Are developers generally assholes?
Yes.
The developer who owns my apartment complex is Michelle Malkin's husband, so I'm going with yes.
On the plus side the city I live in was really good about creating livable areas around the Metro stop I live near. There is high density apartment and condo blocks, with lots of nice retail space at street level. It's walkable and well lit at night. I assume the developers are assholes being kept on a short leash by my elected representatives.
There was some scandal re: turning over post offices. No time to find a link, but it's something like a woman on the committee that decides where to locate POs (overseeing consolidation) has a developer husband who specializes in shuttered post offices. Convenient!
U.S. Senator Feinstein. Not sure what her role is, but very squirrelly.
Having once spent significant time in Heebieville*, I was really stunned to discover the sheer population growth since we left the area almost a decade ago. I'd imagine everybody is pretty much building everything they can to keep up with apparent demand.
* I lived north of it, but commuted there daily and actually gained a greater affection for Heebieville than North. I worked below that old-school water tower where they have that train demo, if you know where that is.
3 is right. Most developers never met a plot of land they wouldn't rape, but it's really up to the local government to keep them in line. This is where those interminable, boring, apparently pointless local council meetings really matter.
I always wanted a regulation forcing developers to live in the house they built closest to the flood source.
Developers who sell as soon as they can are all assjokes. Those who build to manage are necessarily megalomaniacs, but not so completely destructive. Usually.
The political and physical destruction of the Postal Service is frothibgly, frighteningly, empire-eating-its-entrails insane.
8: also, there should be some 20-year forced buyback option, possibly for $0, to hand back legal liabilities. The Hammurabi Code would sell them into slavery to recoup damages!
On the happy adaptive-reuse hand, it delights me that the T comes up actually in the Old State House.
6: No kidding! We might have actually overlapped here - I moved here in '06.
The water tower near campus? I'm not sure where the train demo is.
The sidebar is giving me Steve Ballmer flashbacks.
This is where those interminable, boring, apparently pointless local council meetings really matter.
Jammies follows the city council much more closely than I do - we know who has voted for and against the worst of these apartment complexes - but we've got some major shitheads on there. (Probably time to start joining forces with those who work to get better people on there.)
They're probably just lesser shitheads, but it's still important.
Those who build to manage are necessarily megalomaniacs, but not so completely destructive. Usually.
You can be evil without being (unusually) destructive. See, for instance, the developers of Qatar's World Cup stadia.
Or for that matter any development pretty much anywhere in the Gulf.
4 -- Blum (DiFi's husband) is on the margins of (but still mysteriously untainted by) tons of extremely shady stuff that has led to federal prosecutions, of which selling off the post offices is but one small example, and the fact that he hasn't been indicted yet for a large number of possible reasons comes as a surprise to those who know more than I do. Also apparently the couple hate each other but stay together because he's extremely rich and she's extremely a Senator.
I know some non-horrible developers. But, they're developing high end single family houses in urban neighborhoods (i.e subdividing lots, etc.).
My guess, though, is that developers in heebieville are of a particularly awful sort, not the least because of the state they are in, and the, I think, virtual lack of regulation of property development there.
Developers *will* cut down all the truffula trees, if you don't have laws stopping them.
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Feel like a bit of a dick because I didn't tip the two guys who came to deliver my 5 boxes of books/DVDs/CDs I shipped from the states. I'd planned on giving them 2.5x as much but they were 3 hours late and I had to make a bunch of phone calls to make sure they were coming. Not to mention that I was already pissed at the company for that dude who made me go back there this morning because he forgot to ask me to sign some paper (and saying that I was the one who forgot). Also I paid up front so it wasn't supposed to cost me any extra. But it did. 2.5 x the amount I was told yesterday (funny how that worked out). Of course this wasn't the deliverers fault. And all said and done I'd probably use them and the NY shippers going back because at least it got here intact.
Shorter me. I feel like a dick.
But at least I scored an HDMI cable today and now I'm going to stream (illegally in all likelihood) Orphan Black from my laptop to my HDTV and eat some chocolate HR gave me on my first day. Go me.
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19 Oops:
I didn't tip the two guys who came to deliver my 5 boxes of books/DVDs/CDs I shipped from the states. s/b
I didn't tip the two guys who came to deliver my 5 boxes of books/DVDs/CDs I shipped from the states as much as I was planning to.
20 last. I'm not that much of a dick.
20: So, you did tip them, but not as much as you planned? In that case, you're absolved. You can stop feeling guilty.
As long as you're doing better that FIFA.
It's like I gave them $5 for both of them to split instead of the $20 I was planning to. I'm not sure if my math works there with my comment in 19. They looked visibly disappointed.
I also scored a free region-free DVD player from a cow-orker so I may just decided to start binge watching I, Claudius instead.
Apparently, I can't tell Ian Holm from Derek Jacobi.
26: Derek Jacobi is the one with the stutter.
At least they have different names, unlike Bill Paxton/Pullman.
This, of course, is the flipped to all those, "Why do asshole NIMBYs keep SF from being built more densely?" conversations. NIMBYs, more often than not, are fighting asshole developers. Sometimes the asshole developers would be a net benefit to the city and those who would live there, but they're still assholes, and without NIMBYism, pretty much nothing good would ever get built anywhere.
I'd add that modern finance doesn't help either. The least assholish developers tend to be either A. self-financing, which means they're probably rich assholes, but at least they get to set the ROI instead of some jackhole at Goldman Sacks who'd gladly see Heebietown drown in exchange for another 0.01% over 15 years, or B. orgs focused on getting public-associated financing*, because those all come with lots of strings, and so you only get into that biz if you're not a mendacious asshole (some of them are still assholes, of course). But generally speaking, when a developer says they can't do X because it's not in the budget, that's because outside financiers have set the terms, and they obviously don't believe in the common good, but also don't understand basic concepts like "better quality means better value". These are the same morons who've undervalued Apple for 15 years because they can't accept that well-made objects that appeal to large audiences at a premium price can be a successful business model.
*a whole array of things like historic tax credits, Housing Finance Agencies, etc.; not so much public funding as public-backed bonds or tax credits
What kills me is that so much of responsibility for community planing and urban design has been ceded to developers, who's primary motivation is to make a lot of dollars, rather than to create sustainable places that will be nice to live in for decades to come.
Like, National Harbor was in a prime spot, that could have actually been built as a nice community, with good transit, and a dense population center hosting people with a broad range of income, and potentially a thriving ecosystem for small business development. Instead, they handed it all over to one developer and got Opryland on the Potomac.
One of the big underlying issues is that many (most?) local governments have come to view their explicit role as being facilitation of development; they don't see serving the desires of constituents, let alone protecting the common good, as being at all relevant.
Now, of course, this has always been an aspect of American local governance, but I think that a lot of forces in modern America have conspired (a word not chosen lightly) to exacerbate the tendency: less accountability among elected officials; deindustrialization; anti-tax mania; valorization of capital(ists); inequality. There are probably more. But the striking thing that I see as someone who's been on a design review committee, dealing with developers, is that it's hard to get the gatekeepers to understand that the only way to get decent development is through a stance that is, if not adversarial, at least skeptical, towards developers. They either want to roll over for whatever the developers want, or to stop asking for more as soon as the developer pushes back.
But the thing is, the developer isn't coming to the table as a favor to the community*; he needs the community, or he doesn't have a project. But officials are like people dating with low self esteem: they're so convinced that they don't deserve love, they'll accept it on any terms.
*obviously this is complicated in/by towns that are, in fact, down and out, as I know first hand. But you can't develop your way out of depression through shitty housing and low grade retail; if you forced an official to explain how it would work, they couldn't, but they're so brainwashed that they'll just mutter shibboleths about "job creation"
JRoth, community "charette" meetings in Seattle often get people saying, approximately, "This looks like the last dozen bumpout collections, why don't you try something like the 1930s simple boxes that most neighborhoods already gave and like?" And the PR response is generally "If we tried to it wouldn't come out right anyway." Can you guess what the actual problem is? I wonder about ADA, though some 1930s buildings had wide doors and elevators already. Parking? Cost of any decorative detail whatsoever? Fashion among developers?
Speaking of developers, I wonder what they will do with the abandoned VA site up Highland. On the one hand, it's several hundred acres with perfect views and good access to lots of nice places. On the other hand, it's right next to juvie hall and there must be a ton of ghosts (former mental hospital and TB sanitarium). Plus the road up there in winter kind of blows.
We have enough of the not-haunted variety of retirement housing.
But if you try to improve things with a simple rule, like retired people over 70 can't be in the grocery store from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm on work days, suddenly you're the asshole.
34: Could you point me to some images? I'm not sure exactly what you're describing on either count (never been to Seattle).
But without looking, I'd speculate that it's about materials: a lot of the richness of prewar buildings is in skillfully applied materials, some of which are no longer available at any reasonable price, others of which require prohibitively expensive labor, and much of which only works in revivalist styles, which are hard to get right unless you're steeped in them. On that last bit, the point is that there's a lot of proportional stuff in those old buildings that we don't really know how to do anymore. As someone who lives in an old neighborhood and works on mostly old buildings, I can always spot well done new houses in old styles; they stand out starkly from their lower quality brethren. Some of it is $$, but it's mostly skill. And there are issues with modern needs that aren't super-well suited to old house designs (ductwork, garages, many bathrooms, giant TVs).
Opryland on the Potomac
Holy shit, you weren't kidding. Is this really what it looks like inside? That's...well, really stupid looking.
Is this really what it looks like inside? That's...well, really stupid looking.
It is. I've been to a conference there. The best thing that can be said for it is that the posh restaurant does an OK steak (at a price). The rest is a nightmare.
The big trend here is developers demolishing functional (and sometimes grand and historic) houses and replacing them with two or three new ones on the same lot, generally way out of scale for the neighborhood. This happens in a lot of places, to some extent, but here it's very widespread. To add insult to injury, they typically salvage nothing, just taking places down with backhoes, and the pat response to protest is that they're doing the city a favor. Yes, they are assholes.
What about the people buying these buildings from the developers? Are they idiots? Or are they making money by finding an even bigger sucker? Or are they just low-information buyers and this process is parasitic on a bunch of much more beneficial deals going on elsewhere?
44: apartment and condo dwellers don't have a lot of choice, what with not having enormous capital. Condo buyers are often suckered when buildings fail the year after the warranty expires. I don't understand what people buying off center palladian windows and glued-on stone arches in executive developments expect, long-term.
JRoth, I daydream about making a building with brick and salt-tile proportions out of Corten and ? CAM polypro?. We haven't actually forgotten math.
Salt-tile?
It's not that we've forgotten math, it's that the building industry is no longer set up to create classically proportioned houses. The clearest example is that windows morphed from 2:1 to 3:2, and while you can, of course, purchase 2:1 windows, they're not the most commonly available. It's very difficult to get doors that don't suck (idiot 6 panels for interiors, hideous fanlights or those stupid elliptical glass ones for fronts). Gutters and downspouts are undersized, casework is woefully undersized, etc. So architects need to really work to get things right. By contrast, if you ever look at old blueprints, it's really striking how much is essentially left to the discretion of the builder, because it was understood by both architect and builder what sorts of products would be available and which would be appropriate.
46 -- wouldn't what they did in old blueprints be easier now, since we have more standardization? I'm speaking from ignorance here, but I do know from deep experience that trying to find and replace non-standard parts, especially for fixtures, is one of the most maddening parts of having an old house. "Oh, you need a new washer for the bottom of the faucet handle for your bizarre old fashioned non-standard size? Look through this big box and see if you can find one that fits."
You can find a guy to machine a washer. Or make one out of duct tape.
In Soviet Russia, machine washers YOU!
I'm of mixed feelings. On one hand I'm used to the "developers are assholes" mentality. On the other hand I live in a nice bike- and transit-accessible neighborhood that's juuuuuust too low-density to have its own coffeeshop. If someone would tear down ten or fifteen (cheap, soulless, 1960s, expensive) ranch houses and replace them with 30 or 40 (soulless) moderate-income apartments or condos, it'd make the neighborhood a better place.
But that's an argument about development (and zoning), not developers. I think everyone agrees that development can be responsible, but developers, left to their own devices, will rarely be.
51: Right, like JRoth said, the issue is really about public policy. Developers are sort of just a force of nature, and the role of local government is to channel that force into the sorts of development that the community wants. And way too many local government officials don't really see it that way, and just see their choice as to either let developers do whatever they want or not let them do anything.
11: Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's the one. The train demo is in the same lot as the water tower.
Somewhat related to the OP, but the water tower actually made the owner of the business park a mint. Basically, it was a legacy free-standing structure that regulations won't allow to be constructed anymore. So it basically became on outlet for all sorts of radio beacons and the like. Whatever needed to be up high. I guess like for cell signals or something. Whatever the case, it was extremely wired up and I'm told it made the owner a mint.
I was there from 2006-07, until we temporarily relocated to Sh1pr0ck, N3w Mex1c0, where I believe someone else around here lived in or around. We were only there for six months. I've lived in seven places in the last dozen years. So tired of moving.
we temporarily relocated to Sh1pr0ck, N3w Mex1c0, where I believe someone else around here lived in or around
For certain values of "around," I guess, assuming we're thinking of the same person (not me).
On a related note, I was in a meeting today with a prominent Navajo who at one point described Tuba City as "very remote." (Some of the Alaskans in the room [not me] pushed back a bit on that.)
If you have a city of tubas, you really want it to be remote.
My best friend in college played tuba in the marching band. I always felt like I should send him a postcard or something from Tuba City, but I never did.
I'm imagining it as one of those huge Soviet one-industry towns they used to build in the Urals, like Azbest or Magnitogorsk.
We went to Boatstone a few times, but it was a pretty good way from us. I was going to roll my eyes at Alaskans and their remoteness Olympics, but then I hear about Alaskans who live 50 or 100 miles from the nearest road (and I bet it gets more remote than that, ok?) and I think, ok, there's a whole other scale of remoteness that Alaskans get to claim. Places in NM are remote for the lower 48, which can be remote enough to substantially affect your life, but they aren't Alaska remote.
45 makes the development sound like maybe a terrible waste of potential, but not obviously net bad, since without increased development the people who have little choice might well have none.
It's really stupid how rare it is in high-rent major urban areas to see a managed pro-growth approach.
Thoughtful people should really get more involved in local government. Less 'taining' than the infotainment that passes for our national political discussion, way more consequential on people's lives per given unit of our personal effort.
Maybe I'll join the 14th Ward Independent Democrats Club. I'm sort of afraid they'll want me to do work. Also that they might put two and two together and figure out who has been leaving asshole comments signed with 'MH' on local politics blogs.
|| Have many people done the AirBNB thing? What sort of closet space should be provided? Air mattresses on the floor -- ok? |>
64 Most likely, they'll try to get you to run for something. I got talked into running for an officer position this term (2 yrs) in the county party organization -- the lowest possible rung (alternate delegate to the state convention) -- but it means I'm on the executive board, and so I have to form an opinion on everything.
45 makes the development sound like maybe a terrible waste of potential, but not obviously net bad, since without increased development the people who have little choice might well have none.
The terrible waste of potential is a serious net bad. You've got very poor families now living in shitty apartments intended for party-animal college students, with an indifferent management company that is going to let it slowly drift in to disrepair. In contrast, you could have a well-planned apartment complex with a nice playground in the middle instead of sprawling parking lots separating the buildings.
People who aren't lawyers get that sort of request less often. Also, it's basically a one-party system here. I think you have to pay some dues before you even get deputy assistant block chair. Also, regular Dems tend to think the Independent Dems are elitist yuppy assholes.
Which, because of where I live and what I do, the regular Dems are going to think of me regardless.
There is a section of town which I think of as College Student Hell - as in, I pity the fools - which is maybe 10-15 sprawling ginormous gated apartment complexes. As in, each complex may have 15 buildings with, I don't know, 20 apartments each? Massive amounts of parking lots and 2-3 story sprawling buildings for miles and miles, unbroken. It's the most depressing thing.
70: You just described like 30% of American housing.
Air mattresses on the floor -- ok?
That would be very thoughtful. Then the "XXX Freakfest" organizers won't have to bring their own.
67 reminds me that I'm excited about the Scholar House being built across town for low-income single parents who are going to school, although I have no idea why they decided to make so many two-bedroom units and so few three-bedroom ones.
71: I suppose so. It's not the massive apartment complex itself that I find unbearable, so much as the endless adjacent string of them forming a quilt over such a gigantic swath of land.
65- We've done one rental and have another lined up, made $1100 with another $800 next week. First one was no problem.
We have a 5 rooms:
Queen standard bed
Double futon mattress on floor, plus single mattress on floor in loft
Single mattress on floor
Single mattress on floor
Standard toddler bed plus an inflatable double bed available on floor
Every place I've ever lived except Pittsburgh and my very small home town has had that. And I assume Pittsburgh has them all over the suburbs.
I mean, Austin and Ann Arbor and Gainesville all have them, but I can't think of any spot in any of those towns where there are so many of them in a single unbroken swath. No gas station, no grocery store, no nothing. Maybe I should google maps this and estimate the square mileage of the area I'm describing.
Looking at the map, it's probably only about a full square mile, maybe a square 1 1/2 miles. The road winds through it, though, and somehow it seems worse than what I see elsewhere, insofar as it was all built simultaneously, probably in the last 15-20 years, and has absolutely nothing - not a blade of grass - breaking it up.
That would be depressing. Usually they have some landscaping.
I think I've found it, if heebieville is where I think it is, and that looks unlivable. Definitely developed without any thought of making it into a community, although if it's mostly college students that probably doesn't matter.
It's right along the river that just flooded, if that matches what you're looking at. The entirety flooded. Tons of the kids at xfit lost their cars.
Yeah, between the river and the highway, and extending just as far on the other side. Woo, putting dense housing on floodplains. Privilege is being well off enough to live on a watershed boundary.
Heebie, please look in the Circumcision thread...
OP.1: Usually yes, especially if they're from out of state. They're not tied to the community, so it's all about profit.
52: Nicely said. JRoth has been 100% the way I've experienced these things, both working on the design side and the city review side.
63: I wish meetings weren't interminable. A city council meeting is long, boring, and way too prone to being hijacked by crazy people with a bug about something. As much as I'd like for my city to improve, a night every week of high maintenance people for 4+ hours would drive me insane. (Though, clicking over to the council site, it looks like they just approved 2 minute speaking limits, for an 8 minute total per speaker per night. That sounds much more manageable.)
84.last: The thing that ex-bureaucrat AB most appreciated about Parks & Rec was the depiction of public meetings, in which the citizens were consistently angry, ignorant, and insane.
figure out who has been leaving asshole comments signed with 'MH' on local politics blogs.
They won't think that if you sign up as Wry Cooter.
I've been meaning to be more active in local stuff. Is there any point in going to public local government meetings?
Maybe you could start out small by watching the meeting on TV while drunk.
Tons of the kids at xfit lost their cars.
They had to burpee the whole way to the gym.
87: I'm dubious about Council, but developer-related stuff is definitely responsive to public attention/input. The way to have the most impact, I'd argue, is to get involved with a local neighborhood group, because they effectively amplify your lone voice. If you just show up at Zoning or Planning hearings, you won't be very informed going in, and Zoning, at least, weighs adjacency very heavily - for most projects, if the immediate neighbors don't mind, you'll have a hard time raising a fuss as a non-neighbor. But there's a Mt. Rodent Urban Consortium that basically finds out about everything that happens anywhere in the neighborhood and checks into it, and developers know they have to make nice, because nobody wants a busload of angry old Jewish ladies hijacking a public hearing.
I had hopes that your councilman was going to call me up about doing some work on his house, but nothing came of it (a client passed my name to him).
nobody wants a busload of angry old Jewish ladies hijacking a public hearing
Especially because they pick up lots and lots of trash. I think they're saving it up.
84, 85: Oh yes. When I am back at the office I think that civil servants should listen to The People and work to turn their voices into policy. Every time I leave a public meeting, however, I vow once more that The People should never be allowed anywhere near an important decision.
A populist between the meets, an unaccountable bureaucrat in the streets.
What sort of closet space should be provided? Air mattresses on the floor -- ok?
I've only ever been an airbnb renter, but I think that as long as you're honest about what's being provided, people can make up their own minds. Nicer means you can probably charge more, obviously.
Especially because they pick up lots and lots of trash. I think they're saving it up.
Wait. Is this a thing? I tease my mom and grandmother about it.
My Facebook feed usually has a fair bit of material in support of the idea that The People suck. However, there's been not one complaint about the overriding of the death penalty veto in Nebraska. Possibly this means that my "hide this" function is working too well or maybe it just shows how very Catholic all my Nebraska friends are. But that not one of them appeared to link to the anything about the death penalty may mean the signature drive won't work very well.
96: I know the Mt. Rodent Urban Consortium organizes neighborhood clean up days, but I don't know who goes because I don't go.
I do know that they just put the trash they collect on the curb for the garbage collection.
We're guests at an AirBNB. Wondering how unimpressed to be.
Nice boat ride out to Fort Sumter, though.
If we were renting out, we'd do it very differently, I'll tell you what.
We've rented our place out quite a bit. Our place isn't super fancy, but it is as represented on the site. If people want a furnished two-bedroom bungalow for the weekend, they'll get one.
I've been searching the site a whole lot recently and have been super inspired by some of the listings. There are a whole lot of obscure parts of this state where people have built some strange and lovely housing. I wish, wish, wish we could afford to do a tour of the whole state.
Also, more people have exotic animals than I expected. Last week we broke up the drive to LA with an overnight at an alpaca ranch.
62, 67: noisy, dangerous for pedestrians, poorly sited for the weather and hazards - these are bad uses of the building resources but not at all the worst cases. Badly made buildings rot and leak before they're 20 years old, back up into city plumbing, slide onto neighboring lots or roads, kill adjacent trees, change drainage so hillsides collapse. And the builders have vanished behind some shell companies and the city faces a lawsuit for allowing them to be built. Private profit, public hazard.
Even the just-stupid buildings are drain on their city and renters because they get expensive to maintain faster than they hold economic value. Fixing buildings is more difficult than building them right; rebuilding them uses more material. We build like a game of musical chairs.
Megan has a line about ecological care going to be a pain in the tichis when we realize we have to plan ahead and save in advance and stick to it. Yeah.
I do? Recently I've just been preoccupied with finding places to stay that have zebras.
In addition to finding neato places for a quick weekend trip, it turns out that there are a surprising number of places that can host 16-20 places. My college friends and I can choose between ranches, lakes and mountain cabins for our next get-together.
91: Huh, maybe I'll check them out. At least on local issues I think I want to be on the side of busloads of old Jewish ladies.
I'm not very impressed with our councilman; he seems perfectly fine, but doesn't seem to push forward a progressive agenda the way the next councilman north (not sure if he's yours) does.
I did finally end up seeing the mayor at his favorite bar in, enh, Darkend last weekend. He's good at the man-of-the-people presentation.
109: He seems to be better than his father, who was fucking worthless (rest his soul), but yeah. I'm a block from having the good councilman, and instead have a currently worthless one who seems to have a lock on his seat, which is frustrating as hell.
110: From everything I know, it's legit. The guy is kind of a real life Leslie Knope, without the frenetic pace. All he's ever wanted was to be a Good Government neighbor. I have a skepticism of GG types, but after the last 2 mayors, the City really needs it.
OTOH he promised AB a commission seat and failed to follow through, so fuck him.
I've never actually seen him in person, which seems odd considering how many other local officials I see while wandering around. Last week, I was riding the bus with his predecessor.
What do you have to do to get a seat on a decent commission? Like maybe I should be on the URA's board. My qualification is that I am, I think, the only person currently living in Pittsburgh who was born in the same county as the guy who ran the URA when they screwed up East Liberty.
I don't know who Leslie Knope is anyway.
Maybe that's why I'm not on any commission.
