* What exactly was his plan for the building? I don't see anything coherent. One moment it's a makerspace, another it's a music warehouse, then it's a science museum. Was there a coherent plan? $281k is a lot of money to spend with no real plan.
* The city allegedly giving him grief. I'm still not sure if this was preventable or not considering the bit about how he failed to submit building plans. If your plan is to own a significant chunk of this city, you're going to have to play better politics than repeatedly being asked to leave at public functions. Palm-greasing would be a far better strategy than righteous anger. Maybe a fraction of that $900k could've opened a nice park they always wanted. Maybe the PD needs a new bearcat. Something.
* Living in a tent on the lot instead of hiring security. This bit was straight out of some episode of a sitcom. This is a depressed flyover country town. If you couldn't afford security then you couldn't afford the building. Again, a good chunk of that $900k would cover round-the-clock security for at least a year. Righteous indignation over the crime isn't an actual cost-cutting measure.
* The land is cheap for a reason. The way a town gets revitalised is external value flows in. How would the makerspace-warehouse-museum thing bring that value into the city? Even if all this did pan out, I'd predict an entirely new problem he'd have, which is no willing customers outside of a 200 mile radius.
I don't get why people make cockeyed "investments" like these when the S&P 500 is sitting right there at a nice 8% a year. No bums, no politics, no thinking it through at all really. Just buy it and don't touch it. If your idea can't do better than that intersection of earnings and effort, don't bother with it.
He was living in a tent and subsisting off ramen until he landed the $900k windfall, which he proceeded to squander on unrelated properties.
But yeah, the total lack of security is astonishing, you'd think he could afford to hire a security guard: the main theft happened after he got the windfall and could easily have paid for it.
I don't see why everyone's trying to prove that they're smarter than this guy. If the town turns around it'll have been a great real estate gamble. May we all live long enough to see the outcome.
Plus, the 74 houses were all part of the same auction! That's what I gathered at least.
And there are benefits to those houses. He could, for example, pick nicer ones and hire people for security and give them free rent in a house as part of their job. With what he paid, he could even give them a "rent to own" mortgage!
He could include the house, and even just minimum wage. Minimum wage is a livable wage in a very, very economically depressed area (look at what housing costs here!), but at the same time, minimum wage + free housing or rent to own housing is a great wage.
He could start a hacker hostel. Those houses give loads of opportunity.
He just needs to stabilize things a bit. But security would do that. Especially if security = 20 people. He just needs a real business plan, or at least to move towards something.
Another way to look at it is, imagine if he used the house to hire security, maintenance people, groundskeepers, cleaning personelle/janitors, and on and on.
Now, he's a major employer in the area.
Now, those left that are honest? Are actively fighting to protect their jobs!
He bought 74 houses at an average price of $2000 each. I'd suspect many of not most of them were in uninhabitable condition, at least without additional investment and maintenance.
Those are all great ideas! That’s the kind of focused “make your investments help you towards your goals” implementations that I see lacking in the overall approach of the person in the article, though. Those _would_ be good ideas, but instead they’re fighting with the people that could help his plans move forward (council) and sleeping in a tent in danger.
> The city allegedly giving him grief. I'm still not sure if this was preventable or not considering the bit about how he failed to submit building plans. If your plan is to own a significant chunk of this city, you're going to have to play better politics than repeatedly being asked to leave at public functions.
Maybe it's just because I don't live in a depressed area like this, but I simply don't understand the city's motivation for being a pain in the ass here. I mean, pretend you're the mayor or city council of this town. Industry has left. The jobs have left. Your schools suck. The state and country is ignoring you. Your citizens are spiraling into poverty, drugs, and crime. A wacky entrepreneur moves in, and would like to take a shot at revitalization.
And you're worried about architectural drawings and building codes?????
Even if the guy is has weird ideas, why would you make it your job to get up his ass when he appears to at least be trying to do something positive?
It's hinted in the article that the local government has its own (lame) revitalization plans, which will also not work, and sees this guy as competition. So silly. No wonder it sucks living in these hopeless places.
> And you're worried about architectural drawings and building codes?????
The most important reason why building codes exist is for safety. The buildings have been abandoned for some time and are likely in deep disrepair. It seems the city wants to know that if their children go to the science museum, it won't collapse or burn down. This guy is not an architect or engineer, and hasn't even hired one. If the city had building codes but didn't enforce them, and some tragedy happened, they might even be liable legally. They would definitely be liable politically if a big tragedy happened.
That’s the thing! Even if the city had plans of their own, I’d be willing to bet if this guy came in with any sort of backing beyond “well I’ve got my own ideas!” in the way of actual (architectural/engineering) drawings, (time/financial) budgets, etc, he’d have a lot better luck.
Also—like other people have said, if the city are assholes, that sucks, but he’s still going to be fighting a steeper uphill battle on his plans and investments without them behind him—suck it up and learn to work with them or it’s going to be that much harder to not only get started on his current plans, but also his longer term plans of revitalization.
Maybe a great piece of software can be built as a single person working alone, fighting the odds and pissing people off, but I can’t see that approach working for building a town full of people.
Some development boards and city councils definitely have a talent for shooting themselves in the foot, but the man is outright antagonistic to them and has been for years. Before you can build you have to do some legwork in advance and show the development board that your plans are going to be compliant. The board wants to be assured that the plan won't have safety or nuisance issues for the town. In some cases they want to have a guarantee that development will actually happen. In each case, Pine Bluff presents very low bars to development that this guy repeatedly fails to meet.
IMO this is not a case of a nimby board standing in the way of an eccentric trying to innovate. The problem is that he has made himself known to this board as an unserious crank who does not show the board respect for their processes. He has been approved for several different uses at the site and failed to follow through on any of them. He demands special permissions while actively campaigning against their plans. If he could show a good faith effort to help the town build upon what the electeds are doing he might have a fighting chance, but he instead goes around talking shit about them anywhere he can.
Wacky entrepreneur moves in, builds go kart track in abandoned warehouse. No safety precautions are taken whatsoever. Kids come for birthday party. Go kart catches on fire, the warehouse fills with smoke. The kids die.
For a less hypothetical scenario, its not hard to see the parallels with another wacky entrepreneur and a submarine that eschewed traditional safety concerns
> And you're worried about architectural drawings and building codes?????
Building codes, like several other categories of regulations that can at times feel oppressive or arbitrary, tend to be written in the blood of accident victims. See, for example the ghost ship fire in my recent memory of why they are important even if (especially if) you are using an under utilized space
Building codes are not a good example for this one, partly because the ones in America/Canada are clearly less safe than Europe and we don't seem to care, but also because you can just go back and read early 1900s planners talking about them and they will explicitly say "it is our goal to make safety rules stricter for apartment buildings than single family homes so they'll cost more to
build because we want to stop black people from moving in."
"[D]o everything possible in our laws to encourage the construction of private dwellings and even two- family dwellings, because the two-family house is the next least objectionable type, and penalize so far as we can in our statute, the multiple dwelling of any kind... If we require multiple dwellings to be fireproof, and thus increase the cost of construction; if we require stairs to be fireproofed, even where there are only three families; if we require fire escapes and a host of other things, all dealing with fire protection, we are on safe grounds, because that can be justified as a legitimate exercise of the police power... In our laws let most of the fire provisions relate solely to multiple dwellings, and allow our private houses and two-family houses to be built with no fire protection whatever (NHA Proceedings 1913, 212)."
Another notable quote is Euclid v. Ambler, where SCOTUS legalized the US zoning system and in their opinion said it was good to ban apartment buildings because they were "parasites".
Of course, this is partly about not liking poor people as well as minorities, but if you leave it in place this long it eventually becomes a ban on your own children living in the same state as you.
These things were introduced at the same time as racial convenants (where a developer would construct a neighborhood and require its houses to only ever be sold to white people), and mostly for the same reason; they merely weren't repealed when that one was. For the racial details, see the book "The Color of Law".
I was thinking the cheap warehouse made sense if it were to be a warehouse/logistics operation. But then a makerspace, without a huge quantity of makers living nearby - huh?
Then after discovering that he is a far above average target, and getting a windfall and bringing all his gear and customer's property to the site, he gets no security?
Definitely seems to be a few cards short of a deck and have more money than sense. I hope he doesn't get himself or his family killed if one of those robberies goes bad.
None of his ideas make sense. It just sounds like he has this picture of a life in his head, but it's not even remotely his. The last line is particularly baffling:
> “It'd be freaking fantastic to own a hotel, and like, have rooftop parties and turn the whole top floor into a penthouse for me. You know? Like, that's, like, how would I not want to do that?
Dude? Who the fuck are you going to be partying with? The town is full of criminals who steal from you. A makerspace? Where are the makers? An art studio? Where are the artists? Your town is "MAGA, drugs and crime" as an HNer put it in the previous article about this saga. Where is all of this culture going to magically come from, besides your imagination?
This guy seems like the true "If You Build It They Will Come" believer, but he's not even building anything. And even if he does Build It, the place seems like too much of a shithole for anyone to actually come.
This particular town is majority Black, so I doubt the MAGA vibe is strong.
Also, if you research the town, it looks like a big casino was just built there, at the cost of $350M. Which would suggest that the RE investments this guy made might just pay out, and that the town leadership was in fact maliciously trying to get rid of him (so that someone else would profit from the appeciation).
> This particular town is majority Black, so I doubt the MAGA vibe is strong.
Yep, according to Wikipedia, you're absolutely right. Strike the "MAGA" part from my comment!
But, plopping a casino into an already-crappy town is not going to make it less crappy.
And, to be fair, if his plan was to help the city, plopping a makerspace or art studio, or a science museum isn't going to move the crappiness needle either. There's no silver bullet building that fixes poverty and misery. It's not like SimCity where you sprinkle your city with evenly spaced bonus-providing buildings and suddenly all your metrics start going up.
If his plan wasn't to help the city, but to arbitrage the low property values into a profitable business, then he should have bought strip mall properties and installed the usual turnkey check cashing stores, liquor stores, payday lenders, and so on. Not easy businesses, but at least they are understandable to the city and have a chance at being profitable.
If his plan was to just speculate on real estate and hope that some miracle happens that raises property values, that's just high stakes gambling. Good for him if it pays off and he can flip these properties to another sucker for a profit.
If it wasn't any of these, then honestly I don't get what his plan was. I'm going to buy a bunch of random real estate in a dilapidated city and... then... do what? Sit there getting robbed every time you move anything of value into those properties?
Skin colour doesn't really have anything to do with with whether they are MAGA or not, statistically speaking. My family and most homies I know don't care for either Trump or Biden though that's obviously some first hand stuff but lines up with the stats. Obama was the last good one anyway.
Yes, it does. About 12% of black people voted for trump whereas 58% of white people voted for Trump. A random white person is about 5x more likely to be a MAGA-hat wearer compared to a random black person.
I've got to ask what is with those family and people you know -one candidate literally worked the first black VP, has a black VP, and is literally doing all he can to help lift POCs, and the other is blatantly racist, claims that elections were "stolen" by black people being allowed to vote, and with a party apparatus doing everything possible to disenfranchise black ppl. And they DGAF which one runs the country for the next 4 years?
That is a serious question - what is their thinking or feeling that drives them to this?
I fell down the pontifier rabbit hole from a HN comment in early 2021 as well and I’m glad other people have found the story as fascinating as I did.
I do think the article makes him a bit overly sympathetic and glosses over some of his eccentricities. Like the fact that he seems to really think he can build a nuclear fusion reactor from an old MRI machine and I guess all of the Nem saga: https://whoispontifier.wordpress.com/2018/05/14/the-journey-...
I still haven’t decided if all this is or isn’t some sort of elaborate performance art, but I appreciate the effort in any case. And even though I think he’s probably a few cards short of a deck, you do kind of root for him in the end.
I'm rooting for him too. He doesn't have all the qualities of a classic protagonist, yet I find myself hoping that he succeeds in his madcap endeavors. I admire his grit: I would have not had his fortitude in the face of violent threats nor withstand the constant frustration.
I'm not anywhere near knowledgeable enough to chime in on the feasibility of creating a nuclear reactor from a MRI machine, but there is this guy in Floyd, Virginia who has created a nuclear reactor from some old medical equipment, so maybe it's possible with a MRI machine too?
Nuclear fission is relatively straightforward so long as you either don't know or don't care about the health risks of radiation. It's just a pile of spicy rocks at the end of the day.
Fusion, on the other hand, requires you to get center-of-sun temperatures and pressures going on to work properly. That usually requires either extremely difficult engineering processes or a fission bomb (and more precise engineering calculations but they're actually reasonably solvable).
I don't know about easy, but hundreds of people have accomplished this as a hobby project using the Farnsworth design, including a handful of very disciplined teenagers.
I always thought fusion was easier than fission, since all* you really need is water and electricity — the problem being that it's currently impossible to get more energy than what you put in
* I am eliding over the fact that building a Farnsworth fusor is still a challenge, but less of a challenge than sourcing, purifying, and enriching uranium certainly.
If you just want any reactions then fission is still way easier, you get more fission from a random bit of uranium ore or in some cases even a banana than from a fusor.
Nuclear fission includes radiative decay, what makes a nuclear reactor rather than a bomb or pile of rock is becoming self sustaining where the reaction is driving the reaction. Fusor’s don’t get there, ITER will as the energy from fusion is driving more fusion reactions.
It’s the difference between rotting wood and a fire.
Pine Bluff is crazy. I know this because many years ago I found an amazing building in the downtown area for sale and went to see it. After a couple of hours of tours from a real estate agent and town officials I realized that this place was not coming back from the dead. The previous owner of the building had been stabbed there while trying to get it ready for occupancy. The city employees openly wanted money to help me avoid taxes. And the kicker was that it smelled awful when the wind blew in from the nearby Tyson chicken farm. It’s consistently been in the top murders per capita rate in the US. I feel bad for this guy, but it would hard to miss the red flags before buying there.
I would like to remind HN that hoarding is a serious and well established mental disorder and that we should not encourage this poor soul that has fallen victim to a real estate version of this disease.
It is unusual that someone should hoard real estate and it is interesting to see the circumstances of how this happened but otherwise it is a pretty standard case.
Note how from the interviews he gets pleasure in obtaining new properties and yet has no idea what to do with them. Note he does not spend the money required to even get an architectural drawing made and yet he spends money on obtaining more and more properties.
Or the fact that he has decided not to hire security but to guard his properties by himself, which would make it much more convenient if he has fewer properties not more. But he still keeps buying more. At this point a smart thief can get a map of his properties helpfully provided on the internet, find out where he is and attack any one of his other forty something properties.
Note how in the end of the interview when he is supposed to say some inspiring words of his progress or near term plans, he does not talk about what he is going to do with the warehouse but fantasizes with great excitement about buying yet another abandoned property, a hotel.
By the way I fully sympathize with the city officials. No city will approve any building project that does not come with fully compliant drawings signed and stamped by a licensed civil engineer and/or architect (depending on the project). Nor should they. It is their job to keep the community safe and habitable.
It is kind of funny they are stealing his ideas, but that also might be understandable. They might be good ideas, after all. Here you have a town that is looking for ways to revitalize itself with little money, and here comes a young techie guy from California with what seem to be some very good ideas and some money. There probably was some excitement in city hall when this guy first submitted his plans. But then they slowly realize that this is a sad disturbed individual that is unlikely to ever accomplish anything and will not spend money on anything other than acquiring abandoned real estate.
But the town keeps deteriorating, they have to do something, and his ideas do seem pretty cheap. So they decide lets try them out ourselves. Cities do not like to own businesses. The officials cannot take outsize profits for themselves but are on the hook for any screwups. So I am sure they would have much preferred if someone else was running these things, but they simply knew that this guy was not going to get it done.
So yeah, this is an interesting case of hoarding, but that is about it. I urge Mr. Fenley to consult a psychiatrist.
I feel a bit bad, because John Fenley is among us here on HN. But I think they also surface that John, you really need to get out of Pine Bluff and reevaluate these pie-in-the-sky ideas.
Doesn't the writer sort of revel in the misfortunes of John?
I'm not sure how he got his money, but what he is trying to do with it doesn't sound awful. He might be bad at business - it seems like that's the idea here - but a person like John, from what I can tell, is a kind of protagonist.
He wants to build his crazy ideas that seem on their face not all together sound. And he puts a ton of effort into making it happen. These ideas are meant to improve the world in some way through the market forces as he can tell. I wish him the best for it.
It seems like there is a big culture of cynicism towards people trying to improve things through action and not words. Underlying it is the assumption of negative externalities. But I think we lost sight of something here. All actions have the possibility of some negative externalities, but humanity got to where it is because of a lot of people doing their best to improve things.
The instinct to make potshots from the sidelines at the guys playing the game sucks.
John isn't a bad guy, and if he was close to achieving good things, I would be all for supporting him.
Unfortunately, he is living off a 6 figure sum he got from stock years ago. He is rapidly burning it to 0 by buying unprofitable real estate. Instead of proving out ideas on a small scale, and scaling up from there, he thinks if he just tries for a home run, he can eventually do it. But he has multiple kids that he isn't seeing when he's in Pine Bluff most of the time. It's obvious that he's burning through his savings and will go bankrupt if he doesn't change course sooner. The nuclear reactor or mayor of Pine Bluff moonshots are never going to pan out.
Yup, I don’t like to see anyone be the victim of crime like that. We can laugh at some of the poor investments he has made, but the reality is things sound pretty dire in Pine Bluff. I feel bad for him and all the residents of Pine Bluff living in a city where the rule of law has basically failed.
I think buying a warehouse is kinda cool! But if he’s facing security problems, can’t he just hire guards? The labor price must be as low as land price there.
I’ve looked up minimal wages in Arkansas. It’s $11/h, which seems ridiculously high, but I’m not an American. I think that in a depressed town, it shouldn’t be hard to find someone for, say, $35 per 12-hour night shift, just to patrol the property with a torch, so that it wouldn’t look abandoned? Which amounts to about $13k per year.
> I’ve looked up minimal wages in Arkansas. It’s $11/h, which seems ridiculously high, but I’m not an American. I think that in a depressed town, it shouldn’t be hard to find someone for, say, $35 per 12-hour night shift
This makes sense. The legal minimum wage is $11/hr, which multiplied by 12 hours comes out to thirty five dollars
"Minimum wage" is a bit of a misnomer as there are a whole raft of situations and exemptions where the minimum wage is not actually the minimum wage you can be legally paid.
Overnight security guard is not one of those exceptions and if you think you can convince an independent contractor to even put on socks for 35 dollars, which is the only way this would be legal, you're living in a fantasy.
Tipped minimum wage requires a person to receive enough in tips to match the non-tipped minimum wage. If there aren't sufficient tips for that, the employer has to make up the difference. The only question is if Arkansas has its own version of that to require matching the Arkansas minimum wage ($11) instead of just the federal minimum wage ($7.25).
They're supposed to do that, but many don't. It's not like the IRS is going to swoop in and bust them for parking less than minimum wage. The employees that take those jobs aren't in a position to make demands and likely aren't even informed that it is required.
I think you would have to adjust the wage up quite a bit to account for the security guard's collusion with the local thieves. 100% what I would expect anyway.
Not even that, being a tip-enabled position is satisfactory to reduce the minimum to 2.63, so just slap a tip jar somewhere no one can reach (but still see) and call it a day.
Please don't propagate misinformation like this. Even with tipped wages you still must make minimum wage including tips. The issue is people will read and believe that someone can make just a low amount of money because a position is tipped. This is incorrect.
You can get exceptions for people with disabilities and full-time students in a few fields. There's very few exceptions where someone can make less than minimum wage actually.
Surprised to see this downvoted as it is just a simple statement of fact, to the best of my understanding.
My understanding of minimum wage is on the (US) federal level, where in addition to the standard exceptions that folks know (servers, farmworkers, etc), small enough companies or companies that don't engage in interstate commerce are also exempt from paying the minimum wage.
I wonder if people just don't like what I wrote and downvoted ab irato, if this came across as contrarían and was downvoted for vibes, or if state minimum wage laws change the fact pattern and I'm wrong in my understanding. If I'm wrong I'd like to be corrected.
P.S. since I hate to leave something incorrect: servers actually ARE supposed to get federal minimum wage from their employer if their tips don't cover the difference between the $2.xx they get paid and the federal minimum wage.
In the context of this conversation, who are you going to hire for a 12 hour shift at a real job, where their life is on the line, without having insurance or hazard pay or anything, for $35?
(metaphorical you, and this is more in response to
chucksmash above)
Hold on, friend. You're not from there but you feel comfortable dictating a fair wage without looking at the local cost of living? That's really weird.
Minimum wage is $11/h, but that is too high. Time to hire some undocumented immigrants for $35/12h. Toss in some "nobody wants to work anymore" and complaining that regulations are what is ruining the economy, and they'd sound exactly like many Americans.
Isn’t Arkansas one of those states removing child labor protections as fast as they can?
Just set up shop at a rural hospital and pressure kids with sick parents into cheap labor. Charge them room and board to recoup the minimum hourly wage. Easy peasy lemon squeezey.
I doubt that anyone anywhere in the western world would take a job (especially one where you might get stabbed or shot, work 12 hour night shifts and don’t get weekends or holidays off) for $13k per year. There’s always some other job you can take. You can get a job at McDonald’s that would pay more. In the worst case you can try to live off welfare and you’d probably be better off like that.
Whoops, I’ve just checked the thread and it seems that I angered some folks. Not that this comment would be read by anyone, but just for history: as non-American, it was hard to wrap my head around the fact that the minimum wage is $11 de facto, not de jure. It’s almost $2k per month, which is a salary of an educated (non-IT) specialist in lots of countries. I also forgot that minimum wage must be a hot political topic in the US. Sorry for writing stupid things on the Internet, I guess.
Based on what's being described ("career criminals") it doesn't seem like that would be a good deterrence.
A security guard is going to be looking out for their own safety and well-being before any property they're guarding. What do you think is gonna happen if armed criminals show up against a lone guard being paid $35 a night...?
This reminds me of when my brother and I read one of the Harry Potter books as a kid and we were incredulous when it mentioned him using a "torch" under his blanket to read secretly at night. We thought it literally meant he was using a flame and didn't understand how his he managed to keep his blanket from catching fire
You only need to hire armed guards for a few months until the problem of the repeat career criminals breaking into the place is solved. They will run out of criminal burglars before you run out of armed guard salary.
Sure, because criminals are all dumb as rock and flock to your guarded property like lemings.
What they certainly won’t do is threaten the family of your armed guards, or bribe your guards, or sabotage the vehicles of your armed guards until they don’t show up no more, or learn the schedule of your armed guards and sneak around them.
Or you know, lay low and do easier things until you stop paying guards and come back then.
How even do you reclaim Pine Bluff? it's obviously overrun with thieves and the local police are qualitatively useless. It's almost like the national guard needs to be sent in.
I propose pillorying for lesser crimes and public executions for greater ones, but that’s likely not possible due to the eighth amendment. And suspending the constitutional would be the final nail in the coffin of the whole American project.
The modern western criminal justice system only really works when thieves and killers know what they are doing is wrong, but do it anyway. What you have in places like Pine Bluff is more like barbarians sacking Rome. They don’t think it’s wrong but do it anyway, they do it because they believe that it’s right. It’s an antique problem that calls for an antique solution.
You don’t need the /s because it would indeed work better. But that’s just because anything would work better than a tower that randomly dispenses dollar bills.
the /s is so i don’t get banned for non sarcastically proposing obvious classical conditioning methods (that would be undoubtably uncomfortably effective) against what appears to be a severely disadvantaged and traumatized population.
Wow. I thought stories like these ended when the internet died. I’m glad I was wrong. Should have been on HN ages ago. Crazy and exciting read. Thanks max read.
I think one of the things that makes this guy’s story interesting, at least to me, is that there is big part of me that would do as he has done but I have actively and intentionally suppressed it. Maybe we share the same
ADHD inspired impulses. The part of me that suppresses these impulses could have easily been missing, I see his story I think, ‘there but for the grace of god go I’.
I don’t want to see him fail but since I’ve suppressed this aspect in myself I am kind of seeking reassurance of my own decisions. If he succeeds then that may suggest that I have been making the wrong choices in life. I wouldn’t begrudge him for his success and instead I would use it to try to recalibrate my own decisions.
I am a lifelong Arkansan, and I hope he is able to pull off some kind of win. I visited that area often as a teen, and Pine Bluff was the main entertainment destination for the region. I haven't been in awhile, but it sounds like the years have not been kind.
I really hope that his analogy to 1980s NYC works out. It's easy to give up when there's so much cultural and institutional inertia, but this guy seems to have a pretty deep well of motivation. I hope he hangs in there.
Others have touched upon the point of crime, but it really is worth mentioning that crime (especially of the violent and/or property type) is a huge hindrance to the economic revitalization of any area. It's much, much easier to risk time and capital to try and build something versus risking your life and those of your loved ones.
Just goes to show that rule of law and strong private property rights are necessary conditions to any level of wealth-building.
As always, The Simpsons did it first. Go watch the episode where Bart buys an abandoned factory at a tax auction for $1, although even Bart hired Millhouse as a security guard.
The reason the city wants architectural drawings and probably an engineer to be involved is the same too. Spoiler alert: the building collapses into rubble at the end of the episode.
The thing that people always seem to forget about real estate is that assets can have real ‘negative value’ elements.
For awhile they were selling houses in Detroit for something like $100 - but all the articles about it didn’t mention the $10k+ in delinquent tax liens on the properties, or the $100k+ in required improvements to make the property even basically habitable.
Or that you’d likely get shot attempting to live there, unless you had some very specific skills.
Perhaps he has really long term vision. According to National Geographic, if the polar ice caps melt completely, Pine Bluff will benefit immensely by being waterfront property on the now larger Gulf of Mexico.
I find that there is a lot of inertia in decline, things that have been declining for a long time generally continue declining. The amount of work to turn around a township (?) would be insane and I wish him the best of luck.
I can't believe no one has mentioned the FDA toxicology lab near the town [0]. There is good reason they put the lab in the middle of impoverished no where. There has been issues with the lab in the past, including missing primates last year [1]. Maybe I'm a bit tin-foil-hat, but this is literally an isolated place to study toxicity and I think it's a unique risk to relocate near it.
The article you linked does not talk about missing primates. They were doing experiments on monkeys. Activist put pressure on them to stop and they did stop. Then they rehomed the monkeys to a sanctuary.
They are “missing” in as much as the monkeys are no longer there, but everyone knows where the monkeys have gone and why the monkeys have gone. The article you linked itself explains this.
For Australians: Right-wing, Sky News talking head, Rita Panahi, was born in Pine Bluff, AK, according to its wikipedia page. Sure would explain her hatred of the poor.
If he is posting, I sincerely hope he's doing it through the security-from-state of some anonymized internet access. Chances are he's just dead though.
What he bought was a large warehouse and later some foreclosed lots at auction, spending in total ~400k. The warehouse alone was worth 3.4 million as recently as 2008 but de-industrialization and local crime have since cratered it's value. [1]
While he's engaged in a completely unreasonable adventure, It's sad to see how accepting & cynical we are of the hallowing out and degradation of the US.
I've lived in Pine Bluff before (not that long ago) and almost everyone I worked with commuted from either Little Rock (a straight shot on the interstate for something like 45 minutes of drive time) or one of the nearby little rural towns. A lot of businesses have since left the town and will likely never come back. The crime is just too high and there aren't enough jobs in the area. Little Rock is pretty dangerous too in parts, but is safe for the vast majority of places.
i was stationed in Arkansas in the late 80's and we used to go to Pine Bluff sometimes. It was a lovely little town. Just tragic about the downturn. I had no idea.
For anyone who wants to understand the macroeconomics behind why the US Economy seems to hate export industries lately, I highly recommend the book "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Michael Pettis.
> It's sad to see how accepting & cynical we are of the hallowing out and degradation of the US.
Certain parts of the US. It’s a big country, it might not be reasonable for it to all be doing well, especially with an overall older and older population with productive segments of the population agglomerating to smaller regions.
While Pine Bluff is one of the fastest a shrinking cities in the country, the northwest corner of AR is one of the fastest-growing metro areas. A fascinating example of the somewhat fractal nature of growth in the US.
>t's sad to see how accepting & cynical we are of the hallowing out and degradation of the US.
It is disappointing that people are socioeconomically swept away by the tide, but I think all across America since its inception has been a place of ebb and flow. A nation of boom towns and ghost towns.
Probably a case of just wanting to vote for “your own people” rather than who’s actually competent.
You saw the same the same thing when Jacob Zuma was jailed for corruption. They had massive riots in his support. They had massive pro-, not anti-corruption riots.
i find the person who wrote this to be a complete ass-hole. talking about ill-advised redditors, he gives one example of a man who decided to build his own house. but the link to that guys story is a weird twitter thread that just shows a guy building a house. as someone who knows how to build a house, i knew how much work and hard-earned lessons went into each of those progress pictures. and the guy builds the house better than most contractors would. besides the plumbing snafu. the doors and windows were not placed in a way that is pleasing to the eye but overall it was a great accomplishment. how is that ill-advised? its not, its awesome. i hate people that take a shit on those who actually make change in the world and take risks. all from their safe little cubicle or basement. people who are so ignorant and dumb that all the information that is packed into those pictures flies right over their heads.
as a person in real estate, looking through pontifiers twitter feed is like looking back at my own life. most people know that there is a homeless problem. but what many people dont realize is that basically everywhere in the united states there are people who wander around at night looking for stuff to steal. they poke around everywhere but actually do not physically break in most of the time. people in liberal areas are familiar with window breaking and break and enter but everywhere else there is just this omnipresence of vagrants who commit smaller crimes. they are just really annoying and make the neighborhood seem more trashy than it really is. these people are all fit and ready to work. the cops wont arrest them. nobody really bothers them. i think the reason they exist is because people are shittier now and dont feel any urge to fix the societal problems that they see around them. there are videos on pontifiers twitter where he confronts them and they are totally without shame. they arent afraid of being caught. i think something similar happened in the 80s and people got super fed up and then NY started stop and frisk and other things. we need another one of those.
as for the actual purchase of the warehouse and other properties, the risk isnt so bad when you take into account the relatively small amounts of money that are actually on the table here. as far as i know, hes making these purchases in cash. i would say that theres a good chance he will pull through and be able to use what hes learned to start making a real difference in this community and others. by far the most concerning part of this story is the city not cooperating. biggest road block by far.
The individual with the bad window placements was actually a Something Awful user (not a redditor) and he was actually well advised not to do what he was doing. Folks who'd like to know more can search for "Groverhaus" or the more evocative "load-bearing drywall".
yeah, the author seems to like the guy but still falls into typical prejudicial choices in explaining the actual story. It's so schoolmarmish. Step back man, people can do what they want, they make mistakes, they have grand plans that sometimes fail.
> “The Overconfident Optimist and His Ill-Advised DIY Project.”
This is what I mean. The article just started and he's defining his conclusion for all readers.
Then, he compares Fenley to a "Child-destroying slackline" (which apparently never actually hurt anyone?). Fenley bought some property and tried to artistic type stuff. It is really slimy to compare him to such a horrible thing as hurting a child. That linked tweet is another "we know better" type of guy who's telling someone else how wrong they are. Yeah, doing risky stuff is risky, and I definitely don't think kids should (or would) be allowed to ride that thing, but I think they'd figure it out real quick (possibly after the creator died testing it).
This is really a cultural thing - puritan types freaking HATE how unplanned, disorganized, and free/careless other cultural groups are in the US (i.e. appalachian/borderer people). So reading this as straight up cultural mockery/status management/ridicule makes it clear. Its basically equivalent to a 19th century "lets go to other countries and laugh at people's behavior" type of travelogue by northeast USA "know better than you" types criticizing other cultural groups for the behavior they don't like (monster trucks, bbq, hotdog eating competitions, basically anything that's just not done in the uptight north-east USA)
Also: author, did you personally ever make 900k from a patent? So yeah, people are weird, have bad/dumb ideas. And I can feel you kind of like the guy despite everything. So like, get over the contempt you feel, figure out what he's got that gave him the skill to invent something, and rise above your need to mock him. The rest of the article is fine in tone, just fix the initial disrespectful comparisons. Something like "I looked into this guy and found a complicated, naive, but also gifted guy... <details>" rather than just hitting the regular playbook.
Final comment: the note about race / murder is super weird. You mention a company moved, then immediately explain the race distributions without any reason to do that, as if there is a connection. Is there? what is it? Did the company ever mention race? This is typical journo hinting/dogwhistling. Is there any evidence of any racial problems in the subject of the article? Some towns are poor, some rich, some white, some black, whats the point? Then you mention the murder rates... inadvertently confirming a hate fact, that certain groups are linked to super high murder rates (victims and perps). I just don't get it. Like, what's the point of bringing that up?
Our protagonist hails from deeply Mormon Provo, Utah, home to BYU, a slew of tech startups, and 0.8% people who identify as Black, and they've trying to spin up their business in a wrecked, deindustrialized shell of a Southern town that's over 75% Black and they know exactly nobody. Even with the best of intentions they're going to get major culture shock.
Are you saying that scrappers and thieving and muggings is just “Black culture” rit large? That’s an incredibly fatalistic mentality to put it politely.
Yeah, the framing you need to have to understand the comment is dark. How is one to "know" that one ought not to do this, unless the facts about cultural behavior are communicated? Yet those facts themselves, about regions and risks, are extremely contentious. It doesn't seem fair to have it both ways - either every group should be free to move to, try to make a life, do business an lots of US regions without worrying much, or we should spread stereotypes and warnings about how groups are likely to behave, which would look a lot like racism.
The points about not knowing anybody are fair, but still, the obvious implication is that the comment, while coming from the left, is also suggesting that the MC should have privately been told the racial realities of that area. But the right to speak about that, too, is under attack. Is it or is it not okay to mention that majority black, southern, low income towns are likely to be extremely dangerous, and that poverty is a proxy for it, but that other methods of stereotyping are likely even more effective?
* What exactly was his plan for the building? I don't see anything coherent. One moment it's a makerspace, another it's a music warehouse, then it's a science museum. Was there a coherent plan? $281k is a lot of money to spend with no real plan.
* The city allegedly giving him grief. I'm still not sure if this was preventable or not considering the bit about how he failed to submit building plans. If your plan is to own a significant chunk of this city, you're going to have to play better politics than repeatedly being asked to leave at public functions. Palm-greasing would be a far better strategy than righteous anger. Maybe a fraction of that $900k could've opened a nice park they always wanted. Maybe the PD needs a new bearcat. Something.
* Living in a tent on the lot instead of hiring security. This bit was straight out of some episode of a sitcom. This is a depressed flyover country town. If you couldn't afford security then you couldn't afford the building. Again, a good chunk of that $900k would cover round-the-clock security for at least a year. Righteous indignation over the crime isn't an actual cost-cutting measure.
* The land is cheap for a reason. The way a town gets revitalised is external value flows in. How would the makerspace-warehouse-museum thing bring that value into the city? Even if all this did pan out, I'd predict an entirely new problem he'd have, which is no willing customers outside of a 200 mile radius.
I don't get why people make cockeyed "investments" like these when the S&P 500 is sitting right there at a nice 8% a year. No bums, no politics, no thinking it through at all really. Just buy it and don't touch it. If your idea can't do better than that intersection of earnings and effort, don't bother with it.