Category: California

“Under the 10 Freeway: Immigrant businesses scraped by while landlord dodged Caltrans” (Los Angeles Times):

Their landlord, Apex, owned by Ahmad Anthony Nowaid, had failed to pay rent on the 48,000-square-foot triangular lot at South Alameda and East 14th streets for more than a year, and owed $78,000, according to Caltrans, which sued the company for back rent in September.

The property was one of five that Caltrans was attempting to evict Apex and another Nowaid company from, including a plot along the 5 Freeway in Sun Valley and another a block away from the fire. All told, Nowaid owed about $620,000 to Caltrans in unpaid rent as of September, the agency said in court filings.

In April, court records say, a Caltrans employee visited the lot and told tenants to stop paying their rent to Apex as the state planned to evict the company.

Several tenants, including Serafin, said they stopped paying Nowaid this month after receiving notice from the court to appear for the lawsuit in December. They said that the moment they stopped paying rent, Nowaid threatened to lock the gates again.

The story is interesting because you’d think that the government would have great access to its own courts, yet a California state agency was apparently unable to use the California state courts to evict a nonpaying tenant. Via their strong tenants rights laws, Californians managed to flambée their own 10-lane freeway (not sure if freeway is masculine or feminine in French, but in California it can identify as any gender, presumably).

Separately, the headline references “immigrant businesses”. Diversity was supposed to be the freeway’s strength. The primary tenant was named “Ahmad”, an Arabic name that is a diminutive of “Mohammed”. The article describes the subtenants as immigrants from Mexico. As a group, they should have been super strong, yet the article describes the result as economically marginal.

“I lost everything,” Serafin said. “We are not educated people. Most of the people are people that crossed the border, work hard, or maybe grew up here. But we are working-class people. We break our back to barely make a good living.”

The triangular tract was chaotic, with no clear entrance or address, and with unhoused people living in tents and trailers outside its gates. Graffiti was scrawled around the perimeter. Inside, workers and equipment shared close quarters amid the stacks of pallets.

Serafin said fires regularly broke out in encampments around the property, but calls to police or for cleanups often went unheeded. He and others would sometimes pay homeless people $20 just to move away from their businesses.

“We’re living paycheck to paycheck,” said Jose Luis Villamil Rodriguez, 53, who had a mechanic stand under the freeway.

Maybe it works better for private landlords? An aviation friend owns some apartment buildings in California. He says to budget $80,000 to $200,000 in legal fees to evict a tenant who doesn’t pay rent and 1-2 years of time, but “if the word ‘Covid’ is mentioned they get 4 years.”

Someone torched a homeless encampment and a pallet storage facility underneath a 10-lane freeway, melting the guard rails and resulting in a shower of concrete that had been supporting the freeway. A gaming enthusiast striving for a high score in Grand Theft Auto? No. Real life in Los Angeles this weekend. The Daily Mail:

Coincidentally, our tender 8- and 10-year-olds were at a birthday party this weekend where the hosts brought in a “gaming truck” with Xbox. Their mom was supervising, saw Mario on the outside of the truck, and decided that it would be okay if the boys played “a racing game”. At dinner, the boys recounted the fun that they’d had smashing into buildings, running over criminals, stealing and punching, etc. “Were you playing Grand Theft Auto?” I asked. “Yes, that was the name of the game!” they responded.

I had always thought of Grand Theft Auto, which I’ve never played, as American. What other country has a lot of cars and social decay? Wikipedia, however, says that the creators are Scottish.

Proving that there is always balance in the universe, just as Los Angeles was being trashed by this fire San Francisco was being cleaned up. Also from the Daily Mail… “Outrage as San Francisco boots vagrants off streets ahead of Xi Jinping visit – as California Governor Gavin Newsom admits woke city was only given polish to impress world leaders”:

• In the span of a few days, the city scrubbed seven intersections in the notorious Tenderloin and South of Market – leaving the hotspots almost unrecognizable
• Where tents were once propped up, sidewalks are clear and spotless. Locales where homeless once congregated are cleared, video from the sites shows
• Hangouts along Mission Street and Market are no more, along with an open drug market that for over a year has been outside the Nancy Pelosi Federal building
• Last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom admitted the clean-ups were only done to provide a good impression for visiting world leaders

Gavin Newsom said that the idea of a border wall was “a monument to stupidity” and “a distraction” when Trump proposed it. Here’s the new San Francisco border wall:

Let’s check on traffic in LA at 10:30 am on a Monday:

It doesn’t look worse than usual!

From Governor French Laundry:

I am in love with him/her/zir/them referring to these restrictions as “freedoms”.

Separately, I can’t figure out why the proposal is so weak. He/she/ze/they says these tweaks will “end our nation’s gun violence crisis”. But if the government continues to allow private citizens access to firearms, won’t there still be plenty of gun violence? Governor French Laundry promises to ban “civilian purchases of assault weapons”, but that still leaves approximately 6 percent of Americans in possession of an AR-15. If any one of those 6 percent wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, that’s high potential for gun violence!

Also, though Americans under 21 will be restricted by these freedoms from legally purchasing a gun, those 21+ will still be able to do so. Aren’t there enough Americans over 21 committing gun violence that we would still be suffering from a “gun violence crisis” even if nobody under 21 ever did any shooting?

Readers may recall Seal off criminal-rich neighborhoods to tackle the public health emergency of gun violence? in which residents of some neighborhoods would be locked down and walled off. Could being forbidden to leave the house/neighborhood also be considered a “gun safety freedom”?

Most of the folks whom I’ve met at Burning Man (attended in 2014 and 2015) were California residents. Thus, some of the Americans who most enthusiastically embraced school closures and lockdowns have found themselves stuck for an extra day or two on the Playa. Cowering at home from 2020 through 2022 could be considered prep for this year’s Burning Man, in which the car gate was closed by authorities due to deep mud.

A couple of tweets from the organizers:

The airport closed on Saturday, supposedly, but there are no NOTAMs for 88NV in the official FAA system. An AvWeb story:

(Note the “shelter in place” phrase, mirroring the language of the San Francisco mayor in 2020: “Homeless individuals are not subject to the shelter in place order”)

From 2015, not the best leggings for mud… (my original caption: “Russian journalist”):

Maybe a good mud vehicle?

A hard “no” on this one:

This probably wouldn’t work either…

Related:

• Burning Man for turboprop pilots (links to the rest of my photos)
• the New York Times, which said that a 12-18-month lockdown was the best thing that ever happened to K-12 kids, now reports that a 2-day lockdown requires near-divine intervention: “By Sunday afternoon, a White House official said President Biden had been briefed on the situation and that administration officials had been in touch with state and local officials.”