Cool, thanks! I'm sort of curious how big a city has to be to get that kind of intense segregation. Where I am is too small and there are all-white blocks but not all-Latino or all-black ones. I'm looking to move to a less white area, but I probably don't count as a normal white person for purposes of this sort of argument.
In the spirit not of hijacking but of elaborating, ohmygoodness everyone needs to read Evicted, which I finished last night. There's a New Yorker excerpt you can read to get a feel for it.
I like his most recent post, talking about neoliberalism, in which he readily acknowledges that "baggier definitions of "neoliberal," [...] treat it as a synonym of "laissez faire," or "bad from my perspective as a leftist,"" which is becoming an increasing pet peeve of mine. Apparently Chait complained about this--not company I particularly want to be in*--and lefties on FB were mocking him, but I see all the time deeply uninformed uses of the term as a slur.
TBH, I'm seeing the same thing with "capitalism"--it's apparently fashionable to use it as a content-free slur, but, despite Corey Robin's most logorrheic efforts, there's nothing remotely resembling a coherent philosophy behind its rejection. Capitalism is a bad thing that we should obviously end, and that's the extent of the thought. Only a neoliberal [spits] would disagree.
*his output is at least 50% worthwhile, but philosophically he's tied to all sorts of, well, neoliberal positions that I do reject.
2.1 I'm deeply suspicious of the kind of pushback against the use of the term "neoliberalism" in 2.1. If I were the paranoid type I'd argue for a connection with a Clinton soon to be in the White House again.
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Here in Minneapolis, "over North" functions much like Chicago's South Side (and in fact, when I've been over North for stuff, a lot of streets remind me of Chicago, which is nice). That is, most white people haven't been there but have heard about it, and have really stupid ideas. Even white people like me, who live in a multiracial low-income neighborhood in South and who have, like, been to the South Side of Chicago for stuff.
It's astonishing how effective the segregation is. Part of it, unlike Chicago, is about public transit - not only is there less public transit going over North, but what there is is kind of designed to be segregated. For instance, you can ride the bus virtually from my front door to North, but that's because it's a bus line which goes from one poor neighborhood to another - you're simply not going to ride that line if you're well-off. Part of it is geographic segregation - no one is going through North on their way to anywhere. You're either going there or you're not. Part of it is cultural segregation, like Chicago but more so - there's stuff to do over North, clubs and restaurants and bookstores and so on - but the cultural segregation is pretty complete. I've been to a couple of cultural things (of general interest - I wasn't trying to show up at POC-only spaces) at Black-owned businesses over there, and I found out about them very indirectly, and would have missed them if it weren't for following Black Lives Matter stuff.
Also, I was walking around on my way to a Black Lives Matter thing last winter, and just as the article points out about the South Side, there's some really, really lovely houses and neighborhoods over North. White people talk about it as if it's a part of town that is nothing but burnt-over brownfield sites, because we are dumb and fail to apply even elementary reasoning about race.
Also, honestly, I have learned that here in MPLS, white people define "bad neighborhood" as any place that doesn't look like a fancy suburb. There's lots of "bad" areas that are, to anyone with ordinary reasoning ability, perfectly decent working class streets. And my neighborhood, where my own street looks pretty ropey, but if you go onto the side streets it's all very nice.
But then, my feeling is that if the choice is "white people aren't afraid to move somewhere, so the buildings are renewed and Black people mostly get driven out" or "everything stays kind of crappy but people still have a roof over their heads", I'm going to go with B. Which is, honestly, one of the reasons I don't go over North for stuff very often - I really feel that North is going to be improved by people like me letting other white folks know that there's some nice houses going for a song.
4: Well, that was a slip! North isn't going to be improved by me, despite my treacherous white savior unconscious.
In OAK, the East and South were early suburbs that the city finished annexing around the beginning of the 20th century; they were even part of the KKK's political base when it was briefly in power, but were flighted and blighted over the 70's and 80's. Now the center is gentrified and a lot of the deep poverty is out there, so it's a bit of the same donut process, despite being considered a core city by regional standards.
Robert Self's book on Oakland is supposed to be really good, but it was among the many I've checked out of the library and failed to read.
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despite Corey Robin's most logorrheic efforts
I've been thinking about Corey Robin's latest which I think is good (if slightly unfair), because I'm aware of how much my political coming-of-age was influenced by the sort of neoliberalism that he describes.
There's definitely food for thought there.
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North isn't going to be improved by me, despite my treacherous white savior unconscious.
Oh, I'm sure you'd improve it in all sorts of ways.
10 to the link at 8. Twitter hasn't killed my whole attention span.
I was going to worry that I had the same problem with over-wide use of the term neoliberal as Chait but Chait is apparently saying that it's synonymous with liberal.
But then, my feeling is that if the choice is "white people aren't afraid to move somewhere, so the buildings are renewed and Black people mostly get driven out" or "everything stays kind of crappy but people still have a roof over their heads", I'm going to go with B.
I hate this choice a lot. I'm not saying you're wrong that it seems to be the available choice under a lot of circumstances, but it's horrifying.
13: see, that's why it's so important to bring kids up to be racist, so that no matter how nice the black parts of town are they still won't want to live there, and that keeps rents from going up.
Like, residential segregation is genuinely horribly socially damaging. Actively cheering for it because it's better than the alternatives is a nightmarish statement about how bad things are.
16 before I saw 15, which is not a joke I would have made myself.
You can't do everything, LB. Don't beat yourself up about it.
Oh, I've got much better things to beat myself up about lately.
3: Honestly, you have your fellow Berniebros supporters to blame. The mindlessness with which I've seen the term deployed over the past 6 months has been breathtaking. I mean, it's been used as a pejorative by lefties for a decade or more, but it was almost always attached to the policy preferences of actual, you know, neoliberals. The hook for the post linked in 2 was Yglesias mocking an article that declares UBI--which was invented by neoliberals--a concept that is anathema to neoliberals. It's just mindblowingly stupid, but that's the lefty discourse in the heat of this moment (see "winning primaries in the South doesn't count").
I'm sure the center-left is saying stupid things as well, but I don't care about that, because I don't expect anything more from the center-left.
Any analysis of reinvestment in those Chicago neighborhoods that doesn't mention crime is off in liberal beard stroking fantasy land.
anti-black racism is so strong that it overcomes, and arrests, the regional pattern of disinvestment and reinvestment
Hey idiot, you know what's even stronger? People's aversion to getting murdered.
Let's take his example of Chatham, which Wikipedia tells me has around 30K people. Look, Chatham has cheap bungalows! You know what else Chatham has? A shit ton of murders. Last year Chatham had 80 shootings, 20 of them fatal. 20 murders in a community of 30K. If you don't follow murder rates, then compare to the rates of various third world countries. (which are per 100K people)
okay guys, you should probably be aware a skeptical take on the "keep the neighborhood a dumpsterfire so people aren't forced to move" view, from literally the author that the OP linked:
http://cityobservatory.org/whats-really-going-on-in-gentrifying-neighborhoods/
"The hook for the post linked in 2 was Yglesias mocking an article that declares UBI--which was invented by neoliberals--a concept that is anathema to neoliberals. "
That would be horrific neoliberal-splaining except I don't think neoliberals are for UBI anymore.
I don't think "neoliberalism" as a term is going to go away. No better term to describe a certain slate-y fairism:
The Fight for 15: It's a bad idea.
The Fight for $15 Is Unreasonable.
The New York Times' weak argument for a $15 minimum wage
What does UBI have to do with the minimum wage?
See, the whole point of my comment about North MPLS is that it's not a dumpster fire, but in fact has its share of nice houses, cute parks, fun cultural events, etc. It's got some problems, but from a "why don't rich people move here" standpoint, the problems are basically racism. Which has the incidental effect of preventing gentrification and preserving some housing stock in town which is pretty nice, available to Black buyers and tenants, and relatively cheap.
The same is true of the South Side of Chicago, if memory serves. You might enjoy a visit to the DuSable museum and the Fountain of Time, perhaps followed up by some live music and dinner nearby, for instance.
21: You know the basis of his statements is not just a map of one city, right? There are 10,000 mostly-black neighborhoods in America, and the vast majority have neither a lot of murders nor any white people willing to live there.
It's also well-established that white perceptions of "bad neighborhoods" are untethered from actually-existing crime rates. For a dozen years, the local paper would do an annual story about neighborhood-by-neighborhood crime rates, ranking all 90. It would be accompanied by surveys about perceived rates. And guess fucking what? Every year, my current neighborhood, which was 75-90% black, would be middle of the pack for actual crime, and top 5 for perceived crime.
But sure, white people are just rational actors dispassionately perusing crime reports before deciding where to move.
You know what would make a good dumpster fire? Hand sanitizer.
24: Nothing, but we're talking about neoliberalism, so facts don't matter.
My favorite was a recent FB post from Kotsko in which he was making fun of the NYT for describing the stark class stratification that is (apparently) becoming common on cruise ships (again) without actually using the term "class". He didn't use the term either, treating it as an obvious fill-in-the-blank test. But of course he got the answer "capitalism" before anyone came up with "class". Just rank stupidity.
UBI is all about robots now:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601019/the-danger-of-the-universal-basic-income/
http://www.businessinsider.com/universal-basic-income-justifications-2016-4
UBI does not have anything to do with the minimum wage
26: I'm not claiming pure rationality for white people but you can't just hand wave away that in most big cities the correlation between race and violent crime is huge. In your own town black people are around 26 percent of the population and 80 percent of the homicides. Or take Frowner's south Chicago example. South Shore and South Chicago are about 80K people. In 2015 those neighborhoods accounted for 169 shootings with 31 fatals. That's a murder rate higher than Columbia or South Africa.
Again, I'm not claiming racism isn't a factor but it's nuts to only invoke racism as to why whites aren't buying near the south side museum when those neighborhoods are averaging over three shootings a week.
Mormon's don't count. They hardly ever kill anybody.
One of my earliest adult realizations was that poor =! dangerous neighborhood. Growing up in very white suburbs, with lots of implicit racism, it took me a year or so of really spending time in the city to understand that extreme graffiti and litter and check-cashing places did not a dangerous neighborhood make.
(Yep, lots of internalized racism I'm still working through, 20+ years in.)
But I'm going to half agree and half disagree with gswift. He's of course right that nobody wants to live in a violent neighborhood. I spent a wrenching three hours recently listening to (mostly poor, mostly black) people recount horrifically painful stories of crime victimization. IME, to a first approximation, nobody who actually lives near violence is romanticizing it.
But. But but but. JRoth is of course completely right that many white (and some non-black POC) have wildly inaccurate perceptions about how much crime is actually going on in neighborhoods that are far from their personal experience.
And even in actually-violent neighborhoods, most of the violence is confined to sharply limited social circles and sharply limited geographic areas. you can still be a bystander or witness or accidental victim, but if you actually look at the crime incidents (not just the stats) even apparently "random" violence is happening between people who know each other.
It really depends on the place. North Oakland in the mid-2000s was genuinely dangerous. Central Harlem circa 2010 was just not significantly dangerous. Both were mostly black, mostly poor, and starting to gentrify.
33 gets it right. It also depends who you are. I'd worry a bunch about raising a black or Latino boy through teenagerdom in my neighborhood, b/c gangs. As a white person you are invisible to tbe gangs.
I really found this exasperating when we moved to DC in 88, height of the murder "epidemic." Of course I was never in any danger, and never felt like I was in any danger. Because I wasn't engaging in any of the kind of conduct that put people at risk. But to hear people back in Montana, or pretty much everywhere else tell it, we were foolish in the extreme.
(I've mentioned before that I left my keys in the ignition nearly the whole time I was in law school in NE DC. At first voluntarily, having lived in Montana the decade before, and then because the key got stuck. No one ever stole my rusty BMW, nor was I ever really afraid they would.)
Googling stuff related to this thread I ran across a interesting map of New York neighborhoods labelled by which cities have comparable murder rates. It's remarkable that only the very most dangerous parts of the Bronx manage to get as high a murder rate as the entire city of Chicago! (Brooklyn has a couple neighborhoods that manage to get to Oakland levels of murders.)
(In case it wasn't clear, Oakland levels are worse than Chicago levels. Nothing in the Bronx gets to Oakland levels.)
most of the violence is confined to sharply limited social circles and sharply limited geographic areas
Absolutely, but most people don't know that. I guess we could put out PSA's or flyers with "come get a bargain on a house, all those shootings on the news are black guys who know each other and we all know that's not your crowd", but that seems a bit fraught. I don't really disagree with anything you say in 32. My peeve is when articles like the one in the OP just go right to "whitey won't buy here 'cause he hates coloreds" without addressing that these house hunters are seeing murders in the news in these areas damn near every night.
New York is a great example. There's been much more willingness for people with money to move back into Harlem, etc. in the last ten or fifteen years precisely because New York, including Harlem, is pretty widely perceived by its residents to be a safe place to live.
But Oakland is probably gentrifying at a faster rate, despite being dangerous. So I think it's actually the price of housing that's driving whether people are willing to move to black neighborhoods, more than low levels of violence.
That is, the difference between Oakland and the south side of Chicago is that San Francisco is much more expensive than the north side of Chicago.
36: That map is really interesting. I guess I've never thought of NYC as an especially dangerous place, perhaps because I moved to NYC from Baltimore. Well, never as an adult living in the States, I guess I should say: as a kid, I thought of New York as the big, bad city (but also thought of Toronto as big and bad, come to think of it!).
Newark I consider genuinely unsafe. I worked there for three years, and would probably work there again. But live there, and send my son to its public schools? No. This I would not do, because I'm privileged enough to have other options. So I'm part of the problem, obviously.
And speaking of Newark, the dramatic "white flight" of the late 1960s was followed by a slower, but also quite significant, exodus of black middle-class families from the inner city to the surrounding suburbs. As Witt notes above, nobody wants to live in a violent neighborhood. And, given other options, almost nobody will. Which creates a vicious, downward spiral, with money and people flowing outward, out of the city, and with those who lack the resources to move now caught in an urban deathtrap of dwindling resources and diminished expectations.
It is beyond depressing; and yes, it's all about the politics of race; and racist policies in urban planning; and racial disparities in income and opportunity. But just blaming it all on the racist housing preferences of individual whites doesn't even begin to get at the root of the problem, and certainly won't help to solve the problem, at any rate.
40: And San Fran is geographically constrained in a way that Chicago isn't.
UBI is not a neo liberal invention. It was pushed in the eighties in this country under the Thatcher terror by a liberal peer, whose name I have forgotten (very old liberal privileged leftie who disliked socialism) and a one nation conservative woman called Mimi Parker whom I liked and interviewed at the start of my career. Even then it was old.
Thatcher and her circle wouldn't touch it because it could only be paid for (then) by removing the tax advantages to home owners.
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32 is certainly true over here. When I first came to London I lived in the most murderous bit of the city (naturally) and I still remember reading the Evening Standard's roundup of that year's killings and noting that almost all the unsolved ones seemed to be of young guys in my area who were probably involved in gang activity. I moved out but just because the area had terrible transport links and no decent pubs, not because I felt unsafe. The only time someone ever tried to mug me was outside St Katherines Dock, an extremely upmarket area where the flats come with yacht moorings and where I will naturally never be able to afford to live.
Newark I consider genuinely unsafe. I worked there for three years, and would probably work there again. But live there, and send my son to its public schools? No. This I would not do, because I'm privileged enough to have other options. So I'm part of the problem, obviously.
I find this interesting because a lot of my friends from grad school (in urban planning) ended up moving to Newark (because NJ), so most of the stuff about Newark I see on FB is pretty boosterish. I have no idea which perception of Newark is more accurate, and I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle, but it's an interesting example of the different perceptions that people can form of the same place depending on perspective.
The only time someone ever tried to mug me was outside St Katherines Dock, an extremely upmarket area where the flats come with yacht moorings and where I will naturally never be able to afford to live.
The smart muggers target rich neighborhoods.
Oakland is geographically huge and variable (or seems so compared to SF), and the centers of gentrification are not the most murdersome areas, to my knowledge.
Oakland is geographically huge and variable (or seems so compared to SF)
Not compared to New York or Chicago, though. Granted that that may not be a fair comparison since the Bay Area is structurally different from most other major metropolitan areas in the US.
For sure; my point is that trying to analyze Oakland as the Bad Neighborhood of the Bay Area doesn't work on its own. Too many neighborhoods.
lourdes! are you on the train?
I've been puzzling out the when-will-Richmond-gentrify question for a while. In addition to racism and worries about crime, there's the nontrivial pollution from the oil refinery; I heard some version of "every kid in North Richmond has asthma" shortly after moving back up here. I am also very suspicious of the link in 22 as argued: seems like gentrifying vs. non-gentrifying neighborhoods with similar demographics, in the wild, would be an apples to oranges comparison, no?
I think I went trick or treating in Richmond when I was a kid and I don't remember anyone getting asthma or murdered. But we might have been in El Cerrito.
All gentrifying neighborhoods are alike; each non-gentrifying neighborhood is a dumpsterfire in its own way.
I wonder if reading Evicted would make me extremely angry about how fucked over Milwaukee is. This can be hard to predict. I did appreciate the excerpt I read, but...
52: Inorite? No murders, no asthma, just delicious coffee every time I visit. So I don't know what the problem is.
The train got me home! Hanging out on the West Oakland platform (murderful neighborhood) for fifteen minutes did no harm.
My sister lives in what seems to be a not-obviously-gentrifying* more or less middle-class, integrated, neighborhood in Oakland that has strong neighborhood community, if you measure that by the way the blocks to the north of her held big Halloween parties and you saw trick or treaters all over the place in the dark. A few blocks south and it's all bars on the windows, visibly vacant buildings, and (presumably**) high crime. The contrast is striking, especially if you drive in from the south after getting off on the wrong freeway exit. The area to the south starts getting into a mix of industrial and residential, with the Coliseum, etc. out there.
*It doesn't look like it's getting the same turnover you see in Temescal/Lake Merritt areas. It may just be a slower process there.
** I haven't looked up the official stats; I'm going mostly on the increase in fortified-looking home exteriors.
That area in Richmond around the former Toys 'R' Us and Montgomery Wards, two boxes surrounded by huge parking lots, was mostly a wasteland after those two stores closed. Last time I went by on BART it looked like there had been some kind of development there, so that's something.
Richmond has a sad history of people hoping transportation lines (railroad, BART) would stimulate economic growth and development and then seeing that basically not happen.
The Bay Area definitely has some unusual demographics. You don't see a lot of white* or black people in large parts of the south Bay - basically from south Sunnyvale around the bay up to Fremont/Hayward. At least if you go by who's shopping at Costco.
*Ok, non-Hispanic white.
If you want estimates of what could happen in a full-blown Trumpfail scenario, Larry Sabato has them:
http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/house-2016-how-a-democratic-wave-could-happen/
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I'm going to be in London from Saturday evening through Wednesday. (I leave Thursday.) I'd like to meet up with folks if your schedules permit. I'm staying near Covent Garden, and am flexible on venues. I do realize there's a bank holiday Monday, so that might factor into people's availability.
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53.2: I worried about that too, but he's very clear that much of it generalizes. And I winced at the comments about the wealthy suburb where my mom went to HS but I would have anyway and there are no references to the (union!) factory her dad ran or its long-ago failure, so I personally felt left off the hook! As I said, I think the level of segregation may be particularly extreme and easy to track there, but it's indicative of larger trends in a way that seems fair. (I would like to hear more about the choice to use one openly obnoxious-racist character and make everyone else apologetic about most of their stereotyping. Perhaps that's the way it worked in reality, but I think it was deliberate.)
The confusion may be that are different conceptions of UBI. The neoliberal conception of UBI is "give everybody money and fund it by dismantling the welfare state." A leftier conception of UBI is "give everybody money and fund it by redistributing the wealth." I don't think that second version is as popular with neoliberals.
At first voluntarily, having lived in Montana the decade before, and then because the key got stuck. No one ever stole my rusty BMW, nor was I ever really afraid they would.)
I'm stunned your car wasn't stolen. Not because you lived in DC; I'd think that would get your car stolen anywhere. Is this a common practice in Montana?
My parents used to do it in the DC suburbs. So much easier than having to find your keys.
Used to be more common. What did happen to me a number of times in law school is that well meaning classmates would see that I'd left the keys in the ignition, and take them out, to protect me, and take them to the library or the dean's office, or something. So I get to the car, keys are gone, and now I have to figure out where some helpful person has gone with them.
I'm actually locking my car these days, but probably don't need to go that far.
AIPMASPB, I had a high school classmate whose family set their cars so that they could run without keys. There were too many of them sharing cars to keep track of keys. One guy did once drive their car away and hide it, but it was still within walking distance. One other guy did that to a cop car, which turns out to be a problem for the cop when there is no other cop in town to give him a ride to his car.
61: Given the people he mentioned and what we saw from the stuff we've seen from Republicans and (to a lesser extent)neoliberals for my entire lifetime I'm guessing the plan to implement it would: (1) dismantle the welfare state, and then (2) implement a HEY LOOK OVER THERE!*
My first reaction to reading that bit was to think that Friedman/etc. were either disingenuously pushing that strategy or just straight up trolling new deal democrats. I don't for one second think any of the people we tend to associate with neoliberalism would be cool with a Universal Basic Income: it sounds exactly like the sort of thing that the New Republic would strongly object to in exactly the way that got it the "Even The Liberal New Republic" nickname.
*See, e.g., mental health care reform.
The closest thing we currently have to Universal Basic Income is Social Security, which is UBI for old people who've already paid into the system. Its telling that neoliberals and Republicans are constantly looking for ways to make Social Secuity pay people less.
The other thing they want to do with Social Security is privatize it. I'll be curious to see what they come up with in figuring out how to privatize UBI.
64: Used to be more common.
It's still plenty common, because people are idiots. Like half my godamn caseload are cars with a key left in it.
67.1: Old people really do suck, but there I'm not aware of any neoliberal effort to privatize social security.
This thread is illustrative. I am always boggled at the number of times during a Phillies game I hear a commercial that intones "Lock your car. Take your keys."
I always wondered who on earth that commercial was targeted at -- my association with people who leave their keys in the car is entirely rural. I am astounded to hear that people routinely do this in urban/suburban contexts.
Also, "universal for people who have already paid into the system" is such a contradiction in terms that it is meaningless.
"Lock your car. Take your keys."
"Did you leave a gun in your car? Please go back in the parking lot and shoot yourself in the face." No joke, a ridiculous number of guns are stolen because they were left in a vehicle.
"Lock your car. Take your keys."
This assumes that you remember to not shut the door until after you have taken you keys. I'd rather see it the other way.
72: Taking them into the bar seems like a worse idea.
Locking your car and leaving your keys in it is a really bad idea.
Old people really do suck, but there I'm not aware of any neoliberal effort to privatize social security.
Perhaps I'm blurring the neoliberal and libertarian schools here. Hillary doesn't want to privatize social security, but certainly followers of Milton Freedman do.
70 gets it exactly right.
So all this time, the people I hear talking about "bad neighborhoods" mean neighborhoods where if you literally leave your keys in the car's ignition whenever you aren't driving it, it might get stolen?
Also, "universal for people who have already paid into the system" is such a contradiction in terms that it is meaningless.
Ok, how about "not as universal as UBI is proposed to be, but, within certain demographic restrictions and among those who have participated in the funding mechanism, which is mandatory for those participating in the labor market, universal."
Like half my godamn caseload are cars with a key left in it.
This is blowing my mind. I grew up in a very rural area and I've literally never even heard of anyone routinely leaving their keys in the (presumably unlocked??) car when it was parked. (I do know people who do that with their tractors, but not their cars or trucks.)
76: That's "libertarian", not neoliberal.
No joke, a ridiculous number of guns are stolen because they were left in a vehicle.
You mean specifically left in an unlocked vehicle? I thought there were a bunch of situations in which gun-owners were supposed to leave their guns in their cars.
My parents always leave their keys in their cards, but it is inside a garage with the garage door down.
Universal means rich people get it too.
It's completely insignificant to them in financial terms, but it gives them a warm fuzzy, because it means the government loves them too.
78: But, the demographic restrictions are such that it is only nearly universal for people over 65. Which is not nothing, but it still excludes a very high percentage of those disabled in early adulthood.
Which, on reflection, is not really a quibble with Social Security on "universal" part but the "basic income" part.
I've literally never even heard of anyone routinely leaving their keys in the (presumably unlocked??) car when it was parked.
A lot of people leave a spare "hidden" in the glovebox, center console, etc. One of our chronic offenders told me he stopped trying to file down a jiggler key to steal old Hondas and Nissans and instead just goes to parking lots and starts trying door handles. Loads of the cars are unlocked and he says within 6-12 open vehicles he'll find a spare key.
You mean specifically left in an unlocked vehicle? I thought there were a bunch of situations in which gun-owners were supposed to leave their guns in their cars.
Usually locked, but not left in a lockbox or even the trunk.
76: That's "libertarian", not neoliberal.
Well, my definition of neoliberal is "favoring market-based approaches to managing social problems," where as libertarian is "fuck social problems, I got mine." They blur around the edges; Milton Freedman was strongly influential to both modern conceptions.
Loads of the cars are unlocked and he says within 6-12 open vehicles he'll find a spare key.
This is good information to have, just in case I one day have need to steal a car.
87: You say "neoliberals and Republicans" when talking about Social Security privatization, thus implying there are Democrats who support Social Security privatization. I'm not aware of any.
88: Protip: If you steal a common type of car that was unlocked and had a key hidden, if you get caught just say a friend left a car of the same make/model/color for you in that lot. Bolster this claim with an email you sent to yourself from a fake account.
89 is more or less correct, but I think Josh Marshall deserves some real credit for pushing back in 2005 when the idea was floating. I don't doubt some blue dogs might have been enticed to support one of the privatization options had it not been abandoned by many Republicans.
The crash killed it for all time our attention span, though.
I mean, if I were on a jury and somebody with no criminal history said he just got into the wrong 2004 Silver Honda Civic in a parking lot, I don't see what could be said to get to me think they actually intended to steal a car unless he tried to outrun the cops or whatever.
Real pro tip: Find the same make, model, color, body style year vehicle and steal a front plate off of that car. People will notice a back plate missing but often don't notice a missing front plate. Pay attention to the dates on the stickers of the car you're stealing, take the same stickers off another random car, and now put that new plate on your stolen ride. You'll have a plate that's not reported stolen so it won't alert on the license plate readers and if a cop runs it the details will all look good.
That's a useful tip as far as it goes, but this state doesn't have front plates. Of course, plenty of cars from other states around.
thus implying there are Democrats who support Social Security privatization.
That wasn't meant to be my implication (though I'm sure blue dogs would have gone along with it if the politics made sense.)
While neoliberalism is strong among centrist Democrats, I think its wrong to conflate Democrats with neoliberals. There are plenty Rebublican neoliberals, and, further its also not a thing confined to American politics.
The Chilean pension system comes to mind, which is a neoliberal design. I recall that Bush kept pointing to it as the shining example of how to privatize Social Security.
You'll have a plate that's not reported stolen so it won't alert on the license plate readers and if a cop runs it the details will all look good.
Also don't use the Easy Pass, and turn off your cell phone.
Wait, we don't have front plates and I don't steal cars and so this doesn't help me, but wouldn't you want the stickers to stay the same as they were on the non-stolen car since you're now passing your car as that one? I'm confused and, I reiterate, not interested in actually becoming a car thief.
There used to constantly be messages to our neighborhood listserv about "I accidentally left my car unlocked and someone took the change from my change tray" or whatever. Dumbasses. But so are the dumbasses taking the stuff, like some of Rowan's sadder relatives.
Random true story: a few years back I has one of those temporary registration things that you tape to your back window (this was in Ohio, maybe they do it differently in other states). I also still had my back license plate on because the screws were so rusted that I couldn't get it off. One day I'm driving down the road and get pulled over. I noticed that the officer seemed unusually...not confrontational exactly, but he was politely telling me to keep my hands visible, which never happened for any ordinary traffic stop in my experience. After a number of what seemed to me mysterious questions, I showed him my title, expired registration & etc., and he explained what was going on. The combination of temporary registration + plates apparently says "stolen car" to cops. Hence the fact that he wanted my hand where he could see them.
Nothing came of it, but I did find someone with a power screwdriver to get the damn license plate removed.
98: You're right. I meant to say plate, not car.
Aaaand, I just got a case declined from the DA with a way less plausible story than 93. I'll get it in the end but god this particular screening attorney is a complete fucking idiot.
I accidentally left my car unlocked and someone took the change from my change tray
Get used to a lot more vehicle burgs for the foreseeable future. This whole decarceration + not funding alternate programs = lots of druggies roaming around needing their fix.
The trick is to tape a little bags of heroin on the doors of the car, so they can just take those instead of breaking in and taking other things. It's like how my parents eventually got tired of the constant war with squirrels over the bird feeder and just dumped about twenty pounds of birdseed on the ground underneath it for them.
104: Centuries from now, anthropologists will puzzle over the obscure Norteamericano holiday of "Heroinnacht."
Once I had my car in my garage and someone broken in, took the radio half-way out, and left it. I doubt they were spooked away since they took four 12 packs of Pepsi with them. I think they just decided (correctly) that a 12 pack of Pepsi had higher resale value.
107: They were filming a Pepsi commercial. Haven't you seen it?
My tickets to Ecuador just came through. Looks like I need to learn Spanish this weekend.
103: I'm eagerly awaiting the 2015 Crime in California report (July 1) so we can see how substantial that effect is.
If we can elicit more tips like 94, we could really get somewhere. GSwift's Internet Crime School.
I did leave the key in the ignition overnight last week, but it wasn't, like, as a convenience. I just got distracted bringing in groceries.
I left a key in the ignition of my 87 honda accord for several years. I live in a section 8 apt so sometimes troubled people live around here. I was kind of surprised I never had a problem. The ignition had gotten finicky enough about the key that it was taking up to 5 minutes or so to get it in. People aren't that interested in old hondas I guess I'm careful about locking my new 2008 subaru though.
94 is quite informative, if not morally edifying. But I have to say: it sounds like a lot of work.
It is also three separate thefts (all felonies I think) Also isn't the cop who has you stopped going to be able to pull up right away the person associated with that registration? I think that would mean you'd have to know specifically the person got the plate from so you could claim to have borrowed their car. That's 4 felonies and lots of premeditation, if you screwed up and got caught you'd be going away for a long time.
115: Only the car is a felony. The real trick is to know what jurisdictions (hint, mine) can't pursue for non violent crimes so you can just take off with impunity instead of pulling over. Going away for a long time? Hahahaha. It's just a high level felony that victimizes the shit out people by robbing them of the ability to get to work, take their kids to school, etc. Why would we lock them up? Typically I'm getting people in to jail for 3-6 months, even guys with priors. I've seen as little as five weeks.
Alright, I'm going to hold off on stealing a car and doing 94 until gswift gives some good answers to 115.
They're always going be able to pull up the person associated with the registration. Nothing's foolproof. The thing is to try and avoid detection from the automated license plate readers and to have a plate on the vehicle that is going to match the vehicle, come up as insured, etc. Stealing a temp tag is common and is a red flag as mentioned in 99.
That'll teach me to reload the post before commenting.
I stand corrected. Good information to know if I ever need to steal a car. I think I'd lose my HUD apt if I got caught though and that would be essentially all my discretionary money so the downside still seems substantial. I'm really surprised stealing the stickers is so much lighter than falsifying federal documents.
Every year I have to fill out several forms that warn me it is a felony to get wrong.
Don't tear the tags off your mattress!
That's only an issue if you're going to resell it.
Sounds like you're speaking from experience.