They Just Moved to Austin. Now They Want to End One of Its Traditions
texasmonthly.com
texasmonthly.com
In this particular instance I find myself asking why it matters that the Weaver residents were originally not from Austin. If you’re born in Chicago, shouldn’t you still have the same rights as someone who was born in Austin? That includes the right to complain. However it doesn’t mean anyone has to listen to you. As other users have pointed out, it’s not exactly a new situation for people to move to a neighborhood and immediately try and kick their neighbours out. It’s just that most of the time they’re told to kick rocks.
It seems to me the real crux of this issue is that rich white people are so much more prioritized by the law that a couple of irate Karens can overrule an entire neighbourhoods opinion. It has nothing to do with where they’re from or gentrification.
Not that gentrification doesn’t cause it’s own problems. But the way some people talk about it, as though existing residents are entitled to a higher set of rights, leads down some pretty dark paths, especially when newcomers are of a different nationality, or race than current residents. It reminds me of something that used to be said a lot in jest when I was younger in the 90’s and 00’s and working in fast food. Whenever people gave me extra work to do, they justified it by saying something like, “well, he should just be grateful he isn’t working in a rice paddy” (I’m from Singapore originally, but ok). There seemed to be this view that because my parents chose to move to Canada when I was young, I was somehow entitled to fewer rights, even as a citizen.
I've seen similar things in Berlin in the 90s and early 2000s when West-Germans, mostly from Swabia moved in. They were sold apartments next to Youth clubs and the new neighbours didn't like that they had loud music on Friday and Saturday nights. But this was Berlin, this was what it was famous for. But whatever, a lot of the clubs had to shut down.
No idea what drives these people.
The Austin-Statesman noted that people in Austin have been complaining about change in the city since at least 1884:
"A few years hence the citizen of thirty years ago will be a comparative stranger in the home of his youth with no familiar objects to greet his eye save the eternal hills on which the capitol city sits enthroned as a queen in her royal beauty and the sparkling Colorado at her feet."
In a letter (not at all dramatically) titled “Passing Away” sent to the American-Statesman 135 years ago and signed “Old Citizen,” an Austin resident expressed dismay at the news that “the buildings on the north side of Pecan Street, between Brazos Street and the alley next to the Avenue would be sold and removed.” Old Citizen lamented that “one by one the old land-marks leave us and but few of the original houses of Austin remain.”
https://www.statesman.com/news/20190204/austinites-have-been...
It's not like the rich screwing over the poor is a new thing
It's almost a tautology that only long term residents are around long enough to feel the negative effects of gentrification directly. I've been in my home for 15 years and only in the last 5 or so have I come to really understand what this trend has done to the community.
My initial response to the current wave of millionaire neighbors is to resent the gentrifiers with all that wealth who don't see what they're doing. But a quick look in the mirror confirms the awful truth... I was just like them when I moved here 15 years ago.
Sure I wasn't as rich as the current crop, but the exact degree of wealth surely would not have been terribly meaningful to the lifelong renter residents who were slowly being displaced by middle class people looking for a bargain on a home at that time.
The system we have created around real estate and home ownership is optimized to erode culture and atomize community. We like to pretend that this is somehow inevitable, the will of the market, but we need to own it - this is the world we have built for ourselves.
So yeah, I do understand the anger at individuals - because there's nothing else to be angry at. It feels like being angry at the system itself is futile.
And then it struck me. 7 years ago we built our house here, in what used to be a slot of an old small factory. In the middle of buildings with smaller apartments, mostly rented out. And there we come, young well of couple building a house for us on a land plot large enough for, what, 6-8 appartments. In a sense, we were the first ones, or at least among the first ones.
Only owners can sell, usually to investors. This is a major rent driver. Up to the poitn were small grocery shops can#t afford it anymore and have to close. And I am not sure how us building a house for us, and only us, had any positive impact on any of our neighbors.
How is it not the will of the market? I don’t see any option other than to limit people’s freedom to move about the city/state/country.
What if government policy for the last few decades had been to keep housing as affordable as possible. So if average rent in a city started increasing, the government would make sure new apartments and got built and/or expanded roads and public transit to help people live farther away without a longer commute.
Suppose you create a lot of high density housing in the city. Housing costs decline. People who used to have to live with their parents get their own place. People have shorter commutes.
The population of the city hasn't changed. Maybe if you're the only city doing this then it's a competitive advantage and people move there from other cities to take advantage of the lower cost of living. But if all cities do this then there is no relative advantage and all that happens is that housing is more affordable and people waste less time sitting in traffic.
I believe they're mostly complementary. You can't rebuild the city every other year because you have more demand for housing, it's a slow process. The city expands outwards if possible, and at the same time will be made denser when convenient.
I'd love for the whole thing to be Sim City-style "we'll just remove those 12 single-story homes and add a sky scraper", but it's really not. It takes years and years, and it's really impacting the quality of life during those years. I used to live in a part of the city that got more dense housing, and it wasn't fun at all, construction sites everywhere, traffic jams everywhere, and housing prices rising sharply. It might turn out nice in 20 years when they've doubled the density, but it's absolutely not during those 20 years.
I imagine you'd still have the same pattern, just perhaps in more consistent circle shapes. Yesterday's "outskirts" would turn into tomorrow's "upcoming new area" and the people who lived there initially because it was all they could afford would get pushed further out, etc. The three story buildings will slowly get replaced with ten story buildings with wealthier residents, etc.
Constant growth doesn't mean more that in-demand areas won't stay expensive as demand constantly grows too, or that once less-demanded areas will stay less-demanded.
It's not our densest cities that our our cheapest cities. The demand is the underlying factor, not the density. (The density follows the (lack of!) demand for the cheap places.)
I'm not sure how you'd lower cost of living without negative population growth. Try to reduce the footprint of the city but keep the population the same, and you still have just as much money competing for places, so the supply/demand dynamics will keep prices high for the places people want.
This would help and is necessary to solve the problem, but I don’t believe insufficient desirable cities or dense cities with public transit is the whole problem. Part of the problem is the ever widening income/wealth gaps, and people will sort themselves and want to surround themselves with as many people in theirs or the next higher up socioeconomic class as possible. So the bigger the divides, the more this is reflected in the neighborhoods, especially culturally.
> So if average rent in a city started increasing, the government would make sure new apartments and got built and/or expanded roads and public transit
How? Should they...raise taxes? Subsidize housing(and pay for it by raising taxes)? Take from the people who produce much, and give to the people who produce less? I'm not implying it's right or wrong, I'm genuinely curious as to "how" government should go about accomplishing that goal.
>Take from the people who produce much, and give to the people who produce less?
Maybe? Depends if you want to avoid this situation:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/77/8f/07/778f07ec78b997b4f218...
For some contrast, I live in the "rural" US, my home is surrounded on 4 sides by farm fields as far as you can see. This is like peering into an alien bureaucracy for me.
And in the meantime, you might also be stuck paying property taxes or fees on a contract to purchase the land that you need extended because the zoning board meeting ran too late and they couldn’t get to your permit.
People don’t understand what it takes to develop property in already occupied areas, and why developers only build “luxury” housing. There’s a reason rents and land prices are high.
Most of the stress on land comes from exclusionary laws. People with power don’t want poorer people (and especially people of another race) to live near them—attributing their success to their efforts and labeling their own servants as parasites[1] and deadbeats—and pass laws that make housing affordability impossible. Thus, people need to drive long distances to jobs and live in disinvested communities in order to participate in regional economies.
The worst offenders are actually not cities, but the inner suburbs surrounding cities. Cities are filled with guilty settlers who want to help less fortunate people but are unable to let go of the systems of power, while their suburbs are usually created for the purpose of segregation and repeatedly reaffirm their desire for segregation.[2]
[1] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/272/365/
[2] https://www.greenbelt.org/blog/vote-no-on-measure-y-to-provi...
https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten...
When we have developers building luxury condos amidst squalor, that’s a second-order effect of policies intended to create such contrasts. The market is constrained by the laws.
IMO this is the lesson that a lot of people never seem to learn.
> the real crux of this issue is that rich white people are so much more prioritized by the law that a couple of irate Karens can overrule an entire neighbourhoods opinion.
There's no reason to be racist. Cultures vary regionally. Californians in general act differently than Texans in general. Rural Americans in general act differently than urban Americans. Some people like their culture and community and don't want it to change just because rich outsiders come in.
Not necessarily. It's not about where you're born, but about whether you've been somewhere long enough to be part of its community. You have the same natural rights, obviously. But not the same standing in the community, input into cultural norms, or right to legal enforcement contrary to those cultural norms.
Going with the principle of live and let live, when you visit or move to some place with a different culture, it's on you to accept that culture. Showing up, planting yourself, and then demanding everyone else conform to your own culture will rightly create pushback.
This is a conservative stance, and it can be taken to the extreme to justify a whole bunch of horrible shit as you mention ("newcomers are of a different nationality, or race than current residents"), which I am certainly not condoning. But the same goes for every heuristic turned into a political axiom - the tamer form is still valid.
(edit: I changed "fit in" to "accept that culture", because the former bites off too much, and can too easily turn into an indictment of a person who others consider different even though they aren't acting to cause a problem)
Live and let live works for small things where there is no material effect on others, such as your spouse’s ethnicity or gender. For matters affecting others, such as noise, pollution, etc. live and let live is not applicable.
For all of those matters, the ultimate force is might makes right, but some places have democracy that allows votes to serve as proxy for might, or frequently money serves as proxy for might.
My point in invoking live and let live is that things like noise do not matter when you are far enough away. So different communities can exist with different norms regarding noise (or yard maintenance, farm smells, etc), and that is a good thing.
When someone used to one type of community moves into a different type, it falls to the person moving to accept the culture of where they're moving to. So for example it's unreasonable for someone who gets up early for work to move into a building full of college students, and then complain about the late night parties.
The alternative is to insist that there is one "right" culture, presumably yours, and to demand that everyone else conform to it. This is wrong.
Honestly, these people complaining in Weaver sound insane. They moved into a community and it’s their job to integrate with the community. We have a Brit who lives on my street that does community organizing and he’s been wonderful about building a sense of community that integrates the old and new residents. They should really be talking to him or Pio, mentioned in the article, instead of calling the police and accusing the car club of dealing drugs. Yeesh.
With that said, I think there are legitimate criticisms about the car club. For one, they absolutely trash the place every Sunday. When I walk down to the lake on Monday, there’s just tons of trash on the ground. I don’t know who picks it up but it’s certainly not the car club.
Also, doing burnouts and donuts on public streets sounds fun but it leaves the road covered in tire rubber and I imagine it smells awful while they’re doing it.
Those are basically the two things I’d like to see change, and in my humble, gentrifier opinion, they seem like reasonable issues to talk about with the community. Instead of having those conversations, we get white people leveraging their white privilege in the worst ways and anarchist groups like “Defend Our Hoodz” intimidating new businesses that open up. Fun times in my little corner of the world.
Is that a broadly-accepted opinion? Does it apply consistently to all cultures -- e.g. does it apply when nonwhites move into a white area?
And, does it reflect reality? Do new populations really preserve the prexisting culture in practice?
The best thing about this article is that it's
a.) Black and Latino car enthusiasts, and
b.) Texans who hate "libtards"
finding common cause against white ladies who say "toxic masculinity" with a straight face.
There's a political future hidden in that.
I'm not totally sure what you're presuming integrating with a community should involve, but there's a large gap between preserving and - as in here - actively interfering with the preexisting culture of a community.
> Is that a broadly-accepted opinion? Does it apply consistently to all cultures -- e.g. does it apply when nonwhites move into a white area?
If you move to a place and don't respect the local traditions or culture, you're making life harder both on yourself and to the existing community. I see no reason why it wouldn't apply every direction.
> And, does it reflect reality? Do new populations really preserve the prexisting culture in practice?
It largely depends on the societal and cultural homogeneity of the newcomers. If newcomers are largely from the same place or share the same culture, then I'd expect it would be more likely that they'd shift things in their direction.
If you move to an area and expect everyone to adopt your norms, that's close to colonization or conquering.
Alternatively, how do you react to the new person on your team who insists you're doing everything wrong and should change to match their view of the world. "When in Rome, do like the Romans" is good for a variety of reasons.
I don't think calling the cops and asking them to "shut it down" is a productive way for driving change in the community at all.
Also, completely selfishly, those kinds of actions give the gentrifiers who respect the Tejano community and traditions a bad rap. I really don't want to get to a point where all the long-term residents paint all the newcomers with a broad brush because of the Weaver people. At the beginning of Covid, newcomers were helping elderly long-term residents and vice-versa, but if crap like this keeps happening, those bonds are going to be strained.
So, yes, people move into farmland and immediately complain that "Somebody's got to do something about the smell."
As someone involved in private aviation and small airports I can't tell you how many times people move in right next to an airport that has been there for decades and then complain, protest, and threaten legal action against those very airports because the planes are too loud.
FWIW, I'm kind of in the same situation, as I bought a place last month in the gentrifying East Riverside area (just across the river from the one in the article). Everything was going as expected until last Sunday, when a preacher set up a concert grade sound system for an outdoor service, which was new even to long-term residents. The 311 app and social media lit up with complaints about it. (Apparently, some group does this around there weekly, but until now not with such loud equipment.)
But whatever you do, stay off of NextDoor -- nothing good happens there.
1. Unions provide negotiating power against elites.
2. Unions were the last remaining non-religious, working-class, political action organizations.
I think the second point is important and a underrated when it comes to union power, and more importantly might be more important than being able to negotiate wages. In the past, unions used to be actual voting blocs, so it provided a secondary mechanism for the working class to exert their political power. That is almost impossible now, and as a result our politicians answer more to wealthy PACs than anything else. Without unions, most people are politically inactive, or self-select into red/blue due to culture factors or team sports.
Without an organization it's literally impossible for any individual to overcome the system even if they realize the problems within; and it's hard to not get involved in identity politics when if you lose it means you lose your job/housing/opportunities.
Focus on identity politics started around 2014-15 (IIRC around Ferguson, MO riots). I always thought that that was a convenient distraction from the real elephant in the room - wealth inequality, poverty, classism - which was being highlighted by the Occupy movement.
It is almost as if "nefarious elites" pushed the media narratives about racism, sexism and all other -isms in order to divide the masses. Same as prior culture wars about relatively minor issues - who uses which bathrooms or abortion etc - which affect only a tiny subset of the society.
It is especially weird when you look at the history of the concept “gentrification”, even the word comes from “gentry”, which basically means upper class, and it exists also in monoethnic cities. The basis of the issue doesn’t lie in the race.
I don't get why you've left out probably the most legitimate criticism of the practice, that it's quite dangerous. I don't know much about Austin, but in SF and Oakland people are killed fairly often in side shows, and often it's innocent bystanders.
Sounds to me like those legitimate criticisms are exactly what the "insane Weaver residents" are complaining about. That and the violation of noise ordinances in a residential area, for half the weekend, every single week.
People move around in America. Both within cities and across cities. I don't see why people shouldn't be allowed to complain about laws being broken, just because they are new to a neighborhood. If the city decides that certain neighborhoods are exempt from certain laws, they are certainly welcome to make that official. And make it very clear to prospective tenants that the "normal laws" do not apply in those neighborhoods. Alternatively, there are also plenty of non-residential areas where people can gather, play ear-piercing music, trash the place, and have all the fun they want.
I don't understand why having laws, enforcing them, and residents requesting for their enforcement, is somehow a bad thing. Much less a matter of racial debate. Selective and subjective enforcement of rules are generally harmful to people of color - we need more consistently enforced laws, not less.
Or maybe the silent majority of the old residents actually agree with the new people, except they already got tired of trying to enforce those rules, being ignored? That's just as likely in my opinion.
I think that sort of local override is something that needs to be tested on frequent intervals. Communities change. They get older, they have kids, whatever, situations change. It's not enough to say that "this is the way we've done things since 1582". It's the people today that matter.
Really, the white dude who complained to the cops to do something about the black and latino car club because they are "scary" is just genuinely concerned about law and order and the imperative that all minor violations of local codes must always be enforced?
Color me skeptical.
Calling the cops on scary black people for minor infractions of ticky-tack laws is how Eric Garner and many others have ended up killed at the hands of law enforcement.
- be filled with thrash
- smell like burning rubber
- violate noise ordinances
every single Sunday? Yes. Most middle-aged people do not want to live in such an environment, and neither do I. This is exactly why residential zoning laws exist, and most people support some form of restrictions in residential neighborhoods. Not sure what there is to be skeptical about.
In all of America there are actual laws against littering, noise and pollution and wherever I move I expect them to be enforced.
Also I wonder if these lawbreakers were respectful of the culture that existed prior to them arriving? I doubt it and with that I will conclude that they probably don't deserve the same respect. It's a free country you know? If they don't like it they can move somewhere else (and probably disrupt wherever they move to).
I've been on the receiving end of car heads moving into my neighborhood. I ended up having to move out. What goes around, comes around I guess.
If a bunch of people like me moved into town and started complaining, we probably could have gotten rid of those lowly pests that moved next door to me.
Since that wasn't happening anytime soon, I figured the next best thing is to just use some of my high income to move to a place where these kinds of lower class people can't afford to live and that's exactly what I did. I saved plenty of money living in a lower class neighborhood for a long time and the market conditions were totally right for a move so in the end, I actually won.
...YOU are the one who claimed everyone that was complaining had a legitimate complaint about law and order and enforcement of local codes.
I mean it's literally in the first few paragraphs of the piece that some dude thought the black and brown guys at the car club were "scary" so he reported them.
"Are there some people who might have complained for dumb reasons?"
"dumb reasons"?
I think the term you should be looking for is "bigoted" reasons.
Read again. I never claimed that 100% of complainers had legitimate motivations or complaints. And YOU responded by cherry-picking a single person who had dumb motivations, and acting as though he is representative of everyone else, and the point I am making. This is the definition of a cherry-picking and a strawman.
"This is a tradition" isn't good enough. It has to remain a tradition that people want in their back yards. If they don't, find somewhere else to do your noisy car things.
Clearly the police here disagree, and feel that anyone can be as disruptive as they like.
And here you are claiming there's NOTHING AT ALL wrong with that.
Sure let's just ignore decades of selective enforcement of law to discriminate against black and brown people, I guess "racism is over" because it makes you uncomfortable
Leave your baggage at the door. These things are objectively noisy, objectively disruptive and leave a whole heap of very real mess in their wake. Those are my problems, skin colour is yours.
That bit "on public streets" is material - that makes it illegal. Calling the police is the normal course of action there, right?
The trend towards authoritarianism is all too familiar as well.
I've never understood not just joining in and talking. But that's Karens for you!
But I also have never had a problem with hanging out with local folks in Oakland and East SJ when I lived in SV despite being lily white and sticking out like a sore thumb. They have a lot to offer and you have to wade in and respect the differences.
But then plenty of techies think these are "scary places" - most because THEY make them scary by how they act.
It indeed does smell awful, and the tire dust is filled with toxins that you probably don’t want in your system; that have already been implicated in the deaths of salmon.
It’s also very loud, well over 100 dB. That’s enough to cause permanent hearing loss.
I don’t believe the moral high ground is with the car club. Their behavior harms people outside of their in-group, with the most severe harms falling on people less privileged than themselves.
I mean, I want their car club to survive and I want them to enjoy their hobby no doubt. I would hate it if someone told me I couldn't enjoy my hobbies. However, some hobbies require a place to do them and in this case it has come to the point they need a place that will allow them to do things they want to do. Then again, they go somewhere else and do it where people don't care. Just my two cents.
Well, article definitely commits a statistical fallacy there. Austin is one of the fastest growing cities, especially from 2000-2017 period. The fact that the percentage went down (from 9.5 to 7.5), while the city's population nearly tripled does not mean people were 'forced to move out'. In fact, it means that the black population nearly tripled while other races moved to the area in even greater numbers.
None of these numbers will give information on who was forced out. You'll need migratory data for that.
[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/22926/austin/population#:....
At any rate, if someone moves from East Austin to Del Valle or Manor, are they 'forced out of Austin'? Even if that move affords their family a larger living space? These are satellite communities only a couple miles further out of the city center.
No doubt East Austin has gotten much more expensive in the past 10 years, as the article underscores. There's still quite a bit of low income housing, but it's certainly making up a smaller portion. As the downtown corridor jumps across I-35 and expands east, more and more high rises are being built in East Austin, where older ranch houses and traditional neighborhoods used to exist.
The thing is, many of these older ranch houses on the east side aren't even in great shape and don't really fit modern standards. They have character, sure, but raising a family in a small, wooden, 2/1 or 3/1 1950s ranch house with bad upkeep is not necessarily a desirable thing. Migratory data alone is not enough to interpret the story.
So what's the interesting and unusual nuance that makes this story more interesting?
"these folks have been gathering in this spot to do this [illegal] thing weekly... residents... want it canceled, citing [the law]"
I don't agree with this reductive view, but to me it's not clearly more so than the one-sided perspective you expressed. As I mention in another comment, I think the question of community rights and "the tyranny of bureaucracy" is a fascinating and complex one, and don't think the situation is covered by simply noting that the gathering is clearly against the law[1] and isn't victimless. I don't personally recognize adherence to every detail of every law as the highest moral good (a view that's clearly widespread, even implicitly, as evidenced by the PD's refusal to do anything about the plainly-illegal event thus far, as mentioned in the article).
But the question of where exactly acceptable, public lawbreaking starts and ends is a complex and interesting one. Where exactly does the line fall for where lawbreaking should be grandfathered in? What's the plainly-obvious equation for how to calculate when a group of citizens is entitled to break the law, and does that apply to all citizens equally? If so, how widespread is this legal bubble? If the law itself is irredeemably flawed, why not repeal it? If it hasn't been repealed, and implicitly has the support of our democratic system, on what basis do we determine that the exception being granted has the consent of society?
None of these are rhetorical. Laws can obviously be unjust, as can specific by-the-book applications of overall-just laws. On top of that, not all important communities are concretely well-defined and not all important norms are codified. But I'm really puzzled by the claim that it's trivial and unnuanced to draw lines between the rule of law and the (many! contradicting!) uncodified moral convictions that it's being claimed should transcend collective decision-making about society's norms.
[1] The article mentions consistent violation of ordinances. To the extent that the complaint is about the legal parts of the gathering, I agree that the topic isn't especially interesting.
The rims pictured in the article are one of the most dangerous things you can do to a car (and are not legal as shown) and present a massive safety risk to pedestrians, cyclists, and other drivers.
It's basically turning the vehicle into something that will cause amputations/maiming if you're ever near anyone, and other road users won't necessarily see your "spikes" to be able to avoid them, especially in a busier environment. You might as well just stick swords or axes sticking out from your rims, because that's basically what they'll do in motion to anyone you get a little too close to.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to a lot of car culture modifications, but that particular class of modifications should be zero tolerance, car impounded on sight.
There's no unusual nuance in this case. That's the point. It's a very typical example of a pattern that's happening all over. Money shows up and destroys culture.
[0] https://www.austintexas.gov/sites/default/files/files/Planni...
- Black 18+ pop increased from 45.5K to 46.2K - Black children pop decreased from 18.7K to 14.5K - Hispanic pop increased from 200K to 277K (most significant demographic increase) - White, non-Hispanic percentage decreased from 53% to 49% - Asian percentage increased from 4.7% to 6.3%
Either black people in Austin had less kids from 1992-2010 than 1982-2000 (possible, given the stable adult pop numbers) or black families left for the suburbs or other cities entirely.
In 2010, Austin real estate was still quite affordable and the east side was not quite developed (article mentions a house could be bought for $100K there).
And the political side of journalism, but I think we should avoid derailing the discussion.
While it's valid to be against the gentrification of a neighborhood. We should not conflate it with other issues.
There is a real problem, and that is black people are under represented in the upper classes. If you fix that problem this one goes away. If you try to keep the black percentage high in this area without fixing the wealth gap, I'm not sure that you are achieving much.
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-martins-beach-supr...
There is a nearby new housing development with residents complaining about the air pollution (apparently it is really smelly) - and their response is "yeah, we've been here since before you were born, so whatev". It cracked me up.
Edit: Oh! I almost forgot, there are people who built their house next to a NASCAR track! WHO thinks that is a good idea?
People who don’t mind noise and want to make a shitload of their mortgage back on Airbnb.
Depends on how often it's used I guess. At times I've lived a couple of blocks from a formula 1 track and right on a hairpin bend of an IndyCar track. Both were held once a year so even though I don't like car racing it was a feature not a problem.
People make some interesting exhausts just for this track.
https://images.autotrader.com/scaler/620/420/cms/images/over...
Thunder hill has a similar policy but they move the Sensor around...
Reid-Hillview airport opened in 1937 when nothing but farmland surrounded it.
Would this be relevant for something that is in violation of the letter of the law? I ask this purely legally, as the ethical question of community rights and the tyranny of bureaucracy is a separate one.
I can see where the airport is on a map in relation to my new apartment. It's reasonable to expect airport noise.
If I visit the apartment, if I spend a day walking around the neighborhood, is it reasonable to expect a, (illegally) loud party to happen at a given time at a given week?
Should chicano culture be preserved? Should people expect to be comfortable in these homes? The answer to both is yes.
This situation would certainly qualify for a residence--if a loud party shows up every weekend that makes traffic terrible for a while, that should have been disclosed.
But the issue here is with renters, and property management doesn't have to disclose that to renters.
The club posted a large yellow sign by the entrance: "A safe & friendly neighbor since 1913" so that prospective homeowners could see it, as it was suspected that the realtors & sellers were not disclosing it's existence.
To me, the more interesting question here is how does Austin avoid what happened to SF, where tech hollowed out nearly all of its existing culture and then tech workers began to complain it was bland.
Real estate and zoning policy is going to be key here. I've seen a decent deal of discussion about "Yuppie Fishtanks" [0] recently and generally it seems to be supported that massively increasing the housing supply is one of the best ways to keep rents intact and avoid hollowing gentrification. For the existing Austin residents here, how is the city approaching it thusfar? Do people think this is another SF gentrification story in the making, or is something different?
[0] http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2018/07/yimbyism-explaine...
At one point I was on the east side and saw an old black woman rocking on her front porch in front of a 70's shotgun shack, next to an ugly post-modern 2 story house with a lambo and a tesla sitting outside of it.
I don't think increasing housing density is the answer. We really don't need more luxury apartments or million dollar condos.
This was my first natural instinct maybe 5 years ago, but seeing the differences in gentrification stories has made it clear it's far worse to keep density the same. If nothing in the city changes and rich people decide they want to flock to your city (in this case, tech workers), it's a given that the existing poorer people will be forced out and prices will increase. Measures like rent control only slow the process, holding back a rising tide.
I've seen this personally in my backyard in Brooklyn. What has happened there is that massive luxury towers have been built along a busy street (central to transit but still not "neighborhoody"). While rents have still gone up, it seems this real estate and luxury market has helped stave off the insane hikes SF has seen, for example. Million dollar condos, probably not a good idea. But luxury buildings with high density turn into normal real estate in 20 years, and that top of the market ease keeps a lot of that tech money out of existing minority and poor neighborhoods.
The question for Austin if they accept that is where to put them. Finding a balanced place would be key here IMO.
Those luxury buildings are going exclusively into poor neighborhoods because they have the cheapest land and least restrictions.
> Those luxury buildings are going exclusively into poor neighborhoods because they have the cheapest land and least restrictions.
That sounds like what the cities should precisely fix. Use zoning and legislation to herd these buildings into more desirable places. Real estate will still come and build. Many cities have done this before, this is very much possible.
If not private, then we get back to the idea of public housing being built. This is much more of a political longshot, but I think it would actually be quite interesting to see public housing at the top of the market. "Affordable housing" approaches are a bandaid on the issue. By the city building the luxury buildings themselves, they can select the exact places they want them instead of just generally herding.
https://hoodline.com/2016/01/how-urban-renewal-destroyed-the...
https://www.pbs.org/video/the-first-angry-man-lnpy07/
There are other ways to provide relief for rising property taxes. For example, Washington has a property tax deferral program, so seniors don’t have to pay the increased property tax until they or their heirs sell the house; the capital gains that increased the property tax will pay for the deferred property tax.
It is hard to tell the poison from the cure with these things.
78704 is in your future too.
Of course we do. If condos are a million dollars we need more of them so that the price decreases. All housing is "luxury" housing when there isn't enough housing.
I held out a small hope that covid and the remote-work wave would stem things a little bit, but it's hard to say whether that's happened. If anything, the influx could have increased due to the exodus from SF.
Overall I don't feel optimistic.
This is exactly what we're seeing in the Seattle area. A lot of people in the various circles I'm in thought, as we entered the early stages of this pandemic really settling in for the long-haul, "well, phew, at least it'll put a breather on housing costs."
Nope.
Because of the "work wherever you want" and Seattle and Puget Sound still being a wonderfully attractive place to live, the pace has accelerated. Housing prices here have shot up by double-digit numbers, even inside the city limits from which people are supposedly "fleeing." Both the north and south ends of Seattle, even West Seattle where the main road link has been severed for a year (as of today), have seen massive upticks.
The Department of Licensing has released statistics that show that the number of California driving licenses and vehicle titles exchanged for Washington ones is the second-highest it's been in ten years, with only 2018 being higher, and that's with most DOL offices being closed or heavily restricted due to in-person limits from the virus. (The influx of cars isn't going to do our "pristine environment" any favors, either, and I look forward to the even-louder rants about how terrible traffic is driving by oneself from Marysville to Queen Anne for a hockey game).
Meanwhile, people around here continue to insist that building is bad and, I shit you not, that if we simply don't build then the people will stop coming. I don't know why anyone still thinks this; it hasn't been true for twenty years, why should now be any different? And the new arrivals aren't keen on building more or making sure newer arrivals have space because, well, they moved here, to this spot because they liked it that way and, gosh-darn-it, this space is going to stay like this forever.
It's getting quite frustrating. After many, many years of waiting and hoping and moving around, I finally live near where a light rail station will be opening in the coming year-ish and I fear, even on my moderately good tech salary, I'm not going to be able to afford to live here before the train arrives, or shortly thereafter.
Where's a person supposed to lay down roots, without retreating deep into a suburb? I don't need or want a job at FAANG or the next "unicorn"; I'm happy with my normal tech job/income and the life it affords. Why couldn't those things stay confined somewhere else and leave the rest of us in peace?
The other answer IMO is to pick a city no one in tech is even thinking about, and the growth rate is expected to be slow. Not to jynx them but places like Cleveland, Richmond VA, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, Detroit, Columbus, San Antonio, Milwaulkee, etc.
Personally, I far prefer the megacity, but that second list is a potential option.
From an urban development perspective, to me it seems that the best course of action would be a massive federal investment in existing mid-sized cities. Build large public transit networks in some of these becoming desirable cities and distribute the strain tech is putting on our urban centers. Massively increase housing density, but with this foresight, avoid doing the short term luxury development that won't hold up longterm and build some old fashioned 3-5 story brownstones.
The risk is that the people never come, but the alternative is the consistent hollowing out of all major US cities. Something has to give.
DFW is going to be in a world of hurt when the water runs out and that day is coming somewhat soon. There are already places in central Texas where the aquifers are dry and the lakes don't refill during the formerly-rainy season. North Texas is reliant on a set of manmade lakes that are already slower and slower to refill, with more and more taps being added every year.
In my first round of interviews out of college I interviewed with a company in Dallas. It was going well, but towards the end of the day I was frank with my interviewer and told them I simply didn't want to live in DFW. I didn't have another offer yet, but I found one in Austin and moved there.
Hudson Yards is not what I'm referring to in any way in my posts on this article. I'm mainly talking large towers in Williamsburg, along Atlantic Ave in Brooklyn, in the East Village edge near Alphabet City, some in Gowanus, Long Island City, and many others I'm probably forgetting.
Hudson Yards is not anywhere remotely near Harlem, and was built on a deck over what's been a rail yard for a century.
I'm don't love what was built there, but it certainly wasn't rehabilitating Harlem and not a single person was directly displaced by building there.
Not to sound too defeatist about it, since let's be honest we are still sitting pretty high on the list of people doing pretty well for ourselves, but I'm not sure there is any real escape.
In addition to more people moving here, one of the other reasons the Puget Sound housing market has shot up so dramatically is because lots of us didn't lose our jobs during this pandemic, but we for damn sure lost what we usually spend money on. With so much money sloshing around, people make the decision of "well, surely now I should buy a house, right?" And then they do. And since more money is available to them, housing prices are driven upward.
What sucks is if we have this worry, those of us of the high-five-figure/low-six-figure brigade, how must it be to be of even lesser means? If we're feeling the creep--the only reason I didn't get hit with yet another $100/month rent increase is because the Governor said they couldn't--then what is everyone else doing? I am anxious not only for my family, but for society at large.
I don't know how much longer that can last. Maybe it can last forever, since the monetary policy in this country seems to be that housing prices Must Never, Ever, Ever Fall, because housing is both a required good and the primary "investment" vehicle of everyone with lower net worth than an Apple executive.
My employer has taken up the work from wherever mantle and has said that where our company has offices, even internationally, are places where living is acceptable. As I'm an EU citizen, I wouldn't need work permission to go live there, maybe I give there a go for the second half of my life.
Absolutely; I didn't mean to underplay how privileged I still am, that my worst-case scenario is spending more than I'd like to on housing or moving somewhere less-pleasant to live. Lots of people are in much worse positions right now and I'm really hoping something gives at some point. I just wanted to air/discuss the source of my own (much smaller by comparison) frustrations, given that lots of people here can probably relate.
Just to be clear, I was all but certain we were in agreement, and I didn't think you were (deliberately) leaving anyone out. What I wrote was more of a "this is gonna suck...for most of us...pretty damn soon...and we all know it...and that sucks."
Pick a city with cold winters and high humidity and not near mountains or ocean.
Literally anywhere in the upper midwest. "Oh but the winters are brutally cold and the summers are too hot and humid" you say. Well, there's a reason you can get a $150k/yr tech job and a nice $300k house in a good neighborhood. And there's no aversion to building homes up here.
Way too many people think the only place to make a living in tech is on the coasts. But you can get tech jobs in any major city. And some are ridiculously cheap to live in. Just look outside the "normal" places.
I assume that's what the parent commenter meant by "retreating deep into a suburb".
Lincoln and Indianapolis are two random examples that I've looked into recently.
It doesn't.
There is a limited number of cities with weather conditions humans prefer.
Some people think others care about culture - no, they mostly don't. They care about weather conditions, safety and job opportunities. Culture is a nice to have feature.
Unless governments get busy building new cities/towns, every existing city with favorable weather conditions will turn into rich people, next to homeless people, or just rich people, if they enact laws against homeless people to get rid of them.
By the way, if governments get busy building new cities/towns, you don't get rid of the problem, you just delay it until every favorable location has a city, and then you're back to having this same problem.
It's the same as dating - we can't all have miss universe, because it's a zero sum game. If you live in a small town and got to date miss universe, who didn't get discovered yet, you shouldn't get mad when a talent agency visits your town and takes your miss universe to New York to be a fashion model and date a super athlete. You should be grateful that you got to date miss universe for a while not due to merit in a zero sum game, but due to pure luck. But, you know, good luck explaining that to the guy who lives in a small town, had a beauty and now doesn't anymore. Those fucking talent agencies, maaan.
This does not track at all with what happened to the Bay Area. Silicon Valley historically means the peninsula. GOOG, FB, AAPL and most of the other tech giants are all closer to San Jose than to San Francisco. Yet it’s San Francisco (and to an extent Oakland) who have experienced incredibly growing pains. If the culture factor didn’t matter then people would have been happy to live in San Jose which has identical (if not better) better weather, safety and job opportunities.
https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/forum/grm/it-is-illegal-to...
Since Sacramento County is approx 50% white, 50% hispanic/black, a case can be made this is a racist law given the relatively high number of hispanics and black who work on their cars, including car clubs such as the Austin tradition.
This is culturally very unhealthy given how fundamental freedom of movement is to the US zeitgeist, and how important car culture is as the core of US life.
These rules are draconian. "[Prohibited if conducted] outside a fully enclosed garage or accessory structure and resulting in the vehicle being inoperable for a period in excess of 24 hours."
On the other hand, if you're rich enough to live there, you're probably rich enough to have a large enough enclosure where you can skirt the law anyway.
Minor repairs are prohibited in a great many cases as well.
If I use a torque wrench to reinstall my wheels (even in a garage), I'm in violation. If I change the brakes on a friend's or girlfriend's car (even in a garage), I'm in violation. If I plug a flat tire for a neighbor or a passing motorist in my garage, I'm in violation. If I start a brake change in the driveway on Sunday morning and need a part from the parts store that I get and install on Monday, I'm in violation. I've certainly done all of those things and am not seen as a "bad neighbor".
Chevy V-8s are easy and there were no emission controls in those days to clutter things up.
No one said a word.
Restrictions that an HOA might adopt can be more carefully tailored to the residents there than a city-wide ban on using tools not commonly found in a residence on a car. (Imagine if this law applied to electronics repair. "Sorry, most people don’t have a Pentalobe screwdriver, so no Apple portable repairs for you; take it to a shop like a good little consumer!")
Rich (mostly) white people who want these kinds of laws and draft them on behalf of their constituents don't.
This is basically a blue collar vs white collar thing.
The people who are really rich don't care either. Their houses are more than the minimum setback apart and they can afford fences if they don't wanna look at something and they can afford big garages and barns to work in so as not to annoy their neighbors to the point of building fences.
Caring about what your neighbors do is solidly the purview of upper middle class busybodies.
Even ignoring money and property values, the answers (for most ordinances, not just this one) are gonna all be various ways to put lipstick on the "behavior not befitting the people who can afford to live here" pig.
Who came up with the rules? And have you carried out a survey to see if everyone agreed to the rules? If you lived there before the rule is in place can you opt out if you disagree?
Halfways well off people don't work on their cars anymore or if they work on cars they are expensive old cars. None of the young people at my company know anything about cars.
This law was written to give code enforcement a cudgel against unlicensed repair shops. All the auto enthusiast blogs and forums immediately lost their minds, but there hasn't been a sweep of the neighborhoods with officers asking to look inside of your garage for uncommon tools. The one complaint I could find online [1] was from a dude whose handle was "nimblemotorsports" and he said he had a car lift on his property (but it hadn't been set up yet). [2]
There's plenty of room for grousing about poorly written laws, but this law has lots of other equally poorly written laws across the country to keep it company. Sacramento county isn't forbidding you from putting shiny new headers on your hot rod in your own garage.
[1]: https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/forum/grm/it-illegal-do-ma...
[2]: It took only a little more effort using the nimblemotorsports name to get an idea of why his neighbors might completely reasonably be getting irritated enough to call code enforcement.
Every other search result about this thing is some motoring site where the internet commenters are absolutely certain that this is yet another example of draconian liberal legislative overreach and just nobody can really do anything on their own property anymore and it's all just so unfair...
Again, I'm expressly not defending the law as it's written, but if the letter of every bad law was to be applied equally to everyone in the same instant, there would not be a single free person anywhere in the country. Like all the others, this one is being applied selectively.
[1]: Warning: really obnoxious autoplay videos, because every local news site is on a headlong rush to the bottom of the pit of asshole design. https://www.abc10.com/article/entertainment/television/progr...
Big cities with traffic problem enact this kind of laws to discourage personal car ownership. Sure, just because now it's not actively reported as enforced doesn't mean it won't be in the future, and it wouldn't be the first time where the enactment and the enforcement of a low separated in time to make the pill easier to swallow.
Unfortunately, the system is lazy. Politicians don't bother to amend laws when these issues arises, police can use their "professional discretion" to enforce or not enforce a law (which leads to unequal enforcement), and the courts tend to "interpret" laws in ways that don't make sense (partially because of the politicians I mentioned earlier, but also a misapplication of statutory construction rules and lenity).
EDIT for response since I'm rate-limited. I interpreted the following section:
> Again, I'm expressly not defending the law as it's written, but if the letter of every bad law was to be applied equally to everyone in the same instant, there would not be a single free person anywhere in the country. Like all the others, this one is being applied selectively.
as something akin to "I think the law isn't great, but if any law were applied fairly, we would all be in jail. Fortunately most laws aren't applied fairly"
But I can understand if that was a misinterpretation.
A terrible thing in itself.
Laws like this exist to only be enforced as needed to screw people as needed. Of course there is not going to be a big enforcement push because that's not the point. The point is to give busybodies a means to screw their neighbors under color of law.
edit: All good points in response. I'm convinced that there is no point in trying to tune the wording of a bad law.
"Politicians are idiots, the law should be X" is a trope, but finding a wording that doesn't run afoul of edge cases is very, very, difficult, even before lobbying and perverse incentives make things worse. Note I'm not saying this law was made in good faith, but starting an argument from an assumption of ignorance instead of malice seems more likely to change people's opinion in your favour.
But that's exactly the kind of law that tends to be enforced in ways that manifest various majority biases in society.
So now we have another set of laws that can be selectively used against some people, usually against people with little money to defend themselves. When I moved to LA it was the same with marijuana laws. Cops were raiding poor neighborhoods for marijuana while you could walk in almost any well off neighborhood and smell the smoke from far away. But these neighborhoods never got raided.
A law should either get enforced or it should be revoked.
Well, this isn't about owing vehicles though, but about a particular style of vehicles, with work done of them, and specific gatherings to showcase them etc.
Might as well ask "Why make the taco-fest about race, everybody eats". Sure, but those against the taco-fest in some place where predominantly latinos frequent it, more probably than not have racial issues against them gathering near them, and are not just against tacos in general...
I mean the parent comment spells it out "given the relatively high number of hispanics and black who work on their cars", and I think they are right. Those same residents wouldn't have an issue with a mostly-white gathering of rich classic car owners...
Every culture owns cars, but not every subculture does things with cars that require you to do most of the work yourself in your driveway.
It’s like Ehrlichman’s famous quote: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.“
all of this is not to say that that particular law at that particular place and time wasn't racially motivated.
The likelihood that it disproportionately hurts members of a certain race wouldn't matter if the issue was solved in a way that benefits everyone.
This is a strawman - nobody is asking for this!
> why would race need to be brought into the equation when it's so much easier to communicate about the core issue rather than discuss things in the context of a more complex issue of race and equality?
Let's look at literacy tests for voters. These are similar as you can absolutely construct a plausible argument for them that never mentions race at all - "We just want to make sure that people voting actually understand what they're voting for". And there were likely advocates for these laws who believed that! And literacy tests of course affected more than just African Americans. But - the near universal consensus among historians was that the primary intent was to suppress black votes.
Not discussing race when discussing voter literacy tests is avoiding the crux of the actual issue. If you only engage with voter tests on the "actually understand what they're voting for" level you're avoiding the much more important conversation of whether this law is passed in good faith.
> The likelihood that it disproportionately hurts members of a certain race wouldn't matter if the issue was solved in a way that benefits everyone.
And therein lies the rub - how can it be solved in a way that benefits everyone? If there was a universal benefit solution for every problem politics would be easy! In the case of literacy tests there is no such solution - there was nothing that you could give the advocates for suppression policies that would make them happy that wouldn't come at the expense of minorities. In this case? Hard to say, but I really doubt there's an amicable solution.
Like we should just go through life pretending like race plays absolutely no factor in any law, human interaction, or bias unless someone says the "n" word or something.
Given our history as a country that seems INCREDIBLY foolish.
...we clearly don't live in the same world.
violence trends down
life expectancy trends up
poverty and hunger trends down
child labor is in decline
leisure time is increasing
nuclear weaponry is on the decline
migration is trending up
I'm not sure which objective metrics I could look at would imply anything other than what I've concluded.
What a WONDERFUL world you live in!
A few of my friends and myself tend to do most of the maintenance on our cars and motorcycles by ourselves. If I had to pay for the labor in my car it would have been "totaled" a long time ago. But it still keeps running 20 years and nearly 200kmi with a new water pump, new timing belt, new main belt, new suspension, brake rotor and pad replacements, brake fluid flushes, EGR cleanout, oil pan resealing, power steering hose replacement, transmission fluid flushes, stereo replacement, power window motor replacements, and a few other things.
Most of these parts over the years have been relatively cheap, but getting a shop to do the change would have been expensive as hell. I shopped around to get the struts replaced recently. Most shops quoted me over $1k for the replacement. _Good_ replacement strut/coil/spring/mount assemblies were $60/ea from reputable sources online. So for a couple of hours of my own time, knowing how to unscrew and screw in some bolts properly (torqued to spec), and $240 in parts I had a new suspension. So taking the low end of ~$1k in estimates I got, I pretty much paid myself $380/hr to do the work.
And don't even get me started on motorcycle maintenance. If it were illegal for me to work on my own bike at home I probably wouldn't be able to afford the bike. Parts are stupid cheap but labor costs on motorcycles are astronomical considering its usually easier to work on a bike than a car.
Not everyone working on a car in their driveway are doing something shady or illegal.
I get not having a neighbor who runs a covert or not-so-covert shop next door, but these laws are bludgeons written for selective enforcement.
Because there is no other reasonable, understandable reason to ban "working on your own car on your own property". Unless it disproportionally hits certain races--which would at least help explain the root motivation of the law.
It seems much more reasonable to guess that neighbors were annoyed by the activity itself and passed a nimby law because they're selfish.
A white lady comes and sees a bunch of predominantly black and latino folks with a tradition of hanging out in a park and screwing around with their cars. And then says this:
> “You can’t tell me drugs aren’t being distributed over there,” she huffed. “The brazenness of it all just kills me!”
Yeah, it's a mystery why people are assuming there's some racism going on there.
I have no idea what happened in Sacramento. But it's not hard to imagine how a group of non-white folks who tended to work on their cars -- either for fun, or for purely financial reasons -- would view this. And then you add in things like this [1]
> As you might have picked up, the code has a bit of vagueness when defining "similar operations," something it briefly touches on in section 5.2.0.B of the Sacramento County Zoning Code.
and
> The code also prohibits individuals to perform repairs which use "tools not normally found in a residence"—another vague term which creates an elucidation of the law, placing it up for deliberation depending on the individual deciphering the legal code.
Vagueness is a weapon that cops use to fuck people. And it's intentionally written into laws for exactly that reason. If the last year didn't convince you that cops harass especially black folks at extremely high rates, nothing will. A report on Jalopnik [2] said that someone who got a $400 fine would have had to pay $700 to right the decision. Again, look at the correlation between ethnicity and having a spare $700.
[1] https://www.thedrive.com/news/29205/repairing-your-car-in-yo...
[2] https://jalopnik.com/sacramento-county-says-its-illegal-to-w...
Dang, it feels like more and more people I know are no longer into fixing things themselves, it almost seems like it'll get to the point where things like hacksaws and ratchets might be included in that vagueness.
I know many people who have garages with an old fridge fridge, a car, and maybe an electric string trimmer that hasn't been touched in several years. If such a garage becomes the norm, just having a screwdriver might be against the law.
It's useful law to stop irresponsible people who are running engines and impact wrenches all day in a residential neighborhood but legally is a dangerous catch all that could ruin a lot of people's car hobbyist lives
When I see ordinances like this I see a 1A violation waiting to happen. I assume the council has worded it in a way that doesn't draw scrutiny or the affected don't have the resources to have it taken to court.
One of the places I lived added an ordinance banning work trucks. My neighbor works out of his truck and would get fined and towed continuously. He threatened to sue and I think the compromise they reached was he had to remove the company vinyl signs. I believe he changed it to magnet stickers that he installs and removes daily.
And it was basically the same thing; working class apartments slowly gentrified and all sorts of new rules were put in place.
Are you sure home car maintenance isn't more associated with poverty than race?
Turns out partisan ideologies are flexible enough to justify the same class preferences.
I like gadgets, and I can understand why people would want to enjoy them and show them off and I think that there should be space in society for that, but those rims and the burnouts seem to be designed to aggressively "claim space" at the expense of others.
But it's not really a matter of understanding subcultures, it's drawing a line between letting somebody exercise their rights, and that exercise impinging on other people's rights.
You don't need a chemistry degree to complain about your neighbor running a selenophenol synthesis in his backyard. You don't need to study the history of Jazz before complaining about them blasting Yamataka Eye at 3AM.
1) Does this mean the developers did not take this into consideration and have a plan on how to deal with this or handle it?
2) Does it mean the folks buying the apartments (or renting) did not do their due diligence and find out this is a weekly event?
Takeaways here (for all of us reading this story) - do you research before you move to a place (rent or buy). Go there on a weekday and a weekend. Ask current residents about the place or other folks who live nearby about the place. It will save you a ton of hassle later on.
This has repeatedly happened with the music venues, which caused them to leave that part of the city. It happened with a really nice gun range. It happened with several bars. Unfortunately the car meetup is probably doomed.
if they were a nuisance, then getting rid of it surely isn't an issue?
The fact that there exists residential places near "nuisances" is the root cause of the problem isnt it?
It's sort of supposed to happen where residents live. Of course this being USA people go there by car (and when a lot of people who know each other go in a procession, who also happen to love their cars, it can get loud), of course this being the 21. century somehow even just built luxury apartments are not noise-proofed sufficiently.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+Weaver/@30.2522831,-97...
This looks like a nice park at the river, which also happens to be the backyard of a middle school.
So it seems The Weaver was built next to a 3+3 + 4 + 4 lane highway/interstate and a school (anyone have any experience with loudness levels at recess?) and now the residents are complaining about the one thing they feel is easiest to change. The BBQ.
Seems the plan is around the expectation that the newcomers, being white and rich, are going to get their way in the end. Which I truly hope not.
I would offer odds on how this turns out, especially considering that the burnouts and stuff associated with car club meets are de jure illegal. All it takes is a cop with a desire to ruin something good.
They just assumed that these traditions must be ones that they would like.
The city adopted a noise ordnance that kicks in at 10pm, and enforces it with SPL meters.
Later, they started complaining about the smoke from the BBQ restaurants. Daily batches of BBQ get started around 3am, and to be good BBQ, are made from beef brisket smoked over a wood fire (not gas, not electric, and certainly not with "liquid smoke"). So .. you moved to a state where brisket BBQ is a second religion for people, only to complain about the smell.
I believe the city figured out there was no pleasing these people, and told them to keep their windows closed if they didn't like it.
Cultural mixing happens both ways. Sometimes inclusion means changing long standing traditions.
Have there been any natural experiments where less-wealthy white folk were priced out by more-wealthy non-white?
Cities like Fremont, Union City, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Cupertino were pretty much 80% white 50 years ago. They're now about 24-34%. With housing prices at $1-3M here, do you think that most of those white people went on to afford even more expensive homes elsewhere? Mostly not, they're priced out of their hometowns. You can see this in California migration patterns, where many more Americans emigrate California cheaper states than immigrate (you could consider some of them "gentrified") while CA adds population from immigrants internationally, and thus the population is steady.
Of course, it's "techies", really affluence, displacing non-techies, rather than any racial motivation.
Upon checking, it doesn't look like overall Hispanic populations are being displaced out of the Bay Area. It looks like some areas like SF and Fremont have slightly lower Hispanic populations from 2000-2018, whereas cities Hayward and San Jose increased by a further amount.
Just guess who is the be seen as the enermy, guilty of some original sin that must be attoned at all times.
So I understand where the gentrifying scum are coming from. But jeez, do they not know how to search Reddit?? Everyone knows about Fiesta Gardens and its craziness. I’m sorry they failed to do their due diligence. Now perhaps they’ll understand why it’s cheaper than Tarrytown.
[quote] 'One particularly vocal tenant, a non-Hispanic white woman with short blond hair who appeared to be in her fifties, claimed that smoke from the tires was killing nearby trees and that traffic from the gathering would make it impossible for an ambulance to reach her in the event of a medical emergency (though two other roads to the apartment building remain accessible at all times). Another Weaver resident voiced more generalized criticism, calling the event a “display of toxic masculinity.”'
[/quote]
I think they only stopped short of saying her name starts with a K and rhymes with "Aaron". My knee jerk reaction is why do people move somewhere and immediately try to change a place to their set of values? Are they just fundamentally unhappy people?
Despite what seems like an over-reaction from this person this sort of struggle with cars is nothing new especially in Texas. The Cars And Coffee thing is pretty big down here, and while I do love cars I have mixed feelings about C&C for a few reasons. Typically you have a subset of the group that does engage in very dangerous maneuvers on public roads. There are enough youtube videos of people doing dumb things in cars going badly that Im sure most of you are aware of it. Typically its more of an age related than race related problem as young kids and cars with 3-800 horsepower are a recipe for trouble. I dont really go to C&C events for this reason. EDIT TO MAKE MORE CLEAR- This seems to be aimed more at the the people complaining about slab/lowrider/people of color car culture. Those folks should be called out (the Karens for the sake of bevity). That should not be conflated, however, with people doing burnouts and other dumb things with cars. This is anti social behavior and should be policed if it is out of control. Of course the archetype that is discussed in this article is known for blowing things out of proportion, so without actually having been there who knows. I personally love how Texas can be such a melting pot with rich culture from all walks of life and there is very real concern about how the great migration from California will pan out.
Why do people harass teachers to try to get the curriculum to reflect their values?
Why do people get elected to Congress and immediately try to change laws to reflect their values?
And so on ... because they think their values are absolutely, unassailably correct. Maybe it's because that's what they've been told on Sunday their entire lives, but there's little to no room for "maybe people from other cultures have values that seem strange or scary to me, but ought to be respected".
And if the car club members are doing burnouts and blasting music, I can't say I blame them. It's entirely possible to have a car meet without behaving like an asshole.
Edit/addition - there is a "Cars and Coffee" event most Saturday mornings a few miles from my home. Lots of fancy cars - Ferraris, Porsches, vintage American and British stuff, a real mix. For the most part, there are no burnouts, no thumping bass - just people who enjoy cars chatting, taking photos, and eating brunch. I go once a year or so, just to see what's there. If somebody complained about this, I'd tell them to pound sand. If it turns out the Austin meet doesn't have burnouts and thumping bass (as claimed in the article), those complainers should also pound sand.
Why is this woman so uniquely and thickly qualified
“A non-white black man with a thick black curly hair who appeared to be in his early 20s claimed he didn’t like the non-hispanic white woman with short blonde hair who appeared in her early 50s who claimed the smoke killed trees “
First the California (or NYC, or DC, or Boston) money shows up kicking out most of the people who aren't at least a white collar level of moneyed.
Then with nobody to stand in their way they Karens and Kevins (not necessarily from CA, just rich enough to still stick around after the CA money jacks everything up) swing their political weight around doing their best to turn the place into a sterile and conformist hellscape.
We've seen this pattern in cities and suburbs across the county.
Compare this article with any article about the need for denser housing in California, which is often opposed by the people who were there first.
TBH, the farmers don't have much except tradition on their side; there is no practical reason for the bells outside the mountains, and research has come to the conclusion that they are not overly healthy for the cows.
Plus it was generally the farmers who sold the urbanites the land to build their houses on.
And for an urban variation: People who move next to a church and want it to stop ringing its bells so often.
"Remember what compelled you to move here and defend it."
IMO that place is terrible to get paying musical work, so I left to go play in the mountains. Where, ironically, it is much easier to find paying musical work.
All the folks I had been playing with out in the hills (literally, 'the boys' from that Luckenbach, TX song) all had a similar feeling, though they all left Austin in the early 80s.
IMO, it's a city like any other at this point, and has been since, say, they closed the Armadillo. But even if that point doesn't work for you, the development around the Broken Spoke is a pretty visual representation of that same feeling.
I wish you much luck with your thought here, cause maybe I am just cynical about the place... my feeling is that mostly people move there cause it is a city with a lot of well-paying jobs and because TX funds itself with property taxes.
But I'd prefer to be wrong about that.
But I can hope that people will think before they push for the same behavior and policies that they've left.. but not counting on it.
The best proper adaptation that I've seen was reading about a developer that took some deteriorating apartments under an airport runway and refurbished them specifically for the deaf community (doorbells that flash instead of ring, etc.). It was apparently a big success.
I'd consider that car meet regularly held nextdoor to be a wonderful benefit.
We are living in a fast paced world so one needs to adapt to the changes. It could be my neighbor, skill sets, policies, etc.
I'm personally pretty inclined towards the change side of the argument, but there's no sense in pretending there aren't two sides to discussion, particularly after the High Modernist failures of the 20th century.
Since TX doesn’t have Prop 13, they are going to be annoyed with the tents cluttering their views.
edit: apparently, it's some sort of limiting of property tax. yes, texas does not have that, as property tax and sales tax are the only taxes. no state income tax has its pros/cons. it's part of being a texan to annually challenge your homes appraisal value. the only time i've ever had an issue with property tax was my first home when i was 21. it was new construction, so for the first year of the loan, the value was based on the unimproved lot. the next year, escrow doubled because they updated to the new value with the house, and needed to double dip to cover the difference from the previous year. more than doubled the payment. hard lesson to learn.
Property tax is generally determined by the average price of housing in an area. California's prop 13 allowed people to lock in their property tax based on when they bought it. Its been beneficial for retirees and older folks in California who bought their houses decades ago and if forced to pay the taxes based on current valuation would be forced to sell their house and move.
Its received a lot of criticism from people who point out that it's inherently unfair and how that the tax level stays the same if the owner dies and passes the house on to their kids. It also receives a lot of criticism because it also applies to businesses. One particularly egregious example is a country club in the middlebof LA that exists on prime developmental land and normally would be paying huge taxes pays nominal fees and is only available to the extremely wealthy that can afford to join it.
Prop 13 did get some reform last November in regards to inheritance and flexibility for homeowners.
Karen? Is that you??
As soon as foreigners invade your shores (er, real estate spaces) move to grandfather a cap property tax that is particularly beneficial for long time real property owners.
I understand that at first, this would do nothing to alleviate the attack on the local culture. The same foreigners would still call the cops.
Yet, with enough time, the latino locals would have been rich latino locals, from simply holding onto property, and renting it out to new arrival..s making a killing.
Then those rich latinos would have had some dollars to contribute to local pols. That could be a group happy to push on repeals of noise or public assembly ordinances.
Rinse,repeat.
You would have a full-fiesta by now. There goes the neighborhood!
Opportunity lost.
I don't see evidence of that, or the opposite.
I admit to be assuming that long-time locals own their property. At least, a significant chunk.
Also note that not enacting a tax cap is not "neutral" to the status-quo of community: for as long as they do not enshrine capped taxes into their code, the longtime locals will be outbid by transplants due to the latter's ability to pay absolute higher property taxes.
This only accelerates gentrification further.
Public parks are not the place for this , nothing to do with culture.
I like urban density, but renting is extraction of wealth rather than a one-time transfer. I wish more of these developments were condos/ownership/co-op/what have you.
why is that? Renting is merely paying for shelter. The purchase price of a property would match rentals when adjusted for the cost of the capital to purchase (aka, interest payments, lost opportunity cost of capital etc).
The only thing rentals lack is certainty - you cannot get kicked out of your owned home, but could for a rental (even with enough notice - it's still getting kicked out).
Some people like this outcome, some do not, and think it's unfair, especially when the latter group was there first/longer.
Oh, and for the unnamed woman worried about drug distribution, it's not local Black or Latino gangs that run drug distribution in Austin.
I've had to deal with gentrification before, the only time I've seen it lose was when someone took a tractor and ploughed asbestos into the ground around the proposed site. The clean up costs were in the billions and the projects died because of all the bad publicity. The site getting known as the toxic exclusion zone was just the cherry on top.
There's a hierarchy of needs. Being able to be at peace in your own property ranks higher than someone else's need to blast music from their car.
I do not have anything against the guy or his music, there are just some things that are more important than others.
No it's not, not according to the law. If I move into town and I want to change things that's my right as a citizen.
Did she demand to speak to the manager?
Is that really something worth calling a tradition? If it were to happen where I live, I would definitely call the police.
I'm assuming that the location was originally chosen because it was out of the way or the area it was held in was deemed acceptable at the time. You could just outlaw it and then what happens? People will still meet up illegally. City planners have a difficult job. They need to find acceptable locations for disruptive activities.
Getting along doesn't happen by accident it takes city officials, car club members, and new and old members of the community to create a city everyone can enjoy. Easier said than done.
This regularly happens on HN for SF, LA, NYC, Seattle, etc. Austin is pretty in line with those for the reasoning you suggested.
I live at the corner of I-35 east-side frontage and 5th in a mega apartment complex. I've tried meeting many of my neighbors and most are asocial/antisocial. There are 2 women roommates and an African-American kid who are legit cool that I've met so far. Also, I don't even know the people across the hall. My conclusion from many interactions is my neighbors are mostly phony, little life experience, selfish, corporate clones who steal shopping carts and leave them blocking the hallways, let their dogs pee everywhere in the hallways and don't clean it up, throw garbage on the floor, don't wear masks, don't talk to one another, sit by the pool on their phones, and act phony cool like they're still in high-school. Heck, my upstairs neighbor complained about my music on the weekend during the day without introducing themselves and not diplomatically. Point being: gentrifiers tend to be mostly uncool and don't care about anything other than forcing their own bubbles on everyone else.
More power to Austin car clubs. Let the gentrifiers pound salt.
Edit: I would like to move somewhere near cooler people, but I'm probably going to have to grow a social circle to find that. Also, I wonder if more upscale or cheaper housing tends to attract or repel cool peeps.
I live in a working class neighborhood in the DFW area, it's much more friendly than the wealthy complex I was in, in WA
The metroplex has an awesome music scene too!
Tangential (and probably just a perennial old guy complaint), but it seems like people have forgotten how to do this. If you have an issue with something your neighbor is doing, then go talk to them. Don't leave an aggressive note. Don't let it boil over until you're so upset you can't talk to them rationally. Living next to other human beings is a negotiation. You can't make a set of rules that cover every possible scenario and then ask police to enforce them. Just go talk to people!
I have also however, never had a good experience knocking on neighbors doors. If someone is being incredibly inconsiderate, like say blasting music at 1am, then why would they be more considerate if I knocked on their door?
A fully grown adult living in an apartment complex should be able to know that sound travels, they have already made the decision to be inconsiderate. Are they supposed to change their mind because I appeal to them face to face?
In most cases, I'd suggest mitigating this risk through your style of interaction, not your initial choice about how to interact at all. GP was just suggesting a normal human interaction. If "retaliation" is a risk after your initial overture to a neighbor, you have done it very wrong.
If you haven't had to spend the night wondering whether your neighbor was going to barge in and murder you, waiting for the moving truck to arrive in the morning ... Well, I suppose you might not share my priors.
On the other hand, I'm not sure what could have been done to prevent it. My neighbor's list of grievances was largely imaginary. His tales of how he wanted to kill his pets seemed earnest enough to make his personal threats equally disturbing.
I suspect that if you polled the long term residents of the area they would have similar negative perceptions of the car club. It's just that they don't have the power to effect change or don't have the attitude that they can effect change.
Respectfully, you're probably giving yourself too much credit here (and your neighbors not enough). It's almost certainly the case that you (and me and everybody else reading this) has done something that annoyed a neighbor. You either just didn't realize it or you were tired or stressed and slipped up. But the odds are exceedingly good for any of us that we've had our music too loud, or our stomping was bothering the people downstairs, or we parked somewhere that annoyed somebody else.
If you'd react reasonably when called out for any of these behaviors, then give your fellow man the benefit of that doubt.
You hold at least one insurance policy? If so, you understand the rationale in at least one domain.
[0] Many of these activities, like, say, driving a car, are probably orders of magnitude more dangerous than, ahem, talking to your neighbor.
All this leads me to conclude that sometimes calling the police is the right thing to do, even if the likelihood of retaliation is low.
You'd be surprised just how oblivious people are. I lived in an apartment building where a fire escape connected my bedroom window to another window that faced min about 7 feet away. People in that apartment would have parties featuring folks hanging out on the fire escape a few feet from my head and keep me awake. I finally opened the window and said very nicely, "hey guys, any chance you could move inside? I have to catch a bus to work at 7am tomorrow morning?" They were completely shocked that they were even bothering someone else. I never had a problem after that and the party stayed indoors. Not everyone will respond so well, but a surprising number of people don't realize that they're bothering others.
I empathize, esp if you're of the generation (like me) where we've grown accustom to distance in time and space via async messaging.
Having said that, I would respectfully push back: negotiating everyday conflicts of life with others (who are most often strangers) is NOT something we should allow to be overly professionalized. Yes, it's true that some extroverts find this easier, and that's a privilege we don't all have. But we can't pass this to landlords and tenant associations and governments to do, while we stay at a fully-intermediated distance. We need to learn and grow in how we relate to one another, ESPECIALLY now that the distance of the internet is working against us and causing our social muscles to atrophe.
Anyhow, I'm not trying to be argumentative -- I almost feel like I'm pleading here. It will be really bad if we "specialize" in this way. Losing our ability to navigate everyday conflicts with one another, and deferring it to higher powers, that's the worst sort of "vendor lock-in" I could ever imagine for a society.
Fwiw, I am a collectivist who values institutions, so I don't share this from a hyper-individualist perspective that distrusts these actors <3
I had a neighbor who was an out-of-work hot-head who shouted at everyone and had his own posse of low-lifes. The guy BBQed right next to the wooden fence (in violation of fire codes) using absurd amounts of lighter fluid and charcoal that seeped into my unit directly above. I tried asking them to move it but they just ignored me. I tried a second time and then him and his posse surrounded me, mean mugged me, and tried to start a fight. I asked the property management to do something, they tried, and they took out their bad experiences on me passive-aggressively. I finally got out of there because it was a horrible situation.
i always wonder, when I have fantastically social failures like that: how could i tune the knobs to make this go better with this specific type of person, who sees me in this way... like if I did this 10 more times with 10 more hot-heads, I wonder what I'd learn about what he responds better to. I'm sure there are parts of who I am that I can't talk around, but still. And not that I have the nerve to keep putting myself in that situation...!
Anyhow, makes me curious from a distance, but to be clear, I'm not judging that there's anything else you could've done :)
If you're making phone calls for armed response because someone is playing music, the problem might be with you.
If it’s a once in a while thing where they’re celebrating or whatnot and it sounds like they’re unintentionally disturbing others, then it’s probably worth talking to them.
It has nothing to do with violence. The correct move is obviously to not re-engage, personally or by proxy.
> Isn't that the very reason societies develop laws and governments? To not have people using violence to get their way?
Quite the opposite. Laws are enforced exclusively via threat of violence, and the only thing that distinguishes the government from any other leadership organization is a claim to legitimate use of violence.
When I see statements like this I wonder if we experienced the same 2020.
Alright, let's say I have a neighbor playing loud music at 2am. I walk down, ask nicely if they'd turn it down. They ignore me. What then? What am I supposed to do from that point?
I personally am with Asimov: violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. It has little to do with whether you employ the violence/threat yourself, or call a man with a gun over to do it for you.
The correct course of action in almost all circumstances is "do nothing".
There are some good reasons to escalate a situation. I'm not of the belief that a noise disturbance is one of them.
So your real response is: when confronted with someone who refuses to engage with you on the level of a decent human being, just take it. This doesn't seem like the way civilization works to me.
You've edited in a nice little tidbit about "well sometimes you've got to escalate" but failed to provide where that delineation is for you. Loud music isn't it. What about gunshots? What about children screaming loudly? What about someone breaking in to your neighbor's? When is it OK to escalate?
This mislocates the point of escalation. The first point of escalation occurs when you arrive and the resident doesn't say the words "I'm sorry about that" followed immediately by turning the music down. The second more serious point of escalation (if there happens to be one) occurs when the police arrive and the same thing happens. In both cases the epicenter of escalation is within the person who won't turn their music down when lawfully required.
Everyone else has behaved reasonably and within the law and so can't meaningfully be said to have escalated the situation.
I've actually written about this very issue before:
https://sneak.berlin/20200628/the-problem-with-police-in-ame...
A society should be careful not to have too many laws; on an individual level one should understand clearly what it means to want something to be illegal (and what it means to refuse to obey the law, should you find yourself in a situation where you might be tempted to do that).
I never chock up to malice what I can perceive as ignorance. My neighbors who are being loud probably don't know they are being loud (to me) because they have never been in my apartment hearing them.
Wouldn't a better option be to introduce ourselves and invited to go to their place to see how loud it is and calibrate so it doesn't bother them for the day and also the night?
With that said, I still agree that it's worth just talking to them as the first action, in case they are just a nice normal person who doesn't realize how poor the soundproofing is.
Hey, I hope you find the like-minded community that you're looking for. But maybe consider that you could still be yourself without totally writing off everyone who isn't just like you as irredeemably uncool and telling them to pound salt?
I've really met random nicer people when I go out and drink on 6th st who happen to be coming thru town, or random more friendly folks who happen to chat with strangers out when eating/drinking, or when going to shows (before COVID wrecked that) around town by myself.
Look everyone. Look how these tough guys cry when they wet their diapers. These wannabes are nothing. Drive them out. Drive them to the gutter, to the wild, to the sea. Just drive them out.
Why didn't the car show buy up the real estate? They had the same opportunity as their neighbors? Oh yeah. They're illiterate junkie diseased bums. F** 'em.
Before you know it, everyone here on HN will be labeling austinites as “greedy nimby’s”, complaining about being made to feel uncomfortable by acknowledging the homeless problem, and complaining that Austin isn’t exactly like whatever place it is they moved away from to go to Austin while seeking their startup millions.
Don't.
Texas, like many states, never misses an opportunity to trumpet the number of people moving there. Texas, like many states, spends a lot of money in the rest of the US trying to convince people and businesses to move there.
You got what you asked for. You got what you paid for.
If I land a remote job I’m selling my place and moving to San Antonio.