The story: A guy in the San Francisco Mission District owns a laundromat. He decides to replace it with an apartment building. The city needs more housing and the apartments will make more money for him. It should be a win-win. Over the next 4+ years, he spends over a million dollars trying to get the necessary governmental approval to build. He fails because the locals lobby against him as they fear further gentrification of their neighborhood. It's all of the standard Secular Leftist tropes - race, oppression, subsidies and more. Lather, rinse, repeat.
It's all about private property
... which is an anathema to the Secular Left.
The story is really one about private property. If the dude owns the place, he ought to be able to build on it. After all, it's his, not "ours." The Secular Left, which runs SF, lock, stock and barrel, does not really believe in private property. The effects of this belief run throughout the video.
The residents claim they won't be able to afford the apartments. That might be true enough. I see two possible ways to deal with it. First, they could buy him out. Second, they could lobby the government to stop the construction.
In order to buy him out, they'd have to come up with money. They'd need to earn more, so they'd focus on building marketable skills and getting better jobs. They'd have to learn to live frugally in order to save for the down payment. They'd need to study and practice financial investing. Perhaps they could even work out a co-op banking business so they all could buy a piece of the action. After all, an apartment complex in SF is a gold mine.
Instead, they run to the politicians and scream. The politicians bend to the will of the voters and after more than four years of yelling at each other in government office buildings, the plan is scrubbed and the laundromat is saved. No new housing has been built.
Had the locals chosen the private property path, even if they failed, they would have ended with valuable skills and a chunk of change. Instead, they ended up with nothing. Literally nothing, as the status quo didn't change at all. They did what the Secular Left taught them to do, what it thinks is the right way to get things done and they ended up four years older and not a penny better.
The Secular Left is a failure. Looking to politics to improve your lot in life is a mistake. If it can't work in San Francisco, it can't work anywhere.
Because it seems like most of our current problems are from nobody saying the counter-argument-- there is a public interest that has to be balanced with private property.
ReplyDeleteAn example from Seattle is the "tiny houses" that were put in some neighborhoods-- without any parking. The official explanation was that they would walk or use public transportation (there wasn't even bike parking), the actual case was that they parked in front of all the other houses in the area.
Another example is the "over 50" housing developments.
Both are examples of an implied contract-- you move into an area, you are promising to be decent and not make things worse; not everyone agrees on worse, so there's formalized rules.
....the freaky thing is that San Fran has decided to define objectively making things better (gentrification) as destroying the neighborhood.
From the arguments against gentrification that I've heard, they accept the argument of public obligation, but they never actually STATE it, or support it, or try to balance the competing interests.
"The Secular Left is a failure. Looking to politics to improve your lot in life is a mistake."
ReplyDeleteNot that there is any difference between the "secular left" and the "religious left".