++The academic calendar can help you with goal-setting, time management, and motivation. +
++The great expanse of time that is a life consists of many days, weeks, and months waiting to be filled. Our earliest years are marked by formal education and structure imposed by parents and other caretakers, not to mention a dedicated break in the form of summer vacation. By early adulthood — and beyond — we’re largely accountable for our time. What to do with this time can prove confounding, as anyone who’s been on the receiving end of “Where do you see yourself in five years?” can attest. When it comes to setting goals and organizing time in adulthood, we’re left to our own devices. “The longer away in time something is, the more abstract or high-level our conception of it is, and we’re not as concrete about what it would be,” says Anita Williams Woolley, a professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. “But as you bring things closer, people have an easier time.” +
++While it’s important to set goals, the roadmap for how to attain them can be murky. Instead of embarking without a plan toward broad ambitions, there’s value in incremental objectives in service of a larger aim. Take a page from the educational system and divide the future into “semesters” — traditionally 15 to 17 weeks long at American colleges — in which to implement minigoals to help get you where you want to go. Use the traditional academic year as a guide to help you stay on track, says Rachel Wu, an associate professor of psychology at the University of California Riverside. Many community classes and educational opportunities are offered roughly on a quarter or semester basis. “At the very least, it will help people, maybe, feel young again. I think that’s a huge benefit,” Wu says. “They can think back to that point in their life when they had that kind of organization and that might be something that works for them.” (You don’t need to follow a traditional academic structure by any means, but having a firm start and end date within a few months’ span in which to focus on certain skills or activities can help keep you motivated.) +
++Just as students tackle specific courses while working toward a degree or certification, you can apply that same focus on targeted aims for clearly defined periods of time, inching you closer to your larger goal in the process. Not only can continuing to learn in any capacity help preserve cognitive function, but giving yourself consistent goals helps to challenge you. Maybe you want to practice speaking up in meetings for a few months in service of your larger goal of bolstering your confidence. Or you could dedicate the next “semester” to saving $100 a month to put toward a vacation fund. Creating a deadline for a specific action spurs motivation. “If you think about your career goal, [it] is something you need to do in the next several years. It’s unclear what needs to happen now,” says Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavioral science and marketing at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. “When you think about this in terms of what needs to happen in the next 14 weeks, something needs to happen this week. You have to do it right now.” +
++Bring the future into focus by enrolling in the “University of You,” no matter your age. +
++How to set semester-long goals +
++Big-picture goals tend to fall into broad categories, such as financial, relational, professional, and health, says Fishbach, who is also the author of Get It Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation. However, goals are more likely to be achieved if they’re specific. This specificity is where people become unique in their pursuits. You should aim to be as precise as possible when it comes to your semester-long missions. +
++First, think about what larger goal you’d like to work toward this semester — select the “major” for which you’re picking “classes.” What is presently important to you? Say you’d like to dedicate more time toward creative projects this semester. How, specifically, will you foster that creativity? Maybe you’ll commit to practicing guitar every other day for 30 minutes or you’ll sign up for a pottery class that meets weekly. +
++It can be beneficial to bundle goals if you’re prioritizing multiple new skills during one semester, Wu says. Just as school curriculums are organized so students can make connections between subjects, you can structure your own semester similarly. “Math might relate to art and art might relate to history,” she says. +
++Plan when and how often you’ll practice your minigoals as much as possible, but allow yourself flexibility for any unexpected disruptions, such as needing to skip a class in order to stay home with your sick child. +
++Check in intermittently to gauge your progress, says Cece Xie, a writer and lawyer who has used the semester approach in her own life. While you don’t need to quiz yourself as rigidly as you would in school, use periodic assessments to evaluate whether you’re refining new skills or making strides toward your semester goals. This could look like taking time at the end of each week to schedule workouts for the coming days if your overall mission is to run a 5K. “Really prevent yourself from placing any judgment or evaluation of how it’s going until at the end,” Xie says. “Kind of like getting your report card at the end.” +
++After about the length of a semester — again, 15 to 17 weeks, or roughly four to five months — measure your overall growth. If you didn’t accomplish your goal of reading a book a month, consider what barriers you didn’t anticipate prior to the semester. (Perhaps you read at a slower pace or doze off after a few pages.) Adjust your expectations and set a new related goal — a specific time spent reading a day versus a number of books — or shoot for a similar objective — listening to audiobooks during your commute. If you’re having success with your minigoal of learning to cook one new meal a week, you can continue to challenge yourself with more difficult dishes or an additional new recipe a week. +
++You can also use the end of the semester to pivot to something else entirely. (However, if you’re attempting to learn a new skill, like a language or an instrument, Wu suggests giving yourself at least a year before deciding if you want to move on.) +
++After a few months, these short-term ambitions won’t be entirely ingrained as a habit, Fishbach says, so it’s important to continue them on top of any new semester aims. Still, you’ll have become accustomed to, say, crocheting, and you won’t need to be as purposeful with setting aside time to the practice, Woolley says. “I think that’s important to keep it going, but it doesn’t require as much active concentration or focus by that point,” she says. +
++Don’t feel limited to just one minigoal per semester either, Xie says. If you have the time and mental space, you can, for instance, implement social and health-related aims for the semester. +
++Why semesters are an ideal length of time to focus on a goal +
++Modeling your life after academic years allows you to adequately mark your process. It’s difficult to determine improvement with daily or even weekly goals, Fishbach says. But with a quarterly or biannual milestone, you’re more easily able to track your progress; you can more clearly look back on what you’ve learned after a 20-week intro to coding class as opposed to after a few days of instruction. The end of a semester allows for these report cards. “It just helps you feel that you’re growing as a person,” Fishbach says. “You’re not the person you were three months ago.” +
++This reflection is crucial, Woolley says. At the end of the semester, you can determine whether the minigoal is moving you toward your larger ambitions or if you’d rather focus on something else entirely. “Maybe there’s an adjustment you want to make,” she says. “Maybe you want to keep working toward the same sort of goal, but now you know more.” +
++Semesters can help you maintain motivation +
++A self-imposed semester system also lends itself to increased motivation due, in part, to the fresh start effect, where people are more driven to pursue goals after a “fresh start” like a new year or semester. (Fully embrace the back-to-school energy and buy some new school supplies, Wu says, “and then learn something.”) With goals that have an endpoint, called an all-or-nothing goal, Fishbach says, motivation increases as you approach the deadline. Having a distinct cutoff to your personal semester can help you stay driven knowing there’s an end in sight. +
++This manageable time expectation makes it easier to set more realistic goals, Woolley says. You might not get a promotion five months after starting a new job, but you can focus on your leadership skills for that period of time, which may set you up for the promotion later down the line. When you consistently reach your self-set milestones, you’re more motivated to continue, inching you closer toward your larger aims. “Most people,” Woolley says, “if they have some success, often that motivates them to either want to do something more challenging of the same sort or just more of it.” +
++However, taking the first step toward a goal can prove the most daunting. Wu frequently works with students who have difficulty setting goals beyond earning a certain dollar amount. Incremental improvements are a way to ease into long-term planning. “Having short-term goals is good because it gets people going and might get people out of a rut,” Wu says. “It might get people off their butts and doing something.” +
++Why concertgoers keep throwing things at celebrities and no one can shut up at the movies. +
++Some people shouldn’t be out in public right now. +
++Movie theaters have become a lawless land where some moviegoers have no reservations about using their phones after films have started. Sometimes it’s not just a glance at the time, but full-on social media scrolls and posting. In New York City, Broadway audiences are drunk, rowdy, and apparently leaving feces in the aisles of theaters. This summer at various concerts, Albanian pop star Bebe Rexha was beaned in the face, fellow pop princess Ava Max was slapped by a stage rusher, aerial-enthusiast Pink was handed someone’s mother’s ashes, fans interrupted country singer Miranda Lambert’s intimate show with an impromptu photo shoot, and a “fan” threw water on rapper Cardi B. (Cardi responded by chucking her microphone at her water-flinger.) +
++Large-scale, in-person events are down bad. +
++According to experts I spoke to, this rash of bad behavior can probably be traced to the pandemic shutdowns of 2020. During the lockdowns, we didn’t have large-scale social events and, no doubt, some people have sort of forgotten how to act now that they’re back. +
++But there’s also something deeper here, reflected in our protectiveness over these spaces and what they mean to us. Going to an in-person entertainment event is about more than just the movie, play, or pop star on display. These events are times when we experience important social connections, a phenomenon that happens so naturally that we don’t think about what these events mean to us — until someone really screws them up. +
++The “collective effervescence” of live events is something humans crave, whether they know it or not +
++It might seem obvious why acting out in public is deeply annoying, but it’s important to understand how much these large social events mean to humans. When someone makes a scene in public at a group event, we’re disturbed in large part because these gatherings are extremely important to our intellectual and emotional selves. +
++Humans are incredibly social creatures, and these events are moments of highly pleasurable social connections — what Shira Gabriel, a psychology professor at the University at Buffalo, calls “collective effervescence.” When we buy a ticket to a Broadway musical, or Barbie, or a Carly Rae Jepsen show, we’re purchasing the performance but we’re also buying that electric feeling of a crowd of humans appreciating the same thing. +
++“Collective effervescence is the way we feel connected when we’re in a crowd of other people, even if we don’t know them. When we’re all focused on a concert or a play or a movie, we feel a sense of social connection and it makes us feel really good,” Gabriel, who studies social behavior, told Vox. +
++Gabriel explained that the strength or weakness of social connections — the relationships we have with friends, romantic partners, acquaintances, and family — are one of the greatest predictors of depression, anxiety, suicide when it comes to our mental health, and wellness when it comes to physical health too. +
++The same kind of positive benefits can come from people we don’t know the community but feel connected to it or part of it. +
++When we get home from a play, movie, or concert, our first thought probably isn’t to quantify the collective effervescence of whatever art we just witnessed. I know I’m usually thinking about whether whatever I saw was “good.” Gabriel insists that part of the “good” isn’t just the art or artist, but the general feeling of the people around us and the social connections being made. We pick up on the laughter, cheers, smiles, and vibes and it nourishes us. +
++“That rush is freaking magic to humans. It feels so good to us and we are so driven by that feeling of connection to other people,” Gabriel said. “That gives us such a high. Some research suggests that kind of high can stick with us to some degree for as much as a year afterward.” +
++The pandemic screwed up the way we behave at concerts and movie theaters +
++Since humans thrive on collective effervescence, it was a complete shock to our systems in 2020 when the pandemic, seemingly overnight, obliterated these large social gatherings. Finding that in-person collective effervescence became impossible. +
++At the same time, we began finding social connections online, primarily on social media. We learned to operate and find these social bonds in different ways. An example: My colleague Rani Molla reported that during the pandemic, users posted more on social media platforms like Instagram — sometimes to the point of being overwhelmed. We also figured out ways to see concerts, have dance parties, and watch movies with people online in the comfort of our own homes. While we carved out a new way to be social, our social skills suffered. +
++“Among younger people, I have noticed, on average, poorer social skills,” Ryan Sultan, an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, told Vox. He explained that while there aren’t yet extensive studies on people’s behaviors in movie theaters and concerts, he does think the lockdown’s impact on social gatherings has affected our social skills, such as conversation and general awareness. “Having a period of time not in school — which is the primary way that we are socialized — has impacted academic performance, and I’m sure it has impacted social skills.” +
++Sultan explained that, throughout history, large social gatherings have always been integral to human development. “Humans evolved for hundreds of thousands of years to exist in tribes and bands of around 100 people,” Sultan said. “We’d have close relationships with those people. We’d learn from them, modeling behavior, receiving direct and indirect feedback on what are next-level appropriate social skills. Our life was a constant social gathering.” +
++The pendulum swing from gathering in real life to being relegated to social media to now, in 2023, coming back to real-life events may explain why some people are being disruptive and not fully comprehending the impact they’re having on their fellow audience members. They’re using the modes of social connection they got accustomed to — posting a video from a movie theater, scrolling through social media during a Broadway play, or treating a concert like a performance they’re watching from home — in a setting that’s inappropriate. In some cases, it’s an upsettingly tangible example of the self-interested behavior we’ve come to call “main character syndrome,” wherein a person seems to believe that everything that happens around them only contributes to their own story. +
++“Because we got out of practice on it, people don’t realize what they’re missing by not just immersing themselves in this social event. So people are trying to pull in what they’re more used to, which is social media, because they don’t realize that they’re missing something,” Gabriel said. “People aren’t thinking, ‘I want to go see Taylor Swift because I want to feel connected to all those other people there.’ They think about Taylor, but really, a big motivation is actually being a part of this enormous event.” +
++Granted, some of this behavior is violent or bizarre — like the fans who, respectively, threw a phone at Bebe Rexha and gave Pink their mother’s cremated ashes. These are extreme examples of this phenomenon, an extreme version of selfishness. That said, these disruptions not only prevent said disruptor from making social bonds, but they’re also affecting other people. +
++“When people near you are doing something different, it pulls your attention away. And you don’t feel as if everyone is in this moment,” Gabriel said. +
++We’ll probably stop behaving like animals in public … eventually +
++So why are some people so willing to harsh everyone else’s good time by scrolling through TikTok or taking video of a movie? “I feel like maybe people aren’t realizing how big of an asshole they are,” said Tim League, the founder of the national movie theater chain Alamo Drafthouse. +
++“Movie theaters are dark by design. Any light, even if you think you’re hiding it, just becomes this beacon, and it’s going to distract anyone in a 10-foot radius around you, if not more if it’s stadium seating. Your eyes will drift down to the person whose light is on and it takes you out of the moment,” League continued. “And it’s so fucking rude and it’s just so selfish.” +
++League doesn’t deny that he, like a lot of us in the general population, is addicted to his phone. But he views movies as “therapy from your phone,” a set, mandated time away from our devices and all their apps. “You don’t fully dissolve into a story or appreciate the emotional charge you would if you’re thinking about how you’re going to post something funny on TikTok,” he said. +
++At League’s Alamo Drafthouse, there’s a strict no-talking, no-texting rule. If an audience member at an Alamo violates this sacred credo, their fellow moviegoers can anonymously report the rule-breaker. If the disruptor is still on their phone after warnings, they’ll be asked to leave the theater. Alamo’s no-talking rule, which went into effect three months after Alamo began in 1997, was created to prevent audience members from answering their phones or sending text messages, but also cut off the rise of TikTok and social media scrolling and posting at the pass. League said that, aside from one report of “rowdiness” at a recent Barbie screening, Alamo hasn’t seen a demonstrable uptick in disruptive phone use. +
++“Your policies are always going to fail to a certain extent,” League said, but he said it was an opportunity to restrengthen and reevaluate the rules. “Okay, so maybe you got some new people that don’t understand the policy, let’s get in there and get it right.” +
++For moviegoers who don’t have an Alamo near them and want to be good audience members, he has a simple rule: “Don’t be rude. Don’t be a jerk at the movies, but also through life: Just try not to be a jerk. And when you catch yourself being one, just realize you can do better. And turn off your goddamn phone during the movie.” +
++For those like League who are a bit dismayed at the turn of public bad behavior, there is some hope that it’ll iron itself out. Gabriel is hopeful that this current spate of annoying antics will subside as we get more exposure to large social events. We’re still relearning our social behaviors, Gabriel said, and as more time passes, people will eventually figure out what’s acceptable and what’s disruptive. +
++She also is hopeful because of another important factor: shame. +
++Because humans are extremely social beings and value social connections (and our collective effervescence), we are also deeply attuned to the attitudes of the people around us. Generally, humans are very good at negatively communicating our displeasure at inappropriate behavior; also generally, humans don’t like to be shamed. +
++“People will get the message from other folks that their behavior is not okay. Some people will get mocked eventually — in person or online,” Gabriel said. “A deep sigh is always good. Side-eye can be really helpful. Or you know, if somebody posts something [e.g. a video filmed during a movie], give them a good-natured ribbing about that. I think that people will get that message.” +
++Here’s hoping they won’t have to open TikTok during a movie or ruin a concert to find it. +
++One of the biggest changes in state politics in years, explained. +
++Over the last decade, whenever California lawmakers tried to pass new legislation aimed at boosting the state’s alarmingly low housing stock, they’d come face to face with a politically powerful barrier: organized labor. +
++It wasn’t that unions wanted no new housing in California, but their top priority was ensuring that any new units would be built with unionized workers, and that the nearly half a million members represented by the State Building and Construction Trades Council, or “the Trades” as it’s locally known, would be well positioned to find good jobs in the future. Keenly aware of how sharply industry standards have declined in parts of the country with less union power, and still reeling from job losses during the last recession, the Trades have assertively fought bills they deemed threatening to their way of life. +
++In the Democratic and proudly pro-labor state, opposition from the Trades has often been sufficient to kill housing bills. Liberal lawmakers have been sympathetic to union arguments that the state’s housing crisis will not be solved by driving construction workers into poverty themselves. Sometimes unions would object to bills that failed to require certain wage standards, or bills that didn’t require enough union workers to do the jobs. And when they’ve objected, labor leaders have not been hesitant to flex their political muscle, running attack ads against bill sponsors and donating tens of millions of dollars to political campaigns. +
++Today, though, a major sea change is happening across California, with some unions now either actively supporting the major housing bills winding their way through the legislature, or otherwise signaling that they’ll no longer fight them. This shift in pro-construction, “Yes in My Backyard” (or YIMBY) politics has been dramatic, and one that hardly anyone foresaw just three years ago. +
++Getting to this point involved some unions being willing to break with the rest of organized labor, as they argued it was worth expanding the number of good-paying construction jobs even if lawmakers could not guarantee those would be union jobs per se. These dissident unions promoted an alternative vision for membership growth, and provided cover to California politicians who worried about being branded as anti-labor. +
++The stakes for workers, though, are high: The vast majority of California construction workers are not unionized, and toil away on sites with weaker protections, earn far less than their unionized counterparts, and fall too frequently victim to injury and wage theft. Though construction accounts for about 6 percent of California’s total workers, it makes up 16 percent of the state’s fatal workplace injuries. +
++A new coalition of pro-housing activists and labor unions has emerged in the Golden State, hoping to prove what is admittedly still an untested proposition: Can lawmakers accelerate housing production fast enough to meet the needs of their growing population without sacrificing standards for workers? +
++Early attempts at housing bills went, well, not smoothly +
++A number of issues have stymied housing development in California over decades: restrictive zoning codes that favor existing homeowners over potential new residents, lengthy lawsuit-laden approval processes, soaring costs for construction and land, and a shortage of available workers to build. +
++Starting in 2016, then-Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown pushed a plan aimed at tackling at least one element of this stalemate: He proposed accelerating the approval process for certain housing projects in California, so long as they included a portion of units dedicated to affordable housing. One reason housing production has been so slow is because individuals and organizations can challenge development in court, under the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA. Originally passed in the 1970s to ensure local construction considers possible effects related to issues like air quality, noise, and natural resources, CEQA court challenges have since become a top tool for NIMBYs (which stands for “not in my back yard”) to block or delay new housing, by dragging out projects in costly litigation. +
++Today, it’s typical for a proposed housing project to face at least three or four years in court battles, with added costs in the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Making this CEQA process both harder for opponents, and faster for developers, is referred to as “streamlining” in California policy circles. +
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Carlos Avila Gonzalez/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
++But unions in 2016 objected to Gov. Brown’s proposed “streamlining” bill, arguing it would strip them of needed opportunity to negotiate higher wages for workers. Labor groups worried about accelerating the approval process for private-sector projects but not requiring developers to pay “prevailing wage” — which typically means the going union rate for labor costs in an area. Unions often use CEQA challenges to force developers’ hands on hiring union workers, though laws requiring the payment of “prevailing wage” historically have only been used for publicly financed projects, not the kind of private-sector development targeted by Gov. Brown. +
++The Trades mobilized hard against Brown’s legislative package, ran ads against his top housing official, and framed the whole effort as a giveaway to real estate tycoons. They successfully killed it. +
++The following year, to avoid a repeat of 2016, Democratic lawmakers introduced more modest streamlining bills, which notably included a huge shift in the state’s housing policies: Several proposed expanding requirements for prevailing wage from public works projects to also include some private-sector housing development. One of the bills — SB35 — came from newly elected YIMBY state senator Scott Wiener, a Democrat from San Francisco. +
++In short, Wiener wanted to streamline not only 100 percent affordable housing but some market-rate housing too. If he could promise unions well-paid jobs on both, he reasoned, then labor would hopefully relinquish its fight to preserve CEQA lawsuits as a negotiating tool. +
++To get it across the finish line, however, unions bargained one more request. For any housing project of 50 units or more that was not 100 percent affordable (meaning not entirely subsidized), developers would not only need to pay prevailing wage but also recruit a “skilled and trained” workforce to build. This “skilled and trained” language refers to workers who graduated from state-approved apprenticeship programs, which are mostly free for students, and are almost entirely union-run. Nearly every apprenticeship graduate later joins a construction union, so requiring workers to be “skilled and trained” is effectively requiring the hiring of more unionized workers. +
++The Trades still had general qualms about streamlining the housing approval process, and in particular about how eliminating CEQA lawsuits could more easily enable private-sector greed. Rudy Gonzalez, the secretary-treasurer of the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council, told Vox his members opposed past housing bills because they weren’t focused enough on dedicated affordable housing. “Who actually benefits from streamlining?” he asked. “I think developers benefit.” +
++But ultimately the “skilled and trained” language was enough for the unions to back SB35 in 2017. Developers, meanwhile, didn’t love the idea of paying prevailing wage, but they agreed it was worth it if projects could move through the pipeline faster. SB35 became law. +
++But it soon ran into another issue: a worker shortage. +
++The Trades acknowledges there’s a shortage of workers for California’s needed residential construction, and they know their existing unionized workforce is getting older. A union-backed study from 2019 stipulated that to meet the state’s affordable housing goals, California would need to recruit at least 200,000 new workers. +
++But the Trades insist things are not so dire yet that leaders need to abandon “skilled and trained” requirements, and they say more people will be incentivized to become “skilled and trained” only if lawmakers guarantee good union jobs waiting on the other end of an apprenticeship. About 70,500 people have graduated from these apprenticeships between 2010 and 2022, according to the California Department of Industrial Relations. +
++In the half-decade since SB35 took effect, it’s become clear that the law has helped significantly increase affordable housing construction in California (a recent analysis found it streamlined over 18,000 new housing units between 2018 and 2021), but it’s been far less helpful in accelerating any market-rate construction. This has been partly due to a shortage of available “skilled and trained” workers developers need to hire. +
++How the Carpenters changed the story +
++Battles over whether additional California housing bills would require “skilled and trained” labor continued over the next several years, ultimately killing a slew of pro-housing bills in the legislature. +
++The California Conference of Carpenters — a labor organization representing about 80,000 unionized workers who install and repair wood structures — was more open to bills that included language only for prevailing wage. But leaders from both the Carpenters’ northern and southern councils dared not cross the powerful then-president of the Trades, who said unions would accept “skilled and trained” or nothing. +
++Change finally came in August 2021, when Jay Bradshaw, a longtime union organizer, successfully unseated a 20-year incumbent to take control of the Northern California Carpenters Regional Council, the Carpenters’ northern affiliate. +
++“While the labor story has ebbed and flowed and can get really complicated, it really can be simplified to say that one person made a gigantic difference in changing the conversation and that’s Jay Bradshaw,” said Todd David, who led the California YIMBY-aligned Housing Action Coalition between 2016 and 2022. +
++At the same time that Bradshaw ascended to power, the Carpenters’ Southwest Mountain States Regional Council — which represents workers in Southern California — elected its own new leader, Pete Rodriguez. Historically the two California Carpenters’ councils have not been closely aligned on policy, but Bradshaw and Rodriguez saw eye-to-eye not only on organizing new members, but also on making it easier to build housing — even if that meant stirring the pot with the rest of the Trades. +
++This first real test came in 2022. An Oakland Democratic Assemblymember, Buffy Wicks, worked closely with the Carpenters’ new leadership to hash out language the union could endorse. Wicks ultimately introduced AB2011, a bill that would fast-track affordable housing development of old office buildings, strip malls, and parking lots in exchange for paying workers the prevailing wage. On larger projects (meaning at least 50 units) developers would have to provide health care and new tools to guard against wage theft. Larger projects would also require developers to see if “skilled and trained” workers were available, but if they weren’t, the project could proceed without them. +
++The Trades, along with the powerful and larger California Labor Federation, fought hard against Wicks’ AB2011, arguing it had too many loopholes and would fail to protect workers in practice. AB2011 had other opponents besides just organized labor, including some environmental groups and groups that advocate for local control. +
++But joining forces with the Carpenters on Wicks’ bill were two other dissenting unions: the 250,000-member strong California School Employees Association, which represents janitors, cafeteria workers, and other school support staff, and the influential SEIU, which represents more than 700,000 mostly low-wage service and health care workers across the state. +
++David Huerta, the president of California SEIU State Council, said after surveying members on issues they’re dealing with, it became clear SEIU needed to stand up more on housing. “Regardless of if you’re a janitor or a nurse or a health care worker or a home-care worker, everyone overwhelmingly said the number one issue was housing affordability,” he told Vox. “We have members sleeping in their cars, who have big families sleeping in one-bedrooms, who are traveling hours and hours to get to work because they can’t afford to live near their jobs.” +
++Bradshaw, of the Carpenters, argued creating more high-paying jobs for all construction workers was more important than having guaranteed union jobs — and that unions could then aim to organize those workers. “For the elected officials we framed it as they do have a real choice,” Bradshaw told Vox. +
++In the end, California lawmakers didn’t really have to make a choice, and ended up passing Wicks’ bill, along with another similar bill that included the Trades’ preferred “skilled and trained” language. For now, developers basically can choose which law they want to follow if they want to convert strip malls to housing. (Yes, really.) +
++“AB2011 was a huge victory, but they allowed the building trades to save face by passing both bills,” said David, the YIMBY activist. +
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Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
++Scott Wiener, author of the 2017 law that has successfully streamlined affordable housing projects but less successfully produced mixed-income and market-rate development, decided this year to run with the labor compromise language Wicks pushed in AB2011. In a new bill — SB423 — winding its way now through the legislature, Wiener is aiming to strip the “skilled and trained” requirement from his 2017 law, and add in the other labor protections from AB2011, like for wage theft and health care. +
++The new president of the California Trades, Andrew Meredith, declared strong opposition to Wiener’s new bill when it was introduced in February, arguing it would hurt safety standards and housing affordability. The California Labor Federation backed the Trades up, too. “More profits for developers, less benefits for workers,” the labor federation’s leader said. “That makes zero sense from folks who claim to be pro-labor.” +
++In the winter and early spring, it looked increasingly like Wiener’s SB423 would be one of the most contentious bills in the California legislature this year — a new proxy fight over who was more sufficiently for affordable housing and workers’ rights. +
++But in April a major twist happened: two more construction unions — the California Council of Laborers and the state Conference of Operating Engineers — broke with the Trades to publicly support Wiener’s housing bill. “We believe the balance that this legislation strikes will result in more available housing and ultimately lead to more affordable housing that could be utilized by our membership and those in need,” said the Operating Engineers in a public letter. +
++Corey Smith, the new head of the YIMBY-aligned Housing Action Coalition, told Vox he thinks the leadership from the Carpenters, and bringing in the other unions, “is perhaps the single most positive shift in California housing discourse, conversations, fights, and politics in the last 40 years.” It’s “such a big deal,” Smith continued, “because the single largest individual problem for homebuilding in California has been local discretion and CEQA and the Carpenters’ union basically said, ‘Hey, we’ll provide a political path to tackle this.’” +
++In June, two months after the Laborers and Operating Engineers joined the Carpenters in supporting SB423, Meredith, the president of the California building trades, resigned from his post. +
++In another big political twist, the Trades have recently announced they are no longer opposing SB423. They’re currently “neutral” on the legislation, and neutral on another bill to develop affordable housing on land owned by religious groups, which failed in 2020 and 2022 largely due to labor’s opposition. +
++“We’re still working with the bill author and we would love to be able to support,” the Trades’ new leader Chris Hannan told Vox. “We’re trying to get the labor standards right for workers.” Whether or not the Trades ends up supporting the housing bills, however, won’t really matter as much in Sacramento as the fact that they’re not actively fighting them anymore. Passage for both bills in September looks likely. +
++Two different visions for growing union membership +
++One important factor shaping the politics in California is that not all labor groups see rapid membership growth as inherently positive. +
++Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action, recalls one of her earliest memories of advocating to expand California’s housing supply. “I was just starting to map out who would be pro-housing, and anyone who built housing seemed like a natural ally,” she told Vox. Foote met with a San Francisco planning commissioner who was also a member of the electrical trades. +
++“I had a one-on-one with him like, ‘Okay, all the construction industry trades are going to be on board? Let’s build a lot of housing!’ And he was very blunt that no we do not want to unleash production … For him, there was a problem that if we unleashed housing production and grew our labor force, then when there’s a downturn all of his guys would be banging down the door at the union hall when times are low and out of work.” +
++The concern of maintaining union strength in a downturn is a real one. More than 365,000 unionized construction jobs were eliminated in California during the last recession, between 2006 and 2011. “The point for them is not higher wages, the point is steady union jobs,” Foote argued. (The commissioner did not return Vox’s request for comment.) +
++Hannan, the new president of the Trades, told Vox his members want to build more housing at all income levels and pointed to the Trades’ support for growing their apprenticeship programs as proof they also want to add to their ranks. +
++“I don’t believe that to be true,” he said, when asked about certain guilds not supporting membership growth. “People are entitled to draw their own conclusions and come up with their own opinions but the building trade unions that I represent want to grow opportunities for their members and new members. The Trades has been a wonderful career for me and I want that for more people.” +
++Still, it’s true that membership growth presents more uncomplicated opportunity for the Carpenters compared to other construction unions, making it easier for them to back YIMBY bills. It helps that the Carpenters offers its members 401(k) plans instead of traditional pensions, which are more common among other California trades. This leaves individual carpenters more vulnerable from a retirement perspective, but the Carpenters as a union is less institutionally exposed to downturns. Over the last few years the Carpenters have embraced an aggressive organizing strategy, growing its membership by 8 percent between fiscal years 2019 and 2022, according to the union. +
++Will the pro-labor compromise actually work? +
++An outstanding question is whether these union-backed streamlining bills will generate enough new private-sector housing in California, and there are skeptics. +
++Making it harder to file CEQA lawsuits should certainly help, advocates say, but the constant debate in housing policy circles is whether a market-rate project “pencils out” — meaning whether the developers’ projected earnings outweigh their building costs. Prevailing wage and other labor benefits raises the cost of a project. +
++Jennifer Hernandez, an environmental and land-use lawyer who has studied how CEQA lawsuits get abused by housing opponents, told Vox she thinks whether SB423 works as intended is “a real bet.” +
++She pointed to Los Angeles, where a 2016 ballot measure that required paying prevailing wage failed to produce as much mixed-income housing as some LA leaders hoped to see. “It’s been too expensive and there’s not enough workers,” Hernandez said. +
++Hernandez thinks SB423 will work best in the most expensive markets where developers can afford to charge tenants higher rents to recoup their costs. +
++No one could say exactly how much more a project might cost if prevailing wage is required, and different estimates abound. Ben Metcalf, the managing director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley, told Vox his organization believes it increases prices in the 10-20 percent range, but can vary a lot by region. Some estimates have it lower than that, and some others have it higher. +
++Some YIMBY advocates say the higher wages for workers will “pencil out” if state lawmakers move next year to tackle the high “impact” fees that cities often attach to new housing in exchange for development approval. +
++Brian Hanlon, the president of California YIMBY, said he’s optimistic about the prevailing wage requirement, but only if these fees and other costly regulations like inclusionary zoning requirements are later addressed. “SB423 is an important law to get rid of a lot of these CEQA lawsuits, but we need to get the math to work right,” he said. +
++Smith, of Housing Action Coalition, said it’s not clear yet how much will be saved by streamlining, but developers wouldn’t really care if they paid more for labor if they saved money elsewhere. The Carpenters and other unions have a vested interest in these projects penciling, too. +
++Ultimately policymakers and advocates of all persuasions recognize California is embarking on a major new chapter for housing politics — one where individuals will have less power to block housing production in court, and where the Trades have less power to block bills they don’t like in Sacramento. +
++“For years the way union politics worked in California is that each union would let the workers in that union lead on that policy, so you wouldn’t see the plumbers having a position on education, or SEIU getting in on housing,” said Foote, of YIMBY Action. “Now it’s like all bets are off.” +