Piedmont, California trip report

First in a series of posts about a trip to Northern California over Labor Day weekend. The trip began at FLL, a center of poetry (“Pack the Fun, No Carry-On Gun!”).

One is greeted by signage celebrating Harvey Milk (Florida Sen. Ashley Moody, by contrast, points out that Harvey Milk’s sexual relationship with a 16-year-old boy should disqualify him from being painted as a hero by first-grade teachers):

And, of course, one sees the Followers of Science (this one relying on a non-N95 mask):

After picking up the 2022 Tesla Y from Avis, I fought my way through heavy traffic (at 1 am on the Bay Bridge!) to Piedmont, California where open-borders candidate Kamala Harris recently won 85 percent of the vote. Where do the residents of Piedmont want the New Americans to live? Not in Piedmont, California. They’ve spent a couple of decades fighting the development of affordable housing, higher-density lower-cost market-rate housing, etc. More than 10 percent of the town, for example, signed an anti-development petition in 2022. This eventually reached the national news, e.g., “Civil war breaks out in rich, white California town as activists from crime-plagued neighboring city demand it’s ‘canceled’” (New York Post, August 2026):

Oakland resident Jesse Rosemoore is behind the provocative “Cancel Piedmont” campaign targeting the 1.7-square-mile city of roughly 11,000 people that is surrounded by Oakland but maintains its own schools, police, parks and tax base, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The median price of homes in Piedmont is almost $2.6 million, which is more than three-and-a-half times that of Oakland’s.

Census data cited by the outlet shows Piedmont is roughly 70% white and around 1% black, while about one in five Oakland residents is black.

What does the front yard of someone who was willing to pay 3.5X for a house so that his/her/zir/their children wouldn’t encounter Black kids in their school look like? In case someone from the 1% minority of Black residents happens to walk by, this house (right next to a school), is equipped with a full-size “Black Lives Matter” sign.

Here’s another example in which the BLM sign has been augmented by pro-Hamas and pro-Iran signage.

(We later walked by the high school. Students were visible on outdoor patio and through a classroom window. All of them appeared white.)

Based on homeowner signage, quite a few Piedmont residents want to see a “Free Palestine”. What if, unlike in any other Arab or Muslim country, there were a significant number of remnant Jews in the resultant Hamas-ruled nation? (Remember that it wasn’t “ethnic cleansing” when Arab and Muslim nations got rid of their Jews after 1948.) The remnant Jews could have a temple devoted to advocating that the Gazans who perpetrated the October 7, 2023 attacks not suffer from any counterattack and, also, that Black Lives Matter (even more so when Arabs who call themselves “Palestinian” refer to Black people as abeed):

Kehilla Community Synagogue’s website says that they admit they are parked on land stolen from the indigenous and, also, that they want to fight ICE so as to increase the number of additional humans who will park themselves on land stolen from the indigenous people of North America:

Speaking of Native Americans, we’re informed by the Piedmont Righteous that they played no role in building any part of “America”. (Perhaps, like Boston, America was primarily built by immigrants from Somalia?)

Returning to the subject of schools, the elementary school recommends that everyone be masked. #SafetyFirst and, when masking the kindergartener, don’t forget the daily temperature check:

Everyone in Piedmont can agree that they don’t want a king in Washington, D.C. telling them they must allow the construction of affordable housing:

Would you be “OK” if you owned a $2.7 million for which you paid $135,000 (in 1977 dollars; $750,000 in post-Biden dollars) and on which you paid almost nothing in property tax thanks to California’s Proposition 13? No, you would not be okay! And you’d have to remind everyone “No Trespassing on Democracy”:

What about as an investor? Would you be okay investing $135,000 and getting out $2.7 million minus realtor commission, 50 years of maintenance expenses, etc.? ChatGPT says that you would not be okay! Had the $135,000 gone into the S&P 500 in 1977, with dividends reinvested, it would today be worth $36 million. (This might not account properly for federal and California state income tax on the dividends. One could also point out that the buyers likely used leverage (mortgage) to buy the house, but they could similarly have used leverage to buy the S&P 500.)

Here’s another way to be a rich douche and not be okay…. buy a Range Rover instead of a Honda or Toyota:

Let’s close by pointing out that the residents of Piedmont love Martin Luther King, Jr. so much that they leave the posters up eight months after the event: