Keep 'Them' Out of Midway and in the Kitchen Where They Belong
Tales of Woe and Class Warfare
Who says developers can’t be NIMBYs?
It’s ironic how the ultimate rationale of neighborhood NIMBY’s is always something about greedy developers.
For example, an anonymous NextDoor-based group is sounding the alarm in Kensington. “Save Our Neighborhood” and “The City Council Has DESTROYED Residential Zoning” are among the headlines on their flyer, which says our local elected officials are ready to “hand over our single-family neighborhoods to corporate ownership.”
https://twitter.com/kenjbarnes1/status/1389794436775694337?s=20
Hey folks, greedy developers have feelings, too. They don’t want poor people running amok in their newly built chateaus, either.
Today’s Union-Tribune features a trio of essays loosely grouped under the header ‘Market Forces,’ addressing elements of California’s housing crisis.
One discusses the need for better public policy toward rental housing. Another reveals the plight of parents whose mentally ill son has become homeless.
And one says the inclusion of low income housing in the redo of the Midway district is a bad idea for San Diego because of the notion of property value as the ultimate goal.
The subscriber version is titled The Unintended Cost of Affordable Housing. The online version has a more direct title: The public is not better served by providing affordable housing at the Sports Arena site. Here’s why.
The author --Nathan Moeder-- is the principal in a firm that guesstimates the profitability of real estate investments. He’s careful not to come out and say directly the servant class needs to live elsewhere.
Instead we get the developer's version of trickle down, holding that if this remake is special enough, the money will flow into upgrading the infrastructure and amenities of other neighborhoods, allowing for infill along with housing construction of all types…
..just not where my clients want to build luxury condos.
I’m sure, looking at it from a strictly dollars and cents point of view, the argument can be made that city owned land near the Sports Arena should be remade into something glittering with gold, aka “strategic.”
https://twitter.com/Koji_Vu/status/1390563289277505536?s=20
Of course, the traditional bang for buck in development has been single family developments. And the author of this piece takes a swipe at the notion of multi-family buildings as the future for housing in San Diego:
….Local government has effectively shut down single-family home development. In San Diego, 90 percent of our future growth is projected to be multifamily. This is a transformational leap in both verticalizing and densifying a region whose housing stock is over 60 percent single-family detached. It remains to be seen if future generations will seamlessly accept this form of living as an equal substitute for lower density suburban living. For now, I doubt that most would trade in the single-family home for a condo or apartment.
This is a bet on our housing future that could well backfire, making our region as unaffordable as most other more expensive West Coast cities.
The first priority ought to be to improve existing neighborhoods and make them an exciting place to live. Give future generations a reason to want to live there. Create the public realm. Create the amenities. Create the open space and gathering places. Improve the traffic.
A vision of the future contained in the bi-centennial issue (7/4/1976) of the local paper where “desert dwellers working for the elite would be jet railed to their places of employment from massive modular communities in the desert” hasn’t worked out.
So there's that...
The single family housing fetish is killing us as more workers--not just the servant class-- driving in from further away are accelerating climate change. And this seems like a good place to point out the role that single family housing zoning laws have played in segregation.
President Biden has it right when he says trickle down doesn’t work.
We all should know by now that developers aren’t going to build moderate and low income housing because of these imagined market forces; there isn’t enough profit in that sort of construction to pay the kinds of returns investors expect.
(And, no it’s not the cost of construction labor, which has in fact declined in recent decades.)
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This brings me to the other tone-deaf bit of reportage going on all over the media these days, namely the “greedy workers don’t want to work in restaurants” story-line.
The most common claim voiced by restaurant owners in these stories is about employees who won’t return to work because the Biden gravy train is so much nicer.
It’s a tough business, where profit for small time operators is elusive, and real estate deals can make or break even the best concept.
Unfortunately, the big players have set standards for wages and working conditions impacting the entire industry. Customers are conditioned to see prices that don’t realistically reflect the costs beyond what gets paid to wholesalers.
The real story for employees is more complicated than just pay. People whose lives revolved around workplaces where soul sucking, health destroying existences were considered the norm have managed to break the cycle. And they’re not so sure they want to go back. Or that they can.
https://twitter.com/RoKhanna/status/1390712152860807176?s=20
National Public Radio’s piece on the subject included hospitality operations impacted by the lack of seasonal foreign workers coming to the U.S. on H-2B visas. We get to hear about restaurant owners heroically working seven days a week to stay open.
You know who we don’t get to hear from at NPR?
The people who’ve decided not to return to work in the industry; the waitress who’s realized life is better without continual sexual harassment; the ‘salaried’ assistant manager whose pay works out to less than minimum wage when all the 14 hour days are considered; the admin person freed up from the outsized ego of all-too-many restauranteurs.
The Union-Tribune piece entitled ‘It’s like a war,’ San Diego restaurateur says of struggle to find workers does include some of the people who’ve left the industry.
And for those who might want to return, the risk to their loved ones has got to be a consideration. Is a well-done cheeseburger with fries worth your grandma’s life?
Even as vaccinations rise, there’s still the fear factor to consider. Some restaurant employees, whether working in cramped kitchens or waiting on unmasked diners, worry that they could be at risk of being infected. Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, says restaurant operators should not be surprised they’re having a hard time finding cooks. She points to a recent UC San Francisco study, which found that among working-age Californians, line cooks had the highest risk of dying during the pandemic.
“Cooks, who are overwhelmingly Latino, made up the highest excess mortality rate of any profession last year — and people wonder why workers would think twice before returning to these jobs?” Gonzalez said. “To build a stronger economy as we recover from the pandemic, it’s time we have a serious discussion about valuing service work and paying workers a living wage.”
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Things in the post pandemic world are rightfully changing. For most of us --nutcases excepted,-- there’s been a growing realization of the importance of “we” over “me.” This contradiction between the many and the few is at the heart of the struggles facing society these days.
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https://twitter.com/PuestoLoco/status/1390711933574258692?s=20
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