of the Song, Van Zandt’s 1968 debut, but its best-known version came out a year later on his self-titled third album, which featured several re-recordings of songs that he felt had been overproduced in their earlier renditions. The 1969 recording is sparser, slower, rougher around the edges, stripping away the swooning strings and jaunty backing vocals that adorn the original. I’ll be focusing on that version, both because it’s the more familiar one and because its lonesome arrangement further brings out the painfully ambiguous quality of “I’ll Be Here in the Morning”  that I want to discuss, which for me is what elevates the song to masterpiece status. 

On its face, “I’ll Be Here in the Morning” is a straightforward inversion of one of country music’s trustiest archetypes. The genre’s history is full of ramblin’ men too drawn to the call of the open road to be tied down by the women who love them: Hank Williams, Marty Robbins, Glen Campbell, Merle Haggard, and many, many others have recorded songs in this vein. At first, Townes’s take seems like just another contribution to the ramblin’ man’s enduring myth, albeit one with an especially poetic rendering of the road’s appeal. “There’s no stronger wind than the one that blows down a lonesome railroad line/No prettier sight than lookin’ back on a town you left behind,” he sings wistfully in the song’s first lines. But then, in the third line of each verse, his tone changes: Sure, he’d like to be out there roaming, but there’s a woman he loves at home who keeps him there. The choruses take the form of reassurances to her: “Close your eyes, I’ll be here in the morning/Close your eyes, I’ll be here for a while.”

If that were the whole of it, “I’ll Be Here in the Morning” would still be a sweet love song, one that finds unexpected tenderness beneath the tough masculine exterior of a time-worn country trope. (For a song that does more or less that, without pressing on the wound like this one does, see Jerry Reed’s delightful “You Took All the Ramblin’ Out of Me.”) But Van Zandt, a deeply troubled guy and a brilliant observer of subtleties of feeling, was not much for uncomplicated sweetness. Though he never lets on as much, I think his narrator is telling his companion to hush and not worry while he plans his escape in the night. Or maybe he will stay, but he’ll never be all the way there, with some part of his heart always yearning to ramble.

My sense of the unspoken sadness in “I’ll Be Here in the Morning” comes largely from its chords. For much of its runtime, it cycles through four or five of them, depending on how precise you want to get. These are E Major, A Major, B Major, B7, and F#7. For the purpose of simplicity, let’s focus for now on E, A, and B7, a trio of chords that firmly situates us in the key of E Major. (F#7, the one chord from outside the key, is what’s known as a “secondary dominant” chord—a concept that’s probably too complicated to explain here, and not especially pertinent to the point I hope to make.) In the context of the key of E Major, E is what’s known as the I chord; A is the IV chord; and B7 is the V7 chord. That’s one, four, and five-seven, if you’re saying them out loud.

These chords are important building blocks of almost all Western music, and they each have their own color and feeling, sonic qualities you might recognize even if you can’t name them. The I chord feels like home: when a song seems to be coming to a satisfying rest, whether literally at the end or just the end of a phrase, that’s often because it’s landing on the I. The IV feels like a departure, or a lift: You hear it and you feel like you’re setting off from home, going somewhere else. The V7 is even further away, but it also has a tension in it that pulls your ear back toward the I, letting you know you’re about to return home. You can make a compelling musical journey by just repeating these three chords, and maybe varying their order from time to time. Home→departure→the feeling of wanting to return→home again. Repeat as necessary. This pattern, with some built-in variations, is the basic underlying structure of the blues, and from there it migrated to all sorts of other American music, including country. With its cycles coming and going, this sort of chord progression has obvious resonance with the subject matter of “I’ll Be Here in the Morning.”

Van Zandt’s composition is evocative of a classic blues form, but without replicating it exactly. One element he does pick up from the blues is a little flourish that comes toward the end of the cycle, before it repeats: You’re sitting on the V7 chord, waiting to be pulled to the comfort of the I, but you travel back through the IV before you get there, as if retracing your steps around a big circle to get home instead of just finishing the loop. This is where “I’ll Be Here in the Morning” gets a little tricky: It pulls this bluesy V7-IV move, setting you up for a leisurely return home to the I—E Major, remember—but it lands instead on C# minor, the first minor chord in the song.

Even if you never got past grade school music education, you might remember that minor chords tend to sound sadder than major ones. C# minor, in this context, is the vi chord (minor chords get lower-case roman numerals), otherwise known as the relative minor. It’s sort of like the shadow self of the I chord: It has all the same notes in common except for one, but that one change makes it dark and heavy instead of light and airy. Home, but a sad version of home. 

Van Zandt lets this unexpected shadow drift over right at the end of the chorus. “Close your eyes, I’ll be here in the morning”—everything’s still fine, we’re making our leisurely way from V back to IV—“Close your eyes, I’ll be here for a while”—right on while is where the vi chord hits. Compared with the chordal gymnastics of “Upside Down,” going to the vi here is not especially daring from a purely musical perspective, but its simplicity is part of its power: There is no mistaking the ominous note that Van Zandt strikes just as his lyrics offer these words of comfort. It’s enough to make you wonder how comforting they really are. “I’ll be here in the morning.” OK, but what about the morning after that? “I’ll be here for a while.” And then what?

I’d always thought of “I’ll Be Here in the Morning” as being a dark twist on the very archetype it seems to undermine: the song of a guy who runs off even as he promises to stay. But as I listened carefully and repeatedly to prepare for this piece, the answer became less and less clear. If he leaves, he’ll miss her; if he stays, he’ll miss the road. The C# minor chord starts to feel like a symbol of the regret he will inevitably feel, whichever choice he makes. Van Zandt’s songs often have an allegorical or philosophical quality: a hand of cards becomes a battleground of fate and free will; a tale of two bandits a meditation on sin and redemption. “I’ll Be Here in the Morning” is not just about one man’s wanderlust, it’s about the way any major decision can feel like a sort of death: The death of the person who took the other path, the snuffing out of the love or adventure that he might have found there. 

Van Zandt’s writing is characteristically beautiful. I especially love the second verse: “There's lots of things along the road I'd surely like to see/I'd like to lean into the wind and tell myself I'm free/But your softest whisper's louder than the highway's call to me.” There are little seeds of doubt that the lyrics may plant in your mind, but the song’s painful ambiguity really comes almost entirely from that single C# minor chord. If you were to change it to E Major, the more expected move, you’d get got a much happier song, and a much less powerful one. 

Humans have told stories to each other for as long as there have been stories to tell. Stories predate language, even humans, appearing on caves, as shadows, or in gestures by a fire. The human mind is great at receiving stories, too. A handful of words in a brutal, inefficient language, can still conjure pictures in our minds.

Stories have power even in the modern world. Beyond creative works like films, novels, or poetry, we use our stories to inspire and persuade. In the working world, we use stories to make data tangible and meaningful. We frame people's personal narratives through the hardships they've faced. Service providers tell people's stories in an arc familiar to epic poems. They faced hardship, they overcame, they succeeded, they thrived.

Organizations often use these stories to describe a program and the impact it's had. Numbers are great when they're large. "Oh wow, we helped 1 million puppy children." or "These puppy children earned 300,000 bones for their families." But for most people the numbers are meaningless. What's the context? A former employer claimed to distribute millions of pounds of food each year. But what kind of food was it? Was some of it rotten? Were some of those pounds industrial-sized cans of baby corn? While numbers are great, they don't convey impact like a person's story does. Donors know this too. Storytelling activates a person's imagination in ways that dry reports can't do alone. A person in need makes a compelling recipient of a donor's so-called largesse. Donating to an organization, not a person, is a request to keep doing whatever work they were doing.

Stories can also come at a cost. I've written before about how hard it is to unlace the trauma in some people's stories. Beyond that, a person's story as told by a nonprofit rarely brings them a direct benefit. It's sometimes twisted or repackaged into a different story altogether. That story's loyalty risks lying more with the donor class, less with the person who lived it.

how do we know?

We're now decades out from the era that coined the term "poverty porn." What has changed since then? I am in the business of telling other people's stories. I run focus groups and listening sessions to hear what real people have to say. Here are some of the things I try to watch out for.

What's our editorial bias here?

• What development process do stories go through?
• Who is the primary audience for the story that we're telling?
• If we use a storytelling template, how was it made?
• What role does the original storyteller play in its retelling?

What's the goal of this story?

• Are we shaping it for donor impact or community benefit?
• How did we choose this story to tell?
• Are we describing a person's own agency in their story, or are we the heroes?

Are we treating these stories with care?

• Do we have metrics around story generation?
• What does one individual story mean to us?
• For how long will we use a person's story or likeness?

making better stories

How can we tell people's stories without bringing more harm to them? It comes down to agency. Who has it? Who gets the final word on how we portray the stories we tell? Is the storyteller better off having told us that story? What else can we do to limit the negative impacts we may have on a person?

Help people tell their stories in their own way. People with limited power face exploitation when they have no other options available. Our noble intentions aren't enough to continue that exploitation for our own gain.

Include storytellers in the full development process. Describe the goal of your stories to people you're soliciting stories from. Explain how you plan to use the stories. People's experiences are unique—we don't have the right to tell their story in perpetuity. Set a length of time that you want to share their story.

Include storytellers in your profit sharing. Compensate them according to the amount of time you'll use their story and the income you will earn from it.

Challenge the systems that created the conditions your storytellers endure. Instead of manipulating a person's story, add context to their experience. Explain to your audience the change we need to keep others from going through what they went through.

I see storytelling as a collaborative process. The people who interact with us are more than outputs. Their lives extend well beyond that of a recipient of our services. In systems of justice, we see community action as peers supporting peers. A thin line often separates the person offering a service and the person receiving them. But everyone deserves respect. No story is worth more than the person who lives to tell it.