That’s some third world stuff right there. This of course should be illegal. She’s taking a public resource (street parking), privatizing it by occupying it with her RV and then charging rent for it. Godspeed if you live on the street where she does this.
My gut reaction is that (A) yes, it's an improper exploitation of public resources, and also (B) the severity of depends a bit on whether anyone else wants to use the space, varying between "hell no" versus "who cares".
With respect to (B), the article says:
> on the street in the East Meadow neighborhood of Palo Alto
Perhaps a Palo Alto native can chime in, but my remote map-searching suggests she's putting those RVs in areas [0] (18,20,21,28) where it seems reasonable for other people to complain, as opposed to some disued access road.
Fabian Way is an office/industrial area near the major 101 freeway with wide streets and plenty of room for the RVs. Seems entirely reasonable to park RVs there. The surrounding office buildings have acres of empty parking lots.
I can see if they stay a long time or are broken down and it becomes a shanty town that would be a problem, but given the problem of stupidly high rents pricing people out of homes, this seems a reasonable solution. City could lease an empty office building and allow cars/RVs in the parking lot with services like security, showers and social services in the office building.
I was ready to agree with you but then you went to blame her and not the economic environment that made this viable—even desirable compared to alternatives. I could never imagine paying for one of these things unless I was in a truly desperate position. It's the zeroth responsibility of government to keep people from
being desperate by providing better alternatives. Both because of empathy but also because desperate people have nothing to lose and people with nothing to lose are a powder keg waiting for a spark. This woman should have no customers because there's an alternative better than living in a RV with no plumbing.
For what she’s charging you could easily afford an apartment somewhere that isn’t Palo Alto.
I get what you’re saying but I think you’re going too far in the other direction. Some people are okay with a “bohemian” lifestyle and want to live on the beach in Venice or Palo Alto or whatever and will use exploitative means to do so.
apparently the other option, as seen in the comments, is that the government bulldoze the houses on that same street to build a highly dense row of flophouses
like I said elsewhere, just move where you can afford. wherever that is, it's probably a few decades away from being some future generation's dream home
The other option would be more like, incumbent Palo Alto single family homeowners can sell their homes at a huge premium to developers who want to build multi-family homes there to satisfy the obvious demand for more housing.
Everyone who lives in a house on a piece of land is privatising a public resource. Yes, it should be illegal, but equally Prop 13 should never have been passed.
"But her take-home is next to nothing because on top of parking tickets, repairs and other maintenance on her vehicles, she also donates at least $800 each month to her ministry, Spread the Name of Lord Jesus"
So her take-home is at least $800 a month (which is still very modest), she's just chosen a very specific way to spend it.
I think you get it, but in case others aren't reading between the lines: a sham ministry is a great way to be a tax-free landlord. I've heard of people in Nevada doing it for a collectively-managed home
Wow, I see these dilapidated RVs all the time. I had no idea people were renting them out like apartments or hotel rooms.
I am against letting people live in RVs parked on city streets whether they own them or not. But the solution here isn't just making it illegal. The solution is making it legal to build actual housing.
Strangely reminds me a little bit of people who get Uber driver accounts, and then sell them. There was a woman who was arrested because she ran a network of basically 150 or so rideshare drivers who bought the account.
Maybe instead of shitting on people you don't know, have a little empathy and compassion, and acknowledge that just because you don't know the reason someone might do something, it doesn't mean there's no reason, or the reason is a bad one.
Oh, and Fresno and Modesto are not "in that area", not by any stretch of the imagination.
But some people who would love to live in the bay area, and have jobs in the bay area, do live out in Fresno and Modesto because that's all they can afford. When people have to drive 3 hours each way during rush hour to get to their job because there isn't enough housing available closer to work, that's a dysfunctional society.
I grew up in the Modesto area. I know people who commute from that area to SF for work. I can absolutely understand why people would prefer to live in an RV rather than subject themselves to that. My current commute, which is the worst I've ever had, is trivial by comparison, and yet already soul-sucking.
Living in a permanent structure where you can afford isn't as good as living in a gross RV on a street someplace and fruitlessly demanding the government build you a house?
You're the only one saying that. Be honest in your posts. Everyone else is saying that Palo alto doesn't permit nearly enough housing to be built. I can't build an ADU because my city won't permit structures within 7.5m of my rear property line. I have the skills and the cash and the need, but not the permission.
It's an economic drag, making housing scarce. All the businesses that need service workers have a much harder time operating in a housing desert like palo alto. More of them will close, and not be replaced. The surviving restaurants will be so busy and understaffed that it's less pleasant to visit than the better restaurants in Fresno. Same for all the other services, like a hotel, or a mechanic, grocery store, pharmacy, parcel delivery. It's also difficult for the b2b suppliers to survive. Suddenly your mechanic has to order parts from farther afield, and your car takes an extra day to fix.
I'm not calling for the government to build houses. I'm calling for the government to stop making it illegal for people to build significant new housing on the land they supposedly own.
How many of the peoople renting those are service workers working in palo alto? If you work as a waiter in palo alto, you are never going to be able to buy a house thats not hours and hours away. These people are taking their perceived best option, but the government needs to get more housing constructed.
I know I risk getting down voted to oblivion, but I truly do not understand this sentiment. There are plenty of places I cannot afford to live, so I live somewhere I can afford. Every time I hear about a "housing crisis" all I see are people demanding government mandated development in some fancy place (Manhattan! San Francisco!) that is out of touch price wise for almost every human being on Earth.
This idea that people are demanding Palo Alto or some other high end desirable community to build them a place to live makes no sense. I understand some community they can afford like Fresno or somewhere may be less desirable, i.e. fewer millionaires as your neighbors, but if that's what you can afford then that's where you go, right?
If someone wants to explain why a high end and highly sought after community needs to use the power of the government to force development for anybody at all please do let me know. Explain it like I am five. Also include in your answer why just living somewhere affordable is no longer an option, seeing as that is what seemingly everyone else so far in human history has done. In fact, it wasn't all that long ago that Palo Alto itself was just some undesirable hayfields. Every place you don't want to live is just a few decades away from being someone else's coveted dream home.
I dislike people all bunching up into cities (we have plenty of free space), but consider that there are many jobs in places like SF, even low-paying ones, that the richer residents do want filled. You're not getting a barista to commute 2 hours because the only alternative is living with 6 roommates. It's not going to happen. So, do you still want your coffee?
Where? SF and Manhattan are surrounded by water on 3 sides. Seattle has water on 2 sides. Other areas: LA, Boston, Miami, Portland, Denver, Chicago, have similar geographic limitations.
If you were to flatten cities out (see Atlanta), jobs will still concentrate downtown. If jobs concentrate in one area, home prices in that area will also elevate (downtown, buckhead, etc).
> You're not getting a barista to commute 2 hours because the only alternative is living with 6 roommates
Personally, I wish I had 6 roommates. People aren't getting married in their 20s, so if they aren't living with their wife/husband, why shouldn't they want to live with friends?
> Where? SF and Manhattan are surrounded by water on 3 sides. Seattle has water on 2 sides. Other areas: LA, Boston, Miami, Portland, Denver, Chicago, have similar geographic limitations.
All those places you listed are the cities with high cost of living and many people. "Where" is outside those cities--somewhere else. America is mostly empty space, even excluding parks, national forests, etc.!
> Personally, I wish I had 6 roommates. People aren't getting married in their 20s, so if they aren't living with their wife/husband, why shouldn't they want to live with friends?
It's fine if you do, but I feel like most people do not, and I do not. Being friends and being roommates can often be two very different experiences.
Are you talking about how certain industries are each concentrated to a small number of locations? That's for good reason. Suppose you were a software engineer, and every five or ten years you had to move across the country for your next job, because almost every single company is in a different city? Suppose you were running a software company, and it took every hire four months to start work because of the move?
The unfortunate truth is that Palo Alto is in the epicenter of one of the biggest providers of jobs and income. As much as many would prefer to have that epicenter relocated to somewhere more deserving given how little the area cares to develop beyond a dreary suburban money vacuum, network effects prevents it
The government doesn't need to build any housing. They just need to stop preventing people from building housing. All of the obstacles to building housing come from the government. Take them away and the problem will solve itself.
I would like folks I hire, folks I work with, etc, to not be forced to live an hours commute by car in order to do business with me. I would like jobs and lives to be possible to be co-located. As part of that, I'd love to do things like demolish the single-family home on my property and pay, with my own money, to turn that into a let's say 6-to-8 unit apartment/condo building.
However, I cannot do that. Due to zoning, I can turn this house into at most 2 houses. Unfortunate. If I could secure the money and funding, I'd love to build more housing via the land I own.
Notice, I haven't mentioned the government at all other than to say I am being held back from building housing. That's what folks talk about.
This is not to say I don't support government operated social housing. But I'd love to START with just making dense housing legal.
> demanding Palo Alto or some other high end desirable community to build them a place to live
That's not what's happening. They're asking to be allowed to build. Y'know, like pay a developer to build them a house.
But no, I guess it's totally fair that the people who live there already just happened to be born at the right time and place to get to take advantage of living in a desirable area, and everyone else can just pound sand.
As a SF resident (haven't lived down near Palo Alto in years), the housing crisis is what's responsible for homelessness and for the high cost of everything (not just housing) here. If I could wave a magic wand and 50k new housing units appeared in desirable neighborhoods within the city limits, I'd do it in an instant. Life would be so much better not just for the people who want to live here, but for the people who already live here. (And yes, I say this as a SF homeowner who might stand to have a reduced home value.)
But NIMBYs love the whole "I got mine, fuck you" shtick, even if ultimately it's against their and their neighbors' own interests.
> in some fancy place (Manhattan! San Francisco!) that is out of touch price wise for almost every human being on Earth.
You're just talking in circles. The reason these places are out of touch price wise for so many people is because of the anti-housing policies in place in these cities.
> I seriously doubt anyone living in an RV has a plot of land in Palo Alto that they are forbidden to develop.
Sigh, I didn't mean that literally. Of course what I actually meant was: if housing policy allows for building more housing, with less friction, and less unnecessary cost, developers will naturally build more, and faster, because there's demand, and then people won't have to live in RVs, because there will be housing units available than they can afford.
> Is it just boiled down to the sentiment that you want to "stick to the rich!" by forcing the government to bulldoze their communities?
Wow, not what I said, and not what I think. If you're going to continue to take the most uncharitable interpretations of what I say, I don't really think there's much point in continuing to participate in this discussion.
There's plenty of land in all these places. No need to bulldoze anything. And not sure why you keep bringing up "the government". The government won't be doing anything except making it easier and more affordable to build housing.
You can easily see what the down stream effects of these housing issues are with how many ski towns have been struggling. Exceedingly high property value with low housing availability means it's incredibly hard to field workers for the shit you usually take for granted. The end result is that nobody can afford anything, people start leaving and existing property gets bought up for use as rentals or AirBnB and everything sucks.
>why a high end and highly sought after community needs to use the power of the government to force development for anybody at all please do let me know.
Why should they be able to use the power of government to force everyone to not develop please do let me know.
Palo Alto is filled with rambleshack little 60's starter homes. It's fucking preposterous they're a walking commute to the HQs of some of the largest employers in the region, some of the largest companies on the planet in history, and the houses near by are basically the same size and style of the ones in the Midwestern suburb I grew up in, but with less land and pissier neighbors! And because its lacking in density, every fucking road is a horrible shithole loud stroad, so don't even give me that bullshit "its so natural and pretty", it's an ugly strip mall. The land isn't expensive because it's nice, it's because of where it is, and the insane, overreaching rules that keep the built environment exactly the way it was 50 years ago, that makes it expensive.
The entire Bay has a natural growth boundary. If it hadn't been unnaturally ossified in amber, it'd be a wonderful, confederated metropolis of taller multi-unit, lots of 3+ flats, multi-use, even plenty of SFHs, and transit to link it all together. Instead, it's a ponzi scheme for the rich and the lucky who got there first, who are starving the state of voters for the 2030 census, the middle class schmucks clogging the roads in their car, and all the poor who can't afford to live there, but can't afford to leave, so they pitch a tent in a park to get out of the rain and get their face plastered on Fox News. It's short-sighted, selfish, and fucking stupid. Absolutely brain-dead land-use policy all around.
> Also include in your answer why just living somewhere affordable is no longer an option, seeing as that is what seemingly everyone else so far in human history has done. In fact, it wasn't all that long ago that Palo Alto itself was just some undesirable hayfields. Every place you don't want to live is just a few decades away from being someone else's coveted dream home.
Until the '50s nowhere had zoning laws, that's the big difference. Not to mention all the other ways to make housing illegal by stealth, like building code and electrical code and plumbing code requirements that make it illegal to work on anything yourself. It is now functionally illegal to build anything in cities (occasionally a developer who pays a big enough brib^H^H campaign contribution to the mayor's reelec^H^H an unaffiliated PAC supporting candidates that align with their interests gets to build a couple of buildings); if you're willing to build in an empty hayfield then sure, you can build a handful of houses for people who don't need jobs until there are enough people living there that they vote to incorporate and make building illegal. It's now functionally impossible to obtain a house near where the jobs are unless you are a boomer who got one back when it wasn't illegal, or are descended from one, or otherwise have generational wealth.
The people who built when that was a small town growing into a bigger town have pulled the ladder up behind them; that's new, and happening everywhere, and unfair. Especially because the whole scam only works because existing homes are grandfathered in. If you made the existing homeowners play by the same rules they're imposing on everyone else, and tore down any house where the guy who did the wiring back in 1955 couldn't prove that they had the required 4 years of college or what have you, things would get sorted out pretty quick.
Your entire comment is basically an asinine way of talking around the fact that employers want people to go to work in places that they can't actually afford to live or must otherwise waste vast portions of their lives and pocketbooks commuting to work. Perhaps I'd be more sympathetic if employers were taxed on their employees' commute distance and time, or had to pay overtime rates for employees commutes, even for salaried workers, or something, but as it stands people don't "feel like they must live in Manhattan." Instead, they feel like they have to work for whatever company that's got good vibes, aligns with their career (because network effects are very real), and locates their office or coworking space in SF or Manhattan, and then don't want to spend all their salary on rent or commute 2 hours each way.
How dare the poors desire to live somewhere that commuting to their job isn't a multiple hour affair. They should know their place (which is far out of sight unless they're given the honor of preparing an overpriced coffee for their betters).
>Explain it like I am five. Also include in your answer why just living somewhere affordable is no longer an option
OK well, I was hoping to get something done this morning since I woke at 5, but I will provide an edge case.
Sometimes people are living in a high end community, but something bad happens to them, and when the bad thing happens to them the community has programs in place to help them. You might think that the community having programs in place to help them is good because that's what communities should do but it has a hidden bad side called lock-in, because getting the program to help you often takes a lot of time and effort and then when you have it you depend on it and you can't really leave.
But sometimes when bad things happen it means more bad things happen! The first bad thing causes other bad things to happen!
Like if you have a child born that needs a lot of special help and you start spending all your spare time helping them and going through all the work of getting the community to help which means undoubtedly months if not years of fighting for your child and getting stressed and then after a few years of that you can't handle your high paying job anymore you get fired.
So now you can't afford to be in the high end community!
If you move you have to move with the child that needs help, but moving is extra difficult because you have a child that needs help! Also maybe because you lost your job you don't really have the money to move anyway, because moving costs a lot of money! Maybe your best bet is to try to find some way to stay in the expensive community because that community is forced to help you because you have all the paperwork in place.
Also moving takes a lot of effort, you couldn't handle your fancy job anymore because of the stresses of having whatever problem you have (doesn't have to be a child with problems could be other things) and so you might not be able to handle all the stresses of moving, hell you might not even really be able to handle the stresses of searching for a new place to live far away.
But hey, there is a lady here with an RV. So you move into that for a small time until you can get a place in the community that provides help for your problem and devote your time to getting such a place, because that is actually the most sensible solution.
Now admittedly this is an edge case and whatever reasons these people have for wanting to build in Palo Alto, a place they obviously can't afford, those reasons might be different. I do get some feeling that people have a job in the area and need to be in that area to keep that job feeling for some of the characters described in the article.
Those people seem sort of rational (they're after all maintaining a place to live and not living on the street). But you're right they are doing something that on its face seems irrational. Your conclusion on seeing this irrationality seems to be that they are just stupid, much stupider than you.
My conclusion on seeing someone who is rational doing something that seems irrational is that there is something I don't know.
on edit: changed searching for a job to searching for a new place to live.
I dunno why you'd tell your self-driving van to do laps for eight hours when it could just drive somewhere outside the city and park, unless you live in a city where the commute time is more than four hours each way.
What would it matter with a self-driving car if the commute is four hours? No-one will care. Notice how it's often "worth it" even now to drive for half an hour or so to get cheaper fuel. Except, with no rent in the picture, it will be far more worth it. Add to that that Americans aren't willing to give up bigger cars ("easy-ish" to live in) and ... Self-driving will just become a way to use more public resources for specific people.
I just pity the people who still expect to normally get through traffic.
It would matter because sleeping in a moving car in traffic in the middle of a city sucks in comparison to sleeping in a parked car in a quiet street on the outskirts, and also uses more fuel and wears out the car faster. There's no gain to driving around in circles while sleeping compared to having your car go and park somewhere.
On one hand, she's providing shelter. On the other, she's using public streets as her business asset and mixing faith with rental agreements. I'm genuinely not sure if this is selfless service or just late-stage capitalism with a halo on top.
