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.
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.