So, Facebook provides a free service to millions of people in the UK, and people are pissed that Facebook isn't PAYING more for the privilege of giving them free stuff?
I rabidly support every new apartment development. Trinity Towers (across the street from the main branch of the SF Library) should be a model for how these things work:
* Remove rent controlled tenants. They will be displaced for 6->12 months.
* Tear down old building.
* Build Phase 1 of new, far denser building, as quickly as possible.
* Move rent-controlled tenants back into their new units at the same rate they had when they were displaced. Those units are covered by rent control forever. The rest of the building is at "market rate".
* Build the rest of the building at your leisure.
The only thing I might add to the plan is city-sponsored housing to put the displaced residents.
I didn't know that was how Trinity Towers was done, but that's been my suggestion for a while now: bulldoze the Mission and start over if you like, but every damned one of those people had better come back in on the same or better terms than what they had when they left -- and they'd better be housed in the meantime, too.
Too often, the debate about development ignores those people, or makes great promises but fails to deliver.
He probably caused the start of rent control in SF with his "promise" to increase rents in his buildings by something like 100% per year, every single year. [0] AIUI, he never sells buildings; he buys or builds them to rent apartments to people. And now, there's the Trinity Towers deal! He's rich as fuck from the landlording business, but -from what I know of him- he deserves every penny.
> Too often, the debate about development ignores those people, or makes great promises but fails to deliver.
The city's schizophrenic attitudes with regards to housing development confuse me. Something stinks in this city, and it's not just the Combined Sewer System. ;)
[0] IIRC, the story goes that he publicly made this proclamation shortly after the passage of Prop 13.
What do you do with the previous tenants for those 6-12 months? By your last statement I assume it's just "figure your own shit out for the next year", which... well, that's really bad. Just the cost of moving (twice) could break some lower-income folks' backs. I wouldn't be surprised if few of those people return after phase 1 is complete.
I don't know what happened in this particular case, but given how long it took to hash out the details, I would expect that alternative housing was found for the displaced tenants.
I really should ask around; this detail seems to be something that the various newspapers aren't covering.
I agree that having to figure out alternative housing for yourself would be very, very bad for a few classes of tenants. I mention a mitigation in the last sentence of the comment to which you replied. :)
So, journalists get a pass when they 'investigate' someone, but the people they're investigating can't do a 'counter-investigation'? Are journalists some kind of special beings?
You're equating the two kinds of investigating. The "counter-investigation" you're talking about is retaliatory — write something we don't like and we'll punish you with details about your personal life.
Journalists are not special beings, but it is typically presumed that they report in good faith, and without ulterior motives. I know that isn't always true, but it's true often enough that I think the burden of proof would be on the people being investigated to prove that the journalist's intent was malicious.
Ya, on the record here, I think you're absolutely correct.
A lot of journalists, Lacy included, have written pieces targeting founders based on events in their personal lives and their pasts.
People are correct to freak out when someone targets another person by digging into their private lives, the problem is a lot of tech journalists have gotten away with this, especially when the founders or entrepreneurs in question have been libertarians or right-wingers.
Well, rules in anarchy have to come from consensus of the people. So the only rules, in practice, are those that the people are willing and able to enforce against those who wish to break them.
History shows that, in anarchy situations, those who wish to break the rules are sometimes highly motivated and well armed. Thus anarchy at least means "no rules that apply to a warlord when he really wants them not to".
Now, one could argue that that is essentially the situation with the US government now. But the well-armed warlords tend to show considerably less restraint than the US government does.
There is no such thing consensus of the people in any communities of nontrivial size.
In anarchy situations, whoever is capable of filling the power vacuum creates new rules - the "highly motivated and well armed" groups don't break the rules (since if they disagree, there's obviously not a consensus about those rules); they define the rules and others possibly break them.
Rulers can certainly provide rules and conventions. But that is not the only, or best, place they can come from. Rules are usually emergent, and these kinds of rules are better suited to the communities they arise in, since they are tailor-made for the circumstances and preferences of the people from which they emerge. Contrast this with Federal rules and regulations which have little or nothing to do with the way life is lived in rural Alaska. But this is the same old argument about the failures of central planning that has been ignored by progressives and conservatives for more than a century.
See: English common law prior to being co-opted by the state.
People who think like this suffer from a lack of imagination, in my opinion. They are people who cannot imagine that others can negotiate or have negative experiences of being ruled over, thus must be dictated to.
