http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_17057.html#2056492
1: Now I'm curious -- what did you think was so bad about it?
It's okay on contradictions and precarity, but its slam on Schaaf and the cause of building housing is a repeat of the perfect-enemy-of-good left-NIMBYism I'm so tired of. If we had in fact been allowing market rate infill housing over the decades, people like him could have been renting affordably with no, or much less, displacement, so it is absolutely related. ("Market rate" only came to imply high-rent in big cities because of the artificial scarcity I'm trying to tear down; thirty years ago it was different.)
On the cultural side, I'm not sure his poverty tourism is obviated by being self-aware about it, but I don't feel as strongly about that.
And people like the Ghost Ship tenants, I should add, since that's who he purports to speak on behalf of. Not homeless people, their treatment has always been shitty, though of course the lack of sufficient housing is typically what propels them into that situation.
Someone wake me when the synthesis concretizes.
So, this paragraph:
Meanwhile, Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf exploited the tragedy by supporting laws streamlining the development process of condo projects, cynically claiming that they were a solution to the crisis exemplified by Ghost Ship because they created more housing--never mind that these condos were far out of reach of the bohemians who lived in places like Ghost Ship, much less the even more desperate folks, the truly impoverished, on the streets and in the tent cities.
It's funny, I agree with you completely about the substance, but I read right past that sentence because that sort of "perfect-enemy-of-good left-NIMBYism" is so conventional that I don't even notice it unless I'm focusing on that particularly.
Yup.
OMG if you zone 80% of a city exclusively for single family housing and make the development process interminably difficult and unaccountable the only buildings you get might be high-priced, who could have predicted, clearly there is no solution in between status quo and tearing down capitalism!
Also, the building of housing that is 'affordable' for middle-class people with decent although not super high-paying jobs is an offense while the very poor exist and have difficulty finding housing.
Those middle class people with houses suck.
In most places it makes sense that if you build nice new places, people who are now paying a lot to live in a dump will move there, and the rent for the low-quality places will go down and the poor will have somewhere to live.
But San Francisco specifically is so skewed that that may never happen. You can't create "affordable" housing for the poor in a place like San Francisco under a capitalist system. If you create housing, people will pay a lot for it. You have to specifically make housing that only the poor are allowed to live in and specify exactly what the rent will be.
Social housing is definitely a thing that should exist! But the same NIMBYs who oppose dense market rate housing don't usually support dense social housing either.
Maybe if you say 11.2 loudly enough Peter Th/iel's head will explode.
Yes, without major new investment in social housing* it would take another generation for market rate housing to ameliorate the misery. YIMBYs fight for those investments too. But there's no path to solving the underlying program without unlocking market rate housing - which, incidentally, also helps finance the affordable housing.
* And permanently self-sustaining investments, rather than covenants that expire after 40-50 years like our current setups.
Also, California outside the Bay still has some amount of market-based affordability, if more dependent on suburban sprawl, but those cities are equally afflicted by single-family mandates so their rents too are likely to zoom out of reach in ten years if we don't do something statewide.
In conclusion, down with market-only libertarian YIMBYs. Thank you for coming to my TED talk I guess.
The thing I find weird about the article is that the sort of housing-code-violating housing it describes is very alien to me. NYC is definitely overcrowded and expensive, and definitely has illegal units, with immigrants crowded into basements in Queens, but my belief is that anyone roughly middle class (and there I'm defining middle class as employed and not undocumented) is living in a legal unit. No one (in that category) is living in an amateur-built shed with no certificate of occupancy. (Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I don't think I am.) But I'm not sure why not. Cultural differences? Living in a garden shed is something that people accept in the Bay Area because I don't know why, and they don't accept it here -- someone would move out of NYC before they'd live in a garage? Enforcement differences? Literal climate differences -- you'd freeze to death in that sort of housing someplace with a real winter?
I don't know what the explanation is, but the "so there I was living in a 150 sq.ft. plywood box" genre of story throws me.
I hear the weather is very different.
Yeah, that might be the whole explanation, but wouldn't you think you'd get survivably insulated weird illegal units if that was all?
Imagine what California and the world would be like if the Bay Area followed the building trends of another oddly-shaped metro area shoved between the sea and steep hills, Hong Kong.
My oldest brother's oldest child (Oberlin graduate) lived the plywood box/backseat of old pickup truck lifestyle for a while in San Pedro, but also never had a real job. Now living in Providence, Rhode Island - I believe slightly more "normal" living accommodations and has more or less regular employment.
California always sounds really incomprehensible when I read about it, but it seemed pretty normal when I visited.
Just finished reading the article now, if there's going to be an actual discussion of it. I thought it was well-written (way too long, but other than that). The author has his biases but seemed fairly clear-headed about them.
19: IANAExpert, but there are tradeoffs, like insulation making fire hazards worse. Also, survivable insulation requires physical space. Not sure where you got 150 square feet from; the author said his shack was 32 square feet. If you start with 32 square feet and you make the walls 6 inches thicker on each side, you're left with 26.25 square feet. It's getting pretty close to a space where a person literally can't turn around. A human being can survive the open air at any temperature by bundling up warmly enough, clothing for use in the Arctic gets very sophisticated, but after a certain point that becomes incompatible with the personal grooming and attire of a middle-class job.
That shed stuff is subculture, not in fact common. Most people in similar situations just put up with more and more roommates for longer stages of their life. Partnering up to form a two-income one-bedroom household is a great benefit. Etc.
There are a number of unpermitted secondary structures scattered about - p. 57 of this PDF - but that's mostly because their construction was done by cheaper unlicensed contractors; I think they're reasonably professionally built.
17: Do you know that for sure? If middle class people were living in garages in the outer boroughs, or on the roof of your building, would you know about it?
A human being can survive the open air at any temperature by bundling up warmly enough, clothing for use in the Arctic gets very sophisticated, but after a certain point that becomes incompatible with the personal grooming and attire of a middle-class job.
Are you saying that even with modern protective clothing, you can't get by in polar latitudes without maximizing facial and body hair? That seems implausible, for sex-based reasons at a minimum.
You can't bathe is the problem when it gets too cold inside.
I think he's saying there's only so much whale blubber breathmints can cover for.
"A human being can survive the open air at any temperature by bundling up warmly enough"
I regularly survive sustained periods in air temperatures of 60 degrees below zero in comfort and ease by bundling up in a nice warm airliner.
To not freeze, you need to pay for business class.
26: I'd know about the roof of my building -- I've been up there fairly recently, and I know what goes on in the building. Outer borough backyards I wouldn't necessarily know about, but I've never heard of someone I knew being shown or offered a unit like that when they were apartment hunting.
To have a space where a person can literally turn around, you need to pay for first class.
27: I was trying to say the reverse. With advanced protective clothing, it doesn't matter how well insulated your living space is. But it's hard to change from advanced protective clothing to something presentable in an office, especially if you don't have access to an insulating living space.
35: You wear your business attire all the time, and take off your thermal wear when you get inside your office.
It seemed like quite a lot of his problem was that he was paying for an apartment in NYC, too, which made the article feel more like poverty tourism. I don't know, maybe I'm spoiled, but if I were peeing in a jar while renting an apartment somewhere else I think I'd try to find a way to maybe cut my other housing cost.
"""
I watched a large man shove his shopping cart into the path of a techie on a bicycle. The techie swerved and fell, and the homeless man put one foot on his victim's chest and tugged at his Google laptop bag. "Help me!" the techie shouted as they played tug-of-war. I sprinted over and pushed the two men apart, yelling, "Get the fuck out of here and don't come back!" I was talking to them both."
"""
I found this paragraph revealingly deranged. Shoving a guy off his bicycle, stomping him, and trying to steal his bag is bad, and so is... moving to a city and working in its major industry?
To try to cancel out the pro-techie-ness of that comment, it's been funny watching certain parts of tech twitter freak out about Chesa Boudin and try to paint San Francisco as some kind of war zone when it's really pretty middle-of-the-pack.
its major industry
Just idly tangentially, what fraction of Bay Area employment is actually tech?
I'll guess higher than NYC/finance, within a few percent of LA/entertainment, but nowhere near a majority.
25 matches my out-of-date (90's) experience. I knew a lot of people who collectively rented houses well into their 30s, others who managed to get rent controlled places in Berkley somehow. Some quadrupled up in 2 bedroom apartments in the city if you could find them. Converted garages on the peninsula were definitely a thing (i.e. people/families living in illegal suites in garages of suburban houses).
Lived in mountain view for a while. Pre google it was a relatively cheap option and was near to work. I was young and single and well paid so I 'splurged' on a studio apartment of about 450sq ft and lived alone in one of those very generic looking apartment blocks of 4-5 stories. I think it was about $1600/mo back then. I didn't spend much time there, but the (identical) unit next to me had a family with 2 small children. We didn't really know each other but I later (with a little more awareness) realized that they were much more indicative of the housing shortage than all of the poverty porn articles that were being written. This was all pre dot-com crash, so not as bad as now but lots of talk of rental shortages etc. also.
We all live in a service-dominated economy; what varies is what other industry that's helping propel (with that answer in many places being "none").
41: I found an article that said it was about 21%.
So anyway should I read this very good garbage article? Apparently it's long.
Also, IDK, maybe Detroit and Houston.
46, 47: You're not one of the attorneys I work for, so you know how to do google searches.
I'm sure this is a dumb question, but what's public transportation like in that area? Commuter rail, specifically. I know it's called BART, I don't know how reliable it is or how much living on a BART line actually helps affordability. According to this, New York, DC, Boston, and Chicago all have worse commuting times than San Francisco. Of course, it can be hard for surveys to include people living like that Harper's guy, and there's more to livability than just commuting times, so who knows.
Cassandane's parents live in a small town about two hours from San Francisco. Google Maps says 1 hour 37 minutes for the fastest route by car, but I think we've never made the trip that fast and I'm sure rush hour would add at least an hour to it.
BART is good for going from SF to Oakland or Berkeley and vice versa, and it'll take you to the airport, but it's pretty lacking in tentacles. The MUNI has more coverage and especially shines for going out west to Ocean Beach/the Sunset.
BART works for the people it's near; it's not a capacious enough system to really serve the region at the scale now needed (bottlenecked for going Transbay; out of service midnight-5am); there also aren't enough reliable bus lines feeding people to its stations.
It may have seemed like a good idea at the time to name the public transportation system after a popular cartoon character, but ultimately, a mischievous, irresponsible child probably wasn't the image that they should have been shooting for.
That there is a privileged choice of words.
The show actually reached out to try to to do some kind of cobranding thing with the transit agency when it came out, but was rejected pretty quickly.
54: Really? I guess I need to make my jokes sillier.
Was it BART that was using the slogan, "The Times They Are A' Changin" to announce a schedule change, and then got sued by Bob Dylan?
53: As a CIS-male-white-heterosexual Boomer, I just can't help myself.
it was cheeky of them to do it a couple decades before the cartoon, also.
Santa Clara made sure BART got off to a problematic start, and I don't think that ever changed.
I liked the article a lot. I think it could have been written by any number of clever, cynical, self-aware, only-somewhat-assholish members of the Unfoggetariat.
Minivet's point about Schaaf's policies is well-taken. Articles should avoid venturing into policy discussions when the author isn't really interested in policy.
I do want to object to the characterization of the author as a poverty tourist. The author acknowledges that deliberate life choices put him in the place he was, and he is careful to distinguish between his position and those of really homeless folks.
I guess in the end, the appreciation of a piece like this depends on one's view of the author. I liked the guy, at least as he described himself, and I felt like I understood the people whose paths intersected with his.
The most entertaining bit of BART history, to my mind, is the time in the 80's when seat cushion slashing went up dramatically, and it turned out a pillar of the community in Contra Costa was paying people to do it because he had the reupholstering contract. (They had to slash in specific patterns so he could keep track and figure out who to pay.)
The buzzword here is all about building "workforce housing," which I guess is like affordable housing except build around the conceit that people only exist for the labor they can provide to capital, and housing is just another input that must be supplied.
The one project I know that's gone in is a set of three barn-like structures in a small town not far from here, well away from the center of that community, surrounded by parking lots and strip mall. There was no apparent consideration given to the idea that people in the "workforce" might have "families" that might want to "live in a nice place."
Or they decided to create housing to encourage people to leave their family somewhere else so that the local businesses can get the labor without the local taxes needing to pay for more schools.
61: Maybe it's time for the WorryFree Corporation to help out.
Or they decided to create housing to encourage people to leave their family somewhere else so that the local businesses can get the labor without the local taxes needing to pay for more schools.
That's diabolical. It also goes along with why senior housing projects are so popular.
It may be diabolical, but it's also pretty obvious.
Popping in to say that I read this article at lunchtime and between the flippant dismissiveness with which he discusses his economic contributions to his NY girlfriend's rent, the utter callousness of describing a man with a knife in his belly and NOT MENTIONING WHAT HE DID TO HELP, and the sheer selfishness of putting his friend Jenny to bed post-breakdown without even rinsing the blood off her hands... I don't need to know anything else about this guy to know that his opinions on housing are garbage.
the utter callousness of describing a man with a knife in his belly and NOT MENTIONING WHAT HE DID TO HELP,
That was very strange. I vaguely figured that it wasn't real (somehow, it just looked as if the guy had been stabbed), and that I was just missing the tipoff that we were supposed to understand that it wasn't real. But yes, if you're supposed to take that at face value it really does not belong in this article.
The knife in the belly symbolizes the harpoon in the belly of the whale which symbolizes the futility of trying to stab nature.
That was a very effective anecdote. Not telling the rest is just knowing how to tell a story.
As for washing the blood off his friend, I don't think either of them had running water. Check your privilege, Witt.
66: I can think of reasons for not washing injured hands after they've otherwise been cared for -- even beyond the lack of easy availability of running water -- but yeah, he should have at least taken off her boots.
And the little literary flourish by which he projects onto her his own interpretation of her boots -- well, that wasn't a good choice.
Her leather boots, still laced tightly on her feet, poked out from the bottom of the comforter, as if, even now, she knew at any moment she might have to wake up from the dream and run for her life.
70 before seeing 69. My privilege is so goddam checked it's practically plaid!
That was a very effective anecdote. Not telling the rest is just knowing how to tell a story.
If I read it as an effectively told anecdote, he's lying.
That is, 'not telling the rest', in a story that's about housing insecurity, communicates that seeing a man who's been stabbed in the gut asking him for help wasn't more important to him than all the inconveniences and financial difficulties the story is about; that it was just part of the chaos of the housing-insecure Bay Area. And no, really, I don't believe that seeing a man with a knife embedded in his belly begging passers-by to pull it out is just what it's like walking around San Francisco.
I refuse to believe that a woman of menstruating age (Jenny has a miscarriage earlier in the story, although it's also earlier in her life) doesn't have baby wipes in her non-running-water-equipped shack. They are so ubiquitous among street-homeless and otherwise vulnerable women with whom I've interacted that it's impossible to believe she wouldn't have had them. Although I guess not impossible that her jerk of a 'friend' didn't know where they were.
73, 74: You two probably didn't believe the Slate story about monkey-fishing either.
Both those anecdotes share the feature of halting early and moving on. So he doesn't say he didn't help, he just changes the subject. Which makes me wonder what he's leaving out to accomplish his desired effect.
Still, the desired effect in the stabbing story is "Man, SF has gotten crazy enough that this is just the kind of thing that happens." And no, not really.
If it doesn't mean something like that, it doesn't belong in this story.
The stabbing thing is easier to believe than the house prices.
The buzzword here is all about building "workforce housing," which I guess is like affordable housing except build around the conceit that people only exist for the labor they can provide to capital, and housing is just another input that must be supplied.
It's not good to have your housing depend on your job, even worse than your health care, but that's pretty normal throughout history I think.
The buzzword here is all about building "workforce housing," which I guess is like affordable housing except build around the conceit that people only exist for the labor they can provide to capital, and housing is just another input that must be supplied.
Here too.
61/62: The one project I know that's gone in is a set of three barn-like structures in a small town not far from here, well away from the center of that community, surrounded by parking lots and strip mall. There was no apparent consideration given to the idea that people in the "workforce" might have "families" that might want to "live in a nice place."
and
Or they decided to create housing to encourage people to leave their family somewhere else so that the local businesses can get the labor without the local taxes needing to pay for more schools.
No, it's not this. It's building outside of areas with zoning laws so you can do less.
The thing that's been eye-opening for me on the planning committee is how zoning laws inadvertently drive sprawl because developers are so fucking determined to not be constrained by your rules of basic decency that they'll just build shitty tracts in the middle of nowhere to avoid them.
I and others in my group commented recently at a planning commission meeting arguing strongly that housing supply stasis directly contributes to exurban sprawl (supercommuters from the Central Valley being the horror du jour), and apparently that really teed off the local NIMBYs, who spent a lot of their comment time attempting to refute it.
Still, the desired effect in the stabbing story is "Man, SF has gotten crazy enough that this is just the kind of thing that happens." And no, not really.
Agreed. The zaniest thing reminiscent of this that I personally know of is this where a councilmember and his chief of staff were on the scene; not a random stabbing but by a man who knew the female victim. (The article leaves out that the chief of staff has a DVM and probably gave the most medical help.)
80: the same thing seemingly happens even when you have essentially no zoning. See Houston.
Endless new freeways are a helluva drug.
78 -- Our county just got some grant money to expand infrastructure out beyond the city limits. They have areas on the map for 'workforce housing' -- I assume what is meant here is housing affordable on average pay (average plus 25% maybe?), and that they are avoiding calling it 'affordable housing' because (a) it's not going to get direct subsidies and (b) they don't want to inflame people who don't want to house the poor.
It's not linked to an employer, which is kind of the impression I got from 78.
I guess in the end, the appreciation of a piece like this depends on one's view of the author. I liked the guy, at least as he described himself, and I felt like I understood the people whose paths intersected with his.
Alternate plan, NO.
Come on, this guy is fucked in the head how many ways? Why on earth is it so important to live in the Bay Area in this fashion? LEAVE, fuckhead, you have no ties and it's not working out. And then this.
Jenny--black bangs and homemade tattoos on her hands--lugged a wicker picnic basket through the grass. She wore a sparking silver dress, like a space suit, with a black cardigan over black jeans and black clogs, and she walked with a limp. She told me she'd had a miscarriage earlier that week. "On purpose," she said, a procedure she'd performed with some concoction of herbs. Why tell me, I wondered, a stranger? Taking me into her confidence only hastened the crush I already had on her
If this guy was my brother or nephew I'd slap him. What the the hell is wrong with this guy? These are the not so little signs nature sends to tell us to RUN AWAY.
I don't even have a nephew, but I'm supposed to get one for Christmas.
But avoiding people who wear a cardigan is useful, except if you enjoy Mr. Rogers cosplay.
Who I should be angry with is myself. Why the fuck did I read this? Of course I hate this guy, most readers will too.
That's obviously the point, how they're generating hits. Spending our time hating this fuck is us getting played.
Hating people who write long-reads is a waste of time. That's why Twitter is so efficient. There, in only takes 280 characters to hate someone.
I'm sure this is a dumb question, but what's public transportation like in that area? Commuter rail, specifically. I know it's called BART, I don't know how reliable it is or how much living on a BART line actually helps affordability.
The largest city in the Bay Area is not on a BART line, and most of the jobs that people who live there hold are also not located on a BART line. With more tech jobs in SF these days, maybe there are more tech jobs in SF than in Menlo Park/Palo Alto/Mountain View/Sunnyvale/Santa Clara, but I doubt it. Caltrain funding may be doing ok, but the Santa Clara County transit agency, which has buses and a light rail system that doesn't fit very well with local housing and working patterns has been facing cuts at a time when corporate profits have been consistently high. I wouldn't be surprised if ridership is declining because fewer people who would take transit can even afford to live here.
A couple years ago I took the 22 bus up to the DMV on El Camino to get there when it opened. True to its reputation, dating back to the dot com era, the 22 ridership at 6AM has a large contingent of people just trying to get some sleep. It's one of the few routes that runs all night.
Just skimming that article, which I'm not going to read, this jumped out among the other stuff that's been commented upon:
I scrounged together enough for first and last on the cheapest place I could find--a not-at-all-cheap $2,600 a month studio at the top of Telegraph Hill
Who among us has not "scrounged" $5200? I guess, in fairness, he does end up with a lot of credit card debt.
Anyway, people who write about living in the Bay Area rarely seem to write about anything other than SF/Oakland. Or, if they're classy, Marin County.
They have areas on the map for 'workforce housing' -- I assume what is meant here is housing affordable on average pay (average plus 25% maybe?), and that they are avoiding calling it 'affordable housing' because (a) it's not going to get direct subsidies and (b) they don't want to inflame people who don't want to house the poor.
This is exactly right as a description of what the term generally means and why it's used.
Everyone knows, I hope, that if you have a patient with a knife or something embedded in his belly, you shouldn't pull it out. It might make the injury considerably worse. Leave it where it is, stop the bleeding with pressure around the object (careful not to press on it and drive it in deeper) and get them evacuated, priority one.
|| I am unreasonably delighted by this.
I think that MMPORGs, like golf, are something I will never have the patience to play myself but will always enjoy reading funny stories about.
|>
This one's for anyone now awake : how Trump repeats Sauron's policy errors.
100 reminds me of when people realised that candy-themed ostensibly kid friendly menagerie game Viva Pinata was actually a forced breeding programme under threat of violence.
I wouldn't call Planet Zoo an MMORPG though. It's a tycoon/landscaping game with an online marketplace.
102 is just lazy populist pandering. The downfall of Númenor under Ar-Pharazôn the Golden makes for an infinitely more relevant case study.
Aragon very definitely didn't take a crown or become King Elessar until after Sauron was gone. There was no revived Gondor threatening Sauron.
And Sauron's loss of Dol Guldur was a deliberate retreat (very temporary until Sauron's final defeat) planned to give the appearance of weakness as a distraction for his enemies.
The article is talking about the second, permanent, loss, simultaneous with the collapse of Mordor itself.
The White Council wasn't involved with that one in the same way.
The White Council didn't exist for that one in the same way. Anyway, the linked piece does indeed have a totally fucked chronology, among other crimes.
the article linked in the op is looooong so didn't finish it, probably didn't get more than 1/4 way through, but some points that could be of interest in the ensuing conversation:
re observations of our planning commissioner about developers shopping for lowest-reg destination, like many, probably most, land use policy issues, has to be solved by regional level regulation, you may be interested in checking out CA's local agency formation commissions and the related requirements that local jurisdictions coordinate regulatory programs for their "areas of influence," it isn't a perfect solution but at least puts in place an architecture that can curb rogue jurisdictions. the most effective checks on edge, sprawl development i've seen are hard limits on the extension of utility services - if you can't get water or sewer service, that pretty much puts the kibosh on development. you have to think of development regulation being applied, to be effective, on the economic-region/watershed-level, the way effective water regulation has to be applied on a watershed/basin level. and you need to have a third party enforcement mechanism, so that injunctions can issue.
basically, ca got some semi-working version of the "end senseless, ceaseless sprawl" recipe, but we crapped out on the other part -- encouraging appropriately dense redevelopment within the existing footprint of development, along with massive investment in transportation, educational, and recreational infrastructure. and the third party enforcement mechanisms intended to help combat sprawl were used systematically for decades to prevent any increased density within existing urban limits.
re: non-code compliant housing, i've had high school mock trialers whose three-gen immigrant families lived in converted garages in the outer sunset, strongly suspect those were unpermitted conversions; they are not uncommon *at all*. one of my faves went on gracefully to ucb - insert multiple hearts, god that young woman, so wonderful. also know in nauseous horrifying detail about various appalling unpermitted "housing" in greater los angeles, including a bunch of guys (undocumented workers) living in a dirt-floored crawl space, plus countless unheated garages and shacks with power via extension cords, no toilets, water from the cold yard faucet, etc.
and welcome to the arsenic belt in southern san joaquin county, where multiple local jurisdictions systematically exclude from their service areas various shanty towns so that the poor agricultural work force that lives in these benighted places is forced to rely on groundwater heavily contaminated by naturally occurring arsenic, and i'm sure a huge load of ag chemicals. the county's inspectors basically refuse to enforce building regulations. plus, the ag industry has their own special building code for ag worker housing bc god forbid they should be required to build ag worker housing to regular-code in the instance they deign to build it at all.
anyways, i remember a couple of years ago on here freaking the fuck out of some people by proposing to upzone all of sf west of arguello-stanyan to inner-paris levels of density (basically 6 stories). it's a pretty moderate proposal in the scheme of things, folks!
dairy queen @ 111: Re: succeeding at blocking sprawl, but not at upzoning the existing urban areas, heh, gosh I can't imagine why they might want to do that (strokes chin) .... oh, that would cause the resale value of existing housing to go thru the roof!
Sigh. Yeah, everything you say is so true. they could take the entire Sunset and Richmond, upzone it, lay down some serious mass transit, and it would do a world of good. Sigh.
111 last and 112: How to build the Paris of California!
I had a friend who lived in a cardboard box in a garage for a semester in the early 80s. That was in California, Santa Barbara maybe. So it's not new (n=1). The weather helps.
114: The political & social conditions i describe in 111.2-.3 began to develop in the 1970s. Ceqa (our little nepa & "best" 3rd party leverage point) dates to 1970, i think, & Prop 13 was adopted circa 1978 or so. The early 1980s was also when uc reg fees first began to precipitously climb climb climb. That clanking you heard throughout the 1970s was the postwar ladder being pulled up, lead up to raegan's election.
Locally there's a housing plan to implement Form-Based Code as part of redeveloping an area that's currently a giant low-income apartment complex. This all happens against a backdrop of historic distrust of city government, which did some super racist stuff in the past, including pushing through a rezoning that bulldozed a historically black neighborhood back in the '60s.
So a lot of people are suspicious of the redevelopment plans, and they've particularly focused on Form-Based Code as some super-double-seekrit gentrification plan. And as far as I can tell, the code itself seems like a good idea for how to lay out several urban blocks, but it's become History's Greatest Evil so let's smash capitalism.
They aren't trying to name the new development after Robert E. Lee?
you may be interested in checking out CA's local agency formation commissions and the related requirements that local jurisdictions coordinate regulatory programs for their "areas of influence,"
Given LAFCOs are county-by-county, that may have potential limit sprawl in the Bay-adjacent counties, but I'm not sure how far that goes. There is still lots of tract-developable land out in the Valley.
anyways, i remember a couple of years ago on here freaking the fuck out of some people by proposing to upzone all of sf west of arguello-stanyan to inner-paris levels of density (basically 6 stories). it's a pretty moderate proposal in the scheme of things, folks!
SB50 is even more moderate: SF impact map (page 9 of PDF). Pink would be upzoned to 3-4 stories, yellow to 4, orange to 5. Let's get it through next year!
the most effective checks on edge, sprawl development i've seen are hard limits on the extension of utility services - if you can't get water or sewer service, that pretty much puts the kibosh on development.
Maybe in California, but there are lots of places where you can just dig a well.
118: yes, lafcos are county-based, i just thought our resident commissioner might find the idea interesting.
119: very low density residential can be supported on wells and septic systems, but for a profitable residential subdivision a developer is going to need access to municipal services.
actually actually, another function of lafcos is to carry out agency service reviews and approve/deny the establishment of new service agencies (e.g., water-sewer districts) with the goal of preventing the creation of unsustainable mini districts serving low density subdivisions, which routinely fail to tax themselves sufficiently to fund basic maintenance let alone upgrades to address regulatory changes.
very low density residential can be supported on wells and septic systems, but for a profitable residential subdivision a developer is going to need access to municipal services.
In California, absolutely, and similarly for other arid or semi-arid regions where access to water is a significant constraint. But in, e.g., New Jersey it's very common to see subdivisions with lot sizes of a quarter acre or even larger where each house is on an individual well and septic system. It's a different kind of sprawl, at a much lower density than the type of development you're talking about, but very sprawly nonetheless, and local governments wouldn't be able to control it by limiting municipal utility service even if they wanted to, which they mostly don't. (This is a case where zoning could potentially be a useful tool to fight sprawl, but again only if that's what the local government wanted to do.)
Another potential tool would be to require new development to hook up to municipal utilities, which would drastically reduce the lot sizes at least. But definitely very little interest by governments in that approach.
There's a development outside of Patterson, CA that seems to have been built with the idea that some roads into the Bay Area would be widened enough to make a nearly impossible commute into a plausible nightmare. It made the news during the housing bust in 2008 or so because it didn't get fully built and allegedly didn't have enough residents using enough water to have enough circulation to avoid concentrations of harmful substances building up in the tanks. I seem to remember that being under a legal dispute and I don't remember what the outcome was.
"in, e.g., New Jersey it's very common to see subdivisions with lot sizes of a quarter acre or even larger where each house is on an individual well and septic system."
OK, this is fairly startling. When you say subdivisions, you mean areas with a fair number of houses? We arent talking about scattered farms here? This is houses on, say, half an acre each, and they are living on well water and septic tanks?
A subdivision with lots, one per house, of a quarter to a half acre each is pretty common here.
126: There are areas in Michigan like that. We rented a cottage on a lake (the town of ~80,000 has three or four depending on how you count one at the edge of the town) when we moved here, where each lot had 80-100 feet of frontage (the lots were rectangular to maximize how many houses could fit around the lake) and covered maybe 0.5 acres for a large lot, and each house or cottage had its own well and septic. It wasn't something built by a developer; individuals bought lots and built whatever they wanted (most original buildings had been torn down and rebuilt as year-round housing rather than summer only). It's not densely populated, but it's fairly suburban, parallel blocks of paved streets and such.
128: Sorry, population 50K for the town with the lakes, 80K for the twinned town with no lakes.
127: oh, here too. That sounds like very typical prosperous-suburb density. It wasn't the density that surprised me, it was the prehistoric plumbing technology. Over here you really only see that in very rural places.
That's true in this part of Pennsylvania also. Ground has too many rocks for septic systems to be cheap.
Since teo brought up pooping, I want to complain about the bathrooms in my office's building. There is no ventilation at all except for the door. And there are ashtrays built into the walls by the sink and the urinals. The building was built in 1996.
I don't know our sewage rules. Rules on wells for subdivisions have been a point of contention over the last two decades. Our constitution protects vested water rights. Our legislature exempts domestic wells from prioritization under the appropriation system, if their flow rates are low enough. The question continuously arises what to do with shared wells for a subdivision, with interconnected systems. Agency policies swing with the different administrations.
It's a big deal because if you fully integrate all groundwater into the prior appropriations system, you can't drill any new wells in basins were, for example, a utility has a big downstream dam on a river, and thus a right to a continued historic flow rate to run its turbines. Or, depending on your compact, a Native nation that has an instream water right to protect the right to fish, traditionally. (I think the CSKT compact, currently before Congress, resolves this in favor of allowing further on and off-reservation development in, for example, my county. But it's not yet ratified, and Republicans seem dead set on defeating it.)
Our city is annexing farmland that then gets developed. The council approved this one -- https://www.hellgategardens.com/ -- two years ago, and this one -- https://www.missoulacurrent.com/business/2019/11/missoula-city-council-approves-hellgate-meadows-subdivision/ -- two days ago.
Since they are in the city, they'll have city water and sewer.
Water rights were some of my dad's favorite cases.
Mine too. Here, like in NE, it's all about the history of the settlement of the country, and of the specific plots of land. As to which no one now alive can offer testimony based on personal knowledge. We have a Water Court, so our ordinary district judges only do certain things in water law.
I have a pretty good one going right now in the Water Court. Couldn't settle at mediation last week. I've got a partial summary judgment issue I'll take a run at, but we may well have to go to trial. In the very early years of the 20th century, a promoter guy had a vision for a big water project that would go way beyond the 2,000 acres ranch land he was in the process of subdividing. He started a big canal, then he died. Then, 20 years later, the ditch gets fixed, and the folks form an irrigation district. But not all the land is included in the district. What, if anything, belongs to the district, what belongs to the family at the end of the ditch who put only a portion of their land into the district? We have the district, four members of the family at the end (who own separate properties and don't get along), the utility that owns a big dam downstream, and the United States as parties.
I don't understand how it works in the long term with everyone pumping huge volumes of aquifer water. Probably it doesn't and then the corn will move north with the warming climate.
Obama had a program to cut water use by subsidizing more efficient irrigation systems. Not that it got him any credit for helping the farm people.
Anyway, it turns out that those center pivot systems that shoot water into the air are about as inefficient as they look. You can save tons just by aiming the water down.
I assume you'll need more power to move the sprinklers, but maybe not. Had a long talk with a guy recently about the economics of shifting from flood to sprinkler. He grows hay. Also a long talk about the difference between angus and hereford, both as animals to raise, and as food to eat. I did not ask which fart more; they probably have opinions on that, though. (I've heard that it's the corn that leads to the farting, so I blame Nebraska.)
Wait. You mean the cows. I have no idea there.
I once saw a documentary about how pigs fart enough to provide energy and light to a whole town. It was narrated by Mel Gibson and Tina Turner.
145: I had to do a google search to figure out what you were talking about. Another movie I didn't see.
It was probably at the Drexel with the other art movies.
There were a number of housing developments in my part of FL that had wells/septic tanks when I was growing up. Definitely less densely built up than a typical suburban neighborhood, but still not actually rural.
147: Maybe, but that was a long time ago - B.C.
Before Cringe-Inducing Antisemitism.
150: No, I think Mel got that from his dad. But, yeah, maybe because he kept it hidden, so it didn't yet induce cringes.
When you say subdivisions, you mean areas with a fair number of houses? We arent talking about scattered farms here? This is houses on, say, half an acre each, and they are living on well water and septic tanks?
Yeah, typical suburban-style developments (though at the low end of the suburban density continuum). As others have noted, they're fairly common in parts of the US with the right combination of conditions: sandy soil, humid climate, and local governments that want to encourage development but don't want to provide services to support it. New Jersey and Florida are classic examples of that mix.
Suffolk County, Long Island has a whole lot of housing, but is almost entirely unsewered -- it's almost all individual septic systems. I think very few houses are still drinking from their own wells though, given the amount of septic discharge, agricultural, and industrial discharge, it'd be a terrible idea.
Do they just drink the well water as it comes out of the ground??
Not anymore, I think almost all residents are on treated town water now. But until sometime in the 90s, for example, my mother's beach house had an untreated well.
Untreated well water is mostly safe in rural Nebraska. I don't know about Pennsylvania. There were people in my home town who used their own well even though the city water pipe went by their house.
I guess I can see why she went with "The Barefoot Contessa" instead of the "The Sewerless Contessa," but the latter is a pretty good way to communicate that she has maintaining the advantages of high status in less than ideal circumstances
We have a well and septic system. I got the impression that this is standard for free-standing houses that aren't in a municipality, whereas if we were in a municipality we would be on "city water". Hard to express how much this irritates me, having to be responsible for this and how wasteful it is to have everyone needing to reduplicate each other's efforts by maintaining a septic system and water supply (softener, neutralizer, pump) for each house. An additional insult, beyond each of us homeowners having to embarrass ourselves with our efforts at amateur property management.
This "not in a municipality" concept is a strange one to those of us who live in the fully-tiled-with-governments northeast.
Maryland is extremely county-based. If you're not in a muncipality you're just... in the county. It's hard to get used to. In Pennsylvania if you weren't in a muncipality you were in a township and there's like 20 of those per county. Here the governing units are larger. Makes more sense for a lot of things.
So it's like New England except the units (county) are much bigger than the units there (town).
159: Maine has some unorganized territory - more recently, some townships have been dissolving themselves as population dwindles.
I've been reading a book about that guy who went hermit in Maine. He was in a very hidden area, but not a been remote area. He needed to be able to walk to places with supplies to steal.
This all stopped making sense to me several comments ago. Municipalities? Townships? Towns dissolving themselves? There are large parts of the country that are, at some level, just not governed?
164: not exactly not governed, but as a land owner you are on your own a lot more than you would be otherwise. There are still restrictions on land use and building codes etc. you will have to adhere to, but there are no municipal services you can hook into and no council or whatever to complain to/about. For example I've known people who had to pay a utility company to run power out further along a (public) road in order for them to access it.
you also see "unincorporated townships" and the like, which I think means they have municipal services provided by a larger, nearby incorporated entity (and little say about them). ICBW about that easily.
in 165, re 166. "there are no municipal services" should be "there may not be municipal services"
164: This is all complicated by the fact that local structures of government can be fundamentally different from one state to the next. There's usually the same general vocabulary, but what it means to be a county or a town in Delaware isn't legally or practically the same thing it means in Indiana.
Right, the terminology is confusing because the categories and usage vary enormously from state to state but often use the same terms. There is always some level of governmental authority but it may be pretty distant and minimal in its actual impact on daily life, especially in rural areas where the operative government unit is usually (but not always!) the county. The general trend has been for suburban sprawl to lead to increasing population and demand for services in areas that were formerly rural and lightly governed, which sometimes leads to incorporation of new local units that provide more services but sometimes doesn't. Another trend in some more remote rural areas is for population loss to lead to less demand for services and capacity to provide them, so you have things like local governments dissolving or merging. All of it reflects the highly decentralized nature of local administration in the US.
The only places in the US that have no local government at all are the parts of the Unorganized Borough of Alaska that are not within incorporated cities. In those areas the state handles the functions that are usually local government responsibilities.
170: There is more of that in Canada (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unorganized_area) but that makes sense given the populations. Alaska is more like large areas of Canada that way, I suppose.
The general trend has been for suburban sprawl to lead to increasing population and demand for services in areas that were formerly rural and lightly governed, which sometimes leads to incorporation of new local units that provide more services but sometimes doesn't.
Somehow this just doesn't happen in Maryland. 2/3 of Montgomery County is sprawl but several of the extremely well-known suburban towns technically don't exist as far as I can tell. Silver Spring? Bethesda? No real boundaries. People can decide whether they are or are not in Bethesda. Gaithersburg and Rockville do exist. Takoma Park does exist. These towns sporadically annex other land if it will get a mall built or something like that, but it doesn't have much impact on governance.
Chevy Chase has expanded several times and each time it was technically the creation of a new tax district, which is like a municipality but not quite a municipality. This seems to be unique to Chevy Chase for some reason. Therefore I think there are people who technically live in the village of "Martin's First, Second, Third and Fourth Additions to the Village of Chevy Chase, Maryland". For all of these it's just a technicality and they think of themselves as being in Chevy Chase with no more complications. Except Friendship Heights, which calls itself Friendship Heights, is adjacent to the Friendship Heights neighborhood of D.C., is the most densely populated census-designated place in the country, and has enough of a government to have banned smoking entirely within its boundaries a few years ago.
I remember when my grandparents bought the lot they built their house on--what became their development was just trees then, on unincorporated county land. I was very glad they had water and sewer, because the development just to west was on wells/septic tanks. When I was in college, their neighborhood and some surrounding developments decided to join the city to the north, so they had to change zip codes.
I lived in a (small) city to the south, and went to school a bit further south than that. It could get confusing trying to figure out who to lobby/protest/write scathing letters to the editor about* in any given the situation, given the overlap of mayors, city councils, county commissioners, school boards, etc.
*I was an active and informed teenager.
We go all the way in the other direction in the East Bay with areas that have no city government but are still plenty built up and have the county providing a lot of city-like oversight. (Sometimes entirely surrounded by cities.)
Castro Valley, for example, has its own BART station and the county does zoning and urban planning and provides extra sheriff patrols. The elected county board defers on its local issues to the member whose district includes it, so it's as if he's both executive and legislative branch; there's also an appointed "Municipal Advisory Council" that helps him out.
I should say that the school district thing was less confusing than it might have been because the entire (huge) county had one school district, and I went to a district-wife magnet high school. My sisters both went to their neighborhood high schools, though my middle sister was in a magnet program at hers. Our district's magnet program initiative was the result of a court order to desegregate--in the early 1980s, IIRC.
Chevy Chase has expanded several times
This happens to a lot of us as we get older.
Yes. Axl Rose looks like Benny Hill.
There is more of that in Canada (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unorganized_area) but that makes sense given the populations. Alaska is more like large areas of Canada that way, I suppose.
Yeah, that makes sense, and it's quite possible aspects of the Alaska system were inspired by the Canadian one.
I think that's also where they got the idea to put caribou all over the place.
hot or cold running caribou is not typically a municipal service.
They're cold when not running and hot when running (if they keep moving fast enough).
Yes, Bethesda is a state of mind, not a town. It's also a CDP, so it's not complete chaos.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethesda,_Maryland
Speaking of members of the cervidae family, capreolinae order, there are three deer outside my window right now. One is eating the ivy that I would otherwise have to trim. I can't see what the other two are eating.
They're waiting while the fourth one creeps up on you.
Every goddam thing, if they're anything like the white-tails that infest my neighborhood.
Why are you people not eating the deer. You all have guns and stuff already.
There's people complaining that people are hunting deer in the park. I kind of doubt it.
We sometimes get deer from Jammies' side of the family. It's good in small doses, then it gets gamey.
This one is now three feet from me. I have a bow, but no arrows. Or skill at archery.
But killing and butchering a deer on my patio is, I'm pretty sure, one of those things that would not only see me forced to attend marriage counseling, but that I would have stories told about me later at the marriage counselor bar.
I don't suppose that if I covered the raspberry bush with like butter or fluffernutter or something the deer would eat that for me.
I bet butter would give the deer loose stools. I probably don't want that on my patio.
|| Who knows about VPN apps? Context: My sister is traveling in Ethiopia* and wants to install one in case the government shuts down internet access. Two questions:
1. I know that "shutting down the internet" can take different forms. My super-duper lay understanding is that a VPN should be able to get through unless the ISPs literally block all access from anyone and/or they have VPN detection. Is that right?
2. Is there a free VPN app anyone recommends? Since she probably won't have to use it, she's rather not pay for one.
*She's taking her adopted daughter back for a second time to travel around and to see her birth mom. There are some photos of their last trip two years ago in the pool.
|>
That sounds easier than my question, but I still don't know. My thinking is that if things get bad enough that the governments shuts off the internet, Americans should leave because America probably did something horrible there in the past.
Free VPNs are shit and not to be trusted. I use ExpressVPN which is good for streaming but there are other good paid ones out there.
While we should always default to the assumption that the U.S. did something horrible in the past, current Ethiopian political emotions are internally focused. (If things got dicey for whatever reason she would leave, but all the more reason that she'd want internet access while figuring out how to do so.)
198: Not to be trusted because they'll sell your data?
So, one of my neighbors just made her daughter put a robin in a box and drive it to the animal rescue place. The robin had a broken leg. I kind of wonder what the animal rescue people are going to do with an injured robin. It's also a good reminder of why the deer around here are so sure nobody is going to eat them.
https://onezero.medium.com/why-vpns-are-suddenly-everywhere-and-how-to-pick-the-best-one-22d4cfdeff6f
And I think (but don't know) the Ethiopian shutdowns have indeed shut down all access for everyone.
Sometimes global, sometimes just social media, sometimes bandwidth throttling.
And they appear to prefer regional to nationwide.
193: My parents are still married 40-some years after the night my mom and siblings and I came home from Halloween movie night to find my dad hard at work on a half-butchered carcass hanging from the tractor bucket. The story was that the young bull that had been in the back pasture when we left for town had gotten a whiff of the neighbor's heifers when the wind shifted, knocked down the fence, and went to throwing the dog house around the back yard with his horns. Dad's former students who were visiting that night thought he was kidding about it being too dangerous to try to pen the critter back up until the gun went off.
My mom may be excessively tolerant.
204: Based on my paper-thin understanding of the current political situation, it's more likely than not that a regional shutdown would include one or two of the areas they'll be traveling in.
205: That somehow seems less problematic than killing a deer in the middle of a city (of the second class).
Eh, but yours is within spear range.
A decent VPN is not that expensive
