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Los Angeles has extremely high rents at present. One obvious solution is to increase the supply of housing, such as by building apartment complexes on vacant lots. Increasing supply would moderate the price of rent. But …
Amid gentrification fears, officials kill plan for 577 apartments in South L.A.
An L.A. city commission voted Tuesday to reject plans for 577 apartments on an empty lot on Crenshaw Boulevard.
By DAVID ZAHNISER STAFF WRITER
NOV. 20, 2019 12:29 PMThe South Los Angeles Area Planning Commission has voted to reject a plan for 577 apartments near a Crenshaw Boulevard light-rail station, the latest flare-up in a debate over gentrification and the benefits of market-rate housing.
The commission, which is made up of appointees of Mayor Eric Garcetti, unanimously opposed the six-story development known as District Square, despite a last-minute offer from the developers to charge below-market rents at 63 apartments inside their project.
Tuesday’s vote effectively kills the project at City Hall, unless a member of the City Council requests a review and a reversal of the decision. Councilman Herb Wesson, who represents the area, has already come out against District Square.
“What we need is affordable housing, and no matter how you try to tweak this project, this development will not do that,” Wesson said in a letter read to the commissioners by one of his aides. “If the current residents of the neighborhood cannot afford it, we should not build it.”
The current residents already have housing, so why should the only housing that is allowed to be built is so lousy that the current residents could afford to move next door into it? It’s a little bit like saying car companies should only make new cars that are cheap enough for you to pay for them by trading in your old car.
Of course, the real reason is that rents in this neighborhood are relatively low because the quality of residents is also relatively low. Building 577 units near a public transit station would attract commuters with jobs, which would raise the average quality of residents in the neighborhood, which would presumably also raise rents on existing buildings.
The commission’s vote comes as residents in South Los Angeles, a region of the city with serious concentrations of poverty, are voicing growing concerns over gentrification and the prospect that pricey new residential projects will spur landlords to hike rents at their own buildings. Plans are already in the works for a 400-unit project next to the District Square site and a major renovation of the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, which is expected to add 900 new homes.
Basically, South-Central Los Angeles ought to be Magic Dirt, due to its superb climate and close commuting distances to vast numbers of jobs downtown, near LAX, Beverly Hills, and at the giant port. For example, two Presidents of the United States once lived in Compton.
But for some reason that can’t quite be spelled out in the newspapers, all this Magic Dirt turned into Tragic Dirt.
Now, some people hope and others fear that the Tragic Dirt might gentrify back into Magic Dirt. For example, Los Angeles has constructed a lot of public transportation infrastructure lately to serve South-Central, which developers are seeing as a plus for people with jobs to which they need to commute.
… Nelson also warned the commissioners that if they voted the project down, they would be violating a state law that requires that cities provide a specific health and safety rationale for rejecting a residential project that complies with local zoning laws.
“The project before you is a textbook example of a project that meets the purposes and the criteria of the Housing Accountability Act,” he said.
… Arman Gabay, one of the project’s developers, was arrested last year on bribery charges in an unrelated case dealing with Los Angeles County government leases.
… The Gabays worked with Garcetti’s office to retool District Square, adding hundreds of residential units. But the reworked proposal drew protests from members of the surrounding community, who complained about its larger size and the potential for it to push rents higher in neighborhoods along Crenshaw.
Gina Fields, who serves on the Empowerment Congress West Area neighborhood council, said her group had pushed for District Square to set aside 45% of its units for low-income households. Appearing before the commission, she said her group is determined to protect residents living in “the last long-standing African American neighborhood in Los Angeles.”
“We do not want our neighbors priced out and displaced,” Fields said.
Rental enhancement/real estate development = immigration/dieversity
Housing, along with labor, is not subject to the law of supply and demand whenever either "immigration" or "affordable housing" is mentioned.
Whenever i hear the words "affordable housing" or especially "affordable housing activist" my brain immediately thinks "scam", "layabout", "racket", "skimming", "political hack", "parasite". And my brain is 100% on target.
The one thing these people never want to do is just ... leave developers alone to build, build, build lots of housing. No, they always and everywhere want to harass them, regulate them, litigate with them, make demands on them ... and of course skim money off of them so that they can continue being useless parasites.
Yet, the only two things that actually increase housing affordability are:
-- stopping immigration -- i.e. reduce demand
and
-- building more housing -- i.e. increase supply.
I can see only one "affordable housing" regulatory push that makes any sense and that is to have developers build more housing at desirable locations. So if say this developer only wanted to put up say 50 luxury units on this prime site near a light rail station, it would be reasonable for "affordable housing" advocates to say "no, this is a prime spot with access to transit, you should build *more" units." Repeat "build more units" continuously all over the city and that would actually improve affordability.
Of course as long as immigration continues ... all this "affordable housing" stuff is useless, like swiming up a waterfall.Replies: @Lot
The last sentence should read “We don’t want our voters priced out and displaced. This thing was voted down because local African-American politicos see gentrification as a threat to their political careers. After all, the foreign types who would likely move into that building would probably not vote for them.
The word I heard was- the final straw which killed the proposal was talk that Maxine Waters was going to move into one of the residential units- and- as Angelinos know- this could only mean one thing: the area really was going to be a really really otherwise non-black.
OT: But there is a lot of iSteve in this.
From the author’s Twitter bio.
She was being presented with an Archeology Research award…
This appears to be the case with this girl, who also happens to be suing Cambridge U for “discrimination.”
Google finds zero references to this supposed “queer” with a girlfriend, and her pictures do not look like any lesbian I’ve ever met. She’s thin, attactive, and has zero visible tats.
If anything, she doesn’t even look the type to make out at a bar with a girl for funzies.
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/320/cpsprodpb/4968/production/_108329781_dani.jpg
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/08/14/13/17269142-7356101-image-a-32_1565785758328.jpgReplies: @Mr McKenna, @YetAnotherAnon, @AnotherDad
https://twitter.com/anthroqveer/status/1197971952788549633
From the author's Twitter bio.She was being presented with an Archeology Research award...Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Lot
It’s funny how Feminism 2019 resembles Victorianism 1869 in terms of how it sees young women as extremely fragile.
Alas, the wide open field of 'sociology on sociologists and anthropologists', despite the intense weirdness of the whole milieu is largely untapped. It's the biggest joke that nobody got. All we have are amateurs watching them on Twitter. It's really quite fascinating, all the little subgroups and tribes, their turns of phrases and diffusion of culture.
One thing I saw when the mini series of campus revolts happened in the US was that they were inspired by the South African university protests (I don't think they would have happened if Twitter hadn't linked black American SJWs to live them vicariously, they did seem to come from nowhere.) who themselves used all the terms and alien vocabulary of American SJWs, an interesting cross-pollination.
I do feel sorry for these young women though, they're just doing what society, their parents, teachers and friends told them was best and don't understand what else they were supposed to do even though it makes a lot of them miserable. The likes of them never start revolutions.Replies: @Redneck farmer
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/47096.Courtesans_and_Fishcakes
might give a few clues to the realities of life in Classical times.
Or not....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eef-1HLKgoQReplies: @Mr McKenna
Whenever I see a name like, say, "Mrs Herbert Lyman" or "Mrs H. H. A. Beach", I think, this is one person you do not want to mess with.
The only way to get truly affordable housing built in big cities is government subsidies. Rents would have to be subsidized too.
Now who’s willing to pay higher taxes for the consequences of decades of high immigration?
Who’s willing to ask that future immigration rates be lowered?
None of the necessary questions are being asked and they will not be asked and even if they were asked, they would not be answered.
I just like how she (And the award granters) didn’t see the joke in that she wasn’t actually engaged in archeological research but sociology. Given her Twitter handle I presume her undergrad degree is actually social anthropology.
Alas, the wide open field of ‘sociology on sociologists and anthropologists’, despite the intense weirdness of the whole milieu is largely untapped. It’s the biggest joke that nobody got. All we have are amateurs watching them on Twitter. It’s really quite fascinating, all the little subgroups and tribes, their turns of phrases and diffusion of culture.
One thing I saw when the mini series of campus revolts happened in the US was that they were inspired by the South African university protests (I don’t think they would have happened if Twitter hadn’t linked black American SJWs to live them vicariously, they did seem to come from nowhere.) who themselves used all the terms and alien vocabulary of American SJWs, an interesting cross-pollination.
I do feel sorry for these young women though, they’re just doing what society, their parents, teachers and friends told them was best and don’t understand what else they were supposed to do even though it makes a lot of them miserable. The likes of them never start revolutions.
” It’s a little bit like saying car companies should only make new cars that are cheap enough for you to pay for them by trading in your old car.”
Well, this is EXACTLY the same as the ban on new machine guns via the Hughes Amendment to the McClure-Volkmer Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1985. And baby, look at those prices NOW!
James Davidson
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/47096.Courtesans_and_Fishcakes
might give a few clues to the realities of life in Classical times.
Alas, the wide open field of 'sociology on sociologists and anthropologists', despite the intense weirdness of the whole milieu is largely untapped. It's the biggest joke that nobody got. All we have are amateurs watching them on Twitter. It's really quite fascinating, all the little subgroups and tribes, their turns of phrases and diffusion of culture.
One thing I saw when the mini series of campus revolts happened in the US was that they were inspired by the South African university protests (I don't think they would have happened if Twitter hadn't linked black American SJWs to live them vicariously, they did seem to come from nowhere.) who themselves used all the terms and alien vocabulary of American SJWs, an interesting cross-pollination.
I do feel sorry for these young women though, they're just doing what society, their parents, teachers and friends told them was best and don't understand what else they were supposed to do even though it makes a lot of them miserable. The likes of them never start revolutions.Replies: @Redneck farmer
No, but many a martyr decided that it was better to die for the cause than listen to their nagging bitch of a wife.
Well, this is EXACTLY the same as the ban on new machine guns via the Hughes Amendment to the McClure-Volkmer Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1985. And baby, look at those prices NOW!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHmaP2GYh4sReplies: @Redneck farmer
Some of us don’t need reminded, Joe. A Sten is worth 8 to 10 times what I paid for one in 1994? M-16s 20 times what the government pays?
[slow fade in picture of a sad frog]Replies: @Redneck farmer
https://twitter.com/anthroqveer/status/1197971952788549633
From the author's Twitter bio.She was being presented with an Archeology Research award...Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Lot
I’ve posted before about how straight white millennial girls call themselves “queer” or “genderfluid” for the wokemon points.
This appears to be the case with this girl, who also happens to be suing Cambridge U for “discrimination.”
Google finds zero references to this supposed “queer” with a girlfriend, and her pictures do not look like any lesbian I’ve ever met. She’s thin, attactive, and has zero visible tats.
If anything, she doesn’t even look the type to make out at a bar with a girl for funzies.
I did get a laugh out of this, though:Were they canvassed? Were they all sitting together? Sure, sounds legit.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
New production top break Webleys are coming, chambered in .357 magnum. They’re going to be seven thousand dollars each.
[slow fade in picture of a sad frog]
This appears to be the case with this girl, who also happens to be suing Cambridge U for “discrimination.”
Google finds zero references to this supposed “queer” with a girlfriend, and her pictures do not look like any lesbian I’ve ever met. She’s thin, attactive, and has zero visible tats.
If anything, she doesn’t even look the type to make out at a bar with a girl for funzies.
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/320/cpsprodpb/4968/production/_108329781_dani.jpg
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/08/14/13/17269142-7356101-image-a-32_1565785758328.jpgReplies: @Mr McKenna, @YetAnotherAnon, @AnotherDad
You think she’s attractive?! She’s all yours, bud.
I did get a laugh out of this, though:
Were they canvassed? Were they all sitting together? Sure, sounds legit.
skin damagetattoos makes a woman attractive by default. Beggars can't be choosers.Though Lot actually wrote attactive, which sounds like a candidate for sexual assault.Now who's willing to pay higher taxes for the consequences of decades of high immigration?
Who's willing to ask that future immigration rates be lowered?
None of the necessary questions are being asked and they will not be asked and even if they were asked, they would not be answered.Replies: @Mr McKenna, @MrLiberty
Yep. Supply and demand don’t exist when it comes to things like housing and immigration.
Building more housing at any price will lower market rates. But that’s not exactly what they want. They want cheap housing–in nice areas–for themselves and their cronies.
This is why ‘affordable units’ in luxury developments are catnip for them. Just a dozen or so! And guess who decides who gets to live in them?
Slightly OT, but it’s worth taking the time to read the full story of the Locol fast food joint, as covered in many longform articles in various media over the years. Two media darling chefs teamed up to open a burger joint in Watts. Hilarity ensued. They hired local workers, i.e. lazy fuck-ups, they had to hire gang-like ex-con security (“greeters”), and they boomeranged from trying to tweak their food to be gourmet (“some shiitake juice for more umami?”) to giving in to fast food junk to juice sales (At one point the New York Times’s food reviewer flew out just to trash the place, giving it a rare rating of zero). When it came time for exapansion, they opened in gentrified areas so the upper crust customers could get a taste of “that Watts place” without having to go there (thankfully the menus completely different). The one good thing about the project was that rather than just talk, the chefs put their money and effort behind it, and not by donating to a charity. They rolled up their sleeves and got to work. So they learned their lesson good and hard.
Two hours ago I read the longform piece "Cooking Lessons" from California Sunday magazine.
Now I want to see it made into a movie.
This is why I read Sailer.Replies: @Anon, @Triumph104
‘It’s funny how Feminism 2019 resembles Victorianism 1869 in terms of how it sees young women as extremely fragile.’
Great minds think alike.
Joan Didion wrote an essay with a similar thesis back around 1970.
…if Steve Sailer and Joan Didion have the same thought, does it become an established truth?
…or maybe you just read Didion’s essay too.
Gentrification is just on the opposite side of the coin as multiculturalism. Where multiculturalism is the bringing in of non-Whites into White areas, gentrification is the reverse. The former is sacred while the latter is bad.
Another difference is that you can openly complain about one, but not the other. Can you imagine a headline that read, “Amid multiculturalism fears, officials kill plan for 577…”?
Gentrification is code for 'Asian Immigration'
Very interesting, is there a link? This is exactly what Steve and/or his commentators proposed back when Stabucks CEO Howard Deutsch was shooting his mouth off about black people. The difference is that Starbucks was smart enough to not try it.
Local officials in King Kong also kept killing all proposals from Mainland China to build affordable housing for the King Kongers. There’s apparently lots of land there which can be used for building, but the local “self-ruling system” is keeping it off the market.
https://www.asiasentinel.com/econ-business/hongkong-rewards-property-oligarchs/
Beijing, in response, “respected local self-rule”, and instead built another 100 cities on the Mainland.
And here we are today.
Difference is, after the riots, Beijing will quietly stop caring about the feelz of King Kong oligarchs, and build the damn housing, and the local Millenials and Zoomers will pipe down and stop pretending this is all about “white man come back to rule us”, and the economic fallout from all this will additionally bring down prices on the island, as much of the economic activity is redirected to “safer” mainland cities with similar infrastructure capabilities.
Ten years from now King Kong will be a vastly more mellow and less hectic place, because it just destroyed its current identity with its own hands. And maybe that’s for the better, in the long run.
Whereas Los Angeles… In this case the way to go is probably leave the cities to the thugs and parasites, and go through with https://www.newcaliforniastate.com/ for normal people to live and work in.
“Light rail”, a pretentious name for overpriced streetcars, is stealth gentrification. It’s like they listened to Paul Weyrich, a rare rightist urban rail supporter. (He had connections in the business.) He pushed trains over buses because white people were willing to ride them. Seriously. And explicitly.
The Twin Cities junked their streetcars in 1954 (they went to Newark, where they lasted another 45 years). Sellers remorse kicked in a half-century later, and a “light rail” line was built from Minneapolis to the airport and the Mall of America. Condos and townhouses popped up along it, but at a moderate rate.
A decade later, St Paul’s line finally appeared. It clogged University Avenue from the namesake to the Capitol, and the capital, about seven miles away. Condos sprouted immediately, along with trendy eateries and breweries, and may take over the entire stretch.
Which was quite run-down. The car dealerships vacated in the ’70s, the warehouses mostly came down in the ’80s. My stepdad said he could hardly believe it was called University. Nobody on about 90% of it looked like they even finished high school.
Ironically, one of the most adamant opponents was the owner of the used bookstore at the half-way point. Whatever the faults of the new line, the functional literacy rate along the avenue went up considerably.
But is it good for the Asians?
https://www.virtualnewarknj.com/memories/newark/bodiantrolley.htm
P.S. Light rail has not had a particularly salutary effect in Baltimore. There's a strong undertow there.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
On a related note, the British Labour Party’s election manifesto, released this week, includes a prominent ‘promise’ committing a future Labour Government to build ‘150,000’ new ‘Council Houses’, (housing project homes), into the foreseeable future.
The fact that the Labour Party is committed to massive uncontrolled immigration – of at least 800,000 per annum – does not seem to logically compute with the Labour Party.
Yes, but also, contrary to the Victorians, modern young womyn kick @ss in both feminism & audio-visual culture. It never occurs to them that these stereotypes, which they think apply to all womyn, cannot be true simultaneously.
Or not….
No, the obvious political solution is to transform desirable places into shit-holes nobody wants to live in, to wit the ongoing San Francisco and Riverside Homeless encampments.
Found it! The story which merges “The Rent’s Too Damn High” with “OK Boomer”
Remind me again? Is there too little housing or too much?
Wait a minute. She writes for the WSJ. We all know what the prescription is for all of society’s ills. The same one the NYT and all other major outlets favor. Repeat after me….I! M! M! I! G! R!
[slow fade in picture of a sad frog]Replies: @Redneck farmer
That’s, that’s the price of some transferrable full-autos!
This appears to be the case with this girl, who also happens to be suing Cambridge U for “discrimination.”
Google finds zero references to this supposed “queer” with a girlfriend, and her pictures do not look like any lesbian I’ve ever met. She’s thin, attactive, and has zero visible tats.
If anything, she doesn’t even look the type to make out at a bar with a girl for funzies.
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/320/cpsprodpb/4968/production/_108329781_dani.jpg
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/08/14/13/17269142-7356101-image-a-32_1565785758328.jpgReplies: @Mr McKenna, @YetAnotherAnon, @AnotherDad
Oh dear. Still, I seem to remember we put 18 year old boys in Lancasters over Germany and into D-Day landing craft. I think a man getting that reaction would be angry, not tearful. But THE TEARS are still a powerful weapon, as noted in Bonfire.
You get young men and women, plus older archaeology “stars”, together on digs in remote places and there’s bound to be some unwanted sexual harassment as well as some wanted sexual harassment. How do you know if your advances are welcome until you make them? But I doubt all archaeologists are like this guy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortimer_Wheeler#Personal_life
Or not....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eef-1HLKgoQReplies: @Mr McKenna
LOL @ her Kryptonite. Almost worth watching the vid for that.
“land of the free” my fucking ass, you have enough bureaucracy to make people want to delete the western hemisphere immediately to free the planet?
What’s so hard about setting up a most basic regulatory plan (outlining basics like building floor amounts, size, width of street and sidewalk) and just letting investors buy lots and building shit?
In reality you get retardation like single-family only parts with no services (if anyone from the american c*ty g*vernment sees this they immediately die violently from the thought of people being able to walk to get groceries or a haircut), or rent controls and other bullshit (albeit condominiums never seem to catch on in western nations, here like 99% of all housing is owner occupied, there’s basically zero cases where a single guy owns an entire apartment building)
So yeah, force owner occupancy to return, actually make human-scaled plans for cities, crush NIMBYism with a hydraulic press (literally, if need be), and the only thing investor should do is send a project to the municipal government or whatever to get construction licence, then arrange the workers.
That is the only way to get actually livable cities – anything that doesn’t conform shouldn’t really even exist
I don’t understand how this conciliates with Rent Control which now it seems it’s a law in all of California. So basically with immigration and blocking of new construction they increase the demand, which in turn increases the market price for rental units, but then they lower artificially the price below the market, with the result that renting become unprofitable for many landlords at the same time that eviction becomes almost impossible.
This page says 1952 was the last year for Newark’s street cars. What gives?
https://www.virtualnewarknj.com/memories/newark/bodiantrolley.htm
P.S. Light rail has not had a particularly salutary effect in Baltimore. There’s a strong undertow there.
I rode them in 1995, unaware of their previous life at the time. They were fun-- cute cars on a cute line. Newark's system, not to be confused with PATH or NJ Transit, runs through the better part of town, up to Branch Brook Park, which is the place to be in the spring if you're a cherry blossom buff.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w0GnnkLhBaI
Not quite Wuppertal-level funky, but among the most memorable of the 30 or so systems I've ridden. Like a pilipina-- short, but entertaining.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lnZIypeMYwQReplies: @Charon
Some furniture designer should come up with modern fainting couches.
Yesterday I never heard of Locol.
Two hours ago I read the longform piece “Cooking Lessons” from California Sunday magazine.
Now I want to see it made into a movie.
This is why I read Sailer.
https://story.californiasunday.com/cooking-lessons
The author is Daniel Duane, one of my favorites, a novelist who pays the bills with longform pieces like this. His surfing memoir, Caught Inside, is very good. His wife is also a writer, and they have managed to write embarrassing pieces about each other without getting a divorce.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/hipster-helper-a-celebrity-chef-opens-a-restaurant-in-watts/
A good developer can build any type of housing anywhere–if they are ready and willing to pay the bribes (to local officials) necessary to make it happen.
The bribes are a cost of doing business and are a part of the cost of housing.
Our cities are third world–bribes “trump” ideology. 😉
I know someone who used to be the Presiding Judge of the LA Superior Court system. The system has about 2.7 million cases per year. Based on this knowledge he decided buying an apartment building with almost 100% African American tenants made sense. The dawning horror of what he had done was amusing to watch.
Another difference is that you can openly complain about one, but not the other. Can you imagine a headline that read, "Amid multiculturalism fears, officials kill plan for 577..."?Replies: @Thoughts
There’s not enough white people for gentrification
Gentrification is code for ‘Asian Immigration’
This appears to be the case with this girl, who also happens to be suing Cambridge U for “discrimination.”
Google finds zero references to this supposed “queer” with a girlfriend, and her pictures do not look like any lesbian I’ve ever met. She’s thin, attactive, and has zero visible tats.
If anything, she doesn’t even look the type to make out at a bar with a girl for funzies.
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/320/cpsprodpb/4968/production/_108329781_dani.jpg
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/08/14/13/17269142-7356101-image-a-32_1565785758328.jpgReplies: @Mr McKenna, @YetAnotherAnon, @AnotherDad
What is she 15? So she’s annoyed with all the “barely legal” aficianados hitting on her?
CU investigated her claim and appears to have just told them both to stay away from each other, a normal response to a he said/she said. She sued saying that isn’t enough.
I agree she could pass for 15, common for short college girls who aren’t fat but have chubby cheeks. (There’s a body shot I couldn’t embed showing she isn’t fat at all).
Along with the obvious connection, both areas induce “liberals” to repeal the law of supply and demand.
Housing, along with labor, is not subject to the law of supply and demand whenever either “immigration” or “affordable housing” is mentioned.
Whenever i hear the words “affordable housing” or especially “affordable housing activist” my brain immediately thinks “scam”, “layabout”, “racket”, “skimming”, “political hack”, “parasite”. And my brain is 100% on target.
The one thing these people never want to do is just … leave developers alone to build, build, build lots of housing. No, they always and everywhere want to harass them, regulate them, litigate with them, make demands on them … and of course skim money off of them so that they can continue being useless parasites.
Yet, the only two things that actually increase housing affordability are:
— stopping immigration — i.e. reduce demand
and
— building more housing — i.e. increase supply.
I can see only one “affordable housing” regulatory push that makes any sense and that is to have developers build more housing at desirable locations. So if say this developer only wanted to put up say 50 luxury units on this prime site near a light rail station, it would be reasonable for “affordable housing” advocates to say “no, this is a prime spot with access to transit, you should build *more” units.” Repeat “build more units” continuously all over the city and that would actually improve affordability.
Of course as long as immigration continues … all this “affordable housing” stuff is useless, like swiming up a waterfall.
Little more complex here. Recently the NIMBYS, mostly white homeowners, have suffered some huge defeats. The state passed a bunch of laws eliminating single family zoning. Every house can now get a “granny flat” and “jr granny flat” without a kitchen. Local rules about parking and garage conversations to restrict this were voided by the new laws.
What happened is a coalition of SJWs, the construction industry, and NAMs outvoted the GOP+White Dem NIMBY coalition.
They also passed a statewide but very weak rent control law with so many holes in it that it might only hit 1% of rentals, primarily in Silicon Valley. Still, an ominous sign of what could pass in 10 years.
The last and most powerful NIMBY tools remain in place: dragging out approvals for years to make dense development uneconomic, and environmental reviews. And if the city illegally says no, add another 3 years at least to litigate before a judge who is a lot more likely to be an upper middle class homeowner than Yglesias type YIMBY.
Still, prices are so high that developers are willing to deal with delays.Replies: @AnotherDad
Victorian women were a tough, pushy lot. Though the eponymous queen was long dead, women brought up in her era pulled off the most impressive political victory in US history, the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment by 46 or 47 states (out of 48), despite not having the vote in two-thirds of those states. (Not to mention the idiocy of elevating matters of statute law to constitutional issues– sorry, Californians and Alabamians, but it must be said.)
Whenever I see a name like, say, “Mrs Herbert Lyman” or “Mrs H. H. A. Beach“, I think, this is one person you do not want to mess with.
As they say, “15 will get you 20!”
I did get a laugh out of this, though:Were they canvassed? Were they all sitting together? Sure, sounds legit.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
These days, not being obese and a lack of visible
skin damagetattoos makes a woman attractive by default. Beggars can’t be choosers.Though Lot actually wrote attactive, which sounds like a candidate for sexual assault.
She’s likely 21 in those photos. Her lawsuit against Cambridge was big news in England.
CU investigated her claim and appears to have just told them both to stay away from each other, a normal response to a he said/she said. She sued saying that isn’t enough.
I agree she could pass for 15, common for short college girls who aren’t fat but have chubby cheeks. (There’s a body shot I couldn’t embed showing she isn’t fat at all).
Housing, along with labor, is not subject to the law of supply and demand whenever either "immigration" or "affordable housing" is mentioned.
Whenever i hear the words "affordable housing" or especially "affordable housing activist" my brain immediately thinks "scam", "layabout", "racket", "skimming", "political hack", "parasite". And my brain is 100% on target.
The one thing these people never want to do is just ... leave developers alone to build, build, build lots of housing. No, they always and everywhere want to harass them, regulate them, litigate with them, make demands on them ... and of course skim money off of them so that they can continue being useless parasites.
Yet, the only two things that actually increase housing affordability are:
-- stopping immigration -- i.e. reduce demand
and
-- building more housing -- i.e. increase supply.
I can see only one "affordable housing" regulatory push that makes any sense and that is to have developers build more housing at desirable locations. So if say this developer only wanted to put up say 50 luxury units on this prime site near a light rail station, it would be reasonable for "affordable housing" advocates to say "no, this is a prime spot with access to transit, you should build *more" units." Repeat "build more units" continuously all over the city and that would actually improve affordability.
Of course as long as immigration continues ... all this "affordable housing" stuff is useless, like swiming up a waterfall.Replies: @Lot
“ The one thing these people never want to do is just … leave developers alone to build, build, build lots of housing.”
Little more complex here. Recently the NIMBYS, mostly white homeowners, have suffered some huge defeats. The state passed a bunch of laws eliminating single family zoning. Every house can now get a “granny flat” and “jr granny flat” without a kitchen. Local rules about parking and garage conversations to restrict this were voided by the new laws.
What happened is a coalition of SJWs, the construction industry, and NAMs outvoted the GOP+White Dem NIMBY coalition.
They also passed a statewide but very weak rent control law with so many holes in it that it might only hit 1% of rentals, primarily in Silicon Valley. Still, an ominous sign of what could pass in 10 years.
The last and most powerful NIMBY tools remain in place: dragging out approvals for years to make dense development uneconomic, and environmental reviews. And if the city illegally says no, add another 3 years at least to litigate before a judge who is a lot more likely to be an upper middle class homeowner than Yglesias type YIMBY.
Still, prices are so high that developers are willing to deal with delays.
People most certainly *should* be able to protect their neighborhoods--and much else. Voluntary association. If i choose a nice single family neighborhood, i certainly don't want to live around a bunch of Asians chopping up houses and making them apartments.
I'm just pointing out that the if you actually want "affordable housing", that means supply keeping up with and ideally surpassing demand. Econ 101.
The way you square that circle is the biggest voluntary association of all--a nation.
Once you have a nation--i.e. a closed border--these issues resolve fairly easily. Even in racially diverse America. We were fortunate to have plenty of space for various people wanting to live differently and separately from each other to do so. But we've been pissing it away.
Close the border, end the endless demand and we'll have affordable housing--of various types, of various ethnic makeups--without endless contention or living on top of each other stacked up like cordwood.Replies: @Lot, @Art Deco
Little more complex here. Recently the NIMBYS, mostly white homeowners, have suffered some huge defeats. The state passed a bunch of laws eliminating single family zoning. Every house can now get a “granny flat” and “jr granny flat” without a kitchen. Local rules about parking and garage conversations to restrict this were voided by the new laws.
What happened is a coalition of SJWs, the construction industry, and NAMs outvoted the GOP+White Dem NIMBY coalition.
They also passed a statewide but very weak rent control law with so many holes in it that it might only hit 1% of rentals, primarily in Silicon Valley. Still, an ominous sign of what could pass in 10 years.
The last and most powerful NIMBY tools remain in place: dragging out approvals for years to make dense development uneconomic, and environmental reviews. And if the city illegally says no, add another 3 years at least to litigate before a judge who is a lot more likely to be an upper middle class homeowner than Yglesias type YIMBY.
Still, prices are so high that developers are willing to deal with delays.Replies: @AnotherDad
Just to be clear i’m all for the NIMBYs. I “get” NIMBY.
People most certainly *should* be able to protect their neighborhoods–and much else. Voluntary association. If i choose a nice single family neighborhood, i certainly don’t want to live around a bunch of Asians chopping up houses and making them apartments.
I’m just pointing out that the if you actually want “affordable housing”, that means supply keeping up with and ideally surpassing demand. Econ 101.
The way you square that circle is the biggest voluntary association of all–a nation.
Once you have a nation–i.e. a closed border–these issues resolve fairly easily. Even in racially diverse America. We were fortunate to have plenty of space for various people wanting to live differently and separately from each other to do so. But we’ve been pissing it away.
Close the border, end the endless demand and we’ll have affordable housing–of various types, of various ethnic makeups–without endless contention or living on top of each other stacked up like cordwood.
I am also closer to the NIMBY side. I definitely don’t want halfass garage conversations to take over the suburbs.
However, a single family enclave near an expensive subway station and highway ramps is an example of where I make an exception. Sometimes people have to move for the sake of the rest of the area. If a subway stop opened next to my house and made my plot of land worth many millions, I don’t have a right to complain about my next door neighbor building an apartment complex. There are benefits and compromises you have to make living in a giant urban area.
Now who's willing to pay higher taxes for the consequences of decades of high immigration?
Who's willing to ask that future immigration rates be lowered?
None of the necessary questions are being asked and they will not be asked and even if they were asked, they would not be answered.Replies: @Mr McKenna, @MrLiberty
Since when is anyone asked if they would be willing to pay higher taxes??
Found this.
People most certainly *should* be able to protect their neighborhoods--and much else. Voluntary association. If i choose a nice single family neighborhood, i certainly don't want to live around a bunch of Asians chopping up houses and making them apartments.
I'm just pointing out that the if you actually want "affordable housing", that means supply keeping up with and ideally surpassing demand. Econ 101.
The way you square that circle is the biggest voluntary association of all--a nation.
Once you have a nation--i.e. a closed border--these issues resolve fairly easily. Even in racially diverse America. We were fortunate to have plenty of space for various people wanting to live differently and separately from each other to do so. But we've been pissing it away.
Close the border, end the endless demand and we'll have affordable housing--of various types, of various ethnic makeups--without endless contention or living on top of each other stacked up like cordwood.Replies: @Lot, @Art Deco
“ If i choose a nice single family neighborhood, i certainly don’t want to live around a bunch of Asians chopping up houses and making them apartments.”
I am also closer to the NIMBY side. I definitely don’t want halfass garage conversations to take over the suburbs.
However, a single family enclave near an expensive subway station and highway ramps is an example of where I make an exception. Sometimes people have to move for the sake of the rest of the area. If a subway stop opened next to my house and made my plot of land worth many millions, I don’t have a right to complain about my next door neighbor building an apartment complex. There are benefits and compromises you have to make living in a giant urban area.
Well, that. He may, though, take his own contention quite seriously. He’s been in political office and political staff jobs for 30-odd years and doesn’t admit of any employment history prior to that. He has a degree from a wretched HBCU in Pennsylvania.
People most certainly *should* be able to protect their neighborhoods--and much else. Voluntary association. If i choose a nice single family neighborhood, i certainly don't want to live around a bunch of Asians chopping up houses and making them apartments.
I'm just pointing out that the if you actually want "affordable housing", that means supply keeping up with and ideally surpassing demand. Econ 101.
The way you square that circle is the biggest voluntary association of all--a nation.
Once you have a nation--i.e. a closed border--these issues resolve fairly easily. Even in racially diverse America. We were fortunate to have plenty of space for various people wanting to live differently and separately from each other to do so. But we've been pissing it away.
Close the border, end the endless demand and we'll have affordable housing--of various types, of various ethnic makeups--without endless contention or living on top of each other stacked up like cordwood.Replies: @Lot, @Art Deco
No, you’ll have reduced demand, which will have some effect. What you’re seeing in this story isn’t derived from an immigration problem, but from cockeyed land-use regulations.
When immigration is unconstrained, building new homes will not decrease rents – it will simply draw in more people.
https://www.virtualnewarknj.com/memories/newark/bodiantrolley.htm
P.S. Light rail has not had a particularly salutary effect in Baltimore. There's a strong undertow there.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
What gives is that Newark used the PCC trolleys they purchased from Minnesota in their subway, not on the street. Those were finally replaced around the turn of the century. Perhaps they’re in Africa now– that was the fate of some of my Coast Guard vessels. Newark has gone light-rail, too, but at least they use the old tracks.
I rode them in 1995, unaware of their previous life at the time. They were fun– cute cars on a cute line. Newark’s system, not to be confused with PATH or NJ Transit, runs through the better part of town, up to Branch Brook Park, which is the place to be in the spring if you’re a cherry blossom buff.
Not quite Wuppertal-level funky, but among the most memorable of the 30 or so systems I’ve ridden. Like a pilipina— short, but entertaining.
Two hours ago I read the longform piece "Cooking Lessons" from California Sunday magazine.
Now I want to see it made into a movie.
This is why I read Sailer.Replies: @Anon, @Triumph104
That is one Locol article I haven’t read. Sending it to my Kindle right now. Thanks!
https://story.californiasunday.com/cooking-lessons
The author is Daniel Duane, one of my favorites, a novelist who pays the bills with longform pieces like this. His surfing memoir, Caught Inside, is very good. His wife is also a writer, and they have managed to write embarrassing pieces about each other without getting a divorce.
a last-minute offer from the developers to charge below-market rents at 63 apartments inside their project.
The “below-market” priced units always wind up going to folks who are politically connected.
I rode them in 1995, unaware of their previous life at the time. They were fun-- cute cars on a cute line. Newark's system, not to be confused with PATH or NJ Transit, runs through the better part of town, up to Branch Brook Park, which is the place to be in the spring if you're a cherry blossom buff.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w0GnnkLhBaI
Not quite Wuppertal-level funky, but among the most memorable of the 30 or so systems I've ridden. Like a pilipina-- short, but entertaining.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lnZIypeMYwQReplies: @Charon
That is so cool! And not a little sad, like most views of the cities we once had.
So much was done with the best of intentions, but then most of our cities became wrecked.
How many of the countless billions thrown down the drain goes on the Reparations tab?
LA Has More Vacant Homes Than Homeless People, Report Finds
https://laist.com/2019/11/20/los-angeles-housing-vacancy-homeless.php
Two hours ago I read the longform piece "Cooking Lessons" from California Sunday magazine.
Now I want to see it made into a movie.
This is why I read Sailer.Replies: @Anon, @Triumph104
Steve wrote about the “Cooking Lessons” article in 2017.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/hipster-helper-a-celebrity-chef-opens-a-restaurant-in-watts/
No, the people are drawn in because they have relatives in the area and there aren’t effective impediments to them being there.