Shanghaied Cities

preparing for the Asian invasion

shanghai

/ˌʃaŋˈhaɪ/

verb

1. (transitive) To force or trick (someone) into joining a ship crew.

2. (transitive) To abduct or coerce.

3. (transitive) To commandeer; appropriate; hijack

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housing for who?

Using the trojan horse of 'affordable housing', my town of Santa Cruz has been commandeered, appropriated, hijacked, shanghaied. Dozens of 16-story highrises have been erected, with a hundred more planned, with no parking. Zero! Zip! (well, maybe zipcars).

WEFfie YGL Gavin Newsom has mandated that California build millions of new housing units in the next few years. If you want to see if your city is under the spell of a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, James Corbett has just published:

How to Search the Young Global Leaders Club - #SolutionsWatch

We’ve been given the illusion of choice: 16-story buildings in downtown blocks or 5-stories in every neighborhood. 26 prime acres between downtown and the beach boardwalk must be developed in order to fund a stadium no one wants. Traffic is already gridlocked on weekends at every intersection from March to November, as the beach town for Silicon Valley. Those who live in Santa Cruz work in Silicon Valley, commuting a dangerous mountain pass. Those who work in Santa Cruz commute an hour from Latino Watsonville, which would be 15 minutes with no traffic.

If Santa Cruz doesn’t come up with these units fast enough, there’s something called ‘the Builder’s Remedy.’ It allows developers to override all city regulations. From a recent newspaper article:

… under the leadership of Gov. Gavin Newsom, the state has tried a number of reforms designed to increase building and affordability. But not much had changed until legislators and Newsom enacted the Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA), a somewhat convoluted process with a goal that roughly 2.5 million new housing units be built by 2031, with a million of them affordable to low-income families.

Locally, the county faces a requirement to permit 4,634 new homes in unincorporated areas by 2031. The city of Santa Cruz will need to permit 3,736 more units; Watsonville, 2,053 units; Capitola, 1,336; and Scotts Valley, 1,220.

That’s about 13,000 new housing units over the next six-plus years – a lot of building in a county where development has long been a dirty word.

To make matters more complicated, local communities also can be left open to a once-obscure law known as Builder’s Remedy in which a developer may sidestep city approvals to construct a housing development as long as 20% of the project’s homes are considered “affordable” housing.

Then there’s the “density” debate. Santa Cruz elected officials tried to reduce the height limit of proposed buildings in the downtown expansion project from 175 feet or roughly 16 stories tall, to 12 stories. However, the height limitations were found to be not enforceable under the state density bonus which allows a developer to build additional units if they meet a number of affordability standards (meaning a project’s height ostensibly could go higher to meet the bonus allocation).

The city planning staff subsequently put together a Downtown Density Bonus program as a local alternative to the state law that would, among other provisions, also allow developers the option to pay their way out of including any affordable housing in potential projects.

Massive apartment buildings and high-density living may not be what most people in California, much less Santa Cruz County, want. A recent Public Policy Institute of California survey found that 70% of the state’s adults preferred single-family residences.

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cubicle living

While 70% prefer single-family residences, how many of the remaining 30% will live in a 100-unit highrise with no car? These 2BR apartments, to stretch the meaning of the word, are 800 sq ft and rent for $3000-$6000 per month. How will low-income families get to work? To school? This is a conjurer’s trick that dangles an affordable home in front of voters and pulls a 16-story luxury prison out of a hat.

This month my aerial teacher is putting everything in storage because she and her boyfriend lost their lease. They’re going to drive around Yosemite because they can’t find a place to live. My friend, with whom my dance teacher and her mother live, has to be out of her place by the end of the month. These are some of the most well-liked people in Santa Cruz, and they don’t know what they’ll do.

So who will be living in these units, already constructed and sitting empty while residents leave? Who is willing to pay sky-high costs for skyscraper living by the beach? I think California has been traded to China for the Treasury bill debt. The real estate mogul in the Oval Office will turn Palestinians into golf caddies for Gaza and Californians into baristas for Shanghai West.

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yimby decoys

Five YIMBY laws have been passed to ‘supercharge the construction of desperately needed housing.’ One flips defunct strip malls—10 takers. Another enables owners to split SFH into duplexes—140 takers. One called ‘Yes in God’s backyard’ lets churches use their parking lots to build apartments—no takers.

Unlike the no-holds-barred Builder’s Remedy, homeowners or small business owners need to hire union labor, rent or sell below market value, and limit the size. They’re subject to environmental review and significant fees. Even an ADU couldn’t be built prior without the ability to park three cars off the street side by side.

Now that they’ve loosened that, 28,000 were permitted last year but can’t be used for short-term rentals like AirBnB. While foreign hedge funds build 16 story shoeboxes with no parking, homeowners are blamed for not providing the rentals people want.

Meanwhile, floods, fires and State Farm are forcing people out of mountains, forests and open spaces and into the can of sardines. A friend whose home was spared from the so-called Lightning Fires just had her insurance increase by $10K a year. And of the 700 homes lost, only 127 are now rebuilt and occupied. The rest are subject to regulations on wastewater treatment and geological hazards. The consultants hired at $7M to streamline this process have retired since so many have given up.

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the killing joke

Thanks to Fadi Lama for recommending ICE-9, who is putting out a multipart, clever and perceptive analysis of what’s happening as The Killing Joke. Here is an excerpt from Ice-9 The Killing Joke Ch 18 of 25 (Part II):

The Killing Joke - Chapter 18 of 25 (Part II)

… a small, in-bred, highly unified hereditary conjuring class over a mongrelized, discretized, and stupefied productive class that, through its generational exposure to never-ending sorcery, had finally been stamped and beaten and molded into a static and immutable caste. A caste consisting of a few hundred million “climate crisis” survivors who would be allowed to come in to the future. Survivors of the wizardry spun around an ignorance of the earth’s axial procession, they were an unfortunate necessity whose sole purpose would be to drudge and toil and spend the entirety of their miserable lives satisfying the fickle pleasures of their conjuring overlords. Society would freeze and history no longer exist, as there would be no further changes or events of import worth remembering. All fruits of life, every value added endeavor, each creative outcome, and the very joys of life itself were to be given over in totality into the grabbing and voracious hands of a never satiated conjuring aristocracy.

But this isn’t what’s going to happen, folks. It’s our birthright to live in homes that we love and make into creative masterpieces, that love us back for taking such good care of them. It’s our birthright to have land for gardens and play and pets. My neighbors just threw the 5th anniversary of our first driveway get-together, wearing masks and sitting in lawn chairs 5’ apart. They called it WoW—Wednesdays on Walnut and did it every week. We all deserve neighbors like that.

Under my caret system, we can use eminent domain to buy out any non-local owners of property within our borders. We generate the payment in dollars but it becomes a debt to ourselves in carets, which we can distribute equally to all commoners. So I’m not worried about how we’ll take back our cities, only about what we’ll do with all these monstro-cities when we do.

To that end, we should demand to see the ones already built filled with people who already live in Santa Cruz before we build anymore. Our problem isn’t not enough housing, it’s too many people—starting with transient students, tourists and homeless. Highrises to house the elite of China is just a conjurer’s spell.

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How do we deflect the Dark Arts of word spells? I spell out the steps of methodical thinking--state your purpose, own your dogma, put your rooster in the ring. I define four paradigms in socio-spirituality that I uniquely represent and why we should be agreeably disagreeable.

Responds to James Corbett's Free Your Mind interview on anarchy and auto-didacts, and Mathew Crawford on ways to weaken the Matrix. Rob of Occam's Razor explains why both red and blue pills are needed and I suggest we get all the blue pill we can, while the dementors line up to suck the joy out of our souls. I end with why free will vs. predestination is another false dichotomy.