Tourism is the virus

Nature tried to heal for a little while.  Enjoy it while you can.

The Marais is one of the oldest, most historic neighborhoods of Paris and is known for its quaint village-like charm. But it had become a retail Disneyland where visitors came to spend money, but not necessarily for the history.

I knew the Marais belonged to locals again on the first night of France’s national lockdown, when I opened my window to clap for caregivers. The light had faded and I said to myself, “Paris is no longer the City of Light.”

Sadly, there were few people at their windows, because so many apartments in the neighborhood have been converted to Airbnbs for tourists. But instead of the noise of crowds and suitcases on the pavement, the streets were deserted, and there was an air of enchantment. You could hear the birds singing and the wind blowing the leaves on the trees.

New Orleans can feel like that too; empty and enchanted. The other night I could swear I saw a ghost staring out from the window of this empty Airbnb.



Unfortunately neither we in New Orleans, nor anyone quoted in that NYT story have had a true opportunity to go out and enjoy a locals-for-locals experience of our hometowns. We're only getting glimpses of such places while we commute to "essential" jobs or venture out for "essential" errands or for essential having a few beers on the sidewalk.  A lot like that ghost in the window, New Orleans for New Orleanians is only a momentary mirage. Once we "re-open" the city, it will dissolve before we can touch it.

The short term rentals aren't going to revert to local housing. Yes, there are a lot of desperate sounding Craigslist ads for "furnished rentals" right now.  Some of those could end up staying on the local market. But not as many as you might expect.  Landlords and renters are in a brief period of uneasy detente right now. (In some cases, more uneasy than in others.) But that all goes out the window once the evictions moratorium comes to an end.

Richardson says the city doesn't want people evicted during a health crisis, but it is a short term solution. She says until the economy starts back up, residents won't have a steady income which means both the housing and rental markets won’t be fed potentially for months.

“Eventually rent is going to be owed, eventually mortgages are going to have to be paid, one of the difficult things going forward is the possible, if not probable balloon of payments that people are going to have in the future… it would be a good idea for renters at this point in time to talk to your landlord to see if you can work out even if it’s just a short term deal,” said Richardson.

The sort of small independent landlords with whom you might "work something out" will be under heavy pressure to evict once the CARES Act mortgage forbearance period ends.  Assuming no extension or a more generous round of federal aid, many will be forced to sell out. Probably on the cheap and probably to larger nationally or internationally based mega-landorlds

The proptech industry ballooned following the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, when racist lending practices and government response dispossessed hundreds of thousands of mainly black and Latinx property owners. This era saw over 240,000 black residents lose their homes, erasing most of the gains made since the 1968 passing of the civil rights era Fair Housing Act. Wall Street investment firms such as Blackstone, Invitation Homes, Colony, Waypoint, and Starwood—which have all now consolidated into one mega-firm—swept in to purchase foreclosed homes at auction, ushering in the age of the corporate landlord. Today the conglomerate of Blackstone comprises the largest landowning firm globally and is the biggest landlord in the United States. Hundreds of large investment companies followed Blackstone’s lead, forming massive landlord monopolies in various cities and regions across the United States. These mega-landlords generally acquire new properties through limited partnership (LPs) and limited liability company (LLCs) shell companies, a practice that makes it difficult for tenants to know who their landlords really are, and thus serves to stymie tenant organizing and collective action.

A ginormous private equity firm has no interests in working something out with distressed tenants. Your mayor and councilpersons can talk all they want about finding "balance" between those interests but the future of all housing in your city is going to be about maximum extraction of profit from property by giant ownership entities acting at a far remove from the fate of the people who actually live there.

This begins with vulture firms scooping up distressed properties on the cheap and evicting anyone who can't make rent. A company like Blackstone, whose investments are all but guaranteed by the Federal Reserve, can sit on a lot of unused buildings for a while if it wants. There's no need to shift to a more equitable usage of our housing stock that might drive the investment value down. Better to just subsidize the harsh practices that were already in place. When the pandemic passes, we'll be right back to hollowing out the city of its residents, its schools or its non-tourism related small businesses and replacing anything that resembles a real life community with more of the half-empty resort town we've been building since Katrina. This crisis will only have accelerated that process.

In the meantime, we're already eager to please the architects of that "New" New Orleans in a desperate effort to reopen our tourism economy.  For those willing to don a dining mask and head out for a surreal 25% capacity experience at their favorite restaurant, maybe something like the momentarily tourist-free local-for-locals city really is available.  Or maybe it's another uncomfortable product of the forced march of workers back into the maw of capitalism currently underway.

Mitch McConnell promised House Republicans on Wednesday that the beefed up unemployment benefits enacted earlier this spring "will not be in the next bill."

The Senate majority leader told the House GOP minority in an afternoon phone call that he is comfortable waiting to see how the nearly $3 trillion in coronavirus spending previously approved plays out before moving forward on the next relief legislation. And he told them the ultimate end-product won't look anything like House Democrats' $3 trillion package passed last week, according to a person briefed on the call.

There are over 38 million unemployed nationwide as of this week.  And even though the still raging pandemic guarantees there won't be enough jobs to send them all back to, we're still going to make sure they have to suffer. Why? Well the short answer is, we're trying to make sure we come out of the crisis with a loose labor market full of frightened and docile workers.  McConnell admits as much. So did Louisiana State Rep. Gerald “Beau” Beaullieu this week in Baton Rouge. Republicans are doing everything they can to keep bosses from having to pay a decent living wage.

Beaullieu said hefty unemployment payments could discourage someone from wanting to return to work, and he said the high rate of unemployment was draining Louisiana’s unemployment fund.

“We want to protect that trust fund. We also want to make sure that employees are not disincentivized from going back to work,” Beaullieu said. He said his bill would help “those small businesses get their employees to work."

It's a sad state of affairs that they can be this openly hostile and get away with it. If for no other reason than because they are in danger of rendering all this street theater irrelevant.  

A handful of mostly out-of-state protesters held a small rally outside a Lorimer Street barbershop in Williamsburg on Tuesday, calling on the city and state to end the coronavirus shutdown — so that they can go to yoga and get their nails done!

“My fingernails are breaking, I’ve got hangnails, I’ve been getting my nails done for 14 years … I’m very much into yoga, I can’t go to my Bikram yoga studios, I can’t go get my eyelashes done, I can’t go and socialize with the people that are my friends,” said Mississippian Hillary Angel Barq. “It’s led me to depression, it’s made me not feel sexual — I mean it’s awful.”

The gathering of roughly half a dozen people — outnumbered even by the amount of media covering the event — was organized by the pro-Trump group Liberate America together with the owners of Beard Barberia Cut and Shave at the corner of Grand Street.

The brief time of New York for New Yorkers is ending. Tourism season is back on, heralded by a loudly un-horny Hillary Barq.  This can only bode ill for New Orleans.  There can be little doubt now that the "reopening" of our own tourist business will mean catering to similar organized day trips of death cult protesters coming into town to complain about having to wear masks and whatnot. And with that, will come more intense pressure on business owners and therefore the politicians they influence to take such complaints seriously... regardless of the absurdity of their source.

New York City is one of the global epicenters of the pandemic with more than 20,000 deaths due to the virus, and almost 200,000 people infected, according to the city’s health department data on May 18 — but, when asked whether it was worth risking hundreds of further deaths by allowing businesses to reopen, the protest organizer said it was and questioned the staggering death tolls.

“Absolutely, absolutely. But there’s a difference, it’s what they didn’t tell you is what is the mortality rate that’s already been in place,” said Liberate America’s founder Frank Scurlock, who is from New Orleans.

Nature had a scarce two months to heal. Earlier this week we read that those two months were rather impressive. In April, the emissions typically caused by air and ground travel were down about 40 percent.  Rest assured, though, with Scurlock's group on the loose, the bad air will be back to intolerable levels in no time.