No, I’m not talking about the governor of California; my article is about the possibly only tool left in dealing with the madness of so many housing bills. If they materialize, it won’t be the local government, but the state (which could have a blue government at any time in the future) that must be convinced that a modern-day Cabrini-Green coming to your community is a recognized nuisance. Good luck with that!
Today, I fired up the internet to a new tweet from user name DREW. It’s a meme captioned “take your Jason Sorens conspiracy shot.” The caricature depicts an angry, red-haired nurse holding a syringe and wearing a shirt that reads “NIMBY.” Gee, I wonder who Drew is mocking! Indulge me for a moment and consider the hairstyle and enhanced BMI of the cartoon figure. Just replace the hat and gloves with glasses and a sport coat with a stick pin and you get Queen Sharon instead of Nurse Terese. Queen Sharon supports all this housing bill madness despite her hometown of Londonderry already being in disarray over water and infrastructure issues. Talk to Rep Kristine Perez if you or someone you know wants to learn more about that.
Because Terese is my friend and she’s being insulted, I wanted to take the high road, which is “seek to understand,” so my first item of business was to learn more about her critic, Drew. In looking at his profile, I ran into his treatise titled “a pragmatic critique of Travis Corcoran’s libertarian zoning proposal.” I happen to like Travis though I’m certainly not as close to him as I am to Terese. I almost always support what Travis says, just to give some disclosure. My first impulse was to insult Drew for insulting Terese, but back to the high road, I decided to read the Drew essay just as I read the Sorens essay. I will compliment the professional quality and depth of it as both he and Sorens write in a caliber above my skill set.
My critique of Drew’s critique of Travis’s opus will concentrate on selected items because I see a shell game being used in a lot of hostile discussion out in the public square. In my previous article, I’ve noted the importance of knowing your customer and who the customers and salespeople are. Because Drew identifies himself as a 31 year old from Hollis that wants to buy property soon, but can’t afford Hollis (most ordinary people can’t), he’s not shy about wanting to pull the rug out from a system in place because “he wants in” and presumably can’t get in by using his own resources. The shell game being implemented by zoning abolitionists is built on “rage farming.” In short, rage farming is a technique used when you are angry about something and want change, but your personal issue is not popular enough to assemble an army to fight your battle. What do you do? You recruit soldiers angry about similar issues that they are personally passionate about. It’s akin to the straw man. Rage farming comes from the human condition, and I’ve engaged in it myself on multiple issues non germane to housing. Let’s just recognize it is being used to recruit people who were told “no” by local governments on things ranging from universally reasonable all the way to items of property rights cultism. Let’s just offer polar examples, like wanting to turn your garage into a studio apartment for grandma and wanting to build a nuisance brick and mortar business.
Let’s talk about nuisances because in Drew’s essay, it appears to be the operative word in the very very limited recourse available to townspeople wanting to keep unwanted development at bay. One might argue that what is a nuisance is in the eye of the beholder, and the current property owner might not be a victim of the impending nuisance after the closing date of the future sale. The townspeople might want protection from the nuisance in the making. Here’s where one version of the shell game presents itself when talking to a property rights zealot, which Rep Granger appears to be. In my attempt to have a civil two-way discussion, emphasis on attempt, civil and two-way, he went right into the property rights talking point, assuming that my talking points were going to be “one’s home is their biggest investment and protecting investments is not the government’s responsibility.” Not only did he interrupt me enough times to warrant my decision to throw in the towel and politely walk away, but I was never given the opportunity to be heard, and more importantly, listened to. My point is that there will be people who agree to disagree, but when faced with people who give you the “talk to the hand” treatment, there’s no point in howling at the moon to someone who is clearly lost at sea in their mind.
I took the time to read Drew’s essay, though I doubt he’s willing to have a polite two-way discussion with anyone interested in sharing their response to it. It’s an intuition, and I could be pleasantly surprised by finding out that I am wrong. However, Nurse Terese, the object of Drew’s derogatory meme, has invited Sorens and his apologists to have in person discussions at the mic and only a few of them have accepted, so I will finish with encouraging people to think about the word NUISANCE and perhaps inspire some bills that define that word when LSR time comes this fall. With many of these housing bill madness bills expected to cross the finish line in the near future, it’s not too soon to start prepping for their unintended consequences.
