There are ways that people talk about gentrification that always makes me slightly uncomfortable. As a non-white person, something always feels like gentrification is something that “good” white people like to blame “bad” white people for doing, when the real problem tends to be wider and more systemic.
In this particular instance I find myself asking why it matters that the Weaver residents were originally not from Austin. If you’re born in Chicago, shouldn’t you still have the same rights as someone who was born in Austin? That includes the right to complain. However it doesn’t mean anyone has to listen to you. As other users have pointed out, it’s not exactly a new situation for people to move to a neighborhood and immediately try and kick their neighbours out. It’s just that most of the time they’re told to kick rocks.
It seems to me the real crux of this issue is that rich white people are so much more prioritized by the law that a couple of irate Karens can overrule an entire neighbourhoods opinion. It has nothing to do with where they’re from or gentrification.
Not that gentrification doesn’t cause it’s own problems. But the way some people talk about it, as though existing residents are entitled to a higher set of rights, leads down some pretty dark paths, especially when newcomers are of a different nationality, or race than current residents. It reminds me of something that used to be said a lot in jest when I was younger in the 90’s and 00’s and working in fast food. Whenever people gave me extra work to do, they justified it by saying something like, “well, he should just be grateful he isn’t working in a rice paddy” (I’m from Singapore originally, but ok). There seemed to be this view that because my parents chose to move to Canada when I was young, I was somehow entitled to fewer rights, even as a citizen.
It's almost a tautology that only long term residents are around long enough to feel the negative effects of gentrification directly. I've been in my home for 15 years and only in the last 5 or so have I come to really understand what this trend has done to the community.
My initial response to the current wave of millionaire neighbors is to resent the gentrifiers with all that wealth who don't see what they're doing. But a quick look in the mirror confirms the awful truth... I was just like them when I moved here 15 years ago.
Sure I wasn't as rich as the current crop, but the exact degree of wealth surely would not have been terribly meaningful to the lifelong renter residents who were slowly being displaced by middle class people looking for a bargain on a home at that time.
The system we have created around real estate and home ownership is optimized to erode culture and atomize community. We like to pretend that this is somehow inevitable, the will of the market, but we need to own it - this is the world we have built for ourselves.
So yeah, I do understand the anger at individuals - because there's nothing else to be angry at. It feels like being angry at the system itself is futile.
This. Recently I had a discussion with a neighbor who owns the multi-apartment building next to our house about that very topic. All around our in our quarter, old buildings get renovated or torn down and rebuilt. Small bakeries close and the whole neighborhood is somewhat changing.
And then it struck me. 7 years ago we built our house here, in what used to be a slot of an old small factory. In the middle of buildings with smaller apartments, mostly rented out. And there we come, young well of couple building a house for us on a land plot large enough for, what, 6-8 appartments. In a sense, we were the first ones, or at least among the first ones.
Gentrification is a bad word for a positive outcome. When people come to a neighborhood and invest a lot of money and making it a nicer place, it benefits the current residence who can sell their homes for higher prices if they wish. If the current residents wish to stay, they benefit from the improvements.
I have to disagree. In the neighborhoods most like to suffer gentrification, people rent and don't own their living space. Increasing real estate prices only mean higher rents, making it impossible for existing residents to stay, long term, in their apartments.
Only owners can sell, usually to investors. This is a major rent driver. Up to the poitn were small grocery shops can#t afford it anymore and have to close. And I am not sure how us building a house for us, and only us, had any positive impact on any of our neighbors.
> The system we have created around real estate and home ownership is optimized to erode culture and atomize community. We like to pretend that this is somehow inevitable, the will of the market, but we need to own it - this is the world we have built for ourselves.
How is it not the will of the market? I don’t see any option other than to limit people’s freedom to move about the city/state/country.
What's pushing people out is the rising cost of property, caused by more and more money bidding for less space. If the government had done more to create more space, prices would not have risen so dramatically.
What if government policy for the last few decades had been to keep housing as affordable as possible. So if average rent in a city started increasing, the government would make sure new apartments and got built and/or expanded roads and public transit to help people live farther away without a longer commute.
> What if government policy for the last few decades had been to keep housing as affordable as possible. So if average rent in a city started increasing, the government would make sure new apartments and got built and/or expanded roads and public transit to help people live farther away without a longer commute.
This would help and is necessary to solve the problem, but I don’t believe insufficient desirable cities or dense cities with public transit is the whole problem. Part of the problem is the ever widening income/wealth gaps, and people will sort themselves and want to surround themselves with as many people in theirs or the next higher up socioeconomic class as possible. So the bigger the divides, the more this is reflected in the neighborhoods, especially culturally.
> What if government policy for the last few decades had been to keep housing as affordable as possible.
> So if average rent in a city started increasing, the government would make sure new apartments and got built and/or expanded roads and public transit
How? Should they...raise taxes? Subsidize housing(and pay for it by raising taxes)? Take from the people who produce much, and give to the people who produce less? I'm not implying it's right or wrong, I'm genuinely curious as to "how" government should go about accomplishing that goal.
Is this difficult, getting approval? I don't live in a large city where the idea of building permits really comes into mind, so I don't have much experience in what could be involved there.
For some contrast, I live in the "rural" US, my home is surrounded on 4 sides by farm fields as far as you can see. This is like peering into an alien bureaucracy for me.
Most of the stress on land comes from exclusionary laws. People with power don’t want poorer people (and especially people of another race) to live near them—attributing their success to their efforts and labeling their own servants as parasites[1] and deadbeats—and pass laws that make housing affordability impossible. Thus, people need to drive long distances to jobs and live in disinvested communities in order to participate in regional economies.
The worst offenders are actually not cities, but the inner suburbs surrounding cities. Cities are filled with guilty settlers who want to help less fortunate people but are unable to let go of the systems of power, while their suburbs are usually created for the purpose of segregation and repeatedly reaffirm their desire for segregation.[2]
Difficult is an understatement. You have to hire the right lawyers who know the right people who can direct you to make the right donations. And if you need a variance, you can 100x the difficulty. It’s a political game, and everyone wants a cut. Not to mention fighting the people who don’t want change in their neighborhoods or congestion on the roads.
And in the meantime, you might also be stuck paying property taxes or fees on a contract to purchase the land that you need extended because the zoning board meeting ran too late and they couldn’t get to your permit.
People don’t understand what it takes to develop property in already occupied areas, and why developers only build “luxury” housing. There’s a reason rents and land prices are high.
> We'd end up with megacities who'd continuously expand and grow denser, swallowing their surroundings in that case, wouldn't we?
I imagine you'd still have the same pattern, just perhaps in more consistent circle shapes. Yesterday's "outskirts" would turn into tomorrow's "upcoming new area" and the people who lived there initially because it was all they could afford would get pushed further out, etc. The three story buildings will slowly get replaced with ten story buildings with wealthier residents, etc.
Constant growth doesn't mean more that in-demand areas won't stay expensive as demand constantly grows too, or that once less-demanded areas will stay less-demanded.
It's not our densest cities that our our cheapest cities. The demand is the underlying factor, not the density. (The density follows the (lack of!) demand for the cheap places.)
I'm not sure how you'd lower cost of living without negative population growth. Try to reduce the footprint of the city but keep the population the same, and you still have just as much money competing for places, so the supply/demand dynamics will keep prices high for the places people want.
Those two things are the opposite of one another. If a city grows denser, the size of its footprint is smaller.
Suppose you create a lot of high density housing in the city. Housing costs decline. People who used to have to live with their parents get their own place. People have shorter commutes.
The population of the city hasn't changed. Maybe if you're the only city doing this then it's a competitive advantage and people move there from other cities to take advantage of the lower cost of living. But if all cities do this then there is no relative advantage and all that happens is that housing is more affordable and people waste less time sitting in traffic.
> Those two things are the opposite of one another. If a city grows denser, the size of its footprint is smaller.
I believe they're mostly complementary. You can't rebuild the city every other year because you have more demand for housing, it's a slow process. The city expands outwards if possible, and at the same time will be made denser when convenient.
I'd love for the whole thing to be Sim City-style "we'll just remove those 12 single-story homes and add a sky scraper", but it's really not. It takes years and years, and it's really impacting the quality of life during those years. I used to live in a part of the city that got more dense housing, and it wasn't fun at all, construction sites everywhere, traffic jams everywhere, and housing prices rising sharply. It might turn out nice in 20 years when they've doubled the density, but it's absolutely not during those 20 years.
It's the property taxes that kick people out. There should be a graded scale that caps how much property taxes can rise in a year. Say 1% for current owners (or at most the rate of inflation). That would slow a LOT of this down. Sure change is inevitable but let people have a chance to adjust.
This is Texas. It has:
- a limit on how much the appraised value of a property can increase per year
- a limit on how much each tax unit -- county, city, etc. -- can increase their levy
- a exemption for elderly or disabled homeowner with even lower limits.
When we have developers building luxury condos amidst squalor, that’s a second-order effect of policies intended to create such contrasts. The market is constrained by the laws.
I think people abhor change in general. I grew up in Florida, and local Floridians hated the retirees and snowbirds moving in. Former rural communities with orange groves and cow pastures were replaced with massive planned communities that altered the character and culture of the area.
The Austin-Statesman noted that people in Austin have been complaining about change in the city since at least 1884:
"A few years hence the citizen of thirty years ago will be a comparative stranger in the home of his youth with no familiar objects to greet his eye save the eternal hills on which the capitol city sits enthroned as a queen in her royal beauty and the sparkling Colorado at her feet."
In a letter (not at all dramatically) titled “Passing Away” sent to the American-Statesman 135 years ago and signed “Old Citizen,” an Austin resident expressed dismay at the news that “the buildings on the north side of Pecan Street, between Brazos Street and the alley next to the Avenue would be sold and removed.”
Old Citizen lamented that “one by one the old land-marks leave us and but few of the original houses of Austin remain.”
I think gentrification is simply a vague way to put a face on something people don't like: because of fluctuating wages and rents, people are often forced to leave their communities and homes. People notice the gentrification side of it, because it involves a lot of large and imposing buildings, visible cultural artefacts, etc - and they notice the most extreme examples of it - refugees, etc. There's no clear discourse about the vast middle ground, which is much more ambiguous but also much more impactful - that because the right to live in a place is subject to market forces, and because availability of work moves, it's vanishingly unlikely that any but the richest will be able to live in a stable geographical community for more than a handful of years.
I mean, even in LA and the Bay area this is true. You are stuck renting unless you can get enough for a down payment. All of the 1950 apartments are being torn down.
I think one important part of Gentrification means there are people with more money moving into a neighbourhood. The real estate agents just showed the building to them on the quiet day and they bought their piece of it, believing it's like this all day every day. And when they move in, they realise the quietness was rather the exception than the rule. If they were from the area before, they would have known. But because they payed this amount of money, they think they bought the right to a have the quietness they were sold on.
I've seen similar things in Berlin in the 90s and early 2000s when West-Germans, mostly from Swabia moved in. They were sold apartments next to Youth clubs and the new neighbours didn't like that they had loud music on Friday and Saturday nights. But this was Berlin, this was what it was famous for. But whatever, a lot of the clubs had to shut down.
This minority has a tendency to force these things, even by court if necessary. Clubs in cities, church bells and cows in villages. Kindergardens, schools. Heck, even shops and decade old craftsman outlets.
Having had a few nights out in the Knaack, that was sad to read. I lived in Prenzlauer Berg for a short while in the mid-nineties and the clubs were a larger part of what Prenzlauer Berg such an interesting/happening area to live in. Before that, I had lived between Biesdorf and Marzahn – which was a quite a different experience (for a bearded, long-haired “auslander”).
> In this particular instance I find myself asking why it matters that the Weaver residents were originally not from Austin. If you’re born in Chicago, shouldn’t you still have the same rights as someone who was born in Austin?
Not necessarily. It's not about where you're born, but about whether you've been somewhere long enough to be part of its community. You have the same natural rights, obviously. But not the same standing in the community, input into cultural norms, or right to legal enforcement contrary to those cultural norms.
Going with the principle of live and let live, when you visit or move to some place with a different culture, it's on you to accept that culture. Showing up, planting yourself, and then demanding everyone else conform to your own culture will rightly create pushback.
This is a conservative stance, and it can be taken to the extreme to justify a whole bunch of horrible shit as you mention ("newcomers are of a different nationality, or race than current residents"), which I am certainly not condoning. But the same goes for every heuristic turned into a political axiom - the tamer form is still valid.
(edit: I changed "fit in" to "accept that culture", because the former bites off too much, and can too easily turn into an indictment of a person who others consider different even though they aren't acting to cause a problem)
> Going with the principle of live and let live, when you visit or move to some place with a different culture, it's on you to fit in.
Live and let live works for small things where there is no material effect on others, such as your spouse’s ethnicity or gender. For matters affecting others, such as noise, pollution, etc. live and let live is not applicable.
For all of those matters, the ultimate force is might makes right, but some places have democracy that allows votes to serve as proxy for might, or frequently money serves as proxy for might.
Things like noise are exactly what I was referencing by the local culture.
My point in invoking live and let live is that things like noise do not matter when you are far enough away. So different communities can exist with different norms regarding noise (or yard maintenance, farm smells, etc), and that is a good thing.
When someone used to one type of community moves into a different type, it falls to the person moving to accept the culture of where they're moving to. So for example it's unreasonable for someone who gets up early for work to move into a building full of college students, and then complain about the late night parties.
The alternative is to insist that there is one "right" culture, presumably yours, and to demand that everyone else conform to it. This is wrong.
Gentrification is really encouraged by the city. It's a way to replace a low tax revenue generating populace with a higher one. People get mad at the richer people (happens to be mostly white due to population ratio), and assume it's due to racism. Nobody recognizes the city is actually to blame. These people who move into these gentrified area's aren't doing it out of malice.
If the offenders are violating legal constructs(like noise ordinances, traffic safety laws, littering ordinances)...they don't have to listen to you, because you aren't the entity that enforces the laws. Your time is better spent contacting the entity that enforces the laws, and encouraging them to do their job.
> I find myself asking why it matters that the Weaver residents were originally not from Austin.
> the real crux of this issue is that rich white people are so much more prioritized by the law that a couple of irate Karens can overrule an entire neighbourhoods opinion.
There's no reason to be racist. Cultures vary regionally. Californians in general act differently than Texans in general. Rural Americans in general act differently than urban Americans. Some people like their culture and community and don't want it to change just because rich outsiders come in.
Personally (white dude here), I don't think there's good or bad white new residents per se. I think there are people with different values and attitudes that are opposed to long-time residents. Some new residents then try to force these differences on others with their relatively stronger political influences. Regardless of live-and-let-live or my-way-or-the-highway, people moving in change the dynamics, culture, and attitude textures of the area.
I live in this neighborhood, about three blocks north of where the car club meets. I’m white. I’m a homeowner. You get the picture.
Honestly, these people complaining in Weaver sound insane. They moved into a community and it’s their job to integrate with the community. We have a Brit who lives on my street that does community organizing and he’s been wonderful about building a sense of community that integrates the old and new residents. They should really be talking to him or Pio, mentioned in the article, instead of calling the police and accusing the car club of dealing drugs. Yeesh.
With that said, I think there are legitimate criticisms about the car club. For one, they absolutely trash the place every Sunday. When I walk down to the lake on Monday, there’s just tons of trash on the ground. I don’t know who picks it up but it’s certainly not the car club.
Also, doing burnouts and donuts on public streets sounds fun but it leaves the road covered in tire rubber and I imagine it smells awful while they’re doing it.
Those are basically the two things I’d like to see change, and in my humble, gentrifier opinion, they seem like reasonable issues to talk about with the community. Instead of having those conversations, we get white people leveraging their white privilege in the worst ways and anarchist groups like “Defend Our Hoodz” intimidating new businesses that open up. Fun times in my little corner of the world.
> With that said, I think there are legitimate criticisms about the car club. For one, they absolutely trash the place every Sunday. When I walk down to the lake on Monday, there’s just tons of trash on the ground. I don’t know who picks it up but it’s certainly not the car club. Also, doing burnouts and donuts on public streets sounds fun but it leaves the road covered in tire rubber and I imagine it smells awful while they’re doing it.
Sounds to me like those legitimate criticisms are exactly what the "insane Weaver residents" are complaining about. That and the violation of noise ordinances in a residential area, for half the weekend, every single week.
People move around in America. Both within cities and across cities. I don't see why people shouldn't be allowed to complain about laws being broken, just because they are new to a neighborhood. If the city decides that certain neighborhoods are exempt from certain laws, they are certainly welcome to make that official. And make it very clear to prospective tenants that the "normal laws" do not apply in those neighborhoods. Alternatively, there are also plenty of non-residential areas where people can gather, play ear-piercing music, trash the place, and have all the fun they want.
I don't understand why having laws, enforcing them, and residents requesting for their enforcement, is somehow a bad thing. Much less a matter of racial debate. Selective and subjective enforcement of rules are generally harmful to people of color - we need more consistently enforced laws, not less.
“The law” is decided by the most powerful people in society. Why do you think weed dealers have done 20 years in jail while Purdue Pharmaceuticals executives paid a $3 million fine for killing 500,000 people and counting? It’s not the weed dealers writing that law.
"Sounds to me like those legitimate criticisms are exactly what the "insane Weaver residents" are complaining about."
Really, the white dude who complained to the cops to do something about the black and latino car club because they are "scary" is just genuinely concerned about law and order and the imperative that all minor violations of local codes must always be enforced?
Color me skeptical.
Calling the cops on scary black people for minor infractions of ticky-tack laws is how Eric Garner and many others have ended up killed at the hands of law enforcement.
Calling the cops for a sustained and recurrent noise, environmental and traffic disturbance that means you can't reasonably enjoy your home or its immediate environment at the weekend... Seems fair, not racist or even bizarrely NIMBY.
"This is a tradition" isn't good enough. It has to remain a tradition that people want in their back yards. If they don't, find somewhere else to do your noisy car things.
Clearly the police here disagree, and feel that anyone can be as disruptive as they like.
The article literally has people saying they complained to the police because the black and brown men are "scary"
And here you are claiming there's NOTHING AT ALL wrong with that.
Sure let's just ignore decades of selective enforcement of law to discriminate against black and brown people, I guess "racism is over" because it makes you uncomfortable
That's not even an honest reading of the text. It does not report that a white person says brown people are scary, it says they complained about a "celebration".
Leave your baggage at the door. These things are objectively noisy, objectively disruptive and leave a whole heap of very real mess in their wake. Those are my problems, skin colour is yours.
Talk about a strawman. Are there some people who might have complained for dumb reasons? Sure. Are there more people would would have complained because they don't want their residential neighborhood to:
- be filled with thrash
- smell like burning rubber
- violate noise ordinances
every single Sunday? Yes. Most middle-aged people do not want to live in such an environment, and neither do I. This is exactly why residential zoning laws exist, and most people support some form of restrictions in residential neighborhoods. Not sure what there is to be skeptical about.
...YOU are the one who claimed everyone that was complaining had a legitimate complaint about law and order and enforcement of local codes.
I mean it's literally in the first few paragraphs of the piece that some dude thought the black and brown guys at the car club were "scary" so he reported them.
"Are there some people who might have complained for dumb reasons?"
"dumb reasons"?
I think the term you should be looking for is "bigoted" reasons.
> ...YOU are the one who claimed everyone that was complaining had a legitimate complaint about law and order and enforcement of local codes.
Read again. I never claimed that 100% of complainers had legitimate motivations or complaints. And YOU responded by cherry-picking a single person who had dumb motivations, and acting as though he is representative of everyone else, and the point I am making. This is the definition of a cherry-picking and a strawman.
In all of America there are actual laws against littering, noise and pollution and wherever I move I expect them to be enforced.
Also I wonder if these lawbreakers were respectful of the culture that existed prior to them arriving? I doubt it and with that I will conclude that they probably don't deserve the same respect. It's a free country you know? If they don't like it they can move somewhere else (and probably disrupt wherever they move to).
I've been on the receiving end of car heads moving into my neighborhood. I ended up having to move out. What goes around, comes around I guess.
I did. I also told the cops and other regulators numerous times. Unfortunately it's hard to catch someone running a professional mechanics garage out of their house. You have to setup 24/7 audio/video surveillance with expensive equipment to measure decibels, review it daily and eventually bring them to court (and win). Furthermore, even if you do get the laws enforced, you still have to put up with them doing legal things like running machinery in their garage every day up until 10pm (in that town) while they work on "their own/family" vehicles which would still be annoying.
If a bunch of people like me moved into town and started complaining, we probably could have gotten rid of those lowly pests that moved next door to me.
Since that wasn't happening anytime soon, I figured the next best thing is to just use some of my high income to move to a place where these kinds of lower class people can't afford to live and that's exactly what I did. I saved plenty of money living in a lower class neighborhood for a long time and the market conditions were totally right for a move so in the end, I actually won.
We supposedly live in a democracy, but the ability to affect what laws exist is not distributed equally. Sometimes there are two groups with opposing views of what the law should be, and the smaller group loses out. Oftentimes those people gather together in a place and have the local law enforcement disregard the law in their area. For example, pot is legal in Colorado even though it's illegal in the United States as a whole. Similarly, the residents of this neighborhood don't want the noise ordinance to be enforced, and they have been just fine with the way things have been going for decades. The newcomers can certainly appeal to the city that the law is being broken, but in doing so they are exercising political power to undermine the will of their neighbors, who spent time and energy to build a community they would be happy to live in. Having the law on their side doesn't make it a nice thing to do.
> the residents of this neighborhood don't want the noise ordinance to be enforced, and they have been just fine with the way things have been going for decades
Or maybe the silent majority of the old residents actually agree with the new people, except they already got tired of trying to enforce those rules, being ignored? That's just as likely in my opinion.
So many people, the majority even, have spent an extended period pleading with authorities on this issue with no media attention and now merely several residents of one apartment building make the same pleas. These don't seem equally likely. Or should we be interpreting your view through the lens of the "silent majority" euphemism?
> the residents of this neighborhood don't want the noise ordinance to be enforced
I think that sort of local override is something that needs to be tested on frequent intervals. Communities change. They get older, they have kids, whatever, situations change. It's not enough to say that "this is the way we've done things since 1582". It's the people today that matter.
Clearly laws are there in case they need to be enforced. Lot of laws are there "in case". However in this case the community seems okay with it for a couple decades. Clearly these new people come in and think they run the neighborhood but neither the cops nor the city sees the need to enforce "the law" if it's only disruptive to a couple of gentrifiers moving in trying to continue the tradition of white imperialism to subdue local culture.
Relax. By "integrate", the OP clearly means things like "be a good neighbor" and "don't stomp around like you own the place" and "learn about the place you've just moved to" and not "submit" or "conform".
You don't get to complain about the smell of manure if you move in right next to a farm. Know what you're getting into when you move, don't expect the surrounding community to change to suit you, regardless of race.
Haha, I remember this coming up 45 years ago. One of my teachers mentioned that as the nearby suburbs encroached on farm country, it only took a short while until those moving in complained about the smell of their farm neighbors. They tried to get them zoned out of existence.
So, yes, people move into farmland and immediately complain that "Somebody's got to do something about the smell."
The difference is, it's legal for a farm to smell like manure. They do say in the article that the car club is breaking several laws. So it's more a case of, for a long time the cops haven't enforced the laws here, but now the new residents want the laws to be enforced.
I don't know what this is about human nature but it's infuriating.
As someone involved in private aviation and small airports I can't tell you how many times people move in right next to an airport that has been there for decades and then complain, protest, and threaten legal action against those very airports because the planes are too loud.
This is way more nuanced than a HN comment could ever express, but my opinion is that this situation is a two-way street. The people moving in need to adapt to the neighborhood while the long-term residents need to adapt to the changes happening around them. The key though is that it needs to be a smooth, fluid transition that involves gives and takes on both sides.
I don't think calling the cops and asking them to "shut it down" is a productive way for driving change in the community at all.
Also, completely selfishly, those kinds of actions give the gentrifiers who respect the Tejano community and traditions a bad rap. I really don't want to get to a point where all the long-term residents paint all the newcomers with a broad brush because of the Weaver people. At the beginning of Covid, newcomers were helping elderly long-term residents and vice-versa, but if crap like this keeps happening, those bonds are going to be strained.
"And, does it reflect reality? Do new populations really preserve the prexisting culture in practice?"
I'm not totally sure what you're presuming integrating with a community should involve, but there's a large gap between preserving and - as in here - actively interfering with the preexisting culture of a community.
> Is that a broadly-accepted opinion? Does it apply consistently to all cultures -- e.g. does it apply when nonwhites move into a white area?
If you move to an area and expect everyone to adopt your norms, that's close to colonization or conquering.
Alternatively, how do you react to the new person on your team who insists you're doing everything wrong and should change to match their view of the world. "When in Rome, do like the Romans" is good for a variety of reasons.
Exactly, it smells of imperialistic tendencies that occur all over with gentrification. Hopefully the local cops and city council ignore the gentrifiers in this case.
>> "They moved into a community and it’s their job to integrate with the community."
> Is that a broadly-accepted opinion? Does it apply consistently to all cultures -- e.g. does it apply when nonwhites move into a white area?
If you move to a place and don't respect the local traditions or culture, you're making life harder both on yourself and to the existing community. I see no reason why it wouldn't apply every direction.
> And, does it reflect reality? Do new populations really preserve the prexisting culture in practice?
It largely depends on the societal and cultural homogeneity of the newcomers. If newcomers are largely from the same place or share the same culture, then I'd expect it would be more likely that they'd shift things in their direction.
Clearly it didn't happen during colonialism. It might be time to realize that the ways of the white men aren't necessarily best for all though. I'd think we should have come full circle on that by now.
Generally whites moving into a nonwhite area has been exemplified by colonialism, which is the community being coerced into integrating with the colonists.
Exactly "our ways and opinions are more refined and much better than your culture, adjust or we will crush you with our superior weaponry (read cops and lawyers)"
So many words about race, nationality, community, white privilege and literally no mention of wealth, economic inequality or at least increased mobility of labour. This is what I “love” about modern American discourse.
exactly. the elites couldn't be happier about the discourse being diverted away from the real issues. instead they have everyone caught up in a moral panic over melanin and identity.
Focus on identity politics started around 2014-15 (IIRC around Ferguson, MO riots). I always thought that that was a convenient distraction from the real elephant in the room - wealth inequality, poverty, classism - which was being highlighted by the Occupy movement.
It is almost as if "nefarious elites" pushed the media narratives about racism, sexism and all other -isms in order to divide the masses. Same as prior culture wars about relatively minor issues - who uses which bathrooms or abortion etc - which affect only a tiny subset of the society.
The surprising thing to me is that in previous eras the plebes didn’t have access to data or education or literacy to maybe realize this, but what is the plebe’s excuse nowadays? Only one I can come up with is many of the plebe’s think they’re eventually going to not be plebes.
I think "plebes" back then had a tool to balance the dynamic: unions. I previously wasn't a union guy, but the more I read into it the more I realized two things about the union as an organization:
1. Unions provide negotiating power against elites.
2. Unions were the last remaining non-religious, working-class, political action organizations.
I think the second point is important and a underrated when it comes to union power, and more importantly might be more important than being able to negotiate wages. In the past, unions used to be actual voting blocs, so it provided a secondary mechanism for the working class to exert their political power. That is almost impossible now, and as a result our politicians answer more to wealthy PACs than anything else. Without unions, most people are politically inactive, or self-select into red/blue due to culture factors or team sports.
Without an organization it's literally impossible for any individual to overcome the system even if they realize the problems within; and it's hard to not get involved in identity politics when if you lose it means you lose your job/housing/opportunities.
The obvious reason why the wealthy "win" in politics is that they organize. In principle, lobbyism is just the act of telling politicians what you want. There is nothing wrong with it but if only one side is communicating then the politicians are going to fulfill the demands of that side.
What mentions do you think should have been there? I'm having trouble understanding if you are agreeing, disagreeing, or <other> with the parent post. Could you elaborate?
Those are inextricably locked up with race in America, you aren't paying attention to statistics if you don't think there's correlation. Sure there are poor whites. but your chance of being poor and white is much lower than if you're black or latino. A huge portion of it does depend on who currently holds wealth and that is extremely weighted towards white people. The bootstrapping methodology/theory only gets you so far. Sure some people manage to break through the glass ceiling. I managed to break away from being "poor white trash" for example. I was also quite gifted in math/science and had uneducated but stable, caring parents. Lots of people in my community grew up in pure chaos and drugs and didn't stand a chance and fell right into the same destructive patterns. Sure there's the whole 99% vs 1% but race can't be swept under the rug while you're far more likely to die by cop if you're a POC rather than white. We can be activists for both types of change.
I am not sure how any of these justifies talking only about race and ignoring economic conditions. Sure, race can’t be swept under the rug, and I didn’t said it should be. It is overemphasized at expense of other issues.
It is especially weird when you look at the history of the concept “gentrification”, even the word comes from “gentry”, which basically means upper class, and it exists also in monoethnic cities. The basis of the issue doesn’t lie in the race.
> Also, doing burnouts and donuts on public streets sounds fun but it leaves the road covered in tire rubber and I imagine it smells awful while they’re doing it.
I don't get why you've left out probably the most legitimate criticism of the practice, that it's quite dangerous. I don't know much about Austin, but in SF and Oakland people are killed fairly often in side shows, and often it's innocent bystanders.
> Also, doing burnouts and donuts on public streets sounds fun but it leaves the road covered in tire rubber and I imagine it smells awful while they’re doing it.
It indeed does smell awful, and the tire dust is filled with toxins that you probably don’t want in your system; that have already been implicated in the deaths of salmon.
It’s also very loud, well over 100 dB. That’s enough to cause permanent hearing loss.
I don’t believe the moral high ground is with the car club. Their behavior harms people outside of their in-group, with the most severe harms falling on people less privileged than themselves.
Yeah, the article is clearly pro-car-club but it seems to disregard what to me is the main question - is this car club doing anything illegal? If they aren't breaking the law, then it's not appropriate to call the police. If they are breaking the law, driving illegally in some way, or drinking in public where it's not allowed, then of course it's okay to call the police.
Honestly they are bigots. The left in California and SF Bay Area frequently are (I grew up among them in Marin and Berkeley - their hypocrisy has been obvious since my teens and I've always despised it!)
The trend towards authoritarianism is all too familiar as well.
I've never understood not just joining in and talking. But that's Karens for you!
But I also have never had a problem with hanging out with local folks in Oakland and East SJ when I lived in SV despite being lily white and sticking out like a sore thumb. They have a lot to offer and you have to wade in and respect the differences.
But then plenty of techies think these are "scary places" - most because THEY make them scary by how they act.
No, it's a common practice at this particular event. If it's been going for decades and no one has complained why should this one couple come in and try to impose their will on the community, especially with the overtones of racism/gentrification? Old Austin is disappearing pretty rapidly on the East side I can understand why they (the community) pushes back. Note everyone wants white picket fences and perfectly sculpted lawns.
Thanks for the context, that seems like a reasonable approach. The only thing I would offer is, do they know they can contact Pio or the Brit? I'm sure they'd much prefer to liaise with them rather than hope the police will fix everything. How would they discover such people?
FWIW, I'm kind of in the same situation, as I bought a place last month in the gentrifying East Riverside area (just across the river from the one in the article). Everything was going as expected until last Sunday, when a preacher set up a concert grade sound system for an outdoor service, which was new even to long-term residents. The 311 app and social media lit up with complaints about it. (Apparently, some group does this around there weekly, but until now not with such loud equipment.)
Yeah this is hard. Honestly E. Cezar Chavez is lucky in a lot of ways because Pio and the Brit are so active in the community. The one thing I can say is that you should meet your neighbors, join in if there's a block party and just generally talk to people in-person. If you do that, I'm sure you'll meet someone who is at least the de-facto community leader.
But whatever you do, stay off of NextDoor -- nothing good happens there.
Thanks! But also, what about the other side -- is there maybe a way to raise awareness about the existence of these community liaisons so the people in the article at least know they're an option? Like, if they were doing everything wrong, it seems they may be just completely ignorant of them.
Neighbourhoods change whether we like it or not. Pinyata stores being bulldozed and a person with the right connections takes over the place is just what happens. Does the car club have a valid reason to meet there? If it is just because they've always met there, that doesn't seem valid. There are certainly many places they could meet at (they could even buy a piece of land and do anything they want legally without having anyone complain legally about it). If they got money for big fancy wheels, tires to destroy, audio systems, etc. then they could pool some money together.
I mean, I want their car club to survive and I want them to enjoy their hobby no doubt. I would hate it if someone told me I couldn't enjoy my hobbies. However, some hobbies require a place to do them and in this case it has come to the point they need a place that will allow them to do things they want to do. Then again, they go somewhere else and do it where people don't care. Just my two cents.
"The new arrivals have forced many Black residents to move out of the city: In 2000, about 10 percent of the Austin’s 656,000 residents were Black. By 2017, that percentage had dropped to around 7.5"
Well, article definitely commits a statistical fallacy there. Austin is one of the fastest growing cities, especially from 2000-2017 period. The fact that the percentage went down (from 9.5 to 7.5), while the city's population nearly tripled does not mean people were 'forced to move out'. In fact, it means that the black population nearly tripled while other races moved to the area in even greater numbers.
Good callout, but it's important not to fudge the numbers here. Using this source[0], it seems like the population doubled, not tripled, from 911K to 1.84M. If we use that 10% to 7.5% drop, the city's black residents went from 91K to 138k. Hardly tripled, in fact only a 50% increase compared to over 100% population size increase. So the comparative growth was half as fast. I'd still say thats notable to the article's cultural context, though it doesn't support the claim of people being forced out inherently.
None of these numbers will give information on who was forced out. You'll need migratory data for that.
Difficult thing is sometimes you look up a source for a city's population and they will show you the exact population of the city limits and sometimes they will show you the population of the metropolitan area. The article rounded up the actual census data from 9.5% to 10% for the 2000 numbers, but left the 2017 number at 7.5% (fudging with precision).
At any rate, if someone moves from East Austin to Del Valle or Manor, are they 'forced out of Austin'? Even if that move affords their family a larger living space? These are satellite communities only a couple miles further out of the city center.
No doubt East Austin has gotten much more expensive in the past 10 years, as the article underscores. There's still quite a bit of low income housing, but it's certainly making up a smaller portion. As the downtown corridor jumps across I-35 and expands east, more and more high rises are being built in East Austin, where older ranch houses and traditional neighborhoods used to exist.
The thing is, many of these older ranch houses on the east side aren't even in great shape and don't really fit modern standards. They have character, sure, but raising a family in a small, wooden, 2/1 or 3/1 1950s ranch house with bad upkeep is not necessarily a desirable thing. Migratory data alone is not enough to interpret the story.
100% in agreement on the nuance here. I used metro area above rather than city limits, and that will 100% not capture some of that neighborhood level migration away from the cultural center of the city. I think that's important to capture and wish the article did with more detail, but I think this point was meant to be an aside to a more qualitative story. I have no doubt the gentrification story of Austin has been covered in nuanced detail before this, so I hope people don't write off the article due to this.
According to US Census data [0], between 2000 and 2010, the City of Austin (meaning the city proper not the metro area)'s "African American (non-Hispanic)" population fell by 5.4% (a decline of almost 3,500 people). Over the same time period, its overall population grew by around 20% (from 657,000 to 790,000). That seems more consistent with what the article says than with the picture you are painting.
That's a good find, I'd like to see the 2020 census data but we're still waiting on that. At any rate, when you look closer at the data from 2000 to 2010, you see several trends:
- Black 18+ pop increased from 45.5K to 46.2K
- Black children pop decreased from 18.7K to 14.5K
- Hispanic pop increased from 200K to 277K (most significant demographic increase)
- White, non-Hispanic percentage decreased from 53% to 49%
- Asian percentage increased from 4.7% to 6.3%
Either black people in Austin had less kids from 1992-2010 than 1982-2000 (possible, given the stable adult pop numbers) or black families left for the suburbs or other cities entirely.
In 2010, Austin real estate was still quite affordable and the east side was not quite developed (article mentions a house could be bought for $100K there).
It's also a silly point to dwell on. Black people are not being forced out, less affluent people are.
While it's valid to be against the gentrification of a neighborhood. We should not conflate it with other issues.
There is a real problem, and that is black people are under represented in the upper classes. If you fix that problem this one goes away. If you try to keep the black percentage high in this area without fixing the wealth gap, I'm not sure that you are achieving much.
I'm not surprised. The article struck me as particularly amateurish, which is unfortunate because the situation is an unusually nuanced and interesting one on a topic that's constantly talked about.
I'm interested in the nuanced version. I'm not familiar with the event. The article painted a pretty clear and unsympathetic story: "these folks have been gathering in this spot to do this thing weekly for 25 years, an expensive apartment building went up, and some of the residents who moved in don't like the event and want it canceled, citing a variety of flimsy pretexts."
So what's the interesting and unusual nuance that makes this story more interesting?
Strip the subjectivity and emotion away from your analysis for a moment (not permanently), and it's easy to see both sides. Construct and add the same amount of emotion/bias in the other direction and you can construct just as "obvious" a one-sided story for the other side! Just for fun, you can construct a weak form from just the phrase you used:
"these folks have been gathering in this spot to do this [illegal] thing weekly... residents... want it canceled, citing [the law]"
I don't agree with this reductive view, but to me it's not clearly more so than the one-sided perspective you expressed. As I mention in another comment, I think the question of community rights and "the tyranny of bureaucracy" is a fascinating and complex one, and don't think the situation is covered by simply noting that the gathering is clearly against the law[1] and isn't victimless. I don't personally recognize adherence to every detail of every law as the highest moral good (a view that's clearly widespread, even implicitly, as evidenced by the PD's refusal to do anything about the plainly-illegal event thus far, as mentioned in the article).
But the question of where exactly acceptable, public lawbreaking starts and ends is a complex and interesting one. Where exactly does the line fall for where lawbreaking should be grandfathered in? What's the plainly-obvious equation for how to calculate when a group of citizens is entitled to break the law, and does that apply to all citizens equally? If so, how widespread is this legal bubble? If the law itself is irredeemably flawed, why not repeal it? If it hasn't been repealed, and implicitly has the support of our democratic system, on what basis do we determine that the exception being granted has the consent of society?
None of these are rhetorical. Laws can obviously be unjust, as can specific by-the-book applications of overall-just laws. On top of that, not all important communities are concretely well-defined and not all important norms are codified. But I'm really puzzled by the claim that it's trivial and unnuanced to draw lines between the rule of law and the (many! contradicting!) uncodified moral convictions that it's being claimed should transcend collective decision-making about society's norms.
[1] The article mentions consistent violation of ordinances. To the extent that the complaint is about the legal parts of the gathering, I agree that the topic isn't especially interesting.
And the article gives little attention to what looks like the most serious safety issue to me:
The rims pictured in the article are one of the most dangerous things you can do to a car (and are not legal as shown) and present a massive safety risk to pedestrians, cyclists, and other drivers.
It's basically turning the vehicle into something that will cause amputations/maiming if you're ever near anyone, and other road users won't necessarily see your "spikes" to be able to avoid them, especially in a busier environment. You might as well just stick swords or axes sticking out from your rims, because that's basically what they'll do in motion to anyone you get a little too close to.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to a lot of car culture modifications, but that particular class of modifications should be zero tolerance, car impounded on sight.
Millions of people get screwed by the healthcare system but when writing an article about what that looks like you've got to pick a few relatable cases to follow.
There's no unusual nuance in this case. That's the point. It's a very typical example of a pattern that's happening all over. Money shows up and destroys culture.
Facts don't matter for certain people. That being said, I'm sympathetic to the people who like to parade and show off their custom cars. I used to see that in California when I first moved here. No drag racing, or dangerous stunts, just people driving cars slowly down the street.
I'm sympathetic as well, but cool cars with no drag race is a bit like sex with no climax. When I was a teen, we would gather in a shopping center to show off our cars and talk shit, and then drive out to a rural area to run quarter miles for fun. Good times!
Real estate law has this concept of “Coming to the nuisance” where if you know that there is some kind of “nuisance” nearby and you move next to it anyway, you can’t complain about it later. I’m not a lawyer so I’m probably pedantically wrong about it in some way but that’s my understanding of it. People do this with small local airports all the time. They move in, knowing full well (or should know full well) that there is an airport there, then a year later they bitch and moan about the noise and try to shut it down.
There is an asphalt factory 10 miles from where I live, on the access road to a major highway, and in the middle of lots of urban development. The factory has been around since the mid 80s.
There is a nearby new housing development with residents complaining about the air pollution (apparently it is really smelly) - and their response is "yeah, we've been here since before you were born, so whatev". It cracked me up.
Edit:
Oh! I almost forgot, there are people who built their house next to a NASCAR track! WHO thinks that is a good idea?
> Edit: Oh! I almost forgot, there are people who built their house next to a NASCAR track! WHO thinks that is a good idea?
Depends on how often it's used I guess. At times I've lived a couple of blocks from a formula 1 track and right on a hairpin bend of an IndyCar track. Both were held once a year so even though I don't like car racing it was a feature not a problem.
Hereabouts, there's an open rifle & shotgun range that has been around since 1940s. When it was built originally, it was a rural area. Since mid-90s, there were a bunch of suburban neighborhoods developed around the range, some of them right down from where the backstop berm is... and now the people who moved there are complaining that the range makes them unsafe.
There’s a sound limit on the track, I think the decibel sensor is on the right side of turns 4-5. And you get 3 strikes or your out policy if you are over.
People make some interesting exhausts just for this track.
Similarly, there are people who moved adjacent to San Jose's Reid-Hillview airport and then complain about airplane noise from civil (small prop plane) aviation.
Reid-Hillview airport opened in 1937 when nothing but farmland surrounded it.
An airport is as predictable a nuisance as a once-weekly gathering at a public park?
I can see where the airport is on a map in relation to my new apartment. It's reasonable to expect airport noise.
If I visit the apartment, if I spend a day walking around the neighborhood, is it reasonable to expect a, (illegally) loud party to happen at a given time at a given week?
Should chicano culture be preserved? Should people expect to be comfortable in these homes? The answer to both is yes.
When selling a property, the seller must disclose anything in the surrounding environs that may have a material impact on the property's value. For example, when I bought a home years ago, the disclosures were very long and included things like a super-fund site miles away.
This situation would certainly qualify for a residence--if a loud party shows up every weekend that makes traffic terrible for a while, that should have been disclosed.
But the issue here is with renters, and property management doesn't have to disclose that to renters.
> They move in, knowing full well (or should know full well) that there is an airport there, then a year later they bitch and moan about the noise and try to shut it down.
Would this be relevant for something that is in violation of the letter of the law? I ask this purely legally, as the ethical question of community rights and the tyranny of bureaucracy is a separate one.
The Charlotte Rifle-Pistol Club has an outdoor range in a distant corner of the county. But developers have discovered the cheap land out there (cheap for a reason .. it's next to a shooting range) and started putting in subdivisions.
The club posted a large yellow sign by the entrance: "A safe & friendly neighbor since 1913" so that prospective homeowners could see it, as it was suspected that the realtors & sellers were not disclosing it's existence.
Sounds like well off people moving from London to a sleepy village in the country and then complaining about the church clock chiming, cocks crowing, and the smell of silage from the farm next door.
At the general level, I doubt anyone is surprised to see this story, and there will likely be more to come as tech flocks to Austin (though it was already a notable tech hub with some of these pressures already before the billionaires decided to give it the seal of approval).
To me, the more interesting question here is how does Austin avoid what happened to SF, where tech hollowed out nearly all of its existing culture and then tech workers began to complain it was bland.
Real estate and zoning policy is going to be key here. I've seen a decent deal of discussion about "Yuppie Fishtanks" [0] recently and generally it seems to be supported that massively increasing the housing supply is one of the best ways to keep rents intact and avoid hollowing gentrification. For the existing Austin residents here, how is the city approaching it thusfar? Do people think this is another SF gentrification story in the making, or is something different?
I've been here for seven years. It definitely feels like we're on the track toward what people describe SF as. Several cultural institutions have gone out of business in my time here, everything's getting more shiny and less weird, the homeless camps are growing enormous due to rising rents/displacement, etc. We're not SF yet, but we will be before long if nothing changes.
I held out a small hope that covid and the remote-work wave would stem things a little bit, but it's hard to say whether that's happened. If anything, the influx could have increased due to the exodus from SF.
> I held out a small hope that covid and the remote-work wave would stem things a little bit, but it's hard to say whether that's happened. If anything, the influx could have increased due to the exodus from SF.
This is exactly what we're seeing in the Seattle area. A lot of people in the various circles I'm in thought, as we entered the early stages of this pandemic really settling in for the long-haul, "well, phew, at least it'll put a breather on housing costs."
Nope.
Because of the "work wherever you want" and Seattle and Puget Sound still being a wonderfully attractive place to live, the pace has accelerated. Housing prices here have shot up by double-digit numbers, even inside the city limits from which people are supposedly "fleeing." Both the north and south ends of Seattle, even West Seattle where the main road link has been severed for a year (as of today), have seen massive upticks.
The Department of Licensing has released statistics that show that the number of California driving licenses and vehicle titles exchanged for Washington ones is the second-highest it's been in ten years, with only 2018 being higher, and that's with most DOL offices being closed or heavily restricted due to in-person limits from the virus. (The influx of cars isn't going to do our "pristine environment" any favors, either, and I look forward to the even-louder rants about how terrible traffic is driving by oneself from Marysville to Queen Anne for a hockey game).
Meanwhile, people around here continue to insist that building is bad and, I shit you not, that if we simply don't build then the people will stop coming. I don't know why anyone still thinks this; it hasn't been true for twenty years, why should now be any different? And the new arrivals aren't keen on building more or making sure newer arrivals have space because, well, they moved here, to this spot because they liked it that way and, gosh-darn-it, this space is going to stay like this forever.
It's getting quite frustrating. After many, many years of waiting and hoping and moving around, I finally live near where a light rail station will be opening in the coming year-ish and I fear, even on my moderately good tech salary, I'm not going to be able to afford to live here before the train arrives, or shortly thereafter.
Similar feelings here. I simply don't know where else to go; it seems like every nice-to-live-in medium-sized city that isn't SF is going through this same song and dance. Money comes in like a flock of locusts, consumes the city, and SF is one of the first examples we're seeing of the husk that gets left behind. Then they move on to the next one.
Where's a person supposed to lay down roots, without retreating deep into a suburb? I don't need or want a job at FAANG or the next "unicorn"; I'm happy with my normal tech job/income and the life it affords. Why couldn't those things stay confined somewhere else and leave the rest of us in peace?
Odd answer, but go to the megacities that show resilience and are building housing. In the US, so far that may only be NYC. I know that's not amazing to hear if you have other reservations about NYC, but I think it's the reality until mid-sized cities catch on and get their shit together.
The other answer IMO is to pick a city no one in tech is even thinking about, and the growth rate is expected to be slow. Not to jynx them but places like Cleveland, Richmond VA, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, Detroit, Columbus, San Antonio, Milwaulkee, etc.
Personally, I far prefer the megacity, but that second list is a potential option.
From an urban development perspective, to me it seems that the best course of action would be a massive federal investment in existing mid-sized cities. Build large public transit networks in some of these becoming desirable cities and distribute the strain tech is putting on our urban centers. Massively increase housing density, but with this foresight, avoid doing the short term luxury development that won't hold up longterm and build some old fashioned 3-5 story brownstones.
The risk is that the people never come, but the alternative is the consistent hollowing out of all major US cities. Something has to give.
Yeah, I have casually looked towards San Antonio and even Waco. The problem with the "look where nobody's looking yet" angle is that you're potentially just kicking the can down the road. In 10 years when "the market catches up" it'll be back to square one. Perhaps you'll have equity by that point, but that'll be the only difference.
There's an implicit assumption there that this problem will continue until it consumes most every small city, which I don't think is true. At a certain point, it will either stop at a larger/more popular city level or will spread itself so thin that the original set of cities becomes affordable again full circle. I suspect the first case as the cumulative growth rate of tech slows, but of course that guess is just as good as yours likely.
The problem is, from my perspective (and having lived there), the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex is neither resilient nor a megacity. Outside of the 635 and 820 loops, it is just suburban sprawl that gets scorching hot in the summer and everyone who lives there has to be reliant on a car.
DFW is going to be in a world of hurt when the water runs out and that day is coming somewhat soon. There are already places in central Texas where the aquifers are dry and the lakes don't refill during the formerly-rainy season. North Texas is reliant on a set of manmade lakes that are already slower and slower to refill, with more and more taps being added every year.
I came from DFW (technically one of its suburbs). You're either in the suburbs, or you're living in a sea of hot concrete. Unless you retreat to one of the less-wealthy (read: genuinely middle-class) suburbs, everything from the restaurants to the billboards is steeped in corporate pretension and wealth-signaling. And then you're still, well, in the suburbs.
In my first round of interviews out of college I interviewed with a company in Dallas. It was going well, but towards the end of the day I was frank with my interviewer and told them I simply didn't want to live in DFW. I didn't have another offer yet, but I found one in Austin and moved there.
No kidding, I grew up there as well! The not-wanting-to-ever-return feeling is very relatable. I wouldn’t have re-explored DFW were it not for the current state of life in the Bay Area. As it stands, things have changed a lot in the past 10 years, or perhaps I’ve grown up. There’s a lot going on in DFW, and as an adult having explored all over I’m comfortable giving DFW another look.
NYC is building pied-a-terres for money launderers. The whole Hudson Yards was engineered as a phony rehabilitation of Harlem so they could sell visas to millionaires who could then turn around and buy a luxury apartment in the "blighted" neighborhood they revitalized.
No argument here, but what does this have to do with the countless other neighborhoods in NYC and the consistent expansion of housing that has happened in them over the past few decades while other cities experienced far worse gentrification pressures by not building housing?
Hudson Yards is not what I'm referring to in any way in my posts on this article. I'm mainly talking large towers in Williamsburg, along Atlantic Ave in Brooklyn, in the East Village edge near Alphabet City, some in Gowanus, Long Island City, and many others I'm probably forgetting.
It isn't anywhere near Harlem but they created a special zone that connected HY through central park to Harlem so that it could qualify for special redevelopment incentives.
> I simply don't know where else to go; it seems like every nice-to-live-in medium-sized city that isn't SF is going through this same song and dance.
Not to sound too defeatist about it, since let's be honest we are still sitting pretty high on the list of people doing pretty well for ourselves, but I'm not sure there is any real escape.
In addition to more people moving here, one of the other reasons the Puget Sound housing market has shot up so dramatically is because lots of us didn't lose our jobs during this pandemic, but we for damn sure lost what we usually spend money on. With so much money sloshing around, people make the decision of "well, surely now I should buy a house, right?" And then they do. And since more money is available to them, housing prices are driven upward.
What sucks is if we have this worry, those of us of the high-five-figure/low-six-figure brigade, how must it be to be of even lesser means? If we're feeling the creep--the only reason I didn't get hit with yet another $100/month rent increase is because the Governor said they couldn't--then what is everyone else doing? I am anxious not only for my family, but for society at large.
I don't know how much longer that can last. Maybe it can last forever, since the monetary policy in this country seems to be that housing prices Must Never, Ever, Ever Fall, because housing is both a required good and the primary "investment" vehicle of everyone with lower net worth than an Apple executive.
My employer has taken up the work from wherever mantle and has said that where our company has offices, even internationally, are places where living is acceptable. As I'm an EU citizen, I wouldn't need work permission to go live there, maybe I give there a go for the second half of my life.
> I am anxious not only for my family, but for society at large
Absolutely; I didn't mean to underplay how privileged I still am, that my worst-case scenario is spending more than I'd like to on housing or moving somewhere less-pleasant to live. Lots of people are in much worse positions right now and I'm really hoping something gives at some point. I just wanted to air/discuss the source of my own (much smaller by comparison) frustrations, given that lots of people here can probably relate.
> Absolutely; I didn't mean to underplay how privileged I still am
Just to be clear, I was all but certain we were in agreement, and I didn't think you were (deliberately) leaving anyone out. What I wrote was more of a "this is gonna suck...for most of us...pretty damn soon...and we all know it...and that sucks."
> Where's a person supposed to lay down roots, without retreating deep into a suburb? I don't need or want a job at FAANG or the next "unicorn"; I'm happy with my normal tech job/income and the life it affords. Why couldn't those things stay confined somewhere else and leave the rest of us in peace?
Pick a city with cold winters and high humidity and not near mountains or ocean.
>Where's a person supposed to lay down roots, without retreating deep into a suburb? I don't need or want a job at FAANG or the next "unicorn"; I'm happy with my normal tech job/income and the life it affords. Why couldn't those things stay confined somewhere else and leave the rest of us in peace?
Literally anywhere in the upper midwest. "Oh but the winters are brutally cold and the summers are too hot and humid" you say. Well, there's a reason you can get a $150k/yr tech job and a nice $300k house in a good neighborhood. And there's no aversion to building homes up here.
Way too many people think the only place to make a living in tech is on the coasts. But you can get tech jobs in any major city. And some are ridiculously cheap to live in. Just look outside the "normal" places.
> To me, the more interesting question here is how does Austin avoid what happened to SF
It doesn't.
There is a limited number of cities with weather conditions humans prefer.
Some people think others care about culture - no, they mostly don't. They care about weather conditions, safety and job opportunities. Culture is a nice to have feature.
Unless governments get busy building new cities/towns, every existing city with favorable weather conditions will turn into rich people, next to homeless people, or just rich people, if they enact laws against homeless people to get rid of them.
By the way, if governments get busy building new cities/towns, you don't get rid of the problem, you just delay it until every favorable location has a city, and then you're back to having this same problem.
It's the same as dating - we can't all have miss universe, because it's a zero sum game. If you live in a small town and got to date miss universe, who didn't get discovered yet, you shouldn't get mad when a talent agency visits your town and takes your miss universe to New York to be a fashion model and date a super athlete. You should be grateful that you got to date miss universe for a while not due to merit in a zero sum game, but due to pure luck. But, you know, good luck explaining that to the guy who lives in a small town, had a beauty and now doesn't anymore. Those fucking talent agencies, maaan.
>Some people think others care about culture - no, they mostly don't. They care about weather conditions, safety and job opportunities. Culture is a nice to have feature
This does not track at all with what happened to the Bay Area. Silicon Valley historically means the peninsula. GOOG, FB, AAPL and most of the other tech giants are all closer to San Jose than to San Francisco. Yet it’s San Francisco (and to an extent Oakland) who have experienced incredibly growing pains. If the culture factor didn’t matter then people would have been happy to live in San Jose which has identical (if not better) better weather, safety and job opportunities.
This. I do look back at Austin in the 80's and 90's wistfully. Was fully cognizant how lucky I was but realized where it was heading and had to let that pretty girl go.
Those traditional black neighborhoods were bought up, demolished and turned into luxury apartments at insane prices.
At one point I was on the east side and saw an old black woman rocking on her front porch in front of a 70's shotgun shack, next to an ugly post-modern 2 story house with a lambo and a tesla sitting outside of it.
I don't think increasing housing density is the answer. We really don't need more luxury apartments or million dollar condos.
> I don't think increasing housing density is the answer. We really don't need more luxury apartments or million dollar condos.
This was my first natural instinct maybe 5 years ago, but seeing the differences in gentrification stories has made it clear it's far worse to keep density the same. If nothing in the city changes and rich people decide they want to flock to your city (in this case, tech workers), it's a given that the existing poorer people will be forced out and prices will increase. Measures like rent control only slow the process, holding back a rising tide.
I've seen this personally in my backyard in Brooklyn. What has happened there is that massive luxury towers have been built along a busy street (central to transit but still not "neighborhoody"). While rents have still gone up, it seems this real estate and luxury market has helped stave off the insane hikes SF has seen, for example. Million dollar condos, probably not a good idea. But luxury buildings with high density turn into normal real estate in 20 years, and that top of the market ease keeps a lot of that tech money out of existing minority and poor neighborhoods.
The question for Austin if they accept that is where to put them. Finding a balanced place would be key here IMO.
What about the people who own houses? For all their faults, those houses were affordable and many residents owned them. Now they've been forced out by increased property taxes.
Those luxury buildings are going exclusively into poor neighborhoods because they have the cheapest land and least restrictions.
I don't see where I say anything about those, you might be assuming things here. The whole point is to maintain many of those houses affordability and current residents. If done right, property taxes should not increase significantly, and the local government has the levers to ensure that if they make it a priority.
> Those luxury buildings are going exclusively into poor neighborhoods because they have the cheapest land and least restrictions.
That sounds like what the cities should precisely fix. Use zoning and legislation to herd these buildings into more desirable places. Real estate will still come and build. Many cities have done this before, this is very much possible.
If not private, then we get back to the idea of public housing being built. This is much more of a political longshot, but I think it would actually be quite interesting to see public housing at the top of the market. "Affordable housing" approaches are a bandaid on the issue. By the city building the luxury buildings themselves, they can select the exact places they want them instead of just generally herding.
Cities generally want poor neigbourhoods to get developed and upgraded; if a poor neighbourhood becomes a rich neighbourhood, that's a win for the city, no matter if it's populated by the same or different inhabitants. Cities can focus and redirect development in various ways, but they are explicitly redirecting that development to the poor neighbourhoods because they don't want these neighbourhoods to stay poor.
Is property taxes control (similar to rent control) a thing? It seems it would avoid some of the issues of rent control (lack of maintenance for instance), since they actually own and live in the house, so they have an incentive to keep it nice.
That's what California's Prop 13 is. It works as originally intended to prevent people being priced out by rapidly rising property taxes but has other, necessarily linked negative effects. Lots of reading and analysis available by googling California Prop 13.
Those negative effects were not necessarily linked. Prop 13 was written by a lobbyist for commercial landlords, and corporations have always benefited the most from it.
There are other ways to provide relief for rising property taxes. For example, Washington has a property tax deferral program, so seniors don’t have to pay the increased property tax until they or their heirs sell the house; the capital gains that increased the property tax will pay for the deferred property tax.
That's interesting. It seems like it runs the risk of making a long-held house extremely hard (or money-losing) to sell. If a $1M property has $900K in deferred property taxes against it (which would be possible to accrue in a 50+-year timespan). That house would never get sold, because the holding costs are based on 1970's tax rates (maybe with some annual escalator), so I can hold a $1M house for $5K/year and keep adding $20K/yr to the deferred balance or I can give up the house and put $60K in a real estate agent's pocket, $900K in the city's pocket, and $40K in my own pocket. I'm never doing that.
Texas has a limit of I believe a 10% increase in tax assessment per year, so this prevents the worst outcomes but only slows down the rest. If you think of property tax as crudely analogous to rent (from a budget perspective), most families would not be able to endure 10% rising rent every year for an extended period. Yet this future sure seems to be baked into the market here in Austin right now.
As a sibling comment mentions, California Prop 13 is property-tax control, and it did solve the issue where astronomical increases in property taxes ran families out of their homes. But the side effects and unintended consequences are terrible.
It is hard to tell the poison from the cure with these things.
> We really don't need more luxury apartments or million dollar condos.
Of course we do. If condos are a million dollars we need more of them so that the price decreases. All housing is "luxury" housing when there isn't enough housing.
When the population of a city suddenly jumps, increasing density is the ONLY answer. Without extra housing, where do you think all those extra people will live? In the apartments of current residents of course. This is not a view held solely by freemarket enthusiast or "neoliberals" or whatever. Even the DSA understands this. Their only disagreement is that they think the government should be the ones building the housing. I can't get my head around the prevalence of this anti-density view. It's the climate denialism of the left.
A variation of this rinsing out of any local culture is going on in Sacramento County California, where arguably gentrification has resulted in a 2019 autocratic edict that residents are not allowed to work on cars in their homes except fluid changes, with fines if you are found to have professional tools on the premises.
Since Sacramento County is approx 50% white, 50% hispanic/black, a case can be made this is a racist law given the relatively high number of hispanics and black who work on their cars, including car clubs such as the Austin tradition.
This is culturally very unhealthy given how fundamental freedom of movement is to the US zeitgeist, and how important car culture is as the core of US life.
Why does it seem like people feel the need to make anything they can about race? (Maybe I'm just overly sensitive and it doesn't happen as much as I perceive, to be fair) I don't agree with the law, but literally every race owns vehicles. Why complicate the issue with racism if there doesn't need to be any complication? Seems like a clear cut issue that people can unite over that instead is being made into a minority only issue for no reason.
Because race is deeply entwined with culture, and culture is in everything.
Every culture owns cars, but not every subculture does things with cars that require you to do most of the work yourself in your driveway.
It’s like Ehrlichman’s famous quote: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.“
Are most people working on cars at their home doing it because they're wanting to do modifications most shops won't do, or because they're trying to save the few hundred dollars an hour in labor charges to do some things that take a few minutes of reading and an understanding of lefty-loosey righty-tighty?
A few of my friends and myself tend to do most of the maintenance on our cars and motorcycles by ourselves. If I had to pay for the labor in my car it would have been "totaled" a long time ago. But it still keeps running 20 years and nearly 200kmi with a new water pump, new timing belt, new main belt, new suspension, brake rotor and pad replacements, brake fluid flushes, EGR cleanout, oil pan resealing, power steering hose replacement, transmission fluid flushes, stereo replacement, power window motor replacements, and a few other things.
Most of these parts over the years have been relatively cheap, but getting a shop to do the change would have been expensive as hell. I shopped around to get the struts replaced recently. Most shops quoted me over $1k for the replacement. _Good_ replacement strut/coil/spring/mount assemblies were $60/ea from reputable sources online. So for a couple of hours of my own time, knowing how to unscrew and screw in some bolts properly (torqued to spec), and $240 in parts I had a new suspension. So taking the low end of ~$1k in estimates I got, I pretty much paid myself $380/hr to do the work.
And don't even get me started on motorcycle maintenance. If it were illegal for me to work on my own bike at home I probably wouldn't be able to afford the bike. Parts are stupid cheap but labor costs on motorcycles are astronomical considering its usually easier to work on a bike than a car.
Not everyone working on a car in their driveway are doing something shady or illegal.
Yeah, and IMO if someone is running an auto shop out of their garage it would be better to go after that with things like licensing or zone enforcement for using their house as a commercial property. The arguments for laws like banning repair of vehicles on residential properties seems like trying to make something that's already illegal extra illegal. Ding the people for illegal modifications or running an unlicensed/improperly zoned commercial operation, don't screw over the people just trying to save a few bucks by using their own labor.
Most of that subculture divide is on type of car rather than rather they work on it in the first place. Trust me, there are plenty of car clubs consisting 90% of white boomers showing off their pristine garage queen 1960s muscle cars who would also be inconvenienced by that law.
And there are lots of people who weren’t hippies who smoked marijuana. And voter intelligence tests affected people who weren’t minorities. But that doesn’t mean the laws in question were not passed with race in mind, at least for many of those pushing for them.
kind of a tricky topic. a lot of modifications people make to their vehicles are not legal to begin with (emissions, noise, "stancing"), and a lot of that is for legitimate safety reasons. especially with tunes, people know this and flash their ECU back to stock before going in for state emissions tests. but anyways, there is a subset of white people that also enjoy modding their cars or simply doing the routine maintenance themselves. there is certainly a stereotype about a certain kind of white person that has multiple non-functional cars rusting away on their front lawn.
all of this is not to say that that particular law at that particular place and time wasn't racially motivated.
There are an incredible number of topics that are deeply entwined with culture and issues of many kinds, that doesn't mean it's useful to turn a local law concerning garage mechanics into something about race. Would allowing only minorities to work on their vehicles at home solve the problem? It seems obvious (to me, at least) that it wouldn't, so why would race need to be brought into the equation when it's so much easier to communicate about the core issue rather than discuss things in the context of a more complex issue of race and equality?
The likelihood that it disproportionately hurts members of a certain race wouldn't matter if the issue was solved in a way that benefits everyone.
> Would allowing only minorities to work on their vehicles at home solve the problem?
This is a strawman - nobody is asking for this!
> why would race need to be brought into the equation when it's so much easier to communicate about the core issue rather than discuss things in the context of a more complex issue of race and equality?
Let's look at literacy tests for voters. These are similar as you can absolutely construct a plausible argument for them that never mentions race at all - "We just want to make sure that people voting actually understand what they're voting for". And there were likely advocates for these laws who believed that! And literacy tests of course affected more than just African Americans. But - the near universal consensus among historians was that the primary intent was to suppress black votes.
Not discussing race when discussing voter literacy tests is avoiding the crux of the actual issue. If you only engage with voter tests on the "actually understand what they're voting for" level you're avoiding the much more important conversation of whether this law is passed in good faith.
> The likelihood that it disproportionately hurts members of a certain race wouldn't matter if the issue was solved in a way that benefits everyone.
And therein lies the rub - how can it be solved in a way that benefits everyone? If there was a universal benefit solution for every problem politics would be easy! In the case of literacy tests there is no such solution - there was nothing that you could give the advocates for suppression policies that would make them happy that wouldn't come at the expense of minorities. In this case? Hard to say, but I really doubt there's an amicable solution.
It sounds like you are just angry at the mere mention of race.
Like we should just go through life pretending like race plays absolutely no factor in any law, human interaction, or bias unless someone says the "n" word or something.
Given our history as a country that seems INCREDIBLY foolish.
I don't intend to portray anger as I couldn't be farther from angry. I just think solutions are easier to find when you tackle problems directly rather than assume malice exists lurking in the shadows every time a situation presents itself. The world isn't angry, nor is it racist, nor is it violent. The world is full of complexity and misunderstanding far more than it's full of malice. If you go looking for malice with the assumption it exists all over the place, you'll have no trouble confirming your bias just as someone might believe rather emotionless writings portray anger if they go into a discussion believing anyone with differing values must only hold to those values emotionally.
The US has a long dark history of enacting laws that seem "fair" to those (whites) who sponsored it, but in reality are meant to target a specific minority population. Jim Crow is a major example. Many of the laws never particularly singled out blacks in the actual text, but things like poll taxes and literacy tests were used because of the disproprtionate impact they would have on that community.
Well, this isn't about owing vehicles though, but about a particular style of vehicles, with work done of them, and specific gatherings to showcase them etc.
Might as well ask "Why make the taco-fest about race, everybody eats". Sure, but those against the taco-fest in some place where predominantly latinos frequent it, more probably than not have racial issues against them gathering near them, and are not just against tacos in general...
I mean the parent comment spells it out "given the relatively high number of hispanics and black who work on their cars", and I think they are right. Those same residents wouldn't have an issue with a mostly-white gathering of rich classic car owners...
A white lady comes and sees a bunch of predominantly black and latino folks with a tradition of hanging out in a park and screwing around with their cars. And then says this:
> “You can’t tell me drugs aren’t being distributed over there,” she huffed. “The brazenness of it all just kills me!”
Yeah, it's a mystery why people are assuming there's some racism going on there.
I have no idea what happened in Sacramento. But it's not hard to imagine how a group of non-white folks who tended to work on their cars -- either for fun, or for purely financial reasons -- would view this. And then you add in things like this [1]
> As you might have picked up, the code has a bit of vagueness when defining "similar operations," something it briefly touches on in section 5.2.0.B of the Sacramento County Zoning Code.
and
> The code also prohibits individuals to perform repairs which use "tools not normally found in a residence"—another vague term which creates an elucidation of the law, placing it up for deliberation depending on the individual deciphering the legal code.
Vagueness is a weapon that cops use to fuck people. And it's intentionally written into laws for exactly that reason. If the last year didn't convince you that cops harass especially black folks at extremely high rates, nothing will. A report on Jalopnik [2] said that someone who got a $400 fine would have had to pay $700 to right the decision. Again, look at the correlation between ethnicity and having a spare $700.
> The code also prohibits individuals to perform repairs which use "tools not normally found in a residence"—another vague term which creates an elucidation of the law, placing it up for deliberation depending on the individual deciphering the legal code.
Dang, it feels like more and more people I know are no longer into fixing things themselves, it almost seems like it'll get to the point where things like hacksaws and ratchets might be included in that vagueness.
I know many people who have garages with an old fridge fridge, a car, and maybe an electric string trimmer that hasn't been touched in several years. If such a garage becomes the norm, just having a screwdriver might be against the law.
> Why does it seem like people feel the need to make anything they can about race?
Because there is no other reasonable, understandable reason to ban "working on your own car on your own property". Unless it disproportionally hits certain races--which would at least help explain the root motivation of the law.
Are you saying that you think the people who pushed this law had no opinion whatsoever on the activity itself, but just wanted black and latino people to suffer through an arbitrary ban?
It seems much more reasonable to guess that neighbors were annoyed by the activity itself and passed a nimby law because they're selfish.
Not having thought of any explanations is not the same thing as there being no explanations... someone should ask the people living in the community how that law got support.
@toolz Speaking as someone who works on cars at a build level a lot I'm highly aware many motorsports are healthily cross cultural. I normally avoid discussion of gender, sexuality and race but in this case the overly vague Sacramento County law could be ignored on one street and strictly enforced on the next. You then get into zoning and class issues which are going to unfairly penalize certain people.
It's useful law to stop irresponsible people who are running engines and impact wrenches all day in a residential neighborhood but legally is a dangerous catch all that could ruin a lot of people's car hobbyist lives
While I agree that race has been discussed a lot in the past few years, especially on places like NPR or Sam Harris's podcast or in politics, the reality is: poor people are often minorities, and poor people have to do more of their own car repairs than rich people. In general, if laws are related to socioeconomic status, they are also related to race indirectly.
I think it does erase the racism issue. I’m not saying racism doesn’t exist or that nobody should ever be concerned about it, but reflexively focusing all discussions on race drives wedges where there don’t need to be any. It would be like discussing every issue in terms of its climate impacts; sure, climate change is important, but don’t you want to be able to sometimes join forces with people who don’t share your views on it?
This law was written to give code enforcement a cudgel against unlicensed repair shops. All the auto enthusiast blogs and forums immediately lost their minds, but there hasn't been a sweep of the neighborhoods with officers asking to look inside of your garage for uncommon tools. The one complaint I could find online [1] was from a dude whose handle was "nimblemotorsports" and he said he had a car lift on his property (but it hadn't been set up yet). [2]
There's plenty of room for grousing about poorly written laws, but this law has lots of other equally poorly written laws across the country to keep it company. Sacramento county isn't forbidding you from putting shiny new headers on your hot rod in your own garage.
[2]: It took only a little more effort using the nimblemotorsports name to get an idea of why his neighbors might completely reasonably be getting irritated enough to call code enforcement.
I'm sorry but this is difficult to believe. The site says that it's unlawful to do "minor vehicle repair [...] Using tools not normally found in a residence". If it was just a zoning law, why does it have to include that stipulation? I've seen plenty of people who own tools "not normally found in a residence". It's hard to guess exactly what the authors' intentions were, but it wouldn't be unreasonable for someone to conclude that there were other motives besides just cracking down on illegal auto shops.
Well, the law will be two years old soon. There's one local news article about it where the county's PIO clarified the county's intention [1]. Aside from that, alllllll of these homeowners innocently working on their cars in their own garages and yards around the county and getting hit with hundreds and hundreds of dollars in fines have resulted in... exactly zero other local news coverage that I can find.
Every other search result about this thing is some motoring site where the internet commenters are absolutely certain that this is yet another example of draconian liberal legislative overreach and just nobody can really do anything on their own property anymore and it's all just so unfair...
Again, I'm expressly not defending the law as it's written, but if the letter of every bad law was to be applied equally to everyone in the same instant, there would not be a single free person anywhere in the country. Like all the others, this one is being applied selectively.
> Well, the law will be two years old soon. There's one local news article about it where the county's PIO clarified the county's intention [1]. Aside from that, alllllll of these homeowners innocently working on their cars in their own garages and yards around the county and getting hit with hundreds and hundreds of dollars in fines have resulted in... exactly zero other local news coverage that I can find.
Big cities with traffic problem enact this kind of laws to discourage personal car ownership. Sure, just because now it's not actively reported as enforced doesn't mean it won't be in the future, and it wouldn't be the first time where the enactment and the enforcement of a low separated in time to make the pill easier to swallow.
Exactly. If they have to clarify it in some press release, then they should be amending the ordinance so that it is clear.
Unfortunately, the system is lazy. Politicians don't bother to amend laws when these issues arises, police can use their "professional discretion" to enforce or not enforce a law (which leads to unequal enforcement), and the courts tend to "interpret" laws in ways that don't make sense (partially because of the politicians I mentioned earlier, but also a misapplication of statutory construction rules and lenity).
The idea that giving the authorities the ability to enforce selectively on whom they like is a good thing is honestly bizarre to read. It's the classic preserve of biased prosecution.
EDIT for response since I'm rate-limited. I interpreted the following section:
> Again, I'm expressly not defending the law as it's written, but if the letter of every bad law was to be applied equally to everyone in the same instant, there would not be a single free person anywhere in the country. Like all the others, this one is being applied selectively.
as something akin to "I think the law isn't great, but if any law were applied fairly, we would all be in jail. Fortunately most laws aren't applied fairly"
But I can understand if that was a misinterpretation.
Not saying this is a good or bad thing, but one way to make laws not be selective is to have mandatory enforcement and mandatory sentencing required for every law. If the law could be interpreted to apply to a situation, then it does apply to a situation in this model. Laws would be very carefully written under this and extremely well specified. With this you could be much more sure that a law is applied as written, whereas at the moment you have to continually look at the results of cases and can't see when people are let off the hook because someone in an authority position is well disposed to the person because they are friends with them or for other reasons. This can happen before a case goes to trial or during the trial.
The general public can buy all of the equipment and tools they need to open up an unlicensed hair salon in their garage. That doesn't make laws against it unenforceable.
Your defense is a combination of “what about” other poorly written laws and “but it’s not enforced”. I don’t have enough time this morning to explain why these are dangerous and ignorant arguments...
Laws like this exist to only be enforced as needed to screw people as needed. Of course there is not going to be a big enforcement push because that's not the point. The point is to give busybodies a means to screw their neighbors under color of law.
Are you saying that the law is specifically designed to be selectively applied, with the enforcement authorities more or less arbitrarily deciding what does and what doesn't warrant a crackdown?
But that's exactly the kind of law that tends to be enforced in ways that manifest various majority biases in society.
I dont think this is as strong defense of that law as you think. It still makes fixing car or geeking on car punisheable. It still is absurd limitation of what I would expect to be a freedom.
"but there hasn't been a sweep of the neighborhoods with officers asking to look inside of your garage for uncommon tools."
So now we have another set of laws that can be selectively used against some people, usually against people with little money to defend themselves. When I moved to LA it was the same with marijuana laws. Cops were raiding poor neighborhoods for marijuana while you could walk in almost any well off neighborhood and smell the smoke from far away. But these neighborhoods never got raided.
A law should either get enforced or it should be revoked.
Because I did oil changes at my grandparents house when I was younger. I didn't live there, but there was space, tooling, help, breakfast, and an excuse to visit afterwards.
"Politicians are idiots, the law should be X" is a trope, but finding a wording that doesn't run afoul of edge cases is very, very, difficult, even before lobbying and perverse incentives make things worse. Note I'm not saying this law was made in good faith, but starting an argument from an assumption of ignorance instead of malice seems more likely to change people's opinion in your favour.
Because "unlicensed shops" is a red herring. They're trying to make life hard on the guy that owns a bunch of beater cars and turns his own wrenches. They're basically saying you have to be rich enough to do it indoors and dodge enforcement or you should GTFO because we don't want you here.
Do white people not work on their cars? The most obnoxious (and awesome) cars I’ve lived next to were owned by white people. There is definitely a latino car culture where I live but I’ve been other places where it’s all old white dudes. Seriously wtf Sacramento?
Rich (mostly) white people who want these kinds of laws and draft them on behalf of their constituents don't.
This is basically a blue collar vs white collar thing.
The people who are really rich don't care either. Their houses are more than the minimum setback apart and they can afford fences if they don't wanna look at something and they can afford big garages and barns to work in so as not to annoy their neighbors to the point of building fences.
Caring about what your neighbors do is solidly the purview of upper middle class busybodies.
I live in a neighborhood and one guy has 6 cars in different states of repair and a boat on his property. Nice guy but I feel for his neighbors. Trailers and fish houses are not uncommon either but not permanent. We have ordinances against it but they aren't really enforced. We went from $200k houses to $400k houses so I expect things to change. I want the sidewalks fixed etc.. I want nice property values. 95% of the neighbors keep things nice.
Who came up with the rules? And have you carried out a survey to see if everyone agreed to the rules? If you lived there before the rule is in place can you opt out if you disagree?
I think the question is: Why is there an ordinance against this? What is morally wrong with having vehicles on one's own property? How does it affect the neighbors? If the only answer is "well it reduces property values," well, there are tons of things that also reduce property values that are not illegal. That is not a good reason to have a city ordinance against something.
Even ignoring money and property values, the answers (for most ordinances, not just this one) are gonna all be various ways to put lipstick on the "behavior not befitting the people who can afford to live here" pig.
I think they bring this up because race issues are the Achilles heel of the bourgeoisie. Tell the 2021 bourgeois that he hates dirty working class people working on their satanic internal combustion engines and he will agree with you readily. Tell him he's r*cist for doing it, and he'll cry and moan and do whatever you want to shuck the charge.
Halfways well off people don't work on their cars anymore or if they work on cars they are expensive old cars. None of the young people at my company know anything about cars.
> residents are not allowed to work on cars in their homes except fluid changes, with fines if you are found to have professional tools on the premises.
When I see ordinances like this I see a 1A violation waiting to happen. I assume the council has worded it in a way that doesn't draw scrutiny or the affected don't have the resources to have it taken to court.
One of the places I lived added an ordinance banning work trucks. My neighbor works out of his truck and would get fined and towed continuously. He threatened to sue and I think the compromise they reached was he had to remove the company vinyl signs. I believe he changed it to magnet stickers that he installs and removes daily.
And it was basically the same thing; working class apartments slowly gentrified and all sorts of new rules were put in place.
These rules are draconian. "[Prohibited if conducted] outside a fully enclosed garage or accessory structure and resulting in the vehicle being inoperable for a period in excess of 24 hours."
On the other hand, if you're rich enough to live there, you're probably rich enough to have a large enough enclosure where you can skirt the law anyway.
It's even worse than that. Major repairs are prohibited even in a fully enclosed garage.
Minor repairs are prohibited in a great many cases as well.
If I use a torque wrench to reinstall my wheels (even in a garage), I'm in violation. If I change the brakes on a friend's or girlfriend's car (even in a garage), I'm in violation. If I plug a flat tire for a neighbor or a passing motorist in my garage, I'm in violation. If I start a brake change in the driveway on Sunday morning and need a part from the parts store that I get and install on Monday, I'm in violation. I've certainly done all of those things and am not seen as a "bad neighbor".
Seriously, how does any and all of this(along with the whole idea of HOAs) mesh at all with the "land of the free" idea that Americans are constantly broadcasting to the world. It's meant to be the most "free" country in the world and yet so many people are happy to live in communities that restrict them severely in what they can do with their own property. How is the response to any of this anything other than "mind your own damn business?"
HOAs are at least voluntary and hyper-local associations. I hope to never live in housing covered by an HOA (and I can avoid it), but I support other people who willingly or actively prefer to live under those arrangements.
Restrictions that an HOA might adopt can be more carefully tailored to the residents there than a city-wide ban on using tools not commonly found in a residence on a car. (Imagine if this law applied to electronics repair. "Sorry, most people don’t have a Pentalobe screwdriver, so no Apple portable repairs for you; take it to a shop like a good little consumer!")
LOL. I remember a curbside valve job I did fifty years ago after I blew a head gasket. I think I had the hood up a total of four hours - two hours remove, two hours replace.
Chevy V-8s are easy and there were no emission controls in those days to clutter things up.
I don't know Sac's demographics for people who work on cars but I've never associated being a car nerd (someone who works on their car(s)) as a more hispanic/black thing. In fact my stereotype is the "white trash" (used as a shortcut for the description, not a judgement) cars parked on the lawn. My brother-in-law, in LA, white, has had 10 cars on their property, all beaters, he works on all of them.
Are you sure home car maintenance isn't more associated with poverty than race?
In this particular instance I find myself asking why it matters that the Weaver residents were originally not from Austin. If you’re born in Chicago, shouldn’t you still have the same rights as someone who was born in Austin? That includes the right to complain. However it doesn’t mean anyone has to listen to you. As other users have pointed out, it’s not exactly a new situation for people to move to a neighborhood and immediately try and kick their neighbours out. It’s just that most of the time they’re told to kick rocks.
It seems to me the real crux of this issue is that rich white people are so much more prioritized by the law that a couple of irate Karens can overrule an entire neighbourhoods opinion. It has nothing to do with where they’re from or gentrification.
Not that gentrification doesn’t cause it’s own problems. But the way some people talk about it, as though existing residents are entitled to a higher set of rights, leads down some pretty dark paths, especially when newcomers are of a different nationality, or race than current residents. It reminds me of something that used to be said a lot in jest when I was younger in the 90’s and 00’s and working in fast food. Whenever people gave me extra work to do, they justified it by saying something like, “well, he should just be grateful he isn’t working in a rice paddy” (I’m from Singapore originally, but ok). There seemed to be this view that because my parents chose to move to Canada when I was young, I was somehow entitled to fewer rights, even as a citizen.