Hope you like your house the way it is

Remodeling will become much more expensive, starting April 22. Small contractors might as well close up shop now. Neo-neocon has the story, and the comments: Next on Obama’s hit list: small contractors.

I can't recall another American President who thought that prosperity was a Bad Thing, and worked so actively against it.

Which way to Skid Road?

Or, In praise of slumlords. Qualified praise, you understand.

A post at American Digest (No More Bums in America: Noted in Passing on the Streets) reminded me of a song, Larimer Street by Bruce "U. Utah" Phillips. Sorry, no Youtube, but you can hear it at Rhapsody. And a little about it, too. Now go read and listen, and come back when you're done. Van der Leun is in Swiftian satirical mode in this one, so mind the sharp edges.

OK then, we're back here now.

"Urban renewal" and "blight eradication" sound like good ideas. But what they amount to, usually, is the destruction of cheap places to live. That would be unsubsidized, free enterprise cheap, not officially designated "affordable." Old people on pensions need cheap places to live. Young people starting out need cheap places to live. Misers need cheap places to live. The demolition is usually done by city governments under the influence of developers. So the government tears down acres of slums, cheap houses owned by many different individuals, which then are gentrified into luxury housing or shopping malls, and might build a housing project, which will be run by the government, presumably for the benefit of the people who were displaced. But it's a government project, so there will be restrictions and regulations about who can live there, and what the residents can do there, and if it's one of those high-rise projects it will probably be taken over by criminal gangs. Everybody has the same landlord, and the landlord's not even a person, but a bureaucracy.

An analogy comes to mind. Think of a forest, call it Hundred-Acre Wood. Every creature that lives there has worked out its own individual modus vivendi. Now the local government has been persuaded that this area would be better used as luxury condos, so the Wood is declared "blighted." After all, it contains no fine homes, though the residents may like their nests and burrows well enough. So the government and the developer will build a clean, modern zoo for them, with all the amenities. (I'm not comparing slum-dwellers to animals in any real sense, any more than Orwell was comparing citizens to animals in Animal Farm. Don't get distracted.) But that distressing hunny habit that Pooh Bear has … it leads him to do all sorts of foolish and dangerous things. Bears suffering from hunny addiction certainly should not be permitted in this clean, modern facility. That stuff is sticky. It will mess up the tile-work. He muddled along all right when he was living under the name of "Sanders," but this sort of thing is right out, now. And by the way, what's with the alias? Register under your real name and social security number, Mr. Bear, or go live in the street. No, you can't live in the woods any more, there are no woods, where the woods were there are condos.

I won't beat that to death, you get the idea.

[Sidenote on Bruce "U. Utah" Phillips: He was a great storyteller and songwriter, a social activist, anarcho-pacifist, and one of the last of the "Wobblies" (the IWW has been effectively out of business for a long time). He did considerable good by writing beautiful songs, and towards the end of his life ran a homeless shelter. Like all adherents of the labor theory of value, he failed to consciously understand the importance of capital.]

One reason why Van der Leun can say

Nowhere in today's brighter and more-caring American cities will you see those terrible social wrecks on the streets. Yes, no longer will you find "Bums," "Junkies," "Drunks," "Bull-Goose Raving Lunatics," or "The Hard Core Unemployed" on our sidewalks. They are all gone, a fading memory.

is that the city of Seattle has public housing for drunks. Only for 75 of them, though. Better than nothing, but compared to a living Skid Road, not so much. Ain't it great? Back when there was a skid road, these guys could have worked sweeping out a bar, and found a $20 a week room somewhere nearby. Now, they are housed at the public expense, and

benefit from 24-hour, seven day a week supportive services including:

• State-licensed mental health and chemical dependency treatment
• On-site health care services
  
• Daily meals and weekly outings to food banks
• Case management and payee services
• Medication monitoring
• Weekly community building activities

Sort of like what happened to Pooh, in the zoo. Of course there are more than 75 homeless drunks in the city of Seattle. And what about the homeless non-drunks? They can't find those $20 a week rooms any more, and employers are forbidden by law from paying less than the minimum wage. There was a time when poverty did not mean being dependent on government. Now it seems that sleeping on the sidewalk is the only alternative to welfare for the drunks or those who would be called eccentric if they had money. Or for ones who can't make it in the 9-to-5 world, but are too proud, have too much self-respect, to take a dole. It almost looks like the government is trying to create a dependent class.

I'm veering, as Horace Larkin would say, and haven't managed to make my point. When the cheap parts of town disappear, what happens to the people who lived there? No more boarding houses, flophouses, SRO hotels. From Phillips's lyric, "Where will I go, and where will I stay? You've knocked down the skid road and hauled it away."

(Did you find the chicken in this post? The bear was easy.)

Evil mutant targets homeowners in addition to industry

Deep within the Waxman-Markey bill are some provisions relating to energy efficiency of private dwellings, which … well, let Jimmie Bise explain it. Part 1. Part 2.

Santelli update

There are a couple more Santelli clips at Liberty Maven, via Instapundit.

(I would have added this to the other Santelli post, but that has now become uneditable. I now have two posts with embedded MSNBC videos, and both of them are uneditable. This might be a pattern. I'll add a "Santelli" label, to bring these up together.)

Santelli speaks up

Someone, Rick Santelli of CNBC, is trying to speak truth to power. Of course power does not like hearing it. Let's get all the clips together. I dare say there will be more.

His initial outburst, on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange:



For comments, Althouse.

Robert Gibbs does some spinning, in a distressingly condescending tone, for a sympathetic and appreciative White House press corps:



Matt Lauer and Steve Liesman try to trivialize Santelli on the Today show:

Those are from Hot Air, where there are many comments.

And Chris Matthews, who thinks that people are facing "disclosure." (2:36 into the video.) Maybe he is thinking of all those Cabinet nominees who had trouble with disclosure of, say, tax records. Matthews has already disclosed the thrill he gets from hearing Obama speak, so his objectivity is not in question, that is, his bias is on his sleeve. (Or his pants!)


By way of Gateway Pundit, who has comments.

Santelli: "In America, contract law should be sacred." Makes sense to me. Matthews calls him "Ebenezer Scrooge," and says "You're up there with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity." That's enough to make me wonder if Matthews has a contract with MSNBC, or if he does this TV work out of the goodness of his heart and whatever spare change he can find under the sofa cushions in the green room.

I enjoy listening to Santelli's Chicago vowels, as he speaks for truth, justice, and the American way. There's a website promoting the Chicago Tea Party (they plan to throw derivatives into the lake), and a Santelli for Senate campaign button. Roland Burris is looking likely to have a very short Senate term of service. Governor Quinn could establish his independence from the Chicago mob by appointing Santelli. He will not do that, of course, but he could, and it's entertaining to think about.

Update: Roger Kimball has a couple of comments at PJ Media: On the Gibbs remarks, My favorite American; On the Lauer-Liesman interview, Reinventing liberal guilt.

Jenkins: Let Houses Find a Bottom

Megan McArdle posted on Wednesday on Fannie Mae's 4th quarter loss of $3.6 billion. Whew! Sooner or later that's going to start running into real money. (As Everett Dirksen apparently didn't say.) This leads commenter Fred to link to Holman Jenkins in the WSJ: Let Houses Find a Bottom.

We have nothing to fear but fear itself, a president once said, and thereupon embarked on a series of ad-libs some of which deepened and prolonged the country's depression.

[…] drawing out the correction prevents the market from finding a bottom. It prevents owners and shoppers alike from having confidence to judge what houses are worth. It bails out lenders and investors who incautiously or fraudulently financed home purchases for speculative buyers, which can only encourage more of the same behavior in the future.

There's more downside to house prices coming, it's just going to take longer to get there.

Captain Capitalism reports on real estate and mortgages

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. A fair amount of reading, but worthwhile if you're interested in the current state of the housing market. The rest of his posts are worth reading, too.

Can we have a light blue line around the world?

Another from Instapundit, I'll just quote the whole thing:

JAMES Q. WILSON EMAILS: "On August 26, 2007, the Los Angeles Times published an article explaining why the city council of Santa Barbara has been prevented from painting a blue line across the city to mark how high the water will be if you believe Al Gore’s prediction that global warming will make the oceans rise by 23 feet. The idea was not defeated because people realize that Gore’s prediction is silly and wrong, but because a realtor threatened a law suit based on the argument that property values below the line would fall."

The article is here.

I think the various organizations promoting concern about global warming should make this a top priority, not only for Santa Barbara, but for the whole world. They are making predictions that would be much more powerful if they were given some concrete form. Remember how impressive the animated aerial views were in An Inconvenient Truth. There are plenty of people who don't know exactly where those lines of elevation are. Many of them have children. It's for the children!

How to buy bank foreclosures

According to Randy Vredenburg, anyway. Part 1. Part 2.