On the one year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act, @WhiteHouse rolls out a new "stories" feature on https://t.co/TpvpvnQFDL, featuring real world impact stories across all 50 states and territories highlighting how Bidenomics is benefitting families and communities:
— Rachel Thomas (@Rachel_Thomas46) August 16, 2023
The last guy talked about infrastructure week. Well, now we’re in an infrastructure decade. pic.twitter.com/DPr11Vdel1
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) August 17, 2023
One year ago today, President @JoeBiden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law—lowering health care and energy costs, tackling the climate crisis, and creating good-paying jobs. pic.twitter.com/tsCc9Qk0Gs
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) August 16, 2023
At event marking first anniversary of Inflation Reduction Act in White House east room. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi: “This is such a remarkable accomplishment for our country… There is no more urgent task than the saving of our planet.” pic.twitter.com/4OPGoGd8pW
— David Smith (@SmithInAmerica) August 16, 2023
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"but if we prosecute a Republican president for obvious crimes, they'll just prosecute a Democratic president for shit they'll make up" is the lamest, stupidest shit you can say right now and it seems every tryhard bothsider is saying it today
— Roy Edroso (@edroso) August 15, 2023
Yesterday, Donald Trump posted a word that rhymes with the n-word, and some of his fans went to town with it. https://t.co/nd3Q0pNq7H
— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) August 16, 2023
Fox News is struggling to find a good defense of Donald Trump after last night’s indictment.
It turns out “I didn’t know it was a crime” isn’t a real legal argument: pic.twitter.com/jMledhBXn4
— Kat Abu (@abughazalehkat) August 15, 2023
Fun fact: Ginni Thomas, the wife of a Supreme Court Justice who refuses to recuse himself from Trump-related cases, sent dozens of text messages pressuring now indicted Mark Meadows to make now indicted Sydney Powell "the lead and the face" of the efforts to overturn the 2020… pic.twitter.com/7EZycgu8ki
— Jo (@JoJoFromJerz) August 15, 2023
Hopefully one he’s previously called a shithole https://t.co/4YePZMCoFB
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) August 16, 2023
Baud
The savvy set knows in their bones that Dems are all criminals.
Abnormal Hiker
Just me and Baud are up?
Tony Jay
I have been informed by the people currently running the UK Labour Party that there is no money to invest in green energy, healthcare, housing, wages, infrastructure, education or any of the other million things a civilisation is made up out of, and that raising taxes on the obscenely wealthy and/or seeking less restricted access to the world’s largest single market to correct this lack of funds are complete non starters for ‘fiscal reasons’, but I nevertheless have a moral duty to cheer them on anyway otherwise I will be personally responsible for the evil actions of every Tory, now and for all time.
I think I prefer it your way.
The Thin Black Duke
It’s going to be interesting to see if America has the collective will to go against historical and cultural precedent and put a rich white man in jail.
narya
@Abnormal Hiker: Nope; I’m up, too. Trying to motivate myself and haven’t succeeded yet
ETA: good morning everyone.
JMG
@Tony Jay: Starmer really is both gutless and really dumb, isn’t he? As a rule, it’s considered good politics here to avoid splitting your coalition into pieces until after winning an election.
hueyplong
@The Thin Black Duke: Maybe the best way to make it happen is to prove he’s not actually rich. That is probably an essential element of the crime that isn’t expressly included in the jury instructions.
prostratedragon
@Abnormal Hiker:
And the hermit thrushes, according to Amy Beach.
Jeffro
I might have to start using “Tryhard Bothsider” – thanks Roy!
gene108
I find it ridiculous that whenever someone crosses a prominent Republican it’s just accepted death threats are going to happen.
It’s like some background noise that gets tuned out.
I really wish Republican politicians were forced to denounce people making death threats, instead of letting them ignore it.
Anne Laurie
Part of the current spate of indictments, as I understand it, is making clear that TFG has become an embarrassment to all the other rich white white-collar criminal men. Remember Enron’s Ken Lay?
(Of course, that didn’t work on Bernie Madoff, or Jared Kushner’s criminal dad, but by gawd the jurors tried.)
linnen
Funny that the list of excuses made by pundits for Republicans to just make up things to investigate Democrats gets longer and longer. Just so the pundits can twists themselves into pretzels to avoid saying that Republicans are going it for political reasons.
Lapassionara
@Tony Jay: looks like the Labour Party is another casualty of Brexit.
I was in London when there was a big demonstration against Brexit. I think it was 2018. People had come from all over to participate. One large group in the march kept chanting “where is Jeremy.” I guess he tried to thread the needle and failed.
Lapassionara
@gene108: Thuggish behavior is a hallmark of fascism.
Tony Jay
@JMG:
Except when you don’t want ‘that’ coalition, you only want part of that coalition, the furthest right part, plus a large chunk of your former opponent’s coalition. That way you can drop any pretence of believing in all of those icky, embarrassing Lefty ideals live fairness and opportunity and plant your flag firmly in the centre-right soil at the foot of Establishment Mountain, nurtured by the clouds blown in over the Sea of Rich Donors and source of the rivers that fertilise Future Corporate Executive-Directorship Valley and the Celebrity Former Politician Lowlands.
OzarkHillbilly
@Abnormal Hiker: As per usual, I’ve been up since 4. My AM started with cleaning up the kitchen, as per usual.
Betty Cracker
The Orlando Sentinel has a subscriber-only story about local folks who were grateful and excited about the opportunity to upgrade old, inefficient central A/C units and rewire their homes, etc., under a federal IRA energy efficiency program, only to be told when they applied that DeSantis vetoed the funding. Now they have to try and scrape up the $10K. They’re pissed! One of the screwed Floridians described himself as a “political independent” and sounds like he hadn’t paid much attention in the past. Maybe he will in the future.
MazeDancer
Highly rec having Ali Velshi read you the indictments. It’s like an audiobook or podcast, you can do something else while you gasp at the tonnage of wrong doing.
All the indictments are available at “Prosecuting Donal Trump”, which is an excellent podcast hosted by Andrew Weissmann and Mary McCord.
Really, listen to them all. It is remarkable all the details of criming you didn’t know.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Normies are so frustrating, but at least they’re blaming the right people there.
SFAW
@Betty Cracker:
Sure. And maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow being tall, thin, good-looking, and with a full head of hair.
He’ll MAYBE whine about DeathSantis, but he’ll end with “But Demon-craps are worse!”
ETA: Yes, I saw that he’s “independent.” We’ll see.
Tony Jay
@Lapassionara:
He was out there giving more and better speeches opposing the Leave campaign than any other politician, while the Media pretended it wasn’t happening and instead obsessed over “Why won’t those extremists stand on a stage with the leaders of the Tory Party and say how trustworthy they are?”
Labour was a victim of Brexit, yes, in that quite a few ‘socially conservative’ voters and a hell of a lot more ‘soft left’ voters were propagandised to believe that Labour’s Brexit policy was at once a betrayal of the Leave vote and a rejection of the Remain vote, so they voted Tory or stayed home.
And once the 2019 Election broke the back of opposition to Brexit, the very same people who had been screaming that Labour needed to ditch its Leave voters and go full-on Remain did a screeching 180 and announced that their main policy was to regain the ‘trust’ of those who had voted Leave, by adopting their ‘socially conservative’ biases. As cynical and breathtaking an act of in-your-face hypocrisy as I’ve ever witnessed, and one that the UK Media has steadfastly ignored for going on four years now.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Sitting here listening to rain against the window. One of my favorite sounds.
Suzanne
Remember when some GOP lickspittle dumbfuck replied that Trump didn’t say “shithole countries” because he misheard him say “shithouse countries”?
My loathing for these people is…. significant.
Spanky
@Tony Jay:
A swamp we’re trying to drain over here.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Tony Jay: The UK’s determined march down this path has been horrifying to watch. Like the election of Trump, I didn’t believe it would happen until it did.
Ken
“Dammit, there are accepted ways to steal everything that’s not nailed down. And you’re supposed to buy control of the country with campaign donations and free vacations, not stage a coup!”
Lapassionara
@Tony Jay: Thanks, Tony. You are a more accurate source of UK news for me than any other I have found.
Tony Jay
@Spanky:
Whereas over here we’re basically the Everglades, but wetter and stinkier and the alligators all have lawyers.
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Oh, it’s been an eye-opener. I don’t recognise this country anymore. Or rather, I do recognise it, but as the weird, deformed funhouse-mirror version I recall from a cheese-and-poppers feverdream back in 1995 that I never seriously thought I’d be made to live in.
The sooner someone badmouths the Valar and we can start over afresh, if a little damper, the better.
satby
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Oh, goody! Hoping it comes my way in a few hours….
And just like that, the sun went behind a dark grey cloud. 🙂
Edit: slowly, Blue Sky is supplanting
TwitterX. I have an (1) invite code, if someone wants one. Hit me at my business email: skinluvvers at gmail.rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊😊😊
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Tony Jay: A Numenorian apocalypse might not be the thing we should hope for, but it does feel like other avenues are being blocked.
Tony Jay
@Lapassionara:
Thanks, but by the salted ovaries of St Marge the Verdant, that is scary! All Hail Murdoch the Corrupter, for He hath fucked it all uppeth.
bjacques
@Tony Jay: I always got the impression that Tony Blair was so bedazzled by the Thatcher/Major government’s seemingly inexplicable longevity that he figured the easiest road to power was to turn Labour into a cargo cult that sounded enough like Tories that people would vote for them. EDIT: Did he purge the party of leftists like Keith is doing now? I can understand that approach, I guess. I saw a documentary about the Thatcher years and marvelled how she survived so many scandals, but then they occurred over a span of 12 years and not in the 2 hours presented in the documentary. Likewise the shitshow 2010 to the present of a rotating cast of feckless ministers, PMs, and Deputy PMs. But the calculation and triangulation of Tony and Keith is lazy and impoverished, and guaranteed to discourage any voter looking for relief.
As for Trump and his fellow thugs, prosecute anyway. “Don’t fight back or you’ll get it worse” comes from schoolyard stooges enabling the bully. Democracy has a chance if we fight. If we lose, at least we went down swinging. But I don’t think we’ll lose. Bullies always fold in the face of real resistance.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
rikyrah
@Betty Cracker:
Yet another ad the Democrats should run
rikyrah
@Tony Jay:
Always appreciate your insights
OzarkHillbilly
San Diego ramps up arrests of unhoused people: ‘Harder to survive’
Yeah. Sure. That’ll solve the problem.
rikyrah
@linnen:
If you asked the MSM , with a gun pointed at them, what they can impeach Joe Biden over….
They would have to be shot
Cause, they don’t have an answer, cause there isn’t one
different-church-lady
I know he’d never do it, but I do not comprehend how Clarence Thomas can do anything but recurse himself if anything involving the Georgia case comes up before the Supremos.
Ken
Sweet Meteor of Death is out there, although I’m not sure of its current status since it uses Twitter.
(This is the SMOD that is four miles across and will destroy all life when it hits, not the Atlanta indie rock band. Also the first one has run for President, I don’t think the rock band has any political ambitions.)
Tony Jay
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Y’cannae beat Akallabêth, as they may or may not say up in Bonnie Skollan. Though it’s getting to the point where I’d settle for any off-the-shelf brand of cataclysmic reset as long as it’s soon.
Not really. I jest.
Maybe a mild Zombiegeddon? Confined to parts of Westminster and the bluer parts of the Home Counties? A light Triffiding, perhaps? Even an outbreak of
RageQuite Understandably Peeved Virus might suffice.smith
@rikyrah: It’s the principle of the thing. Every time you impeach a Republican president, you have to impeach a Democratic one. It’s only fair. And they are way behind schedule. Where oh where is a convenient unauthorized blowjob when you need one?
Soprano2
@MazeDancer: They did that on the “Jack” podcast, too. It was almost numbing, so much detail about the crimes he and the others committed.
OzarkHillbilly
@OzarkHillbilly: I forgot I had this teed up too.
OzarkHillbilly
@rikyrah: I can answer that question: Impeach him for breathing.
Soprano2
@Suzanne: I heard a story about indoor pickleball courts this morning where they talked about opening courts in malls. It made me think that might be a good way to repurpose the empty Sears department store at our mall. It seems to me that would be a relatively easy remodel. I also thought of health clubs. It seems to me anything that needs lots of open space would work in a place like that.
Cliosfanboy
@Tony Jay:
well, there’s always the LibDems. ;)
Tony Jay
@bjacques:
No, the mild-purging had already been done before he took over (by Kinnock, advised by the odious Peter ‘Spirit of Slytherin’ Mandelson; his mob just monopolised the bureaucracy and stuffed loyalists into enough seats for an internal supermajority, then left the Left be.
What the Plastic Peer has done has been a wholesale pogrom intended to ensure that no matter how badly his faction shits the bed, there will never, ever, ever be a possibility of them losing control over the Party leadership again. And if that turns off millions of left-wing and young voters who want a better country? Good. Those people smell.
Ken
I am skeptical of a global menace that requires 99.9% of humanity to have been blinded in advance.
different-church-lady
@OzarkHillbilly:
We know for fuckin’ certain the population hasn’t increased 30% in the last five years, so that’s not the explanation.
Tony Jay
@rikyrah:
Sure they do. They’d say that Joe Biden has obviously so divided the country with his unhinged attacks on non-Democrats that innocent truth-tellers like them are now the targets of gun-wielding partisans!
Pay them enough in bonuses and tell-all book advances and they’ll even believe it!
@Cliosfanboy:
And there always will be… it’s just that no-one quite knows why.
steppy
I’m glad David Rothkopf bumped this idea back up to the top. Despite all the deference being shown to Tubby about “flight risk” in his many arraignments to date, I have always suspected that there is about a 10% chance that Tubby will take it on the lam. Thoughts about those odds?
Tony Jay
@Ken:
I think the popularity of Coldplay proves that you only need to strip a minority of one of their senses to inflict slow-moving, banal horror on whole populations.
Soprano2
@OzarkHillbilly: Homelessness is such a hard nut to crack. The solution is more affordable housing, but it’s hard to get it built. I can also understand why residents are frustrated at people camping on the sidewalks. If there were a bunch of people camping in the parkling lot my business uses, I’d be angry and frustrated. There are no easy answers, but what they’re doing won’t help things any. Most people want the homeless to just go away, to somewhere else. That’s not a solution, it’s relocation.
OzarkHillbilly
@different-church-lady: California has a serious problem here, which I have no idea of how to solve and am smart enough to keep my idiot mouth shut.
@Soprano2: Same as it ever was.
Frankensteinbeck
@rikyrah:
There are several specific things Republicans want to impeach Biden over.
They’re just fantasies.
@Tony Jay:
Thank you. I always wondered where Lord British got the name for that game.
sab
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I am so old that I remember them going into the EU. They had to wait for deGaulle to die to be allowed in.
OzarkHillbilly
@steppy: God doesn’t love me that much.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Soprano2: They’ve been doing things like that for years. E.g. indoor skate parks, trampoline parks, etc.
Mel
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Add a good book in hand and a sleepy cat on the lap, and it’s a recipe for a perfect morning.
Soprano2
@OzarkHillbilly: My mother’s cousin had a house in Santa Monica – I think it was on the street that ends at the Santa Monica Pier. His wife told us they film a lot of car commercials on that street because of the way it curves. They still had a modest house on a small lot. In 2009 she said that when they finally sold it she thought they’d get millions of dollars for the house, which would promptly be torn down so they could build a mini-mansion on the lot. Mother’s cousin died a few years after we visited them, and his wife moved to Kansas to be near her family. I don’t know what she got for the house, but I’m sure it was enough to take care of her for the rest of her life. They bought the house in the 1950’s – he was a gemologist who taught at a school for gemologists. They traveled to China for his work in the 1970’s, when it was still restricted.
Tony Jay
@Frankensteinbeck:
Now that was something I’ve never been aware of and I must say I very much enjoyed the dive into bonkers MMORPG history.
gene108
@Soprano2:
The upfront cost to build housing is high enough that affordable housing isn’t viable for many developers in high cost markets.
I really don’t know the best way to solve this, but upfront development costs are an issue to “why can’t developers just build more housing”.
NotMax
A detour down memory lane.
Yes, kiddies, that really was the price then.
(In the neighborhood of two grand in today’s greenbacks.)
;)
Soprano2
@steppy: I don’t think he’ll do that unless he thinks going to prison is inevitable. They’d have to remand him to prison from the courtroom to prevent it.
sab
@OzarkHillbilly: My nephew in the Bay area just bought a house for a million bucks that is half the size of mine in Ohio. Mine is worth about $150,000. And my lot is bigger and I have a creek in the backyard. No view of the bay however. And a Republican government.
CaseyL
@Tony Jay:
I love how you keep on keeping on, carrying a torch for Corbyn and trashing Starmer every chance you get. Maybe you can slay that dragon the way the Berniebros did for Hillary in ’16!
Soprano2
@gene108: The only way to solve it is government funding, because you’re right – in the areas where homelessness is particularly dire it’s because the price of real estate is so high. We have that problem in Branson – there is a huge need for workers there, but nowhere there for them to live because everyone wants to build condos and high-priced houses down there. Lots of the workers live in Springfield, or end up camping in campgrounds around the lake, or living in RV parks.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
@different-church-lady: It’s a bunch of .1%ers buying up properties as tax shelters. At least that’s part of the problem. They sit vacant because if they make money off rent they don’t work as tax shelters so they use them as vacation homes for those like 2 weeks a year they’re in whatever city the property is in. Artificially reduces the supply of housing and is a problem in many major metro areas on both coasts.
Frankensteinbeck
@Tony Jay:
Not actually the origin of all computer fantasy dungeon type games, but the second and much better known one. I’ll give Lord British this, the man may be eccentric as Hell and a pain to work with, but he holds a critical place in the history of computer gaming. You look at his games and see the blueprint for modern gaming.
EDIT – Full disclosure, my father was a contractor providing DRM (or ‘software copy protection’ as we called it then) for his early games.
mrmoshpotato
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Thunderstorm! Woo hoo!
Doug R
@Tony Jay: FFS the real thing holding Corbyn back was how much of a squish he was on Brexit. Plus his economic plan was give everyone a Newcastle coal pony?
Suzanne
Various dying malls have tried all sorts of programs/functions for owners who need a lot of square footage. One where I used to live in Mesa tried to do a health sciences campus of the adjacent community college. I have yet to see one really thrive. Usually the problem isn’t the building, it’s the parking. You just don’t need to devote acres to cars for most things. So the rent paid by whatever tenant isn’t enough to cover the costs of the maintenance and taxes of the whole site.
The big suburban indoor mall is just…. not a development pattern that returns any significant value in this century.
Doug R
@Dorothy A. Winsor: TBF trump did get 2,800,000 FEWER votes. As opposed to Brexit, a “non-binding” vote that passed with a majority.
Betty Cracker
@CaseyL: The comparison is an insult to Hillary Clinton, who ran on the most progressive agenda a Democratic nominee had ever proposed in 2016. Also, in general, it’s not a great idea to use U.S. political dynamics as a template to draw conclusions about U.K. politics. It’s this whole other country.
Ken
ANY OF SEVERAL JUDGES: “… twenty years to be served concurrently. Incarceration will begin ten days from now, and I warn the defendant not to use that time to flee the country.” (winks)
Trump, bewildered, looks around the courtroom and sees that absolutely everyone else, including Jack Smith, is winking at him.
Doug R
@Tony Jay: Judging by the COVID death rates of trump vs Biden counties, you’d think the chuckleheads that came up with Barrington would ensure their supporters drop dead at a higher rate as well.
Anyway
@Tony Jay:
That’s all on you, Britain!!!
OzarkHillbilly
@Soprano2: It was the same with my parents. Bought a new 3 bedroom/2 bath ranch in a modest STL suburb for $20K in 1958. By 2006 the zip code they lived in (63131) had become the wealthiest ZC in the state. It sold for $350K and it was promptly tore down and an obscenity replaced it.
Soprano2
@Suzanne: I keep expecting our mall to sell more of its outer parking areas for other development. It’s ridiculous how much parking they required; the only time I ever saw most of those spaces occupied was a couple of weekends around Christmas. Here they say some of the best farmland in our county is underneath the mall.
Frankensteinbeck
@steppy:
I think Trump is too convinced of his invulnerability to flee the country. Going to prison will not be real to him until he is actually in a cell. Maybe, maybe, pre-trial jail will wake him up. If it does, it will terrify him beyond anything he has ever experienced and I don’t know what he’ll do. Recognizing the actual danger would shatter his world.
Until then, this is all unfair oppression by his definition of that as ‘not giving him what he wants’ and/or ‘not praising him.’
Doug R
@steppy:
He’s got to talk a flight crew into committing a felony. Not sure he has the $. But maybe KSA has another payment waiting-at least that’s what he’ll tell the pilots.
Ken
That applies at lower scales too. There’s a strip mall near me that has about twenty stores and hundreds of parking spaces. I’ve never seen the lot anywhere near full.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
And if you don’t, you just haven’t looked at this thing we’ve been obsessing over the last 20 years at the right angle. So, let me continue to push these angles on you.
Scout211
There’s a new hurricane in the Pacific headed toward . . . Southern California. What?!
Hilary strengthens to a hurricane, could bring heavy rain to Southern California, Southwest this weekend
I checked a weather app this morning and my area on the map was covered with a weird layer. Scrolling back, I could see it was the potential path of the remnants of Hilary, right up the central part of the state all the way to Reno. Very strange.
I am beginning to think that the climate is changing.
sab
@Suzanne: They make good antique stores.
RobertB
@Suzanne: A mall close to my house has “Scene 75”. It has an indoor go-kart track and an indoor roller coaster. Two of the anchor stores are still there, but the rest of the stores are pretty run down.
smith
@Doug R: He’d have to bribe his Secret Service detail, too, and it would have to be a whopper of a bribe for them to go into exile with him, or stay and face loss of their jobs and possible prosecution here.
OzarkHillbilly
@Scout211: Butter emails!
OzarkHillbilly
@sab: Around here that is what old Wal-marts become.
Doug R
@OzarkHillbilly:
Repeal Prop 13.
Scout211
Darn! I was so looking forward to TIFG’s Monday press conference/confessional.
But will he listen to his “legal advisers”? I am hoping not.
OzarkHillbilly
@Doug R: It would help if I had even the slightest idea of what Prop 13 is.
Soprano2
@sab: We have Missouri’s largest antique mall here; it’s in an old factory building. It’s HUGE – you probably couldn’t see everything in there in a day.
sab
@OzarkHillbilly: Old Walmarts is an odd concept. Ours is thriving. I don’t go there, partly due to principles and partly because their parking lot is actually rather dangerous what with the bad drivers and the guns and the no security services.
We have an antiques mall (former dead mall) where we bought most of our dining room furniture for what a single couch would cost new. My sister in MA has a similar dead mall turned antiques mall near her also.
Soprano2
@OzarkHillbilly: It restricted property tax increases in California.
Tony Jay
@CaseyL:
Rolls eyes.
Yeah, you got me there. Telling the truth about the authoritarian backstabbers currently befouling Labour is exactly the same as a long-running conspiracy to sabotage a political party by smearing its leader as an untrustworthy, lying, self-righteous scold, filling the News Media with wall-to-wall bullshit scandals gleefully promoted by ideologically-opposed factions supposedly within or allied to the same Party, and giving the utterly unsuitable and unqualified TV celebrity leading the other Party a free ride to victory because they offered corporate tax-cuts and years of juicy claptrap to report on.
Exactly the same. No difference whatsoever.
Hey, wait a minute…
Ken
The plan is that he overpowers them, leads a high-speed motorcycle chase to the airport, leaps into his private jet, and flies it himself to the UAE.
Or at least, so I’m sure his slightly-deranged mind pictures it.
NotMax
@Scout211
Person. Man. Camera. TV. Jail.
//
Suzanne
@RobertB: @sab: Oh, there are many attempts, all across the country, to reuse them for…. something, anything. Sometimes they creak along for a few years, but they rarely (if ever) return as much profit as they used to. It’s the finances that are the issue. They are just financially unproductive places per square foot of land area consumed.
Finding a different use for a building isn’t difficult. But a building is just an instrument for making money, and that’s more difficult.
The project I am working on now is on the site of the now-dead Landmark mall in Alexandria. My part of the project will sit where the Sears and the auto center and the surface parking used to be. The whole mall is being scraped and the entire site is being redeveloped, much more densely, with mixed residential, healthcare, and retail uses. In a hilarious bit of irony, there’s a multi-level parking garage on the site, and that’s the only part that’s being kept and reused.
Ken
@Scout211: We say every accusation is a confession, but Trump’s lawyers are more worried that every televised confession is a confession. Possibly with added witness-tampering and obstruction of justice charges.
sab
@OzarkHillbilly: Prop 13 is where Californians voted a cap on their property taxes. I was and am in favor of it. Working class California retirees were losing their paid for houses because gentrification sent their property taxes skyward.
Californians thinks that is why they cannot have good things. ( Too bad about those dispossessed old people.) They could have the same good things with personal income tax but that is a no go.
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:
I’m wondering how that’s not at least part of the solution to the housing shortage problem. It would seem easy enough to bulldoze that empty Sears store that used to be one of the anchor stores for the mall – or bulldoze most or all of the mall, whatever works best – and build an apartment building or complex where it stood. You’ve even already got the parking issue dealt with, since every shopping mall has acres of parking.
Tony Jay
@Doug R:
Really? I must have missed that amidst all the ‘Red Hitler’ and ‘Make us all wear burlap and pray five times a day to Moscow’ headlines.
Funny how a 100 percent proof version of the very same ‘Brexit squishiness’ he was accused of by his internal enemies became Labour’s ever-so common sense and very, very grown-up policy just as soon as British History’s Greatest Monster was out of the way. I guess that’s just one of life’s little mysteries that we’ll never get to the bottom of.
smith
@Ken: First good laugh of the day! I can envision the scene as McNaughton will memorialize it. Maybe as a mural in the Capitol when the One True President returns from exile to reclaim his rightful place?
Yarrow
@Lapassionara:
Just remember he’s carrying a torch for Corbyn and read him through that lens.
Suzanne
@sab:
To be clear, the vast majority of them didn’t lose their homes. They were being forced by their finances to sell their homes — for nice, high prices — and they could use that money to purchase a paid-off home elsewhere. That’s not the same as being homeless.
Plenty of people are constrained by their finances and thus can’t live where they want. That’s…. almost everyone.
zhena gogolia
@Scout211: Oh, shoot, there goes my afternoon!
OzarkHillbilly
They built a new, bigger, better Walmart to replace the old, smaller, decrepit one they didn’t want anymore. This is in Eureka.
BR
It’s clear from the number of likes Biden and Harris are getting on their tweets that Musk is intentionally decreasing their reach. Just like all the other stuff he’s messed with there. I understand their need to cross post there but the rest of us don’t need to. The toxicity is off the charts. The Monterey Bay Aquarium just closed their account for good. Almost like a sign: without any otters, the urchins will multiply out of control and destroy the ecosystem.
NotMax
@Tony Jay
Lord Binface’s platform looking more and more attractive.
;)
OzarkHillbilly
@NotMax: Ooof… 30 lashes with a wet noodle for you.
Frankensteinbeck
@smith:
Would they? It’s plausible they could argue that their sworn duty is to protect him, not stop him. I don’t know what the actual law is. They seem to be allowed to turn a blind eye to his illegal actions so far. It would make sense if they are trained to not judge, impede, or testify against the president, because that might interfere with him letting them protect him. I honestly don’t know, but it makes me not take Secret Service preventing him from fleeing for granted.
@Scout211:
He’ll release the evidence that completely exonerates him in two weeks.
Trump and Musk are neck and neck for making grand promises and not following through.
sab
@OzarkHillbilly: They tried that here in Ohio. Seriously pissed off a bunch of suburbs and tanked their project. Yay.
Tony Jay
@NotMax:
The guy was a damned prophet.
I’d carry a torch for him too but I’m pretty sure all that plastic is flammable as hell.
Suzanne
@lowtechcyclist: It’s absolutely part of the solution to the housing shortage problem. As I mentioned above, the project I’m working on right now is exactly that — demolishing an aging suburban mall and redeveloping the site, with a large residential component.
Residential rents are much lower per square foot than commercial rents, tho. So you need more square feet than you used to have, so that means more densely packed, and maybe taller. And this is a large-scale project now, so many years of dealing with rezoning and design review and permitting and impact studies, and therefore this is expensive, and therefore it only happens where the demographic and occupancy projections assume a growing population of high-earning residents.
It’s not the solution to low-income housing.
lowtechcyclist
@sab:
That struck me at the time as a terrible argument, and in the 45 years since, my mind hasn’t changed.
If you don’t have a mortgage, and your property taxes are so much more than they used to be that you can’t afford them, then your house is also worth so much more than it used to be. Sell it, buy a house somewhere cheaper for a fraction of what you sold it for, and the difference enables you to have a more affluent lifestyle.
Yeah, they’d have to move. Lemme dig out that tiny violin.
different-church-lady
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?: Thanks so much for the insight in that reply, I’ve been trying to put my finger on it for a long time, and “Artificial reduction” is the perfect way to describe it.
It’s not just “WE NEED MORE HOUSING!!!” If we keep doing only that, then we just create more nourishment for the parasites. There needs to be a more integrated solution. But people are just so stupid that they think if we just let people build everything everywhere it’s going to solve the problem. It’s not.
Yarrow
@Tony Jay: It’s clear you’re upset with Labour. What are you going to do about it? Not vote? Encourage others not to vote as well? Vote Tory? Or Green? Or UKIP (or whatever they’re called now)? What’s the best option for getting the person and party in charge to move the country the direction you want to go?
narya
@Suzanne: @Soprano2: I can’t help but wonder if the land under the parking lots could be “reclaimed.” I know it would take a long time to truly make it a green space, but why not try? I’d give tax breaks for that. (Whenever I wander around suburbs and their endless malls and strip malls, I always fantasize about what that land looked like 200 years ago.)
Alternatively, make it a solar farm.
snoey
@lowtechcyclist: There is a serious proposal to do that to the mall in Braintree. So far the nimbys have blocked it.
I read someplace that abandoned food courts are being used as ghost kitchens for delivery services. All the wiring and venting is in place.
different-church-lady
@BR:
The stuff Musk hasn’t intentionally decreased he’s also unintentionally decreased. That platform is a zombie. It’s just a question of how much longer it’s going to continue to stagger around trying to eat brains.
Delk
@Suzanne: after four years of NIMBYism, and an additional year of finalizing details with the city they are building affordable housing on a parking lot in my neighborhood. It sits across from an L stop and fronts a major north-south street and is a block from a major east-west street. Both streets have 24 hour bus service.
The few
racistSave Our Parking Lot signs eventually changed to For Sale signs.Lapassionara
@Yarrow: maybe he IS Corbyn?
Suzanne
Re: low-income housing…. short of massive public investment and incentivization, there is no way to build it profitably at scale. And thus it will not happen, unless we make that investment.
Ending single-family zoning is a positive step, but one has to remember that many (most?) small landlords also do not want low-income tenants.
sab
@lowtechcyclist: Fucking monster. Old people who have lived in an area for their whole working lives and invested in their community have to move away from everyone they have ever known because rich young people want their location, which is desirable because of the old people investing their lives in the community.
I do not see your point.
ETA I would love to live in SF Bay area but I cannot afford it. That is fine with me. That is different from me living my whole life in an area that nobody had wanted to live in and now they do. If the government wants taxes, tax income of those who have income, not the property of those who built the area by living there.
different-church-lady
@Scout211:
“You know that only tool you know how to use? It doesn’t work anymore. In fact, it’s what got you in this hole. Stop trying to use it.”
He’s in a bad corner of his own making, and he can’t snarl his way out of it.
different-church-lady
@lowtechcyclist:
Sure. That’s a piece of cake.
Suzanne
@narya:
Because that’s a waste of resources?
Honestly, former malls should be redeveloped. They’re usually on existing transit routes or have good freeway access, they already have physical and social services and infrastructure. It’s far less impactful to physical environment to densify within already-developed areas and stop expanding the perimeter of the city.
Suzanne
@Delk: That’s great. I bet there was either a large influx of public dollars or a huge tax break or deferment to make it happen.
NotMax
@Suzanne
Shame, really, nothing ever came of the alternately stacked prefab concrete cubicles built as a demonstration for the Montreal Expo.
smith
@Suzanne: Even if the public investment could be had, it would have to be carried out much better than it was the last time it was tried. No one wanted to live in the projects. Here in Chicago we had these huge, isolated buildings, shoddily built and poorly maintained, and clearly intended as warehouses for Those People to keep them away from everyone else.
MattF
@Tony Jay: Speaking of banal horror, they’re having an ‘I can hold my breath longer than you can’ contest over at jwz.org. Some known names in the eldritch horror community show up in the comments.
Snarki, child of Loki
Trump could just take a trip to visit his BFF Putin, who will give him a guided tour of Moscow high-rise balconies….
…and find out whether Trump is really a “flight risk”.
different-church-lady
Just throwing this out there for general thoughts: here in “our fair city” and surrounding near-burbs, there’s a “life sciences” explosion. Gigantic buildings are going up left and right in formerly low-slung neighborhoods. (In my town they just allowed an 8-story glass monstrosity to create an urban canyon, looming over the modest late-19th century houses across the street.)
What I can’t figure out is how to reconcile this with all the empty existing office space, and the idea that hybrid work is here to stay and supposedly nobody wants to go back to the office. If everything is empty, why do we pretend it makes sense to build more? (And the answer is greed and dysfunction in the economy, obviously, but I’d be interested in refining that.)
Tony Jay
@Yarrow:
I’m not ‘upset with Labour’. I’m disgusted with the spiteful bunch of self-abusers currently turning it into a centre-right authoritarian cult with no electoral future once the current tranche of morons are scraped off the Conservative Party’s shoes.
I’m particularly incensed with their cynical foghorning of exactly the same “Clap for us or you love Tories” dirge you’re very close to dipping your toe into here. I never have and never will encourage anyone to do anything with their vote but give it to the candidate best placed to make sure a Tory doesn’t win any given seat. If the people currently running the Labour Party into the ground had done the same thing between 2015 and 2019 we wouldn’t have had Brexit, Flobalob or the current shitshow, so spare me the inference that actually talking about what they’re doing in a disapproving tone is anywhere in the same hemisphere as telling people to vote for UKIP, because intended or not, that’s just ugly.
If I sound extra pissy, it’s because the people running Labour have spent the last few years ensuring that the only way this country is going to move in a direction that benefits the vast majority of the population is through radical changes in its electoral machinery and, probably, the creation of a new Left wing political Party separate from New New Labour.
That will take a long time, will be incredibly difficult, and will see millions of people who – could – be enjoying better lives suffer under centre-right and hard-right Governments in the interim. The fact that they have chosen, deliberately and with malice aforethought, to do this, yeah, that pisses me off.
That’s normal, isn’t it? Being pissed off with bad people who make the lives of millions miserable to feather their own beds?
narya
ISTM that there are multiple issues, and they won’t all be solved by the same approach. From a people perspective, there are folks whose mental health conditions (including substance use disorders, often to manage the mental health conditions) prevent them from holding down jobs, managing their lives, etc.–permanent supported housing (with a harm reduction rather than an abstinence approach) is one solution there. There’s a second group of folks whose lives are, and always have been, somewhat chaotic; based on the Houston experiment, I’d think that one to three years of supports, including housing and health (and dental!) care can help stabilize their lives. That would help move that group into the third group I see–folks who can’t afford to live close to their jobs and whose financial situation is so precarious that any issue (sudden car breakdown and medical bill) creates a cascade of chaos. That’s where another round of public housing might be useful–but keeping in mind one of the things that made the last round fail was that folks who were successful and achieve a “middle-class” income had to move out, i.e., the most stable folks had to leave the community.
Hoppie
@sab: “Californians think that is why they cannot have good things. (Too bad about those dispossessed old people.) They could have the same good things with personal income tax but that is a no go.”
Uh, what? Personal income tax provides over 56% of this year’s state budget revenue. Quite strongly graduated, as well.
@sab:
Yarrow
@Lapassionara: He might be!
Delk
@Suzanne: yeah, they got a
Low-Income Housing Tax Credit
NotMax
@different-church-lady
Shorter version: “No, Trelane.”
;)
narya
@Suzanne: I threw it out there precisely because I knew you’d tell me why it was a bad idea. :-) But incorporating some green spaces and technologies would still be a good idea, I’d hope.
ETA: I really appreciate your contributions here, especially around these issues!
sab
@NotMax: I thought that has continued as successful popular housing. It’s just that nobody thought they could replicate it.
Suzanne
@different-church-lady: Selling a house in a highly desirable area for a significant profit and moving somewhere else (maybe just further on the perimeter of the city you’re already in) is pretty easy, yeah.
Artifically limiting property taxes for existing homeowners means that newer buyers are effectively overpaying to compensate for it.
Tony Jay
@Lapassionara:
Don’t tell them!
@Yarrow:
You heard nothing,
comradedude!Suzanne
@NotMax:
Yeah, those are pretty highly sought-after. They’re so cool.
different-church-lady
@Tony Jay:
It’s correct. But if you’re using the word in the sense of “common”, then it no longer appears to be “normal.”
different-church-lady
@Suzanne:
And your job is where in comparison to those two places?
Big Mango
@Anne Laurie: I guess Bernie and Jared’s daddy aren’t waspy enough…….
NotMax
@<Suzanne
Looking back at proposed housing.
sab
@Hoppie: In California all local tax is property tax. The state has a monopoly on income tax.
In Ohio, a big part of local tax revenue is income tax. Cities and towns are not having to beg the state for money, which we know cannot be relied upon. We beg the state for money, but meanwhile we have our own tax money to carry on when they disappoint us.
Marin County CA is filthy rich, but their public libraries are appalling. Cleveland Ohio is always almost broke, but they have great libraries.
I lived for ten years in California. Very high taxes and minimal public services because everything came from the state.
Ohio we have control of our services because they are mostly local. Want a library? Vote for it. And we do.
cain
@Tony Jay: Still at the ‘fuck around’ stage eh? Brits are as entitled as us yanks here – and at the first sign of things being uncomfortable they are going to be very angry after all Brexit was all about doing whatever the fuck they want, right???
Suzanne
@narya: Yeah, the chaos is the issue.
I live next door to a house that was purchased by a landlord and divided into separate apartments. The landlord accepts Section 8 vouchers and also some other program for housing mentally disabled adults. The house is very well-maintained. But, two weeks ago, two of the residents got into a screaming, crazy fight in the untended backyard that went on and on. The previous owner of my house put up a fence because one of the apartment residents was jacking off in front of her kids. There’s been some other problems, too…..we found used needles in the alleyway back there.
Realistically, no one wants to live by that shit.
opiejeanne
@NotMax: That price of the calculator is what we paid for one when my husband needed one for the test to become a registered Civil Engineer. It had “reverse Polish notation”, which was a requirement for the test.
It was stolen by a burglar while we were at work and school. A couple of years later they were $10 for a much better one.
Yarrow
@Tony Jay:
Who is the party if not the members? They’re doing things you don’t like, so it seems you’re upset (disgusted in your word) with them.
I am not “close to dipping my toe” into that crap, but thanks for the insult. I’m ultimately just practical. You may wish someone else was in charge of Labour and they did different things. They are not and they aren’t. So, as currently constituted, is Labour the best positioned to do the things you want? If so, beating up on them isn’t going to help get them elected.
We saw what a decades long campaign against Hillary Clinton did here in the US. I personally had people tell me they “didn’t like her.” As if that had anything to do with who would be a good President. Go ahead and keep beating up on Labour and see if that gets you where you want to go.
Has Labour under Starmer done anything good in your eyes? Anything you like at all that you could tell someone about if you wanted to encourage them to vote Labour?
Sure, but again, talking about how awful Labour is won’t help get them elected. You can convince everyone how awful they are and when it comes time to need their votes they’ll shrug and stay home. If Labour is just as bad as the Tories, but in different ways, then what difference does it make who’s in charge?
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:
You posted that while I was typing my last couple of posts, so I didn’t see that until just now. I used to live just south of Alexandria, so I know where Landmark Mall is (or was), and I think it’s really cool that you’re doing part of the redeveloping. There’s certainly plenty of demand for more housing in that area.
Taller means you can build more units, so that’s all good. I assume the only obstacle to building a 20-story condo building is zoning and whatnot. (But those commercial rents: in a dying/dead mall, wouldn’t they have to be zero or close to it?)
That’s always been my understanding, that the real obstacles to affordable housing are the “years of dealing with rezoning and design review and permitting and impact studies” which limit what can be done, and frequently keep otherwise viable projects from being built at all. They create a series of choke points where nearby residents can show up en masse to object – and while I can’t say I blame them, the result is urban areas with a good deal less housing than they would have otherwise had. And pricing is supply and demand, so prices are higher than they’d otherwise be. Good if you already own; not so good otherwise.
Well, the first step is to have enough housing. If middle-class people can barely afford a house for their own selves, they’re not going to want to see destitute people helped unless there’s something in it for them as well.
Scout211
@sab:
No. Local districts are allowed to add up to 3.5% in sales tax.
A list of local districts with added sales tax. Link
cain
@The Thin Black Duke:
Caveat is that Jewish rich people can go to jail. (see Bernie Madoff) – incidently, it seems last year his sister and brother-in-law died in a murder suicide. She was 87 and the husband was 90.
Tony Jay
@MattF:
Oh well, that’s the rest of my afternoon gone. Down the InterPit I go.
Suzanne
@different-church-lady: The vast majority of people in this country don’t live within walking distance of their jobs. Hell, most people don’t even have a specific job for more than a couple of years. I would be equally concerned about that older person not being able to access care because no working-class healthcare workers can afford to live nearby.
Having to relocate because your asset became so unbelievably valuable that you can’t afford the taxes on it…. is much less of a problem than widespread unaffordability.
rikyrah
@The Thin Black Duke:
It’s going to be interesting to see if America has the collective will to go against historical and cultural precedent and put a rich white man in jail.
it will be interesting to see…
Suzanne
@lowtechcyclist:
There’s some significant building code impacts that kick in when a building becomes a high-rise, which is at 6-7 occupiable stories. These matter a great deal because they drive cost up. It’s cheaper, by a lot, to build a five-story wood building with a bigger footprint than a tall, narrow steel building.
The real obstacle is that no one wants it near them because they don’t want to live by poor people. And it isn’t profitable without big incentives. The years of rezoning and design review, etc, are just the tools that the homeowners use to throw sand in the gears.
NotMax
@rikyrah
Michael Milken one line 1. Calling collect.
;)
NotMax
@Suzanne
Absolutely gobsmacking that so many of the purchased units in the luxury needle skyscrapers in Manhattan sit fallow most (or all) of the year.
OzarkHillbilly
Arguments, insults and chaos, my work here is done.
lowtechcyclist
@different-church-lady:
It damn sure was, back in 1978. There were certain in-demand areas, and the remaining 99% of the country was still normal in terms of real estate prices. Finding that cheaper house then might mean moving a few miles.
It’s not like that anymore; over the past several years, real estate prices have gone nuts in entire urban areas. But yeah, there are still cheaper places to move to that aren’t high-crime areas or anything like that.
There are so many worse problems that average Americans can encounter, that having to move and getting a bunch of extra dough as a result doesn’t exactly rank high IMHO on the list of problems that need a public policy response.
Omnes Omnibus
@NotMax: FWIW I will note that he, like some of the others mentioned further upstream, is Jewish.
rikyrah
@bjacques:
For all their bluster, his deplorables don’t seem to want to go to jail for him.
Oh, they would be more than willing to hurt others, but, only if there were no consequences.
This is why I say they long to party like it’s 1923
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:
I’m not thinking of poor people, I’m thinking more middle-middle class people. So many places have become barely affordable for them.
Subsole
@rikyrah: The media has painted itself into a corner.
If they stand up to the Repukes now, we’ll applaud them, sure. But people are also going to start asking why they didn’t stand up at any of the other 400 million milestones we passed on the way to this moment.
And if there is one thing Iraq and the Aftermath of 2016 taught me, it’s that these folks have an anaphylactic reaction to reflection and reckoning.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
@NotMax: Yup. I live in Takoma Park MD on the DC border. A non trivial portion of the Georgetown housing supply is owned by people who are there intermittently. Closing whatever loophole allows the rich to reduce their taxes with redundant housing.
Betty Cracker
@Scout211: My guess is the press conference with “irrefutable evidence” that the 2020 election was stolen will still happen because why not? Lying about the 2020 outcome is Trump’s central argument for his 2024 candidacy — he can’t stop, won’t stop lying about that.
I read somewhere that the hanger-on who’s putting the “evidence” together is Liz Harrington. She’s a total crackpot, but IIRC, she doesn’t come across on TV as obviously nuts in the way other members of the entourage like the pillow guy, Bannon, etc., do. No idea how that might translate to a powerpoint.
sab
@Scout211: That isn’t huge. Pre prop 13 property taxes increases were huge.
Jeffro
@Suzanne: that’s awesome!
Landmark Mall was a second home for earlier generations of the Fro family. (I myself basically grew up at Springfield Mall =)
Suzanne
@NotMax: Manhattan’s real estate market is distorted by money laundering, especially the empty penthouses. So there are some different forces at work there that are not broadly applicable.
BUT…. some of the trends are the same, which is that, in places where it is difficult to build for whatever reasons, the only way to build profitably is for the rich.
SteveinPHX
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Rare sound here in AZ, but remember it from other places. Thanks.
rikyrah
None of the people who actually support him are ready for any of the consequences of their actions.
narya
@Suzanne: What I really want is adequate social services to address the issues. (And a unicorn; I also want a unicorn.) Cops aren’t the right people to deal with most of it, but are often the only solution that has a quick response. W/r/t the needles, I’ve been seeing more places with needle drop boxes; maybe some signs in the alley pointing people to those boxes, if there are any near you? Or even work with a local drugstore or FQHC to put a needle bin nearby . . .
Omnes Omnibus
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?:
Removing any tax benefits for third and subsequent homes would be a start.
Ksmiami
@OzarkHillbilly: frozen property tax law from late 1970s that turned homes in CA into ginormous tax shelters. It was sold as a way to protect Seniors from fast rising property tax increases, but it decimated schools and made normal housing transactions hinky in that ppl were incentivized not to sell…
Ksmiami
@rikyrah: or 1919, unfortunately
Doug R
@Tony Jay: There is this:
https://www.bbc.com/news/election-2019-50530163
Geminid
@Tony Jay: I thought of you when I read a hilarious account by Kenyan writer Patrick Gathara of a recent mission to England:
Most of Mr. Gathara’s long tweet-thread can be found in a Threadreader post dated July 30. It did not include his last few tweets, but I remember him exhorting readers, “We must not give up on the Northern Islanders!” and expressing the hope that someday they could emerge from 1st World deprivation to become “a vibrant 3rd World Democracy.”
laura
@sab: a split-roll would be better because it retains the prop13 benefit for homeowners but reassesses commercial property every 5 years. Jarvis and Gann used the residential problem to benefit the commercial real estate market and that portion of the State’s revenues has been missing ever since.
Jeffro
@smith:
@lowtechcyclist:
@Suzanne:
There’s a housing project sponsored by Habitat for Humanity just a few miles from where we live, and it looks like it’s going to do really well. The site is a former waaay run-down trailer park. The owner of the trailer park sold the property to Habitat, and then all parties got to work figuring out how the property could be redeveloped for the benefit of the residents.
There will be a mix of large, mid-size, and small single-family homes as well as townhomes (2 different sizes there). Everyone who originally lived in the trailer park was offered the chance to buy the smaller homes and townhomes, which were kept well below market rates (which like many places are just nuts). They also were and are able to put in some ‘sweat equity’ towards the purchase of the homes by helping out w/ some of the unskilled labor required.
When the project needed more funding (some of the trailer sites needed serious sewer remediation), the former Mrs. Bezos stepped in with a few mil. So – yay Mackenzie Scott! =)
There are already residents living in each type of housing, and it looks like it’ll be a great success.
(Naturally, when I relay this to my RWNJ relatives, they are shocked that I’m not up in arms about protecting our home’s blessed property values. As if that was going to do anything but go up. So it’s fun to tweak them simply by letting them know how honestly happy we are that this is all taking place! )
Anyway, Habitat’s hoping that the project could be a model for building affordable housing around the country. Go ahead and keep building those big ol’ single-family homes, developers! Just be sure to build some smaller ones and townhomes along with them.
Suzanne
@lowtechcyclist: Affordable housing, meaning below-market-rate, usually has an income threshold that is pretty damn low. So most middle-class people are by definition excluded from it.
For millennia, the way that cities have worked is that the low-density stuff gets torn down and higher-density, more productive stuff gets built in its place, so more people can use the same streets to get around. Everything we do to prevent that natural pattern (including using tax protections to allow people to stay in homes they can’t afford) has an unintended distortion effect that disrupts that pattern.
Doug R
@sab: My parents sold their two bedroom house and moved to a cheaper part of the province, then eventually sold that to move into a seniors only condo.
Where they had level floors and an elevator between floors if they didn’t want a little walk up or down stairs.
Their pharmacy was one building over and they were about 1/2 mile from a mini mall with a supermarket.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus:
Fuck yes. This has been my position for a long time. You get one primary home, and one other home. You can use it as a vacation home, rent it out, put your elderly parents or college-aged kid and roommates in it….. but that’s it.
Doug R
@Suzanne: That getting priced out of your home sounds like a retired problem. In which case selling and moving to a seniors friendly complex sounds like a great idea-as opposed to a large home in a suburban neighborhood.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne:
You can have more. You just can’t get a government subsidy for it.
Doug R
@Suzanne:
@Omnes Omnibus:
British Columbia introduced a vacancy tax-if you don’t live in a place and you don’t rent it out and its value is more than a few hundred thousand-you pay a tax. Primary residence exempted of course.
sab
@laura: Thank you. That is a valid point. Tossing the old people into the bay, on the other hand, doesn’t appeal to me.
Everyone suggesting assisted living as an alternative for a paid for house: have you priced that lately?
Suzanne
@Doug R: It mostly is an issue for seniors, yes. Not exclusively, but mostly. I understand the desire to stay in a longtime home, but practically, the more conveniently accessible places in a city pattern need to be for people who are working and thus use the streets or transit most days. And again, if existing residents are paying less in taxes, than newer residents are paying more to compensate for that, usually at a stage in their lives when they have fewer resources. It is absolutely a case of climbing the ladder and then pulling it up behind you.
sab
@Suzanne: In my example of my RWNJ brother we are not talking about downtown SF urban. We are talking about Marin County CA as suburban and exurban as it gets. That is who prop 13 was protecting.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: I would tax third-and-more properties punitively, other than complex-type developments, in which an owner owns the whole site, not just the apartment/condo.
opiejeanne
@sab: It is huge, though. The property tax isn’t actually locked at what it was at the time of sale; it has a “creep up” factor as part of the law. I still owned a property in California until 5 years ago and watched the taxes ratchet up in a startling way on a tiny 100 yo cabin in a mountain community next to Lake Arrowhead. Although it wasn’t much, relative to more expensive properties, it rose faster than the taxes on our Anaheim house that we owned at the same time.
We’re in WA now, looking down the barrel of aging and where to relocate so we can have easy access to amenities like groceries and health care, but that’s another whine for another day. (Oh, you poor thing, your house is now worth THAT MUCH and you can’t find a place to live if you sell?)
Suzanne
@sab: Marin County is still pretty well-connected to highways and is physically close to SF. It’s artificially low-density because of NIMBY-ism. It needs to be denser and more economically productive than it is.
Having to sell your Marin County home at an exorbitant price and move an hour or two away…. is not a tragedy.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: I haven’t thought deeply enough about it. I just know that we don’t need to encourage via tax policy people owning that much excess property.
wjca
@Betty Cracker:
Or maybe, just maybe, he was making a tactical decision. Saying he’s a stout Democrat gets his views ignored. But evidence that DeSantis is losing them the independents is the sort of thing that gets Republican politicians (at least the ones who aren’t really true-believer cultists themselved) frantic to ditch the radicals’ drive for the cliff edge.
It may not work, but it does seem like it might be worth a try. Tactically, in furtherance of the circular firing squad, you know.
opiejeanne
@Suzanne: It can be a tragedy, though, if it means that you are farther away from health care. We are looking at that right now. One solution would be to add a bedroom to our downstairs and abandon the upstairs part of the house, but I’m not sure we can afford to do that either, plus making this house bigger just so the two of us can stay here is stupid.
France is looking better and better to me every year.
Suzanne
@opiejeanne: Sure, but there is good-quality health care in every major city in the US. Even the less-expensive cities that everyone thinks of as run-down and crappy have good health care.
Rural areas have bad health care.
Ghost of Joe Liebling’s Dog
@Suzanne: You’ve convinced me, selling and moving somewhere else is pretty easy, yeah. So … why are you putting up with that shit?
opiejeanne
@Suzanne: I don’t live in Seattle, the nearest major city, live in a semi-rural “east side” part of King County, and an hour away is not in easy range of health care for us when we hit our 80s, which is soon. No, there is not great health care in smaller towns here because an hour away means a very small town.
Single story houses are few here, a condo in the nearest town (just a mile down the hill) is just about out of our reach.
satby
@Omnes Omnibus: singing my song. I especially want the clowns who buy distressed properties in urban areas to “flip” into rentals. Most of them do a crap job fixing the property up, basically cosmetic work papering over real defects, then rent them out. The places soon deteriorate further. Our general code enforcement was written for property owners who wanted to keep their property, not for people who make their investment back in a year and can afford to drag out the housing court process another year or more while they make bank before ultimately abandoning the property or selling it to another sucker. I live in an urban area ruined by that behavior.
(Not directed to Omnes) And the available Blue Sky code has been taken, sorry.
Paul in KY
@Tony Jay: At least they lay it out there clear & simply.
opiejeanne
You know what?
There is no single solution fix for all of this because people don’t all need the same thing.
It would be cheaper to move back to SoCal, buy back our little Anaheim house, restore it and the garden to its former glory. It was a single story, 1600 square foot house with a big walled garden, at the end of the cul de sac, built in 1947.
wjca
@steppy:
I expect that he’ll try. And it will go about the way it went on Jan 6, when he tried to join his cult at the Capitol. TIFG (perhaps, by then, TCFG) may bribe the flight crew. But the Secret Service guys have guns and the flight crew doesn’t.
Suzanne
@Ghost of Joe Liebling’s Dog: LOL, I did this exact thing…. sold my house in Arizona, took the profit, and bought a fixer-upper for cash in a city, a block away from a bus stop and a ten-minute walk from a light rail line. SuzMom is ten minutes away from a hospital with 19 ranked specialties.
I have to live with some crazy neighbors (naked methhead broke into my house) and finding used needles in the alley behind my house. Still worth it.
Suzanne
@opiejeanne: An hour drive away from a major hospital is….. really pretty close to a major hospital. Most suburbs in this country have at least an hour drive to a major hospital. Primary care should be 20 minutes away or less. Rural areas everywhere in the country are underserved.
sdhays
You monster!!
wjca
@sab:
News flash, California has a personal income tax. Has had one for a very long time.
If you want a state without one, try Nevada.
Lobo
@Jeffro: This! A mix of housing usually works best.
catothedog
@Suzanne:
Property taxes should be mostly used to pay for local services.
The real problem with Prop 13 is that (1) it does not keep up with the cost of services and (2) it does not pay much for local services.
A property tax linked to asset prices is a terrible way to pay for services. Asset prices fluctuate wildly, having nothing to do with income.
Pre-Prop-13, a majority of the population would simple have to move because an increase in asset price does not mean money in the pocket. And I can assure you it wont be just retired folks.
Property taxes need to increase more than Prop 13’s locked in rate, but anyone who says that the Pre-prop-13 increases is the way to go is simply asking for revolution.
The fact is that home prices have simply untethered from incomes, and taxes based to home-prices will also be taxes untethered to income, a recipe for revolution.
I would like to get rid of the inheritance derivative of Prop-13, where kids inherit the property tax basis of the parent, and also change the locked-in rate for Prop13 from 1% to something related to CPI (but not the home value)
Proponents asking for abolishing Prop-13 simply think that it will make a lot of single-family home-owners sell and that turn over will get those converted to multi-family homes, and this will make housing affordable.
Not going to happen. Most single-family lots get converted to very expensive multi-family housing. The cost of development is simply too high to make low-cost housing feasible
Abolishing Prop-13 will will lead to a lot of changes, mostly terrible, But it will not make (or even lead to) low cost housing.
Paul in KY
@Omnes Omnibus: The DuPont guy. But he was convicted of murder.
Ksmiami
Building denser close in housing in California at all levels is really the answer. And yes that means higher builds along the coast akin to the Gold Coast in Australia or Miami.
Suzanne
@catothedog:
Housing prices don’t fluctuate wildly. Probably the most stable investment most people ever make. Plus, you get the benefit of actually living somewhere as your money grows.
I don’t care how you tax rich people. (Almost.) But don’t fool yourself that a California homeowner who has lived there since 1980-whatever and owns their home isn’t a rich person. They’re a rich person, even if their money is almost entirely in their asset.
Citizen Alan
@sab: If the issue is retirees getting pushed out due to gentrification driving high property taxes, surely the sensible solution was to simply exempt people above a certain age from property taxes on homesteads. I mean, do they not have homestead exemptions in California?
Hob
@Scout211: I presume sab didn’t live in the Bay Area (and didn’t bother to do a simple web search before making those pronouncements) because San Francisco also has a local income tax.
Anyway, sab is flat wrong about property taxes being the chief source of funding for government services in general in CA. They were and are a major source of local funding for schools— along with a substantial chunk of state funding (which of course comes from income taxes). And that’s also the case just about everywhere; I can’t speak for Ohio, but if sab thinks that’s a California thing in particular, I can’t imagine why.
So it’s schools that have suffered the worst from Prop 13, but not only because of the direct effect on property taxes: Prop 13 also deliberately makes it much harder for local governments to enact new taxes in general, so sab’s complaint that they’re not looking for other revenue sources is ironic.
I see this kind of thing all the time from commenters who are like “Well I lived in California for ten years, they had problems, I should know!”… yeah that’s nice, I’ve lived there for 20 years, and I’m pretty sure a bunch of people in this forum have lived there their whole lives, but in any case this stuff is extremely easy to look up online so there’s no need to trust one’s own selective memory.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Soprano2: My mother died in late 2014 and I sold her house (my childhood home) in Palo Alto for enough to retire immediately. She and my dad had bought it in 1951 (year I was born) for $12,000. It sold in a week for cash for millions. Absolutely nuts.
I guess all the regular salary people like cops, teachers, and sanitation workers who work in Palo Alto live in the East Bay at the other end of the Dumbarton bridge.
catothedog
@Suzanne:
They do, as far as the homeowner is concerned. My home price doubling does not mean my income doubled.
If you are saying that my property taxes doubled just because my home appreciated in value, and my income does not increase accordingly, I should move?
That is not just a problem for retirees. You are basically insisting that working people who own homes move all the time, like renters. That leads to revolutions
Home prices are the most stable investment? Not in California and not in places where housing is expensive
https://www.vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/home-prices.
Prop 13 is not good. But it is way way better than having property taxes tied to market values as Pre-prop-13 days.
I guarantee you – without Prop 13, Democrats would have lost California during the housing price changes in the last two decades
Suzanne
@catothedog:
Yes, absolutely. If you cannot pay for the services required to live where you live, you can relocate. If your property taxes doubled because your asset value increased, you are better off than most people.
Plenty of people also want to live there and cannot.
opiejeanne
@Suzanne: Not when you’re giving up your car because of age. I hear what you’re saying, but I’m not 45 any more. LOL. We’re 73 and 76 and I have been unable to drive for more than a month due to surgery on my left hand and wrist. That will pass with therapy, but I live far enough away from the hospital where the therapist is that there is no bus stop within two miles. The day is coming soon when I won’t trust my husband to do any driving because I’ve noticed that he does not turn his head when he checks for oncoming traffic at roundabouts, like the one just down the hill from us.
And good for you that you could find that house in the city. I’d love to do that in Seattle, but where I will really need to be is in Kirkland, where my health services are, including my therapist, surgeon(s), and cardiologist. There is a huge cluster of new condo buildings practically next door, and across the street from a new grocery and shopping complex that includes a Trader Joe’s and a Whole Foods, but we could continue with the food delivery service if we wanted to. Maybe. It’s sometimes not so great.
I like you Suzanne but you aren’t really hearing me, or even yourself when you say you bought a house, A HOUSE, in a major city while advocating for those to go away in favor of vertical multiple housing units.
O. Felix Culpa
Late to the show, but the homeless (unhoused) situation is complex and–seems to me–nearly intractable until we as a society deal with the frequently underlying mental health and substance abuse issues. The easiest segment (but not necessarily easy) to address are those who are homeless because of economic constraints. However, there are many hardcore “street people” who do not want or cannot thrive in regular housing or communal settings, again, largely because of mental health and substance abuse problems.
Albuquerque has areas that are overrun with homeless encampments, some of which have overtaken neighborhoods where grannies and schoolchildren and just regular folks live. It is not nice and not very safe for them, and I don’t know how they can sell their homes under those visibly degraded conditions. I wish there were compassionate and equitable solutions for all involved. Hopefully there are capable people working on them.
Suzanne
@opiejeanne: I bought a house, in a tightly packed neighborhood (so neighbors very close and the world’s tiniest yard), no garage, with plenty of “missing middle” housing and apartments-above-the-store. Which is, actually, what I advocate for. Some of these houses are duplexes, some are vertical townhouses built on combined lots, some are divided into apartments. Bus stops nearby, close to world-class healthcare, there are still houses in my neighborhood for under $200K.
I am never going to be convinced that a person who owns a paid-off $750K or greater home needs a public policy intervention that screws over everyone else trying to enter a community simply because they have to relocate.
ETA: I will also note that we moved to Pittsburgh and not Seattle because Seattle is unaffordable. Seattle is one of my favorite cities, and it is actually where SuzFam lived forever, like five generations. But I am priced out entirely.
Calouste
@Citizen Alan: An even more sensible solution IMO would be to allow people over a certain age to postpone paying part of their property tax until the property is sold. Basically the state would be reverse mortgaging the house. Means that the state will get its money eventually, and the elderly won’t get priced out of their home. The heirs won’t get as much as they want, but I don’t see that as a problem.
misterpuff
@different-church-lady: I will recurse him anyway.
catothedog
@Suzanne:
That is not true at all, and that is the root of my disagreement.
Home prices simply got unmoored from income, cost of goods and services . (not just homes, all asset prices went high) . I posted a graph with data above
A property tax tied to cost of services would be a good idea (and I said so above).
But that was not the case pre- prop-13, and no one would agree to go back to that times. Before Prop-13, taxes had no relation to cost of services. They were simply hooked to asset prices.
Anyway good luck. This democrat would be in the forefront of opposing elimination of Prop-13, unless such a proposal also delinks property taxes from asset inflation.
brantl
@lowtechcyclist: YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE THE GOVERNMENT MAKE YOUR HOUSE UNAFFORDABLE IN YOUR OLD AGE, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE! And yes, I know I’m “yelling” at you.
brantl
@Suzanne: Trees are never a waste of resources, since they are keeping us all alive; tell it to the Amazonian rain forests.
brantl
@Suzanne: How do you figure that? I genuinely don’t know how you can say that with confidence, nor how you would prove it.
Brianc
@opiejeanne: wouldn’t he have needed one with a few more functions? I know when I started in 1972 there were “scientific” calculators with trig functions, square root, etc.