Senseless
This is one of the strangest news stories I’ve read in some time, and really highlights the fact that people are often short-sighted idiots.
The article (not actually available online until 3AM PDT on Friday; I read it, as I do, on my Kindle) describes a law which has been sent to Gov. Brown’s desk. It would change the rules regarding homeowners’ associations to indicate that if an HOA decides to ban or limit owners from *renting their condos* to other people, those limitations are only in effect prospectively: they aren’t binding on people who acquired the property before the limit was adopted by the HOA.
As a matter of property law, this makes good sense to me; the power to rent your property to others is such an important part of the bundle of property rights that you should be protected from unexpected denial of that right. I hope the Governor signs it.
And yet … the justification for the passage of the law is that apparently HOAs are doing this, because the economic downturn has led to an increase in rented units, and rented units tend to undermine the commitment of the other owner-occupants to common maintenance and tend to degrade the ‘togetherness’ of the community.
I understand the concern. A community of renters is different from a community of owner-occupants; it has different interests, and generally renters have a lower commitment to maintaining the value of the property than owner-occupiers do. But this ‘solution’ is nothing of the sort, and actually stands a good chance of making the situation worse.
What the HOAs doing this think will happen is this: people will stop moving out of their owner-occuppied units and renting them, or if they have to move, they’ll sell them.
But one of the reasons the rental rates are going up is that people aren’t able to sell – the market is slow, the condo market has softened more than the single-family home market, and a lot of these people are underwater on their mortgage and can only sell at a loss. So they’re trying to rent instead.
Moreover, a lot of the people who are renting out units are people who are forced to move either because (a) they have to go somewhere else for their job, (b) their family is dissolving in a divorce, or (c) they are operating under the desperate assumption that if they can live more cheaply somewhere else and rent out this place, they’ll be able to make the mortgage payments they can’t currently make.
What are people in those groups going to do when forced with a rule prohibiting them from renting?
They can’t sell without the cooperation of the bank that owns the note on the mortgage, because nobody’s going to buy unless the mortgage is lifted.
So they have to move out, and they can’t rent, their options are: (a) default and go into foreclosure (if they’re unable to afford the mortgage payment) or (b) move and leave the unit vacant (if they’re able to pay the mortgage).
Neither of these are good for the HOA. A vacant condo is *worse* than a condo which is renter-occuppied: it isn’t maintained at all, it forces the cost of maintaining the common areas to be borne by a smaller population, and it creates dead zones which are magnets for squatters.
An HOA policy prohibiting rentals represents a decision by an HOA that they’d rather exchange N renter-occuppied units for (M which is smaller than N) vacant units. Unless M is a very small percentage of N, it’s a bad move on the HOA’s part.
Intermittent trivium
According to this report, “an estimated 10 million pounds of pesticides are used in the Bay Area annually, with the highest use in Sonoma and Napa counties.”
Just … wow.
According to an article in this morning’s Chronicle (which I read on my Kindle and so can’t link directly to), the Golden Gate Bridge District is considering abolishing toll-takers and replacing them with a system which takes a picture of every license plate which crosses the bridge, queries the DMV database, and then sends the registered owner of the car a monthly bill. This is expected to save on the order of $3 million a year.
This is a good thing; the technology to do this has existed for some time – even the bridges with RFID toll-taking technology have this built in to bill (and fine) people who drive through the toll-tag lanes without the appropriate RFID chip sitting on their dashboard. In that case it’s obnoxious – because the imposition of a fine which vastly (eg, on the close order of 50x) overcompensates the toll district for the marginal cost of sending the bill is deliberately punitive, an example of the state using an excuse to fleece the citizenry (a gambit which I admit it has been forced to by the budget, but still an obnoxious one). In the case of a system which just bills you, it’s not obnoxious; it’s a plan which lowers transaction costs, allows you to drive across the bridge without worrying about having $6 at the ready and without having an RFID tag in your car constantly broadcasting your identity to anyone with the wits to read it, while allowing the state to not pay an army of people to do really mindnumbingly boring jobs. This is how all tolls should work.
And yet: this also means that it would be impossible to drive across the bridge anonymously. Oh, sure, you could cross it anonymously as a passenger; that kind of anyonymity remains. But … this convenience, this money-saving device, brings us one step closer to the world in which the state regularly tracks everyone’s move, and it is only the sheer mountain of data which prevents officers of the state from paying too much attention to any one individual.
Some days I fear fascism is the inevitable future, not because anyone will deliberately choose it, but because our love of convenience and our desire to save money will cause us to simply slide into it, blithely unaware of what is happening.
It can be mitigated in this case, somewhat, by the bridge authority agreeing that:
(a) records of who has crossed over the bridge will not be made available to police or other government agencies absent a court order or warrant;
(b) there will be a regular program of destroying records of people who have paid within 30 days of receipt of payment;
(c) there will be a regular program of isolating records for which there has not been payment from the rest of the system.
These are really essential if the information the bridge authority collects is not to be misused. (I assume there are similar safeguards already in place for the use of FastTrack).
Spookfest
Spookfest comments:
(a) the crowd was unusually shovy and impatient. There’s a certain grace to flowing through large crowds – I can almost always get up front and close, it just takes some time (15 mins or so) of slowly edging into gaps as they open up and letting the crowd itself push you forward. A lot of the people at the show last night had not the skill, nor the patience to develop it, and more than once I found myself wanting to punch someone.
(b) the kiddies don’t know DJ Shadow or Underworld. It was kinda spooky how quickly the DJ Shadow crowd thinned out (as opposed to, say, the Steve Aoki crowd).
(c) security line was 50 minutes for some really pathetic security; they didn’t even notice my (opaque gray, sealed cylinder) earplug case. I could have smuggled in anything that I might have wanted to (except for large glass bottles of alcohol, but then I wouldn’t have wanted to).
(d) they fixed the overheating problem from etd.pop; it never got nearly as warm as it did then, which was a relief.
(e) still, though, at least 16 people have been hispitalized, at least 2 of whom are in critical condition. I don’t understand how this is even possible. Do people just not take care of themselves? what the Fuck?
(f) we missed Booka Shade.
(g) Steve Aoki – kinda meh. I mean, it was fun to be in a tight crowd, bouncing up and down energetically. But fundamentally he’s doing a more hard-rock version of what DJ AM was doing, and he’s less good at it.
(h) Classixx: these guys were pretty good and fun to dance to.
(i) MSTRKRFT: just as fun as I remember them being.
(j) Aaron Axelsen: to my surprise, actually a reasonably good DJ.
(k) DJ Shadow: I enjoyed it. And the recut of Stem was phenomenal. But … I still find myself wishing for the Shadow of 2002 rather than the shadow of 2010. Sign I’m getting old, I guess.
(l) Underworld: Holy. Fucking. Shit. these guys were awesome. Best show of the night, best crowd of the night, hands down.
(m) Dinner and hanging out with $redacted, and talking: fun. He’s a good guy, and it’s nice to see him and catch up and share. (He doesn’t seem cuddly, though).
(n) Caltrain fatality: dislike! dislike! dislike!
Why would anyone think the Fillmore was a blight on the neighborhood?
I mean, maybe if it were the Regency Ballroom …
Says the New York Times, in an obituary for Mr. Coblentz:
They met when local complaints threatened to keep Mr. Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium from opening.
To show the Fillmore was not a blight on a fine neighborhood, Mr. Coblentz had a friend stake out a hotel across the street known to be a house of ill repute. The friend photographed policemen entering. After Mr. Coblentz shared the photos with the Board of Permit Appeals, the Fillmore was approved.
I wonder if that would work today.
When I first noticed the headline for this story (“Identical twins, identical crimes”) I was intrigued by the difficulty that must be involved in prosecuting the case: how do you prove which identical twin was involved in which crime?
But then I noticed something more curious:
“Feeling sorry for him, she loaned him $1,900 to replace his ID and cell phone.”
Granted that this is probably just reporter oversimplification: no doubt the woman loaning the money was loaning money for more than just replacing an ID and cell phone.
But still.
Feedback