Tina Kotek, Nicholas Kristof and Clint Eastwood
Kotek has already accomplished the first item on Kristof's homelessness agenda. Doesn't she deserve to be governor?
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I recently re-watched Clint Eastwood’s classic Western “Unforgiven.” There’s a great scene at the end where Eastwood is about to kill Gene Hackman’s character Little Bill (Hackman steals the movie, by the way), and Hackman says, “I don’t deserve to die like this.” Eastwood responds, “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”
I’ve been thinking about how often that line is true in politics, and how I’m afraid it might apply to the Oregon governor’s race.
If anyone has ever deserved to be governor, it’s House Speaker Tina Kotek. In 2019 alone, Kotek, her colleagues and Governor Brown collected a china cabinet’s worth of Holy Grails, things Democrats had been working toward for decades. The 2019 Legislature established paid family and medical leave, passed reforms to the draconian Measure 11 for youth, and enacted a gross receipts tax on corporations to dramatically improve education funding. (And one more thing, which I’ll get to below.)
Now, if you are among those climate hawks who oppose Kotek because of her past support of a new I-5 bridge and funding for adding auxiliary lanes in the Rose Quarter, I respect that (although I note that Kotek has also been a strong supporter of tolling congestion pricing, and of “right-sizing” projects if such measures reduce demand). But unless that’s your issue, I don’t see why any Democrat wouldn’t wholeheartedly support Kotek.
But, as we’ve seen time and again in national politics, deserve’s often got nothing to do with it. If people are grumpy, they throw out the incumbent, regardless of whether the incumbent has any control over what they’re grumpy about. If people are happy, they’ll reelect incumbents, even if they haven’t done much of anything. That’s in part a reflection of the fact that most people – especially swing voters – don’t pay a lot of attention to the substance of politics. That doesn’t make them bad people, by the way. It’s just a fact of life.
In this election, though, I’ve been a bit surprised to see some people I know who DO pay close attention to the substance of politics – and have no specific beef with Kotek – coming out for Nicholas Kristof. Now, Kristof is a smart guy with generally good values, and if he’s the nominee, I’ll support him. But, to date, he’s offered hardly any specifics about what he would actually do as governor. Normally, that would be disqualifying for the people I’m thinking about.
Kristof’s pitch is simply “the insiders haven’t solved the problems; I’m an outsider, so I will.” Apparently, exhaustion from the pandemic, the persistent homeless crisis, and, I suspect, spillover frustration with gridlock in Congress has even some policy wonks responding to that pitch.
There’s one thing that I find particularly curious about Kristof’s candidacy. I realize that the argument I’m about to make isn’t anything that’s going to galvanize the general public, but I hope it will appeal to a subset of the policy wonks out there.
Kristof is, logically enough, highlighting the issue of homelessness. But what does he plan to do about it? Since his campaign website doesn’t even have an issues page (to be fair, Kotek's doesn't either), you have to do some searching of his past statements as a journalist to get an idea. In doing so, I found an interesting tweet of Kristof’s from last February:
We definitely need a national push to address homelessness. But that means many things: easing single-family zoning, more vouchers, Moving to Opportunity, mental health and addiction treatment, higher wages, skills training, etc as well as investing in housing itself.
The first item on that list is really impressive. It stamps Kristof as a good liberal wonk on housing policy. I’ve never seen an idea take the wonk world by storm as quickly as the idea that single-family zoning – which hardly anyone was talking about ten years ago – is a huge problem. It raises housing prices (a major driver of homelessness) and perpetuates segregation of all kinds. It’s also a huge environmental problem: housing density is key to reducing carbon emissions. New York City is the greenest place in America because when lots of people live close together it makes mass transit economically viable; housing with shared walls is more energy efficient; and, if enough people are within walking or biking distance of each other, there will be services – like grocery stores – that everyone can walk and bike to.
Here’s the thing, though. There are two states in the Union which have, effectively, banned single-family zoning, requiring cities to allow duplexes and triplexes in current single-family zones. The second state was California. The first was Oregon. And the leader who championed that reform was House Speaker Tina Kotek.
To me, that’s the most impressive thing Kotek did. It’s not something anyone would do for political gain. It’s still a wonky issue most people are unaware of; generally speaking, the people MOST aware of it are the opponents, people ready to take to the barricades to avoid having more neighbors. And it’s not going to solve homelessness overnight; it will take years for the effects to be felt. Kotek did it for one reason: it was the right thing to do.
Kristof says homelessness is one of the biggest issues. He listed easing single-family zoning as the FIRST item on his list of how to address homelessness. But Kristof is running against the nation’s undisputed champion of that issue.
Now, again, I think Kristof is a good guy with good values. And again, the fact that he supports what Kotek did is a reason to respect him, intellectually. But someone needs to ask him the question: “You say that homelessness is a big issue, and the first thing we should do to address homelessness is loosen single-family zoning. Tina Kotek already did that. She is the national leader on that issue. Doesn’t she deserve to be governor?”
If he has an actual substantive answer to that question, we should hear it. If he doesn’t, he could at least demonstrate some intellectual honesty and pop-culture knowledge by saying:
“Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”
Environmental lawyer, former Sizemore fighter, former Portland City Commissioner, believer in taxing the rich and letting people know where tax dollars go.
photo credit: "clint eastwood" by MacQ is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Steve's argument is dead on. Increasing housing (and commercial) densities in transit corridors -- or transit corridors we can create in low-income neighborhoods -- is key to long-term embedded carbon efficiency. Also to transit economic efficiency and growing load factors. I know this was an issue that Steve took on when serving as a Portland City Commissioner, and got bludgeoned for it by NIMBY adherents churning up out of existing single-family neighborhoods (I know because I came to testify for opening up zoning, and heard 90% of witnesses "defending" their neighborhoods). The first-up transportation carbon solution is electric vehicles, but the enduring solution is urban design that enables people to get to services, recreation, etc. without starting up the car. So . . . go Steve, and Tina!
Great column, Steve. But I think there's a big difference between enacting policies and implementing them. The single-family zoning change was an important policy innovation. But it relies on cities to implement. So too with the carbon-reducing energy goals, which rely on strategies to be developed by the utilities. But, closer to home, when implementation (of, for example, pandemic relief assistance) and meeting deadlines (such as the 1/03 goal for standing up the family/medical leave program) are dependent on state government, we've had more failures and delays than is excusable. This is not Kotek's or the legislature's fault. It's up to the governor to get these things done when the legislature hands off to her agencies new programs to deliver and new budgets to spend (although, IMO, Kotek and her leadership team have seemed reluctant to demand accountability from her office for failures and delays). My point is that the Democratic candidates for governor will have to prove their chops for getting things done. They will differ in only minor ways on policy, as you point out. But the question that I think will define their candidacies is how they can make state government work better and turn a progressive To Do list into a progressive Well Done list.