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Comment by olivermarks | Hacker News Reader

A variation of this rinsing out of any local culture is going on in Sacramento County California, where arguably gentrification has resulted in a 2019 autocratic edict that residents are not allowed to work on cars in their homes except fluid changes, with fines if you are found to have professional tools on the premises.

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.

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Why does it seem like people feel the need to make anything they can about race? (Maybe I'm just overly sensitive and it doesn't happen as much as I perceive, to be fair) I don't agree with the law, but literally every race owns vehicles. Why complicate the issue with racism if there doesn't need to be any complication? Seems like a clear cut issue that people can unite over that instead is being made into a minority only issue for no reason.

>but literally every race owns vehicles.

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...

Because race is deeply entwined with culture, and culture is in everything.

Every culture owns cars, but not every subculture does things with cars that require you to do most of the work yourself in your driveway.

It’s like Ehrlichman’s famous quote: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.“

kind of a tricky topic. a lot of modifications people make to their vehicles are not legal to begin with (emissions, noise, "stancing"), and a lot of that is for legitimate safety reasons. especially with tunes, people know this and flash their ECU back to stock before going in for state emissions tests. but anyways, there is a subset of white people that also enjoy modding their cars or simply doing the routine maintenance themselves. there is certainly a stereotype about a certain kind of white person that has multiple non-functional cars rusting away on their front lawn.

all of this is not to say that that particular law at that particular place and time wasn't racially motivated.

You mean american culture.

There are an incredible number of topics that are deeply entwined with culture and issues of many kinds, that doesn't mean it's useful to turn a local law concerning garage mechanics into something about race. Would allowing only minorities to work on their vehicles at home solve the problem? It seems obvious (to me, at least) that it wouldn't, so why would race need to be brought into the equation when it's so much easier to communicate about the core issue rather than discuss things in the context of a more complex issue of race and equality?

The likelihood that it disproportionately hurts members of a certain race wouldn't matter if the issue was solved in a way that benefits everyone.

> Would allowing only minorities to work on their vehicles at home solve the problem?

This is a strawman - nobody is asking for this!

> why would race need to be brought into the equation when it's so much easier to communicate about the core issue rather than discuss things in the context of a more complex issue of race and equality?

Let's look at literacy tests for voters. These are similar as you can absolutely construct a plausible argument for them that never mentions race at all - "We just want to make sure that people voting actually understand what they're voting for". And there were likely advocates for these laws who believed that! And literacy tests of course affected more than just African Americans. But - the near universal consensus among historians was that the primary intent was to suppress black votes.

Not discussing race when discussing voter literacy tests is avoiding the crux of the actual issue. If you only engage with voter tests on the "actually understand what they're voting for" level you're avoiding the much more important conversation of whether this law is passed in good faith.

> The likelihood that it disproportionately hurts members of a certain race wouldn't matter if the issue was solved in a way that benefits everyone.

And therein lies the rub - how can it be solved in a way that benefits everyone? If there was a universal benefit solution for every problem politics would be easy! In the case of literacy tests there is no such solution - there was nothing that you could give the advocates for suppression policies that would make them happy that wouldn't come at the expense of minorities. In this case? Hard to say, but I really doubt there's an amicable solution.

It sounds like you are just angry at the mere mention of race.

Like we should just go through life pretending like race plays absolutely no factor in any law, human interaction, or bias unless someone says the "n" word or something.

Given our history as a country that seems INCREDIBLY foolish.

I don't intend to portray anger as I couldn't be farther from angry. I just think solutions are easier to find when you tackle problems directly rather than assume malice exists lurking in the shadows every time a situation presents itself. The world isn't angry, nor is it racist, nor is it violent. The world is full of complexity and misunderstanding far more than it's full of malice. If you go looking for malice with the assumption it exists all over the place, you'll have no trouble confirming your bias just as someone might believe rather emotionless writings portray anger if they go into a discussion believing anyone with differing values must only hold to those values emotionally.

"The world isn't angry, nor is it racist, nor is it violent"

...we clearly don't live in the same world.

look at any objective statistical trends worldwide and you'd likely come to the same conclusions I've come to.

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.

So because something is declining...that means it doesn't exist.

What a WONDERFUL world you live in!

Most of that subculture divide is on type of car rather than rather they work on it in the first place. Trust me, there are plenty of car clubs consisting 90% of white boomers showing off their pristine garage queen 1960s muscle cars who would also be inconvenienced by that law.

And there are lots of people who weren’t hippies who smoked marijuana. And voter intelligence tests affected people who weren’t minorities. But that doesn’t mean the laws in question were not passed with race in mind, at least for many of those pushing for them.

Are most people working on cars at their home doing it because they're wanting to do modifications most shops won't do, or because they're trying to save the few hundred dollars an hour in labor charges to do some things that take a few minutes of reading and an understanding of lefty-loosey righty-tighty?

A few of my friends and myself tend to do most of the maintenance on our cars and motorcycles by ourselves. If I had to pay for the labor in my car it would have been "totaled" a long time ago. But it still keeps running 20 years and nearly 200kmi with a new water pump, new timing belt, new main belt, new suspension, brake rotor and pad replacements, brake fluid flushes, EGR cleanout, oil pan resealing, power steering hose replacement, transmission fluid flushes, stereo replacement, power window motor replacements, and a few other things.

Most of these parts over the years have been relatively cheap, but getting a shop to do the change would have been expensive as hell. I shopped around to get the struts replaced recently. Most shops quoted me over $1k for the replacement. _Good_ replacement strut/coil/spring/mount assemblies were $60/ea from reputable sources online. So for a couple of hours of my own time, knowing how to unscrew and screw in some bolts properly (torqued to spec), and $240 in parts I had a new suspension. So taking the low end of ~$1k in estimates I got, I pretty much paid myself $380/hr to do the work.

And don't even get me started on motorcycle maintenance. If it were illegal for me to work on my own bike at home I probably wouldn't be able to afford the bike. Parts are stupid cheap but labor costs on motorcycles are astronomical considering its usually easier to work on a bike than a car.

Not everyone working on a car in their driveway are doing something shady or illegal.

If one drives down Alameda street in SF you'll see a lot of people trying to stave off a repair bill they can't afford with amateur shop night.

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.

Yeah, and IMO if someone is running an auto shop out of their garage it would be better to go after that with things like licensing or zone enforcement for using their house as a commercial property. The arguments for laws like banning repair of vehicles on residential properties seems like trying to make something that's already illegal extra illegal. Ding the people for illegal modifications or running an unlicensed/improperly zoned commercial operation, don't screw over the people just trying to save a few bucks by using their own labor.

The US has a long dark history of enacting laws that seem "fair" to those (whites) who sponsored it, but in reality are meant to target a specific minority population. Jim Crow is a major example. Many of the laws never particularly singled out blacks in the actual text, but things like poll taxes and literacy tests were used because of the disproprtionate impact they would have on that community.

While I agree that race has been discussed a lot in the past few years, especially on places like NPR or Sam Harris's podcast or in politics, the reality is: poor people are often minorities, and poor people have to do more of their own car repairs than rich people. In general, if laws are related to socioeconomic status, they are also related to race indirectly.

> Why does it seem like people feel the need to make anything they can about race?

Because there is no other reasonable, understandable reason to ban "working on your own car on your own property". Unless it disproportionally hits certain races--which would at least help explain the root motivation of the law.

Are you saying that you think the people who pushed this law had no opinion whatsoever on the activity itself, but just wanted black and latino people to suffer through an arbitrary ban?

It seems much more reasonable to guess that neighbors were annoyed by the activity itself and passed a nimby law because they're selfish.

Not having thought of any explanations is not the same thing as there being no explanations... someone should ask the people living in the community how that law got support.

Take this article for example.

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.

@toolz Speaking as someone who works on cars at a build level a lot I'm highly aware many motorsports are healthily cross cultural. I normally avoid discussion of gender, sexuality and race but in this case the overly vague Sacramento County law could be ignored on one street and strictly enforced on the next. You then get into zoning and class issues which are going to unfairly penalize certain people.

It's useful law to stop irresponsible people who are running engines and impact wrenches all day in a residential neighborhood but legally is a dangerous catch all that could ruin a lot of people's car hobbyist lives

Oh, this again.

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.

Making laws that target personal liberties in the hopes that they will be selectively applied does not increase justice.

I'm sorry but this is difficult to believe. The site says that it's unlawful to do "minor vehicle repair [...] Using tools not normally found in a residence". If it was just a zoning law, why does it have to include that stipulation? I've seen plenty of people who own tools "not normally found in a residence". It's hard to guess exactly what the authors' intentions were, but it wouldn't be unreasonable for someone to conclude that there were other motives besides just cracking down on illegal auto shops.

Well, the law will be two years old soon. There's one local news article about it where the county's PIO clarified the county's intention [1]. Aside from that, alllllll of these homeowners innocently working on their cars in their own garages and yards around the county and getting hit with hundreds and hundreds of dollars in fines have resulted in... exactly zero other local news coverage that I can find.

Every other search result about this thing is some motoring site where the internet commenters are absolutely certain that this is yet another example of draconian liberal legislative overreach and just nobody can really do anything on their own property anymore and it's all just so unfair...

Again, I'm expressly not defending the law as it's written, but if the letter of every bad law was to be applied equally to everyone in the same instant, there would not be a single free person anywhere in the country. Like all the others, this one is being applied selectively.

[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...

> Well, the law will be two years old soon. There's one local news article about it where the county's PIO clarified the county's intention [1]. Aside from that, alllllll of these homeowners innocently working on their cars in their own garages and yards around the county and getting hit with hundreds and hundreds of dollars in fines have resulted in... exactly zero other local news coverage that I can find.

Big cities with traffic problem enact this kind of laws to discourage personal car ownership. Sure, just because now it's not actively reported as enforced doesn't mean it won't be in the future, and it wouldn't be the first time where the enactment and the enforcement of a low separated in time to make the pill easier to swallow.

Exactly. If they have to clarify it in some press release, then they should be amending the ordinance so that it is clear.

Unfortunately, the system is lazy. Politicians don't bother to amend laws when these issues arises, police can use their "professional discretion" to enforce or not enforce a law (which leads to unequal enforcement), and the courts tend to "interpret" laws in ways that don't make sense (partially because of the politicians I mentioned earlier, but also a misapplication of statutory construction rules and lenity).

The idea that giving the authorities the ability to enforce selectively on whom they like is a good thing is honestly bizarre to read. It's the classic preserve of biased prosecution.

EDIT for response since I'm rate-limited. I interpreted the following section:

> Again, I'm expressly not defending the law as it's written, but if the letter of every bad law was to be applied equally to everyone in the same instant, there would not be a single free person anywhere in the country. Like all the others, this one is being applied selectively.

as something akin to "I think the law isn't great, but if any law were applied fairly, we would all be in jail. Fortunately most laws aren't applied fairly"

But I can understand if that was a misinterpretation.

Yeah, I disagree completely with whoever wrote that this was "a good thing". Who was that, anyway?

Not saying this is a good or bad thing, but one way to make laws not be selective is to have mandatory enforcement and mandatory sentencing required for every law. If the law could be interpreted to apply to a situation, then it does apply to a situation in this model. Laws would be very carefully written under this and extremely well specified. With this you could be much more sure that a law is applied as written, whereas at the moment you have to continually look at the results of cases and can't see when people are let off the hook because someone in an authority position is well disposed to the person because they are friends with them or for other reasons. This can happen before a case goes to trial or during the trial.

It's basically unenforceable, if the general public can buy the tools.

The general public can buy all of the equipment and tools they need to open up an unlicensed hair salon in their garage. That doesn't make laws against it unenforceable.

> a cudgel against unlicensed repair shops

A terrible thing in itself.

I dont think this is as strong defense of that law as you think. It still makes fixing car or geeking on car punisheable. It still is absurd limitation of what I would expect to be a freedom.

This is a very, very, very naive take.

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.

Why not just require that a car being worked on is registered to an owner at the address?

edit: All good points in response. I'm convinced that there is no point in trying to tune the wording of a bad law.

Because working on a family members or friends car isn’t the same thing as running an unlicensed repair shop.

Because I did oil changes at my grandparents house when I was younger. I didn't live there, but there was space, tooling, help, breakfast, and an excuse to visit afterwards.

"Politicians are idiots, the law should be X" is a trope, but finding a wording that doesn't run afoul of edge cases is very, very, difficult, even before lobbying and perverse incentives make things worse. Note I'm not saying this law was made in good faith, but starting an argument from an assumption of ignorance instead of malice seems more likely to change people's opinion in your favour.

Because "unlicensed shops" is a red herring. They're trying to make life hard on the guy that owns a bunch of beater cars and turns his own wrenches. They're basically saying you have to be rich enough to do it indoors and dodge enforcement or you should GTFO because we don't want you here.

Your defense is a combination of “what about” other poorly written laws and “but it’s not enforced”. I don’t have enough time this morning to explain why these are dangerous and ignorant arguments...

Are you saying that the law is specifically designed to be selectively applied, with the enforcement authorities more or less arbitrarily deciding what does and what doesn't warrant a crackdown?

But that's exactly the kind of law that tends to be enforced in ways that manifest various majority biases in society.

"but there hasn't been a sweep of the neighborhoods with officers asking to look inside of your garage for uncommon tools."

So now we have another set of laws that can be selectively used against some people, usually against people with little money to defend themselves. When I moved to LA it was the same with marijuana laws. Cops were raiding poor neighborhoods for marijuana while you could walk in almost any well off neighborhood and smell the smoke from far away. But these neighborhoods never got raided.

A law should either get enforced or it should be revoked.

Do white people not work on their cars? The most obnoxious (and awesome) cars I’ve lived next to were owned by white people. There is definitely a latino car culture where I live but I’ve been other places where it’s all old white dudes. Seriously wtf Sacramento?

>Do white people not work on their cars?

Rich (mostly) white people who want these kinds of laws and draft them on behalf of their constituents don't.

This is basically a blue collar vs white collar thing.

The people who are really rich don't care either. Their houses are more than the minimum setback apart and they can afford fences if they don't wanna look at something and they can afford big garages and barns to work in so as not to annoy their neighbors to the point of building fences.

Caring about what your neighbors do is solidly the purview of upper middle class busybodies.

I live in a neighborhood and one guy has 6 cars in different states of repair and a boat on his property. Nice guy but I feel for his neighbors. Trailers and fish houses are not uncommon either but not permanent. We have ordinances against it but they aren't really enforced. We went from $200k houses to $400k houses so I expect things to change. I want the sidewalks fixed etc.. I want nice property values. 95% of the neighbors keep things nice.

Why do cars on his property bother you?

6 of them, in violation of city ordinances. Two on the grass. We all agreed to the rules.

you already established it was illegal. is that the only reason it bothers you, or is there something else?

What about what?

I think the question is: Why is there an ordinance against this? What is morally wrong with having vehicles on one's own property? How does it affect the neighbors? If the only answer is "well it reduces property values," well, there are tons of things that also reduce property values that are not illegal. That is not a good reason to have a city ordinance against something.

>Why is there an ordinance?

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.

Ordinances restrict meth labs too.

Meth labs explode every now and then, so that actually makes sense.

> We all agreed to the rules.

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?

Let me rephrase that. Do you support the ordinances in question? If so, why?

I think they bring this up because race issues are the Achilles heel of the bourgeoisie. Tell the 2021 bourgeois that he hates dirty working class people working on their satanic internal combustion engines and he will agree with you readily. Tell him he's r*cist for doing it, and he'll cry and moan and do whatever you want to shuck the charge.

"Do white people not work on their cars? "

Halfways well off people don't work on their cars anymore or if they work on cars they are expensive old cars. None of the young people at my company know anything about cars.

> residents are not allowed to work on cars in their homes except fluid changes, with fines if you are found to have professional tools on the premises.

When I see ordinances like this I see a 1A violation waiting to happen. I assume the council has worded it in a way that doesn't draw scrutiny or the affected don't have the resources to have it taken to court.

One of the places I lived added an ordinance banning work trucks. My neighbor works out of his truck and would get fined and towed continuously. He threatened to sue and I think the compromise they reached was he had to remove the company vinyl signs. I believe he changed it to magnet stickers that he installs and removes daily.

And it was basically the same thing; working class apartments slowly gentrified and all sorts of new rules were put in place.

Wow one of my life goals is to have a house with a proper workshop. Guess that won’t happen in Sacramento.

Sounds like a place in need of “right to repair”

https://code-enforcement.saccounty.net/Programs/Pages/AutoRe...

These rules are draconian. "[Prohibited if conducted] outside a fully enclosed garage or accessory structure and resulting in the vehicle being inoperable for a period in excess of 24 hours."

On the other hand, if you're rich enough to live there, you're probably rich enough to have a large enough enclosure where you can skirt the law anyway.

It's even worse than that. Major repairs are prohibited even in a fully enclosed garage.

Minor repairs are prohibited in a great many cases as well.

If I use a torque wrench to reinstall my wheels (even in a garage), I'm in violation. If I change the brakes on a friend's or girlfriend's car (even in a garage), I'm in violation. If I plug a flat tire for a neighbor or a passing motorist in my garage, I'm in violation. If I start a brake change in the driveway on Sunday morning and need a part from the parts store that I get and install on Monday, I'm in violation. I've certainly done all of those things and am not seen as a "bad neighbor".

LOL. I remember a curbside valve job I did fifty years ago after I blew a head gasket. I think I had the hood up a total of four hours - two hours remove, two hours replace.

Chevy V-8s are easy and there were no emission controls in those days to clutter things up.

No one said a word.

Seriously, how does any and all of this(along with the whole idea of HOAs) mesh at all with the "land of the free" idea that Americans are constantly broadcasting to the world. It's meant to be the most "free" country in the world and yet so many people are happy to live in communities that restrict them severely in what they can do with their own property. How is the response to any of this anything other than "mind your own damn business?"

keep in mind we are talking about a city in california. the "mind your own damn business" crowd has mostly self-sorted elsewhere.

The freedom isn't evenly distributed.

HOAs are at least voluntary and hyper-local associations. I hope to never live in housing covered by an HOA (and I can avoid it), but I support other people who willingly or actively prefer to live under those arrangements.

Restrictions that an HOA might adopt can be more carefully tailored to the residents there than a city-wide ban on using tools not commonly found in a residence on a car. (Imagine if this law applied to electronics repair. "Sorry, most people don’t have a Pentalobe screwdriver, so no Apple portable repairs for you; take it to a shop like a good little consumer!")

Stupid question and probably tangential at this point, but: Torque wrenches aren't commonly found in people's homes?

what the actual fuck. as someone who grew up in metro detroit this disgusts me.

I don't know Sac's demographics for people who work on cars but I've never associated being a car nerd (someone who works on their car(s)) as a more hispanic/black thing. In fact my stereotype is the "white trash" (used as a shortcut for the description, not a judgement) cars parked on the lawn. My brother-in-law, in LA, white, has had 10 cars on their property, all beaters, he works on all of them.

Are you sure home car maintenance isn't more associated with poverty than race?

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