"Decarceration" is a social justice movement that aims to greatly decrease the number of people jailed for all types of criminal offenses. Progressive advocacy groups and Supervisor Susan Ellenberg are pressing the county for a "Care not Cages" strategy that would redirect monies for jail maintenance and improvement onto abolitionist and reformist non-custodial programs. Rafael Manual of the Manhattan Institute suggests these strategies lead to disastrous results, including greater crime and recidivism.

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Scott Beyer of the Market Urbanism Report reviews Alain Bertaud's upcoming book, Order Without Design. The book brings economic logic and quantitative analysis to guide urban planning decision-making, colored by a hands-on, 55-year career as a global urban planner. Bertaud concludes that urban planning is oblivious to the economic effects of its decisions, and eventually creates unintended consequences to urban development.

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Next week, San Jose's City Council will consider a new definition of "equity" that will greatly inflate the scope and impact of race-based affirmative action policies across the city. In anticipation of the meeting, we recall Suzi Murillo's Opp Now analysis of the Fall 2020 elections, in which she alone pointed out that local voters soundly rejected local politicians' moves to expand race-based preferences.

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As the City Council readies its Study Session on Climate Change, we humbly suggest a consideration of how free market policies can advance environmental betterment, instead of heavy-handed gov't actions. In an Econlib article, former U.S. Office of Policy Analysis director Richard L. Stroup discusses the feasibility of privately managed parks and environmental habitats. A past study found that state parks, which operate mostly from user fees, serve more people and provide superior services as compared to federally tax-funded parks.

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After sitting through six months' worth of discussion about topics for the Charter Review Commission to consider, former Commissioner Tobin Gilman was floored that CM's. Carrasco and Arenas introduced a midnight motion on 1.11.22 to include non-citizen voting into the discussion. Gilman recommends the city reject such divisive manipulations and return to a level-headed, businesslike approach to charter review considerations. From Gilman's Medium account.

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Negotiations continue about a bizarre, proposed city regulation that would privilege nonprofit buyers in the local housing market (COPA). But local small housing provider Dean Hotop provides a bracing analysis which suggests that the curious proposal would likely defeat its stated purpose, and in fact make local housing even more expensive and unaffordable.

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Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York, argues that non-citizen voting proposals, similar to the ones recently floated by SJ CM's Arenas and Carrasco, are bad for immigrants and the movement to loosen immigration protocols at the federal level. His arguments align with opposition statements nearby from CM Dev Davis and former CM Johnny Khamis. This article originally appeared on Bloomberg News.

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Johnny Khamis, former councilmember and candidate for County Supervisor District 1, brings a special perspective to the discussion of the relationships between citizenry, residency, voting rights, and immigration status: He and his family are immigrants to the United States from Beirut, Lebanon (1976), and naturalized U.S. citizens. He speaks to Opp Now in an exclusive interview.

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At the 1.11 SJ City Council meeting, CM's Arenas and Carrasco argued unconvincingly to allow citizens of foreign countries who are in the U.S. to vote in SJ city elections. In response, CM Dev Davis provided a thoughtful primer on why the right--and responsibility--to vote in city elections should be limited to permanent U.S. citizens. An edited excerpt from Davis' presentation follows.

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San Jose resident Tobin Gilman joined SJ's Charter Review Commission to explore mayoral powers and election cycles. He ended up participating in a case study on how progressives hijack city boards and commissions to advance a radical agenda. In an exclusive Opp Now interview, Gilman provides his perspective on how it happened.

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Commissioner Pierluigi Oliverio takes a critical view of how city governments--including San Jose--invariably take on more and more expensive responsibilities--even if they're not funded, in the city's charter, or within its historic charge. He worries that this never-ending accumulation of expansive civic duties endangers the fulfillment of core and basic city services. An exclusive Opp Now interview.

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In 2021, the long-standing structure of local Silicon Valley politics started imploding. The old, establishment Labor vs Business dialectic revealed itself to be increasingly powerless, and a new generation of independent political leaders and thinkers started to assert themselves. Opp Now co-founder Christopher Escher talked off record with a number of City Hall watchers, analysts, and tenants about the nature of the coming metamorphosis, and summarized his findings in the following Five SJ Fault Lines for 2022.

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