Deal is getting worse all the time

Pray they don't alter it any further.

In order to calm advocates for affordable housing who feared that Airbnb was exacerbating San Francisco’s housing crunch by turning affordable apartments into permanent short-term rentals, akin to hostels, the company agreed in 2014 to put a 90-day cap on short-term rentals for entire homes. It also agreed to require all short-term rental hosts to register with the city. That is the law that took effect in February.

But now only 20 percent of the about 7,000 San Francisco residents who rent out their apartments for less than 30 days have registered with the city, said David Campos, a member of the board of supervisors and a long time opponent of Airbnb who was co-author of the recently passed enforcement law.

“Airbnb is challenging a very modest law,” Mr. Campos said. “In so doing, Airbnb is proving that it wants to play by its own rules, that it believes that it is entitled to something no business has, absolute freedom to operate free of responsibility and oversight. It’s their way or the highway.”

We're about to have a big fight about this in front of City Council at.. some point this year.  No doubt much will be said and written about Airbnb's "reasonable" efforts to compromise or whatever. There will be considerably less said or written about how little their promises actually mean. 

Look out he's nonchalantly walking away

So when I read this today,

SAN FRANCISCO -- Police were reviewing video and conducting an investigation Thursday amid social media outcry after officers shot and killed a man Wednesday who was allegedly holding a knife.

Cellphone video shows at least part of the incident leading up to the shooting and circulating through Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms. Police have not yet identified the dead man, who reportedly stabbed another man about an hour before the shooting.

The stabbing victim went to San Francisco General Hospital around 3:49 p.m. and told a San Francisco Sheriff's Department deputy he was stabbed in the shoulder in the 6600 block of Third Street.

The victim gave deputies a description of the assailant, and officers were flagged down by a witness who provided further description.

Officers found the suspect around 4:34 p.m. and said he had a knife. Several officers arrived as backup, and according to police, they ordered the suspect to drop the knife several times.

When he didn't, shots rang out. The suspect was pronounced dead at the scene.

I was reminded of this.

Associated Press
Wednesday, December 28, 2005 

NEW ORLEANS, Dec. 27 -- Police officers shot and killed a man brandishing a knife in a confrontation that was partially videotaped by a bystander, setting off another internal investigation of the embattled police department.

Monday's daylight shooting on a busy street was the first involving police since New Orleans reopened after Hurricane Katrina. It follows a videotaped police beating that led to two firings in the department.

Monday's victim was identified by the coroner's office as Anthony Hayes, 38, of New Orleans.

A police spokesman, Sgt. David Adams, said on Tuesday that the officers who fired on the man have been reassigned pending the outcome of an investigation. But he defended their response, saying that at least one officer's life was in danger just before the gunfire.

"You have a subject who's lunging at them with a knife . . . swinging wildly at them and they're fearing for their life," Adams said. 

No criminal charges were brought in the Hayes case although the city eventually reached a civil settlement with the victim's family. It was one of several post-Katrina incidences of police violence in New Orleans and has largely faded from memory.

One reason for this is, while there was video of the scene, there was (as far as we know) none of the actual shooting itself. So we have nothing besides witness (mostly police) accounts to indicate whether or not Hayes actually "lunged" at anybody with his knife in a way that might justify the use of force.

Today's San Francisco case is different.  We have this.

A video posted by HotRod (@daniggahot) on Dec 2, 2015 at 4:59pm PST

And this.

Please Retweet! Recorded from my phone. Let's make this go viral pic.twitter.com/AnLbjPo8ai

— Christian (@krispyyyxchris) December 3, 2015

Don't really see the part where the guy does something that tells us, uh oh, they'd better shoot him. I wonder what a similar video of the Hayes shooting would look like.

Nobody actually lives here

This is from Drew Magary's "Why Your Team Sucks" 49ers edition.  You don't have to read the football stuff.  But here's something.  

San Francisco, as it stands now, is no longer a living American Metropolis. Instead, the entire city has been converted into a giant Airbnb rental for tourists and rich foreigners. No one actually LIVES in San Francisco. Don’t be silly. Living on a space station is more feasible for the average American. You wouldn’t actually want to live there anyway. The only people walking around town now are selfish, tech-speak mandroids, each one with the explicit life goal of ascending Amazon’s hallowed Ladder of Triumph. 

We're not quite San Francisco yet here in Dizneylandrieu but we're trying to catch up.

Or maybe we're trying to catch up with Barcelona.  Watch this documentary when you have some time.



Update: City Council will take the first step toward legalizing short term rentals in New Orleans tomorrow.

"Evicted from the city as a whole"

San Francisco is the extreme example, but the rent is too damn high in cities all over the country. In the it cities of the sort that New Orleans strives to be included with, this sort of thing is going to continue happening to people.

According to the San Francisco Rent Board’s annual report on evictions, 1,977 eviction notices were filed this year, a 417% increase from 2012. The highest they've been since the first tech boom hit the Bay Area in 2001. 

“Unlike in years past, if a tenant is evicted from their home today in San Francisco, they are more than likely going to be evicted from the city as a whole,” said Erin McElroy, a housing rights advocate and founder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project.

Every time you flip open your NOLA.com and see yet another "Entrepreneur Week" or "Tech Week" or "Tech Entrepreneur Week" happening remember the aspiration is to emulate what's happening in San Francisco.  The urban development policy here, really since Katrina, has been to build nice things for rich people and kick everyone else out.

I don't know why anybody would want to live in a city homogeneously populated by wealthy tech bros but that does seem to be the goal. 

"Buyer Friendly"

What is a city, really, if not a luxury product?

Through the combined efforts of local real estate agents and residents eager to stake out their own patch of the city, the neighborhoods and districts that have defined San Francisco for generations are being trimmed and tailored into ever smaller, buyer-friendly niche communities.

We talk a lot about neighborhoods and place names in New Orleans too.  The most often cited essay on New Orleans places comes from Richard Campanella where he argues in favor of a mutable and organic understanding of neighborhoods and their boundaries.

The exercise of drawing neat, orderly polygons on chaotic, contested urban space necessarily produces arbitrary and artificial units. Humanity, like nature, resists straight lines and 90-degree angles.

Neighborhoods, I believe, have soft, porous geographies defined and named best by those who live there. They are deeply revealing of history, culture, and group viewpoints, and vary complexly over time. Understanding them requires a healthy dose of postmodernism: a willingness to question the received wisdom, come to terms with uncertainty and ambiguity, and accept the possibility of multiple truths. You can learn a lot about this city and its people by adopting that mindset.

These San Francisco place names aren't "deeply revealing of history, culture, and group viewpoints." As "buyer friendly" brands carved out by real estate agents, they're actually the opposite of that.

For folks looking to sell property, there's the hope that a friendly name or boundary change can add to the size of a hot community or transform a neighborhood with a sketchy reputation into a magnet for new renters and home buyers.

The fact that many of the changes are aimed at neighborhoods with a heavy minority presence isn't lost on the people who live there.

Last month, for example, Supervisor Malia Cohen complained that the first new housing project carved out of the old Hunters Point Naval Shipyard is being marketed as the "San Francisco Shipyard," with all reference to its heavily African American community edited out.

The new names are designed specifically to obscure a city's history in order that they may be sold anew as if from a "blank slate." 

I live on Carondelet Street in an area that can best be described as on the porous cusp between the Garden District and what people my age came to know as "Central City."  Varg might call it "the shooting side" of St. Charles.

A couple of years ago I met a real estate agent at a party who happened to have been trying to sell the house across the street from me. I thought this was a neat enough coincidence so I went into a long talk about how much I enjoy living in Central City.

"Garden District," she corrected me.  "That's in the Garden District." 

And, of course, this is a subjective matter. 

I know of only two legal definitions of the boundaries of the Garden District. According to "the 73 official neighborhoods" map,  St. Charles Avenue is the border.  On the other hand, the Garden District Security taxing district extends to Carondelet.  There is a business at the corner of Third and Carondelet which used to call itself "Garden District Laundromat"



But it has since given up that name.



I've been there in the same beat up apartment in this neighborhood for almost 15 years now. I think it's comfortable, convenient to work and to downtown, and, most importantly, still affordable. I enthusiastically explained all of this to the real estate lady while continually pointedly referring to the area as "Central City."  She corrected me a few more times but I kept on doing it.  It was like I dragging down her sale price with every repetition. Eventually she got annoyed and stopped talking to me. 

The house sold for almost half a million anyway so I can't imagine what she might have been worried about.  The other day, I noticed the multi-unit building next door to that one is up for sale now.  In recent years it has been available to short-term renters via Airbnb.

As for the rest of the neighborhood, it's looking up as well.  Two years ago some folks put together a new neighborhood association under the retro place name "Faubourg Livaudais."  If I happen to run into whoever is handling the sale I'll be sure and ask if the new nomenclature helps with the "buyer-friendly" branding.

"This is a city for the right people who can afford it!"

As we were just saying in the previous post... New Orleans is currently being pulled into the orbit of cities like San Francisco.  Here's what's going on there.

In the video, a Google employee who hopped off the bus shouts down Erin McElroy, a protester who also heads the eviction mapping project. "How long have you lived in this city?" McElroy asked him. He shouted back "Why don't you go to a city that can afford it? This is a city for the right people who can afford it. You can't afford it? You can leave. I'm sorry, get a better job."

Can't stress this enough.  The political leaders you elected to represent you are currently cheering the arrival of these people to your city.

Update: Agent provocateur?  I wouldn't be shocked.  In that case, the little stage play is still a useful fiction.  The caste system is clearly illustrated by Google's privatized buses. Those things are real.

Upperdate:  The guy is very definitely a fake.  Which is another reason to hate Occupy style protesters.  Even when they're right they make it very difficult to be on their side.  And yet, incidentally, this in itself is another reason not to want New Orleans to turn into San Francisco. 

"Xenophopic" hipster haters

Sound familiar? It's a common accusation aimed at New Orleanians less than enthusiastic about the sale of their city out from under them.   Here's an article about San Francisco. 

Carl Nolte, the old native son who writes a column for the (dying) San Francisco Chronicle, said this month of the future inhabitants of 22,000 high-priced apartments under construction, "These new apartment dwellers will all be new San Franciscans, with different values. In a couple of years we'll think of the progressive politicians, circa 2012, as quaint antiques, like the old waterfront Commies your grandfather used to worry about. This is already a high-tech city, an expensive city, a city where middle-class families can't afford to live. It is a city where the African American population has dropped precipitously, where the Latino Mission District is gentrifying more every day. You think it's expensive here now? Just you wait. These are the good old days, but it won't last. We are at a tipping point."

Mr. Nolte, you can tell, doesn't particularly like this. A guy named Ilan Greenberg at The New Republic popped up to tell us that we must like it—or face his ridicule. He writes, "Ironically, the anti-gentrifiers themselves undermine San Francisco's liberal ethos. Opposed to newcomers? Wary of people whose values you don't understand? Critical of young people for not living up to an older generation's ideals? It all sounds very reactionary and close-minded." The problem is that we understand Silicon Valley's values all too well, and a lot of us don't like them.

Adding newcomers might not be so bad if it didn't mean subtracting a lot of those of us who are already here. By us I mean everyone who doesn't work for a gigantic technology corporation or one of the smaller companies hoping to become a global monolith. Greenberg (who is, incidentally, writing for a publication quietly bought up by a Facebook billionaire) sneers at us for defending middle-class people, but "middle class" is just a word for those of us who get paid decently for our work. People at various income levels in a diversity of fields here in San Francisco are being replaced by those who work in one field and get paid extremely well. Small, alternative, and nonprofit institutions are also struggling and going down. It's like watching a meadow being plowed under for, say, Monsanto genetically modified soybeans.

Read the whole thing.

49ers Hate Day

Took this photo at Fisherman's Wharf when I visited over the summer. No idea what they think "Cajun Shrimp Creole" is. Didn't stop to find out.



Apparently they also seem to think boudin is some sort of bread.



San Francisco. It's a nice place to visit but really people shouldn't live there.

Also please see Bob Marshall's column in today's T-P

It was 1987 and the Saints had still not experienced a winning season in 20 years of trying, but that was about the change. Jim Mora's second team shocked the league and ignited bag burnings across The Big Easy by not only having a winning season, but going 12-3 and making the playoffs.

It was the start of a six-year run that made the Saints regularly respected for the first time. Mora's formula was beautifully simple.

He had a stifling "Dome Patrol" defense that could keep teams out of his red zone, and he had an all-time great kicker in Morten Andersen who was money from 40 yards.

So he put together a "no mistake" offense: A quarterback to throw after a strong running game was established.

No risk, no failure. Let the other guys make mistakes.

In any other division except the NFC West, it would have led to a string of championships during that era. But fate was not yet ready to smile on the Saints, because one of the other teams in that group was the San Francisco 49ers. They had a coach named Bill Walsh, then George Seifert. Quarterbacks named Joe Montana and Steve Young. Receivers named Jerry Rice and John Taylor.

They tortured Saints fans the way the Yankees tortured Red Sox faithful; they were always just a little better, especially late. In his winning seasons from 1987-1992, Mora would go 3-9 against the 49ers, never sweeping them. Even when the Saints compiled a 12-4 season in 1992 and 12-3 in 1987, they still finished behind the offense-rich 49ers.

Fuck the 49ers, fuck their "Cajun Shrimp Creole" and fuck their stupid bread. Today is a day to collect very old debts.