Category: Local / Living

San Francisco is losing residents because it’s too expensive for nearly everyone – USA Today

SAN FRANCISCO — Social media influencer Sarah Tripp and her husband, Robbie Tripp, moved to San Francisco in 2016 brimming with optimism.

“We thought, here’s a city full of opportunities and connections where you go to work hard and succeed,” says Tripp, 27, founder of the lifestyle blog Sassy Red Lipstick.

But after a year-long hunt for suitable housing in San Francisco only turned up “places for $1 million that looked like rundown shacks and needed a remodel,” the couple packed up and moved to Phoenix.

They went from paying San Francisco rents of $2,500 for a one-bedroom, one-bath apartment that was far from shopping and other amenities, to purchasing a newly constructed 3,000-square-foot, four-bedroom, four-bathroom home where they’ll raise their newly arrived baby boy.

“It was cool to be living near all those high-tech startups,” Tripp says of her Bay Area years. “But you quickly saw that if you weren’t part of that, you’d be pushed out. It’s just sad.”

via USA Today

More housing is needed, will it be built?

Here’s one take:

“Stephen, you’ve been proven right on housing, and I think you’re about to be proven even more right. The most important driver of home prices is supply and demand. And right now, there is a chronic undersupply of homes in America.”

Census Bureau data shows an average of 1.5 million homes were built each year since 1959. Yet since 2009, just 900,000 homes have been built per year. In fact, fewer homes were built in the past decade than in any decade since the ‘50s!

We have a serious housing shortage in America today. It would take less than six months to sell every existing home on the market…

The Biggest Housing Boom In History Has Just Begun
Stephen McBride, Forbes

Boston’s Carbon Emissions Goals, Climate Change

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Democratic Mayor Marty Walsh says the updated Climate Action Plan he’s releasing Tuesday will significantly cut carbon emissions from buildings, which account for most emissions in the city.

Among the initiatives are investing in energy saving improvements to city-owned buildings, transitioning the city’s vehicle fleet to low-emission vehicles and developing new guidelines for city-backed affordable housing projects.

WBUR

Levellers and Diggers

The Levellers were a political movement during the English Civil War (1642–51) committed to popular sovereignty, extended suffrage, equality before the law and religious tolerance. The hallmark of Leveller thought was its populism, as shown by its emphasis on equal natural rights, and their practice of reaching the public through pamphlets, petitions and vocal appeals to the crowd.

The Levellers came to prominence at the end of the First English Civil War (1642–46) and were most influential before the start of the Second Civil War (1648–49). Leveller views and support were found in the populace of the City of London and in some regiments in the New Model Army. Their ideas were presented in their manifesto “Agreement of the People”. In contrast to the Diggers, the Levellers opposed common ownership, except in cases of mutual agreement of the property owners.

The Levellers were not a political party in the modern sense of the term. They were organised at the national level, with offices in a number of London inns and taverns such as The Rosemary Branch in Islington, which got its name from the sprigs of rosemary that Levellers wore in their hats as a sign of identification.

From July 1648 to September 1649, they published a newspaper, The Moderate, and were pioneers in the use of petitions and pamphleteering to political ends. They identified themselves by sea-green ribbons worn on their clothing.

Levellers, Wikipedia

The Diggers were a group of Protestant radicals in England, sometimes seen as forerunners of modern anarchism,and also associated with agrarian socialism and Georgism. Gerrard Winstanley’s followers were known as True Levellers in 1649 and later became known as Diggers, because of their attempts to farm on common land.

Their original name came from their belief in economic equality based upon a specific passage in the Acts of the Apostles. The Diggers tried (by “levelling” land) to reform the existing social order with an agrarian lifestyle based on their ideas for the creation of small, egalitarian rural communities. They were one of a number of nonconformist dissenting groups that emerged around this time.

Diggers, Wikipedia

Generic Dog Names Around the World

Non-Americans, does your culture have “old-fashioned” dog names like we do in America, such as Fido, Rex, Spot, Rover, etc, and what are some? from r/AskReddit

Snati, Sámur, Hvutti
Iceland

In Singapore, Male dog: boy boy. Female dog: girl girl.
We’re not a creative people.

Australia has Dusty, Sheila, Max, Dog and Bluey.

Pochi and John serve this purpose in Japan, but much like Spot, they’re pretty much only reserved for dogs that an author didn’t want to spend any effort naming. You almost never see actual dogs named either.

Tuzik, Bobik (Russian), Sirko (Ukrainian). No one gives them to dogs any more but they are still used in pet-related jokes.

Indians – Moti and Hira ( pearl & diamond) . There’s also Sheru ( tiger) .

In Ireland, the typical dog name is “Bran” after the legendary hero Fionn MacCumhaill’s hound. Rover is also an old one.

Firulais in Mexico

dig further at reddit

Low Wages in an Economic Boom Time

Today:
* 2.2 million working people are paid the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour or less.
* Approximately another 23 million people are paid between $7.25 and $11 an hour.
* Nearly half (42.4 percent) of working Americans make less than $15 per hour.

 

The productivity of American workers has roughly doubled since 1968 (the peak of the minimum wage in inflation-adjusted dollars), but workers making the minimum wage today make 25 percent less than they did in 1968, once adjusted to today’s dollars. Even though unemployment has dropped precipitously, sitting well below 5 percent for the last three years, it has not been until recently that wage increases for workers in lower-paying occupations have occurred.2 And much of that growth at the low end of the distribution has come from action on the minimum wage at not the federal level, but the state and local level.

Making the Economic Case for a $15 Minimum Wage
THE CENTURY FOUNDATION

Ending single-family zoning. Minneapolis and Oregon.

The city of Minneapolis just launched a quiet revolution when the city council voted to abolish single-family zoning. This is an excellent move. Cities around the country should follow suit.
…
Single-family zoning is also bad for economic equality. It makes it a lot harder for people of modest means to live in a thriving area, since these people tend only be able to afford apartments, townhouses or other smaller or multifamily dwellings. Blue-collar workers aren’t just being priced out of the country’s increasingly productive cities — they’re being prevented from moving there in search of better opportunities. Urbanist Richard Florida refers to this in his book “The New Urban Crisis.”

There’s also a racial dimension to the inequality that exclusionary zoning creates. Black families, which tend to earn less money, are kept out of white neighborhoods by their inability to afford the sprawling homes that cities mandate be built there. In fact, single-family zoning might have even been invented for just this purpose, as part of a large raft of approaches that cities used to keep higher-earning whites segregated from generally lower-earning black residents after race-based zoning was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1917. Eliminating this zoning is thus one important step on the road to integration.

Bloomberg

The Oregon Legislature has passed a bill that largely bans single-family zoning statewide. It’s a notable win for zoning reform advocates.

On Sunday, the Oregon Senate passed HB 2001 by a 17-9 vote, with Republicans and Democrats lining up on both sides of the bill. The Oregon House approved its version of the bill two weeks ago in a similarly bipartisan 43-16 vote.

Reason

Gig economy – on demand restaurant work

Gig workers are nothing new in the restaurant world. Every day, contractors on bikes and scooters deliver food for Uber Eats and DoorDash. But in a growing number of kitchens, contract workers now make the food, too.

With the restaurant industry facing its worst labor shortage in decades, Pared and a rival app, Instawork, are filling a growing void, as managers who have struggled to recruit permanent employees turn to the on-demand services for workers trained as dishwashers, servers, line cooks and even oyster shuckers.
…
Among them is Mr. Mortenson, who said he could not imagine going back to a full-time restaurant job. “I’m making more money than I have ever made in this industry,” he said. “This is crazy.”

Part of the appeal, he said, is that the app exposes him to new experiences, whether icing gingerbread cookies at Bouchon Bakery or cooking short ribs for Twitter employees at the cafe in the company’s New York office.

“It doesn’t make me a better cook,” he said. “But it’s so amazing to go into a new restaurant every day.”

Cooking Eggs in the Morning and Shucking Oysters at Night, Thanks to an App

Random pics Denver, Thursday 8/28/2019

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These pics are from later in the day. On my way into work, around 7 am, I walked past a guy sitting on the sidewalk openly smoking weed from a pipe. I also saw police and firemen attending to a guy laying on his back, shirtless. Not unusual to see someone smoking cannabis in public, but it seemed a bit early. What was going on with other guy I don’t know.

Poverty and Shame

Adam Smith put his finger on the problem back in 1776. In The Wealth of Nations, he wrote: “A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessity of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt …”

At last, a sensible way to measure poverty, Tim Hartford, Financial Times

What struck him, even in the mid 1970s, was the effort that mothers, in particular, made to try to protect their children from feeling shame – to the extent that they would skip meals to buy clothes and toys for them. “Children as young as seven and eight soon learn strategies to persuade parents to buy them what they think they need,” says Walker.

What are the links between shame and poverty? Chris Arnot, The Guardian

More recently, this relational understanding of poverty has been championed by Amartya Sen who has argued that ‘the ability to go about without shame’ should be considered a basic capacity that should be incorporated into general conceptions of poverty.

https://gsdrc.org/publications/shame-self-esteem-and-poverty/