RTFA! But value added, because the comments on the NYT website are quite good.
2 is right. I don't know if Breezy Point was still a literally restricted community, but it was as recently as the late seventies -- a friend of my grandmother's had a house there, and complained that her boyfriend couldn't buy because he was Jewish. Bulldoze them and replace it with sand dunes, I say.
Unless you meant bulldoze the houses, not the Jews.
The problem I have with bulldozing is that these people are paying taxes. In fact, they're paying taxes and then also paying for their own police, fire, street sweeping, etc., while living at fairly low incomes for NYC (62K and 83K medians). They are fucking racists who should be forced to allow access to beaches and streets. But it's not like they're Galtian superheroes living on abandoned aircraft carriers in the sea and then begging for FEMA to rescue them.
So is this the fount of our daily ire or do we get to mix it up a little?
2 is right.
On what grounds? I'm persuadable, but AWB seems to make an important point: they're playing by the rules. Given that, I can't help but feel like you and will are just the mirror-image twins of the racists* who were happy to see New Orleans drown because the people living there weren't real Americans anyway.
* Like sifu tweety.
AWB is right. They may be horrible, but so are a bunch of people collecting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, AFDC recipients, and on and on.
1: You don't know how many hours this post may have been languishing, ignored! RTFFP.
Separate issues, I think:
Should gated communities be eligible for government help in rebuilding? (If so, should public investment be conditioned on future public access?)
and
For any community receiving public money, should the government restrict rebuilding to areas that aren't likely to get hit again and again?
My question is: there is a process by which people can get help if their private property is demolished and their insurance is insufficient. (People get placed in FEMA trailers, etc.) Can that avenue be used for private communities?
They've been refusing city services to avoid things like building codes (which is why all the houses on Breezy Point burned). If they want the law to apply, they can't rebuild in anything like the same way.
Have your cute little beachfront community with no building codes or minorities, but you shouldn't be able to change your mind and make other people pay for it in retrospect.
If it's unobjectionable that the government helps people rebuild their own private homes and private businesses, I don't know why it would be objectionable for them to help people rebuild their own private communities. It's not like public assistance is limited to restoring public assets.
They've been refusing city services to avoid things like building codes
This seems like a problem entirely apart from any potential disaster relief.
make other people pay for it
They've consistently paid taxes for everything, right?
16: not for the roads/services they supplied themselves presumably.
17: "The residents of gated communities pay all the same taxes -- sewer, water and property -- that any city property owner does, in addition to their private association charges. "
So, yeah, I mean, fuck gated communities in general, BUT they pay all the same taxes as anyone else, *plus* association charges. So far their analogy (theirs! theirs!) to a co-op that is horizontal rather than vertical isn't terribly wrong.*
The "make other people pay for it" is certainly wrong, if not gross (sounding, as it does, like the typical "why should I have to pay for their X" sort of response that everyone here except Shearer rightly condemns).
*Co-ops certainly never exclude people, though.
Not much about insurance in the NYT story. I'll be happy to rush to infer that these communities underinsured their most expensive risks to save money, either in ignorance of their vulnerabilities or the expectation that Uncle Sugar would step in if things ever got out of hand.
I know something about Breezy Point, not the other one. And I think 'they pay all the same taxes' is non-false, but not really true -- that they have assessments reflecting that there aren't streets or sewers. So, yes, they pay the taxes they're charged, but they aren't charged much.
But the building code thing is what gets me. Because of their weirdass-off-the-grid status, which they maintain because they want to exclude people, they don't have to observe the building code. And then in a natural disaster, all their houses burn down. My heart fails to bleed.
My doctor has me on a baby aspirin a day so I bleed a little easier than I did before.
21.2: I have no problem at all with other people paying for the repair of their streets, etc., as long as it's through disaster assistance programs that are designed to address the reconstruction of private property. I'd have a problem with the City paying for it out of its capital budget.
22: To some extent that's true of many more people.
26: Grumble sigh grumble mutter mutter grumble.
I just poked around in court cases involving Sea Gate and Breezy Point, and that was a very entertaining hour's read. One of my favorites was 1938's Sea Gate Assoc. v. Sea Gate Tenants' Assoc. The former is suing the latter for picketing in response to the decision to close the beaches and demand $2 more for access. (Picketing is conveniently against the SGA rules.) NY court tells tenants to suck it; if you sign a contract to live in a segregated tyrannical hellscape that doesn't allow picketing, you don't get to picket.
I was a little intemperate above (I was waiting four hours for the same #$&$@!!! pro se plaintiff to show up in court), and I also may be a couple of decades out of date, but part of my thinking in saying 'screw them' to Breezy Point is that to the best of my knowledge, very few people actually live there. At least when I knew people there, they were all summer cottages where people didn't stay over the winter. (I wonder if the apparently low average incomes are explained by a lot of retiree owners?)
A friend of mine is from Forest Hills Gardens. I knew that it was privately maintained, but it didn't seem gated. It was easy enough to go anywhere I wanted on foot. I don't know who they're trying to keep out.
8
On what grounds? I'm persuadable, but AWB seems to make an important point: they're playing by the rules. Given that, I can't help but feel like you and will are just the mirror-image twins of the racists* who were happy to see New Orleans drown because the people living there weren't real Americans anyway.
It is not sensible for the government to subsidize construction (or reconstruction) in places that are prone to natural disasters.
I'm having a hard time evaluating this because it's not clear to me what they're asking for. The article repeatedly uses the word "assistance" but never explicitly says what program they are requesting funds from. If it's some kind of ad hoc insurance for private property damaged in the hurricane, I don't see why private roads should be specifically excluded. OTOH, if they just want a Calvinball exception to treat their private roads as public for the purpose of rebuilding, that's obviously ridiculous.
I will wade into the `should we rebuild, insure, or protect places vulnerable to disasters?' quandary. We could start by figuring out how much we expect it to cost -- of course, those figures require discussing climate change, which is off the legislative docket in at least one state and was mysteriously missing in the Presidential debates. Grrr.
Maybe Swiss Re will build Skynet to save us all. I'm dashed if I see who else could.
I am also very good at writing reasonable quantities of bullshit , so when can I have Matt Yglesias's job?
That's actually one of the least bullshitty Yglesias pieces I've read recently. The part about taxes is totally true. The rest is admittedly his usual handwavey Econ 101 stuff.
33: In Alaska, where climate change is a pressing and immediate issue for many communities, the state has done a fair amount of work on adaptation planning (though political momentum for these programs seems to have stalled in the past couple years). For the most vulnerable communities the preferred approach has generally been community relocation, and three communities have already begun the process of making specific relocation plans. That's hugely expensive, of course, and finding the funding to do it has been a challenge, so those plans haven't actually progressed very far yet.
Single-night or even 1-2 week sublets on craigslist are almost never as cheap as monthly or multi-month rentals.
35
My problem was that it was all so obvious. Who wonders why hotel rooms cost more than apartment rentals. Maybe the same people who wonder why restaurant food costs more than a meal with the same ingredients prepared at home? The tax stuff is certainly true, but I didn't think it was anything people didn't already know.