There is excess in California real estate right now. It is driving the California inequality crisis. A cleansing collapse is needed. Extravagant real estate prices have driven enormous inequality… And that has nothing to do with Trump… Just the opposite.
Although the state is nominally, and stridently “democratic”, the average “democratic” voter behaves like a mini-Trump (that’s why they hate Trump so loudly: they are in denial of their true inner nature… they want to scream to themselves that they are not as they truly are… also Trump took away their tax rebates, and redistributed them to low lives).
The reality is this: by refusing the construction of low and middle income housing, a boom of real estate prices was created. Yesterday’s dumps, bought cheaply, became money making machines. The California middle-class strangled low income housing supply in a mix of greed and NIMBYism. This selfish enterprise started as an esthetic claim. A few decades ago, San Francisco congratulated itself for physically demolishing thousands of units of “ugly” low income housing (those thousands of apartments were replaced by a few multi millionaire houses). In other Californian cities, anything not multimillionaire houses is basically illegal to build.
1775 Broadway apartment #8 San Francisco, CA 94109 Pacific Heights 1 Bed 1 Bath
728 square feet
$994,500… Est. Mortgage $4,759/mo
In San Francisco, a less than 1,000 square feet, one bath apartment, can be more than 1.5 million dollars. Below this, tents in the street, living in filth, is the official city policy. College professors have been known to live inside their cars. I know someone who has lived in his car for twenty years. In another Bay Area city I know all too well, some “democratic” (of course) officials are paid to do nothing, while California governor Newsom put at disposition of the city a small land surrounded by a freeway exchanger, all around, and the busiest railroad in the USA… to be used by the homeless (won’t they be happy surrounded by howling, belching machines?)
To turn this nightmare into a better reality, a good collapse in the existing real estate is what is needed. So as to replace it by something more progressive. Augmenting the taxes on billionaires some more, would help, as the diversity of thinking and initiative in California guarantees they are going nowhere…
The remedy is to build massively, cheap, earthquake-proof, modern, ecological apartments (single family mansions, as presently found in California, would be too ecologically devastating, and should be reserved to millionaires). Developers should be fiscally encouraged to do so.
The manipulated and manipulating have been going around, decrying the US as a systematically racist place full of white racists who have to destroy their inner Hitler.
Last month, the City of Seattle’s “Office of Civil Rights” sent an email inviting “white City employees” to attend a training session on “Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness,” a program designed to help white workers examine their “complicity in the system of white supremacy” and “interrupt racism in ways that are accountable to Black, Indigenous and People of Color.”
Seattle has also expensive real estate… And this is what low lives worry about… not whether all these “whites” who suddenly “care” are busy calling others racist.
The problem in the San Francisco Bay Area is that the minorities are a majority. Many, if not most, of these minorities are highly skeptical of the indignant “systemic racism” discourse. They feel something is wrong, and rightly so: the leader of the “anti-racist” movement is Nancy Pelosi, a thoroughly white woman of extreme privilege, whose Pacific Height house is probably worth around twenty-five million dollars. Her main residence is a gigantic Napa valley estate, complete with tennis court and twisty access road, where she throws lavish parties for her rightly thinking expensive friends. She also owns a vineyard, beside ownership of the Squaw Valley olympic ski resort. Now that she is done making money from scalps, Nancy will push to change the name… But I digress…
Nancy Pelosi is a plutocrat of the most nefarious type (the war criminal type). Like her California colleague Feinstein, she leveraged politics to build a fortune. Such people are systemic oligarch. To deflect criticism from their systemic colonialism those evil oligarchs are addicted to, they invented the notion of “systemic racism”, which accuses those that they exploit… to exploit them even better, by confusing them further by making them feel bad about themselves, and building a fake explanation of what is wrong in the US.
Although I have been victim myself of some form of racism, more than once, and sometimes dangerously so, and always a heartbreak… I must admit that I am significantly different and somewhat obnoxious, and the white US person in her, or his, purity, can’t tolerate by black heart. The worst racism and abuse that I have seen, though, was from… US intellectuals. “intellectuals” are curiously unappreciative in the US for anybody who comes out of the box of established thinking.
That incapacity to think what’s not supposed to be thought may explain why the fact of systemic real estate abuse being really a machine to make the wealthy wealthier has not been denounced. Chomsky speaks about US imperialism… What about banks, and real estate, and how they augment inequality? Above his pay grade at MIT?
From, say, European eyes, the preceding critique may seem strange: in Europe one cannot use real estate for considerable leverage, by having a bank buy for oneself something one cannot afford… lest it considerably augments in value. Trump cut down the amusement by reducing the interest deductibility down from 1.1 million dollars to $750,000. This is one of the reason why he is so hated by the upper middle class in expensive “Blue” states such as New York, California, Illinois, Massachusetts…
Do not expect this sort of introspection to strike those opinion makers as particularly smart. But this also explains why the angry demonstrations attacked even CNN (fanatically anti-Trump), and Ulysses Grant (US president who won the Secession War when he commanded the US Army), Lincoln (anti-slavery president whose election launch the Secession), or even Supreme Court Justice Douglas, a strong anti-segregationist… What the low lives are saying is that they are left out by the plutocracy, whose modus operandi is to present drastic inequality as a fact of life one can’t escape, and one should tolerate with benign neglect… hence the tent cities and squalor a few minutes from Nancy Pelosi 25 million dollar mansions in San Francisco (she has another eight properties…) This is what Nancy teaches; she is so incredibly concerned by the homeless, and it is the fault of that man in the White House… But one can’t do anything about it, although we try everyday.
Actually, nine years ago, a small peninsula within the San Francisco was occupied by hundreds of homeless, their tents, their dogs and their drugs. I called it then “Obamaville”. So, yes inequality reached a new squalor under Obama. And, no, inequality is not all Trump (inequality indices seem to have reached a peak at the end of Obama’s reign, and have stagnated since). Actually, rather the opposite: Trump loves to build housing… especially given subsidies to do so. In truth, it’s because the “democratic” upper middle class became incredibly wealthier by restricting the housing supply that it hates Trump so much: it recognizes in him the builder, the supplier of housing, its natural enemy…
Patrice Ayme
