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Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

SocietyJune 1, 2023

Help Me Hera: An acquaintance is in love with me and it’s making me uncomfortable

Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

I said we could still be friends but now I just want him to leave me alone.

Want Hera’s help? Email your problem to helpme@thespinoff.co.nz

Dear Hera

Towards the end of last year, I was surprised to see a university acquaintance from a different city – we’d had one tutorial together – at my squash club. I greeted him, and we had a nice chat. He then started messaging me … a lot. He seemed lonely and we had some shared interests, so I would reply, but I reckon he sent maybe 70% of the words in our conversations. I was getting some slightly flirty, and certainly intense, vibes from his messages – when I got a new headshot on my work website, he messaged me about it – but I made it clear super quickly that I had a boyfriend, who he has since met multiple times. I told him about various groups and events he might be interested in, some of which I was in too, hoping he’d make more friends, so he met some of my friends at my pottery class, and helped organise a repair day at the local community centre. He was a bit awkward to be around, but some people just are, I told myself – that shouldn’t exclude them from friendship. 

Then last week I got a handwritten letter in the mailbox, describing his ardent feelings for me, as a friend and as something more. It referenced American political thinkers, Polish poets and Greek philosophers. It detailed my “loving” actions towards him – waving to him at an event, hugging him after squash practice, aka normal behaviour towards platonic friends. It did not mention my boyfriend, but it did compare me to a butterfly. I felt deeply troubled that over months of friendship, I’d been seeing one version of events and he’d been seeing another. I felt like the wife from the “don’t email my wife!!!!!” garage.

I promptly told him that his feelings were not reciprocated. But the thing is, I don’t want this man to take my squash club away from me, so at squash practice last weekend I told him it was all water under the bridge, we could go back to being friends and all that. But I’m finding that is easier said than done. I wish I didn’t know about his feelings but I still feel sorry for him because he has various other difficult things going on in his life. And he’s messaging me again. I know that I’m not responsible for his feelings, but how do I cope with the awkwardness of having to continue to see this man? And what does being a kind person look like in a situation when the other person has a lot more to lose than you do?

Platonic (ideal of a?) friend

A line of dark blue card suit symbols – hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades

Dear Platonic Ideal,

Reading your letter I felt like I was watching the opening scene of a horror movie. Don’t go into the abandoned barn, I wanted to yell. There is no antique rocking-horse for sale. But sometimes we don’t know what genre of story we’re in until it’s too late. 

Your situation reminded me of Natalie Portman. Poor skinny Natalie and her habit of being romantically misinterpreted by famous men. Remember when Moby wrote about dating her in his autobiography, and Portman said they never dated, and then Moby doubled-down and posted a bunch of photographs of them standing next to each other as “corroborating evidence”? Remember when Natalie Portman had an email correspondence with Jonathan Safran Foer so good he left his wife, despite the fact Portman was already happily married? 

Your letter reminds me of Portman, not just because you’ve stumbled across that same specific  archetype – a guy who writes long, emotionally overwrought emails, filled with quotes from Socrates and The Gettysburg Address – but because his letter implicates you in his fantasy. Not only do you have to cruelly dash someone’s romantic hopes, you have to challenge their perception you were ever involved to begin with.

I sense an undercurrent of deep annoyance in this letter. You’re obviously embarrassed at being so misunderstood. Nobody likes having to go around refuting things. The louder you say “I didn’t burn that hospital”, the more people start wondering if perhaps you might have burned that hospital. But having basic friendliness occasionally misinterpreted as flirting is, unfortunately, the female condition, and you’re wasting your time scrutinising your past actions. You’ve been cast in the sequel to Garden State against your will, and anything you do is the kind of thing any female character might do before eventually falling in love with the protagonist. 

I’m not against bold epistolary declarations of romantic love. If you accidentally develop feelings for a friend and decide you need to tell them, you can, and perhaps even should, confess. You just have to be prepared for the conversation to end or permanently alter the relationship. But it doesn’t sound like this guy was ever your friend. This guy was always three boyfriends in a trench coat. To be honest, it doesn’t sound like there’s much genuine affection for him on your end, either. Your letter makes him sound like someone you pity, rather than like. Neither of these attitudes are a good foundation for a meaningful platonic friendship. 

In a way, him confessing his feelings was the perfect opportunity to shut things down. Your mistake was in telling him you could still be friends, and then pretending like nothing happened!!! Note my use of three exclamation points. NO! I want to yell. Don’t put your head down the disused elevator shaft, even as a joke. 

You’re right that his feelings aren’t your problem. But in another, more literal sense, his feelings are your problem, because they’re going to continue to haunt you until you find a way to permanently quash them. 

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Alice Neville
— Deputy editor

I know you’ve already told him you’re not interested. But I worry he hasn’t heard you. I can’t help feeling like he’s going to take anything that’s not outright rejection as a subtle form of encouragement. Maybe I’m wrong. But someone who categorises “being waved at from a distance” as an example of “loving behaviour” is clearly someone with a profoundly optimistic romantic mindset, who doesn’t seem poised to take no for an answer. He’s already messaging you again, which shows he has, at the very least, taken your renewed offer of friendship seriously.

It’s all very well suggesting you go around romantically disappointing men who don’t have the firmest grip on reality. But I think you need to seriously consider backtracking here. You can’t be friends with this guy. It’s obvious from your letter that you actively dread the prospect. And we already know this guy is no Poirot when it comes to reading social clues. There are some people who subtlety just doesn’t work on. 

I think you need to issue a retraction. I know you don’t want to cause drama. But he wrote you a dramatic letter that deserved a dramatic response. I think you should message him and say his letter took you by surprise and after thinking about it further, you’ve decided you’re not comfortable being friends, but you wish him well, etc. It’s absolutely a fair response, and something anyone who writes an “ardent” letter should be prepared to hear. Particularly as you already have a boyfriend, who presumably doesn’t love the fact there’s some guy hanging around the wings, waiting for him to conveniently die in a paragliding accident. Hopefully he’ll respect your wishes and gallantly forfeit the squash club. But if he can’t handle a stronger rejection, or you get another seven-page letter trying to change your mind, surely it’s better to know sooner rather than later? 

Usually I’m against corporate “I’m at capacity” scripts, but there are some situations where tact just doesn’t cut it. You obviously have a horror of upsetting other people – even those you don’t particularly like. But the best way to be kind is to be clear. Don’t litigate your decision with him, or attribute blame. The last thing you need is more handwritten correspondence. Be polite, firm, and get the hell out of the haunted kleenex factory. 

You’re asking something deeper in this letter: what do we do with the problem of other people’s loneliness? It’s an impossible question, and one we desperately need better solutions for. But his confession of love has let you off the hook. You can’t comfort the person you’re romantically disappointing. It’s counterproductive, and won’t help either of you. This guy needs some real friends for support. Luckily you’ve already introduced him to lots of people he presumably doesn’t want to sleep with.

This is an annoying situation. I don’t blame you for wanting to bury your head in the sand, and hope it all blows over. But you’ve negotiated a very fragile peace. And his confession is a golden opportunity to shut things down permanently, before they go any further. If I were you, I would, like Roman poet Horace, seize the day. Like George Washington, cross the Delaware. And like a bronze butterfly, blowing like a leaf in green shadow, stop wasting your life and reclaim your beloved squash court today, before it’s too late. 

Want Hera’s help? Email your problem to helpme@thespinoff.co.nz

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Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

SocietyMay 31, 2023

Lessons for New Zealand from California’s cataclysmic housing crisis

Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

The California experience shows why giving councils more freedom to write their own housing rules can be a recipe for disaster, writes San Francisco-based expat Sarah Hoffman.

Nine years ago, my husband and I moved from New Zealand to San Francisco, where we live now. When we decided to build a pergola as part of our backyard DIY project, we thought it’d be a simple process. After 11 months, eight separate approvals, two engineering plan sets, and notifying 60 neighbours, it took intervention from our local supervisor (similar to a city council member) to get the permit approved.

For the first time I understood first-hand why there’s a housing crisis in San Francisco. The obstacles we faced for our tiny project are amplified when it comes to housing – it takes almost two years to get a permit to build a home. There’s a lot New Zealand can learn from California to avoid the same missteps.

For some context on how San Francisco got to where it is today, in 1978 the Board of Supervisors massively “down-zoned” the city, making apartments illegal in 75% of San Francisco. The result was a sharp handbrake on new housing supply, pricing low income and minority populations out of the city and causing widespread displacement and urban sprawl. The tech boom later resulted in an influx of jobs, economic growth and people wanting to live here, but with insufficient housing available. Today, the average home price in San Francisco is $1.34 million (~$2.21 million NZD) – around 24 times the average income. 

As in New Zealand, it’s universally acknowledged that San Francisco has a housing affordability crisis. Yet for decades San Francisco dragged its feet on enacting meaningful changes to increase housing supply. Between the restrictive zoning rules, labyrinthine permitting process and neighbourhood opposition to anything larger than a shack, it’s a self-induced crisis. For example, when a developer proposed building a seven-storey, 100% affordable apartment building in San Francisco’s sparsely-populated Sunset district, neighbours filed a lawsuit to stop it, on the basis that the influx of low-income residents would be “bad for the neighbourhood”. Or when a developer proposed to build apartments on a department store’s valet parking lot, the Board of Supervisors voted it down due to concerns about the project’s impact on a blighted neighbourhood. 

In the meantime, thousands of people live on the streets or are forced to commute for hours because they can’t afford a home here. But anti-housing groups claim that supply and demand somehow doesn’t apply to the housing market, and for years opposed any attempt to promote housing development.

The pergola that took 11 months, eight approvals, and two engineering plan sets to build (Photo: Supplied)

One San Francisco politician, Scott Wiener, pushed back against its restrictive housing policies, first as a city supervisor, and now as a member of the California senate. He recognised that densification promotes compact and efficient land use, prevents the loss of agricultural land and open spaces via urban sprawl, and allows people to live close to their jobs, schools and transit. Increased production also decreases the per-unit price of multifamily housing, allowing low-income and young families to get onto the property ladder. And dense housing isn’t necessarily low quality – our first apartment in San Francisco was 65 square metres, but better insulated, sound-proofed and designed than any New Zealand house I’ve lived in.

Faced with the inaction of San Francisco and other cities, Wiener proposed that the California legislature enact state laws that preempt local control over housing policy in order to advance these goals. In 2017, one such law waived local zoning requirements for affordable housing projects, and has sped up the approval of at least 18,000 new homes across California.

Another central policy is the “housing element” law – every five years, each city and town in California has to submit a plan to the state showing how it will ensure sufficient housing is built for the anticipated population growth. For instance, in 2022 the state directed San Francisco to plan for 82,000 new housing units, 20% of which must be affordable. If a city doesn’t submit a compliant housing element by the deadline, it loses state infrastructure funding. The “builder’s remedy” also kicks in, allowing developers to bypass local zoning rules entirely if they build affordable housing. This year, the builder’s remedy forced the upmarket city of Santa Monica to approve 3000+ new housing units after it failed to plan for new housing. 

These dire consequences have motivated cities to approve ambitious housing plans, albeit reluctantly. While San Francisco supervisors raged against the state law, they ultimately had no choice but to approve the housing element. This illustrates an advantage of this “top-down” approach: it insulates local politicians from the at times unpopular consequences of approving densification. In a city where the loudest voices are moneyed home-owners who don’t want to see anything change, local politicians are often reluctant to be seen as too pro-housing. Central control allows housing to be permitted based on best evidence and objective standards, rather than subjective concerns about neighbourhood character. 

State senator Scott Wiener (Photo: Aric Crabb/MediaNews Group/The Mercury News via Getty Images)

Applying these lessons to New Zealand, there’s a lot to like about the bipartisan MDRS policy, which allows up to three storeys and three dwellings on almost all urban residential lots.

Indeed, the MDRS policy has been lauded as a model for other countries. National’s recently-proposed competing policy would encourage even denser housing near public transit and require councils to zone for 30 years of growth, but also allows councils to opt out of the MDRS rules.

Neither policy goes far enough. Labour’s policy fails to promote the development of large housing projects that New Zealand desperately needs. And while National has aggressive goals that, if enforced, could produce more housing, the insistence on maintaining local control will lead to greenfields development and loss of agricultural land rather than densification.

The reason that sprawl inevitably follows looser controls is that people in existing suburbs vote, but land doesn’t. Given a choice between upzoning in the face of local opposition or allowing urban sprawl, cities will opt for sprawl. And National has not answered the crucial question of how they will avoid the congestion and climate impacts of this policy, such as by providing public transit and infrastructure improvements. 

National also must define how they will address a failure to meet their targets for councils. How will they “take control” of local zoning? Will they be truly willing to override the councils as Chris Bishop suggested on Q&A recently? Will they have courage to go further and employ a builder’s remedy, to offer the consequence that compelled change in San Francisco? 

Both National and Labour must consider what comes next after upzoning – do we need to do more to incentivise affordable housing? Can we streamline the resource consent process to speed things up? How do we ensure existing tenants are protected? The best answer to these questions arguably lies in a cross-party approach that provides certainty and takes the sting of partisanship out of this crucial issue, and has real, enforceable targets.

New Zealand is on the right track, but unless it pursues bold housing policies it will continue towards the scenario San Francisco is trying to remedy today: many people born here simply cannot afford to stay.

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