The man who bought Pine Bluff, Arkansas (2022)
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* What exactly was his plan for the building? I don't see anything coherent. One moment it's a makerspace, another it's a music warehouse, then it's a science museum. Was there a coherent plan? $281k is a lot of money to spend with no real plan.
* The city allegedly giving him grief. I'm still not sure if this was preventable or not considering the bit about how he failed to submit building plans. If your plan is to own a significant chunk of this city, you're going to have to play better politics than repeatedly being asked to leave at public functions. Palm-greasing would be a far better strategy than righteous anger. Maybe a fraction of that $900k could've opened a nice park they always wanted. Maybe the PD needs a new bearcat. Something.
* Living in a tent on the lot instead of hiring security. This bit was straight out of some episode of a sitcom. This is a depressed flyover country town. If you couldn't afford security then you couldn't afford the building. Again, a good chunk of that $900k would cover round-the-clock security for at least a year. Righteous indignation over the crime isn't an actual cost-cutting measure.
* The land is cheap for a reason. The way a town gets revitalised is external value flows in. How would the makerspace-warehouse-museum thing bring that value into the city? Even if all this did pan out, I'd predict an entirely new problem he'd have, which is no willing customers outside of a 200 mile radius.
I don't get why people make cockeyed "investments" like these when the S&P 500 is sitting right there at a nice 8% a year. No bums, no politics, no thinking it through at all really. Just buy it and don't touch it. If your idea can't do better than that intersection of earnings and effort, don't bother with it.
But yeah, the total lack of security is astonishing, you'd think he could afford to hire a security guard: the main theft happened after he got the windfall and could easily have paid for it.
He bought 74 parcels of land in the town, including a house which he moved into, for around $140k.
And there are benefits to those houses. He could, for example, pick nicer ones and hire people for security and give them free rent in a house as part of their job. With what he paid, he could even give them a "rent to own" mortgage!
He could include the house, and even just minimum wage. Minimum wage is a livable wage in a very, very economically depressed area (look at what housing costs here!), but at the same time, minimum wage + free housing or rent to own housing is a great wage.
He could start a hacker hostel. Those houses give loads of opportunity.
He just needs to stabilize things a bit. But security would do that. Especially if security = 20 people. He just needs a real business plan, or at least to move towards something.
Another way to look at it is, imagine if he used the house to hire security, maintenance people, groundskeepers, cleaning personelle/janitors, and on and on.
Now, he's a major employer in the area.
Now, those left that are honest? Are actively fighting to protect their jobs!
Where I live, the city is legally bound to seize and then auction off houses for unpaid property tax.
There are even interesting things, such a legally mandated grace periods, and the original owner can buy back up to one year after auction.
And this sure sounds like a place where property taxes might default.
- Towns don't "turn around" spontaneously.
- people don't usually gamble every dollar they have
That's why this gentleman is a great object of curiosity. He's the perfect story of sheltered, with money, hitting reality and being flummoxed.
Then after discovering that he is a far above average target, and getting a windfall and bringing all his gear and customer's property to the site, he gets no security?
Definitely seems to be a few cards short of a deck and have more money than sense. I hope he doesn't get himself or his family killed if one of those robberies goes bad.
> “It'd be freaking fantastic to own a hotel, and like, have rooftop parties and turn the whole top floor into a penthouse for me. You know? Like, that's, like, how would I not want to do that?
Dude? Who the fuck are you going to be partying with? The town is full of criminals who steal from you. A makerspace? Where are the makers? An art studio? Where are the artists? Your town is "MAGA, drugs and crime" as an HNer put it in the previous article about this saga. Where is all of this culture going to magically come from, besides your imagination?
This guy seems like the true "If You Build It They Will Come" believer, but he's not even building anything. And even if he does Build It, the place seems like too much of a shithole for anyone to actually come.
Also, if you research the town, it looks like a big casino was just built there, at the cost of $350M. Which would suggest that the RE investments this guy made might just pay out, and that the town leadership was in fact maliciously trying to get rid of him (so that someone else would profit from the appeciation).
Yep, according to Wikipedia, you're absolutely right. Strike the "MAGA" part from my comment!
But, plopping a casino into an already-crappy town is not going to make it less crappy.
And, to be fair, if his plan was to help the city, plopping a makerspace or art studio, or a science museum isn't going to move the crappiness needle either. There's no silver bullet building that fixes poverty and misery. It's not like SimCity where you sprinkle your city with evenly spaced bonus-providing buildings and suddenly all your metrics start going up.
If his plan wasn't to help the city, but to arbitrage the low property values into a profitable business, then he should have bought strip mall properties and installed the usual turnkey check cashing stores, liquor stores, payday lenders, and so on. Not easy businesses, but at least they are understandable to the city and have a chance at being profitable.
If his plan was to just speculate on real estate and hope that some miracle happens that raises property values, that's just high stakes gambling. Good for him if it pays off and he can flip these properties to another sucker for a profit.
If it wasn't any of these, then honestly I don't get what his plan was. I'm going to buy a bunch of random real estate in a dilapidated city and... then... do what? Sit there getting robbed every time you move anything of value into those properties?
Though in terms of openness to, say, LGBTQ, it definitely isn't going to be the most welcoming place.
https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/exit-polls/president/natio...
That is a serious question - what is their thinking or feeling that drives them to this?
Maybe it's just because I don't live in a depressed area like this, but I simply don't understand the city's motivation for being a pain in the ass here. I mean, pretend you're the mayor or city council of this town. Industry has left. The jobs have left. Your schools suck. The state and country is ignoring you. Your citizens are spiraling into poverty, drugs, and crime. A wacky entrepreneur moves in, and would like to take a shot at revitalization.
And you're worried about architectural drawings and building codes?????
Even if the guy is has weird ideas, why would you make it your job to get up his ass when he appears to at least be trying to do something positive?
It's hinted in the article that the local government has its own (lame) revitalization plans, which will also not work, and sees this guy as competition. So silly. No wonder it sucks living in these hopeless places.
The most important reason why building codes exist is for safety. The buildings have been abandoned for some time and are likely in deep disrepair. It seems the city wants to know that if their children go to the science museum, it won't collapse or burn down. This guy is not an architect or engineer, and hasn't even hired one. If the city had building codes but didn't enforce them, and some tragedy happened, they might even be liable legally. They would definitely be liable politically if a big tragedy happened.
Also—like other people have said, if the city are assholes, that sucks, but he’s still going to be fighting a steeper uphill battle on his plans and investments without them behind him—suck it up and learn to work with them or it’s going to be that much harder to not only get started on his current plans, but also his longer term plans of revitalization.
Maybe a great piece of software can be built as a single person working alone, fighting the odds and pissing people off, but I can’t see that approach working for building a town full of people.
IMO this is not a case of a nimby board standing in the way of an eccentric trying to innovate. The problem is that he has made himself known to this board as an unserious crank who does not show the board respect for their processes. He has been approved for several different uses at the site and failed to follow through on any of them. He demands special permissions while actively campaigning against their plans. If he could show a good faith effort to help the town build upon what the electeds are doing he might have a fighting chance, but he instead goes around talking shit about them anywhere he can.
For a less hypothetical scenario, its not hard to see the parallels with another wacky entrepreneur and a submarine that eschewed traditional safety concerns
Building codes, like several other categories of regulations that can at times feel oppressive or arbitrary, tend to be written in the blood of accident victims. See, for example the ghost ship fire in my recent memory of why they are important even if (especially if) you are using an under utilized space
Another notable quote is Euclid v. Ambler, where SCOTUS legalized the US zoning system and in their opinion said it was good to ban apartment buildings because they were "parasites".
Of course, this is partly about not liking poor people as well as minorities, but if you leave it in place this long it eventually becomes a ban on your own children living in the same state as you.
These things were introduced at the same time as racial convenants (where a developer would construct a neighborhood and require its houses to only ever be sold to white people), and mostly for the same reason; they merely weren't repealed when that one was. For the racial details, see the book "The Color of Law".
I do think the article makes him a bit overly sympathetic and glosses over some of his eccentricities. Like the fact that he seems to really think he can build a nuclear fusion reactor from an old MRI machine and I guess all of the Nem saga: https://whoispontifier.wordpress.com/2018/05/14/the-journey-...
I still haven’t decided if all this is or isn’t some sort of elaborate performance art, but I appreciate the effort in any case. And even though I think he’s probably a few cards short of a deck, you do kind of root for him in the end.
I'm rooting for him too. He doesn't have all the qualities of a classic protagonist, yet I find myself hoping that he succeeds in his madcap endeavors. I admire his grit: I would have not had his fortitude in the face of violent threats nor withstand the constant frustration.
Fusion, on the other hand, requires you to get center-of-sun temperatures and pressures going on to work properly. That usually requires either extremely difficult engineering processes or a fission bomb (and more precise engineering calculations but they're actually reasonably solvable).
* I am eliding over the fact that building a Farnsworth fusor is still a challenge, but less of a challenge than sourcing, purifying, and enriching uranium certainly.
Nuclear fission includes radiative decay, what makes a nuclear reactor rather than a bomb or pile of rock is becoming self sustaining where the reaction is driving the reaction. Fusor’s don’t get there, ITER will as the energy from fusion is driving more fusion reactions.
It’s the difference between rotting wood and a fire.
At least not a useful fusion reactor.
It is unusual that someone should hoard real estate and it is interesting to see the circumstances of how this happened but otherwise it is a pretty standard case.
Note how from the interviews he gets pleasure in obtaining new properties and yet has no idea what to do with them. Note he does not spend the money required to even get an architectural drawing made and yet he spends money on obtaining more and more properties.
Or the fact that he has decided not to hire security but to guard his properties by himself, which would make it much more convenient if he has fewer properties not more. But he still keeps buying more. At this point a smart thief can get a map of his properties helpfully provided on the internet, find out where he is and attack any one of his other forty something properties.
Note how in the end of the interview when he is supposed to say some inspiring words of his progress or near term plans, he does not talk about what he is going to do with the warehouse but fantasizes with great excitement about buying yet another abandoned property, a hotel.
By the way I fully sympathize with the city officials. No city will approve any building project that does not come with fully compliant drawings signed and stamped by a licensed civil engineer and/or architect (depending on the project). Nor should they. It is their job to keep the community safe and habitable.
It is kind of funny they are stealing his ideas, but that also might be understandable. They might be good ideas, after all. Here you have a town that is looking for ways to revitalize itself with little money, and here comes a young techie guy from California with what seem to be some very good ideas and some money. There probably was some excitement in city hall when this guy first submitted his plans. But then they slowly realize that this is a sad disturbed individual that is unlikely to ever accomplish anything and will not spend money on anything other than acquiring abandoned real estate.
But the town keeps deteriorating, they have to do something, and his ideas do seem pretty cheap. So they decide lets try them out ourselves. Cities do not like to own businesses. The officials cannot take outsize profits for themselves but are on the hook for any screwups. So I am sure they would have much preferred if someone else was running these things, but they simply knew that this guy was not going to get it done.
So yeah, this is an interesting case of hoarding, but that is about it. I urge Mr. Fenley to consult a psychiatrist.
> Ants, flies, termites, cockroaches, mice, rats, mosquitoes, thieves...
> They all want what you have, and make life miserable.
> Will I ever have peace? I'm so tired of everything, and don't see an end to it.
There's a very simple solution to this problem my dude...
is the far more entertaining read.
I feel a bit bad, because John Fenley is among us here on HN. But I think they also surface that John, you really need to get out of Pine Bluff and reevaluate these pie-in-the-sky ideas.
thank you for sharing!
I'm not sure how he got his money, but what he is trying to do with it doesn't sound awful. He might be bad at business - it seems like that's the idea here - but a person like John, from what I can tell, is a kind of protagonist.
He wants to build his crazy ideas that seem on their face not all together sound. And he puts a ton of effort into making it happen. These ideas are meant to improve the world in some way through the market forces as he can tell. I wish him the best for it.
It seems like there is a big culture of cynicism towards people trying to improve things through action and not words. Underlying it is the assumption of negative externalities. But I think we lost sight of something here. All actions have the possibility of some negative externalities, but humanity got to where it is because of a lot of people doing their best to improve things.
The instinct to make potshots from the sidelines at the guys playing the game sucks.
Real life fails much more spectacularly and frequently.
But it also has an infinitely larger chance of effecting actual change.
Edit:
>> He’d had enough. Fenley began open-carrying a weapon at all times and holding any would-be thieves at gunpoint.
This is semi-rural Arkansas.
A state ranked 47/50 [0] in per capita income.
It may require more than holding people at gunpoint, unfortunately enough.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_terr...
Unfortunately, he is living off a 6 figure sum he got from stock years ago. He is rapidly burning it to 0 by buying unprofitable real estate. Instead of proving out ideas on a small scale, and scaling up from there, he thinks if he just tries for a home run, he can eventually do it. But he has multiple kids that he isn't seeing when he's in Pine Bluff most of the time. It's obvious that he's burning through his savings and will go bankrupt if he doesn't change course sooner. The nuclear reactor or mayor of Pine Bluff moonshots are never going to pan out.
If he loses all his money, oh well, sorry ex-wife I've got nothing.
If he wins big, he makes a ton of money, but paying out the settlement will proportionally feel like nothing.
He tweets pretty frequently about the on-going drama
I hope for his sake this is all a performance art but but I doubt it.
https://twitter.com/pontifier/status/1609493285675859973?s=2...
A security guard is going to be looking out for their own safety and well-being before any property they're guarding. What do you think is gonna happen if armed criminals show up against a lone guard being paid $35 a night...?
This makes sense. The legal minimum wage is $11/hr, which multiplied by 12 hours comes out to thirty five dollars
Luckily, the judge didn’t mind. /s
(metaphorical you, and this is more in response to chucksmash above)
My understanding of minimum wage is on the (US) federal level, where in addition to the standard exceptions that folks know (servers, farmworkers, etc), small enough companies or companies that don't engage in interstate commerce are also exempt from paying the minimum wage.
I wonder if people just don't like what I wrote and downvoted ab irato, if this came across as contrarían and was downvoted for vibes, or if state minimum wage laws change the fact pattern and I'm wrong in my understanding. If I'm wrong I'd like to be corrected.
P.S. since I hate to leave something incorrect: servers actually ARE supposed to get federal minimum wage from their employer if their tips don't cover the difference between the $2.xx they get paid and the federal minimum wage.
Just set up shop at a rural hospital and pressure kids with sick parents into cheap labor. Charge them room and board to recoup the minimum hourly wage. Easy peasy lemon squeezey.
I guess $11 goes really far in Russia these days.
If you roll in a $5K welder or roll of copper, your guards are going to screw you.
What they certainly won’t do is threaten the family of your armed guards, or bribe your guards, or sabotage the vehicles of your armed guards until they don’t show up no more, or learn the schedule of your armed guards and sneak around them.
Or you know, lay low and do easier things until you stop paying guards and come back then.
The modern western criminal justice system only really works when thieves and killers know what they are doing is wrong, but do it anyway. What you have in places like Pine Bluff is more like barbarians sacking Rome. They don’t think it’s wrong but do it anyway, they do it because they believe that it’s right. It’s an antique problem that calls for an antique solution.
I don’t want to see him fail but since I’ve suppressed this aspect in myself I am kind of seeking reassurance of my own decisions. If he succeeds then that may suggest that I have been making the wrong choices in life. I wouldn’t begrudge him for his success and instead I would use it to try to recalibrate my own decisions.
I really hope that his analogy to 1980s NYC works out. It's easy to give up when there's so much cultural and institutional inertia, but this guy seems to have a pretty deep well of motivation. I hope he hangs in there.
Just goes to show that rule of law and strong private property rights are necessary conditions to any level of wealth-building.
The reason the city wants architectural drawings and probably an engineer to be involved is the same too. Spoiler alert: the building collapses into rubble at the end of the episode.
For awhile they were selling houses in Detroit for something like $100 - but all the articles about it didn’t mention the $10k+ in delinquent tax liens on the properties, or the $100k+ in required improvements to make the property even basically habitable.
Or that you’d likely get shot attempting to live there, unless you had some very specific skills.
But when you get down to the "How?" it quickly becomes apparent that the inertia is strong and the odds of success are extremely low.
Still, it's a fun daydream.
Maybe some war dogs.
- Satoshi Island [1]
- Seasteading [2]
- California Forever [3]
[1] https://www.satoshi-island.com/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seasteading_Institute
[3] https://gizmodo.com/tech-billionaires-project-to-build-a-new...
[0] https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/nctr-location-facilities-servi...
[1] https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2023/aug/30/monkeys-gone...
The article you linked does not talk about missing primates. They were doing experiments on monkeys. Activist put pressure on them to stop and they did stop. Then they rehomed the monkeys to a sanctuary.
They are “missing” in as much as the monkeys are no longer there, but everyone knows where the monkeys have gone and why the monkeys have gone. The article you linked itself explains this.
>arkansas
yea
If he is posting, I sincerely hope he's doing it through the security-from-state of some anonymized internet access. Chances are he's just dead though.
While he's engaged in a completely unreasonable adventure, It's sad to see how accepting & cynical we are of the hallowing out and degradation of the US.
[1] https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2022/08/17/meet-a-man-who...
Certain parts of the US. It’s a big country, it might not be reasonable for it to all be doing well, especially with an overall older and older population with productive segments of the population agglomerating to smaller regions.
It is disappointing that people are socioeconomically swept away by the tide, but I think all across America since its inception has been a place of ebb and flow. A nation of boom towns and ghost towns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
You saw the same the same thing when Jacob Zuma was jailed for corruption. They had massive riots in his support. They had massive pro-, not anti-corruption riots.
as a person in real estate, looking through pontifiers twitter feed is like looking back at my own life. most people know that there is a homeless problem. but what many people dont realize is that basically everywhere in the united states there are people who wander around at night looking for stuff to steal. they poke around everywhere but actually do not physically break in most of the time. people in liberal areas are familiar with window breaking and break and enter but everywhere else there is just this omnipresence of vagrants who commit smaller crimes. they are just really annoying and make the neighborhood seem more trashy than it really is. these people are all fit and ready to work. the cops wont arrest them. nobody really bothers them. i think the reason they exist is because people are shittier now and dont feel any urge to fix the societal problems that they see around them. there are videos on pontifiers twitter where he confronts them and they are totally without shame. they arent afraid of being caught. i think something similar happened in the 80s and people got super fed up and then NY started stop and frisk and other things. we need another one of those.
as for the actual purchase of the warehouse and other properties, the risk isnt so bad when you take into account the relatively small amounts of money that are actually on the table here. as far as i know, hes making these purchases in cash. i would say that theres a good chance he will pull through and be able to use what hes learned to start making a real difference in this community and others. by far the most concerning part of this story is the city not cooperating. biggest road block by far.
> “The Overconfident Optimist and His Ill-Advised DIY Project.”
This is what I mean. The article just started and he's defining his conclusion for all readers.
Then, he compares Fenley to a "Child-destroying slackline" (which apparently never actually hurt anyone?). Fenley bought some property and tried to artistic type stuff. It is really slimy to compare him to such a horrible thing as hurting a child. That linked tweet is another "we know better" type of guy who's telling someone else how wrong they are. Yeah, doing risky stuff is risky, and I definitely don't think kids should (or would) be allowed to ride that thing, but I think they'd figure it out real quick (possibly after the creator died testing it).
This is really a cultural thing - puritan types freaking HATE how unplanned, disorganized, and free/careless other cultural groups are in the US (i.e. appalachian/borderer people). So reading this as straight up cultural mockery/status management/ridicule makes it clear. Its basically equivalent to a 19th century "lets go to other countries and laugh at people's behavior" type of travelogue by northeast USA "know better than you" types criticizing other cultural groups for the behavior they don't like (monster trucks, bbq, hotdog eating competitions, basically anything that's just not done in the uptight north-east USA)
Also: author, did you personally ever make 900k from a patent? So yeah, people are weird, have bad/dumb ideas. And I can feel you kind of like the guy despite everything. So like, get over the contempt you feel, figure out what he's got that gave him the skill to invent something, and rise above your need to mock him. The rest of the article is fine in tone, just fix the initial disrespectful comparisons. Something like "I looked into this guy and found a complicated, naive, but also gifted guy... <details>" rather than just hitting the regular playbook.
Final comment: the note about race / murder is super weird. You mention a company moved, then immediately explain the race distributions without any reason to do that, as if there is a connection. Is there? what is it? Did the company ever mention race? This is typical journo hinting/dogwhistling. Is there any evidence of any racial problems in the subject of the article? Some towns are poor, some rich, some white, some black, whats the point? Then you mention the murder rates... inadvertently confirming a hate fact, that certain groups are linked to super high murder rates (victims and perps). I just don't get it. Like, what's the point of bringing that up?
Or does getting shot hurt more or less depending on the interior disposition of the shooter?
The points about not knowing anybody are fair, but still, the obvious implication is that the comment, while coming from the left, is also suggesting that the MC should have privately been told the racial realities of that area. But the right to speak about that, too, is under attack. Is it or is it not okay to mention that majority black, southern, low income towns are likely to be extremely dangerous, and that poverty is a proxy for it, but that other methods of stereotyping are likely even more effective?
They key is spending it slowly with people you love, lol that this guy actually wants to go see his kids.
The original thread happened on SomethingAwful where being a sneering asshole was the dominant culture: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=22... (2006)
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