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Permutations of NIMBY

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Homeless_man_in_AnchorageIt absolutely is a case of NIMBY. And it must be said that Not-In-My-Backyardism can indeed be seen as not very nice. Socially irresponsible. Elitist. Selfish. Racist. Classist. Agnostic to the Great God of Free Enterprise. But…

The situation is a little more nuanced than that.

Here’s the Situation as I understand it — and bear in mind that none of this has been confirmed. So far, I’ve heard it by word of mouth. Tomorrow, if I can get to the evening meeting at which the Situation will be explained, I’ll have the details from the mouth of one of the horses.

A house at the corner of Main Drag South and Feeder Street NW has been purchased by a nonprofit. Said property has been a problem house for about as long as I’ve lived here. Main Drag South is one of the most heavily traveled surface streets in the city; in fact, at one point the city planned to widen it (it’s already 7 lanes!), saying that it carried the most traffic of any of the city’s surface roads. The house fronts on Main Drag South. The noise and dirt from a street like that, needless to say, are ferocious. It’s not a place anyone would choose to live, if they could afford better.

It was a bit of a wreck for quite a while; I think it was probably a rental. Then came the Bubble. As prices were climbing, somebody bought the house, fixed it up, and lived in it for awhile. They sold it to someone who apparently figured out its drawbacks after the fact. They noticed, for example, that people trying to turn right at the interminable signal at Main Drag and Feeder would drive up on the lawn to get around cars stacked in front of them.

So they built a pony wall around the lot’s perimeter, which they stuccoed. They stuccoed the house, too, and painted both to match: in a hideous shade of mustard brit-shindle. Proudly, they installed a lawn and a semi-circular driveway. Except for the ugly color, the house looked pretty nice.

Then it rained.

They had neglected to install drain holes in their wall. And apparently they’d never heard of caliche.

The front yard turned into a lake. It filled high enough to flood the house. And…the water  just sat there.

And sat there.

And sat there.

Eventually they had it pumped out. Somebody came in did some work, presumably repairing the damage. And the proud owners moved on.

Since then the mustard brit-shindle house has gotten a little shabby around the seams but otherwise has been inoffensive.

Now we’re told that the people who recently bought the place want to turn it into a homeless shelter.

Yeah. In our neighborhood. Right at the entryway to our neighborhood.

The Neighborhood Homeowner’s Private Club is up in arms. They’re urging everyone to show up at the zoning commission hearing to oppose the new owner’s scheme, which involves getting a variance so they can bulldoze the yard for a parking lot and erect an eleven-foot wall. The owners are holding a meeting with the neighbors tomorrow, presumably to plead their case for the poor.

Now, it has to be said that there are plenty of homeless people around here. Why, just last week, one or two of them revisited their favorite flophouse, the trash-can alcove outside my back gate, tossed their beer and liquor bottles around the alley, and left a great stinking mound of shit next to the gate, decorated with gummy toilet paper.

That’s our fellow humanity.

Central-city neighborhoods are always under a great deal of pressure. The city government itself, often (as ours is) owned by developers, invariably comes up with a scheme like a train or a double-decker freeway or whatnot that will enrich some One-Percenter at the expense of the people who live there. And centrally located middle-class neighborhoods are often bordered by dangerous slums — as this one happens to be.

I’ve been through this before. My ex- and I bought in the Encanto neighborhood just as it was starting to gentrify. It’s now one of the most sought-after neighborhoods in the Valley; what was then down-at-the-heels commerce around it has evolved into trendy shopping, business, and arts districts. At the time, we also had plenty of homeless folks living in the area, pushed out of downtown by the city’s enthusiastic redevelopment there.

None of these people were hapless victims of an economic crash. They were drug users and alcoholics. Not a few were seriously mentally ill men and women abandoned by closure of institutions that, whatever their failings, at least kept a roof over the heads of those incapable of caring for themselves. Some of these mentally ill folks, like some allegedly sane folks, were dangerous: one guy, for example, walked into a dirty-shirt law office on McDowell Road, where an early-bird admin assistant was making coffee for other staff who hadn’t shown up yet, and killed her for the fun of it. Others were just pests, the sort who would shit in your yard and climb into any unlocked car to take a nap.

Down the road, there was a homeless shelter. It would take people in at night, bed them down, and then at dawn would toss them back out on the street. With no place to go, the residents would ride the buses or hang out in the library all day, to keep cool or warm. Or they would wander up and down the streets of our neighborhood, all day long, until they could get back into the flophouse. There were always bums stumbling up and down our street, every day.

We could not let our son play outdoors without constant supervision. When he played outside with his little buddy who lived up the street, either I had to stand outside and watch them every minute, or our neighbor’s housekeeper had to do it. If I took him to the park — Encanto Park is a lovely, shady park in the middle of a historic neighborhood, with a pond and boats and playgrounds and a merry-go-round and it’s really very pleasant — yes, when I would go to the park with him, I would have to take our German shepherd. And yes, twice on those jaunts that German shepherd did her job. If I walked around the neighborhood alone, I would take the shepherd with me. And yes, several times she repelled attempted boarders.

Well, when you’re a boy child, you do reach a point in life where you don’t want your mommy or your nanny peering over your shoulder every living, breathing minute. That was why we moved out of the neighborhood.

So, as you can imagine, I feel a certain degree of empathy with the folks who don’t want this outfit to plop a homeless shelter in our neighborhood.

And I also feel some concern: all these young couples moving in here with their kids, fixing up the homes and making the neighborhood so much nicer and pushing up the property values are going to fly out of here like a flock of migrating ducks as soon as they discover they can’t let the kids play in the front yard for fear of some stoned, unwashed fright harassing them.

I like these young people. And I don’t want them scared out of here by a thoughtless scheme like this. If that’s NIMBY, then so be it.

As a practical  matter, this area probably does need a homeless shelter: but not in the middle of an established, upwardly mobile neighborhood. The shelter needs to go in where the homeless people live, for godsake! That’s over on the other side of Conduit of Blight.

Conduit of Blight marks the eastern border of a swath of old, blighted cheaply built housing tracts that flanks the I-17 freeway and spreads westward for miles. (Yes, Virginia: right-to-work laws do foster the growth of poverty and slums.)

The canal about a half-mile to the north marks the southern border of a habitat for meth gangs.

Either district would benefit from a social service provider like this.

Put the thing in here, though, and what you’ll do is call the drug users, the wrecked alcoholics, and the impoverished mentally ill into our neighborhood: into our park, into our yards, into our alleys, and into our homes. (If you don’t think they burgle, you mis-think.)

So it would indeed make sense to buy a house and turn it into a homeless shelter. But for godsake, put it in an area where the people who need it already hang out.

That’s where we are right now. It’s NIMBY, all right. No, I do not want the homeless set in my backyard…again.

Image: By Josh Swieringa – Flickr, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3270773

Stupid Story of the Day

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From a cashier at a local hardware store:

A couple of teenaged car thieves broke into a vehicle. Then they found they couldn’t drive off in it because they didn’t know how to work a stick shift…

🙂

Not at Snopes. Yet.

Falling Behind in Life

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Working my tail off; making progress in the profit-making department but going nowhere in the “get a life” department.

To end with (not to say, “to start with,” it’s all so damn effing circular!), the instant I sat down to write this post, the accursed computer hung. That was with a file open that I’d been working on since 7:30 this morning, pretty much nonstop all the way through until 9:00 p.m.

It’s now 20 til ten. Miraculously, I managed to save the two open Wyrd files and one Excel file to DropBox before being forced to shut down with the power-off button, supposedly a very bad thing to do to your Mac. It looks like the files were undamaged and the system is working again.

After 40 minutes of wrestling with the damn computer, my head is throbbing. By 5 p.m. the gut thing was feeling better, but I’m sure I’ll hear about this episode along about 3:30 this morning. Oh well. I’d already set a Zantac and a mug of water by the bed.

Holy sh!t. Wouldn’t you just know this damn thing would try to trash 13½ hours worth of work? I yelled so furiously Ruby tried to jump off the bed, a distance about five times her height. Poor little dog. She thinks it’s her fault every time the computer crashes. Since it goes down about every second or third day (the last emergency rescue of my Excel checkbook record was dated 3/30…), she must be filled with Good Catholic Guilt.

Right. The dog thinks the top of the bed is Purgatory.

Spent a fair amount of the day reading about Purgatory. Anglo-Saxon concepts thereof, that is. I’ve now read, marked up, and drafted index entries for all but two articles in this collection.

Weirdly, this is one of the better books in its category that I’ve read. It has some surprisingly interesting articles.

Take the one on wyrmas. Know what a wyrm is? Beowulf’s dragon was a wyrm. A wyrm can be a dragon, a serpent, or an ordinary invertebrate earthworm. Orrrrr….AN EARTHWORM ON STEROIDS THAT ATTACKS AND DISMEMBERS YOUR DEAD BODY AND TORTURES YOUR SOUL IN HELL!!!! Eeeeeeeeekkkkk! They have teeth of fire and they crawl about in an army under the command of a terrifying character named Gifer.

We are dooomed!

The Anglo-Saxons were pretty amazing. Did you know that a fair amount of their visual imagery was influenced by Near Eastern cultures? That included not just contemporary Arabic cultures, but ancient Egypt. They were redoubtable fighters (despite getting trounced, ultimately, by a bunch of Normans) and they left troves of beautifully worked gold and garnet artefacts.

I hope to be done with this project in a couple of days. It’s worth a grand, so as you can imagine I’m anxious to meet the deadline and also to do a decent job on it.

Thank God there was no choir this morning, after last week’s nonstop frenzy. This allowed an entire, uninterrupted day to devote to the project. Yesterday I took copy to a meeting that soaked up the afternoon…managed to get a little markup done but of course not as much as would’ve happened here in the Silence of the Tomb.

Meanwhile another project is going to pot. Am trying to hire someone to take up the slack; a new person who wants to work with me on editorial was approached; she and her hubby are sick and so that went nowhere. Tomorrow, though, is another day. Two other people are on the string…we’ll see what develops there.

Mean-meanwhile, bills have to be paid; gotta figure out someplace to dig up the money to pay the auto and homeowner’s insurance. After I scraped the paint on my co-religionist’s car, they jacked up not only the car but also the house insurance. So that will bite a couple grand out of this year’s budget.

Ugh.

And so, to bed…

wyrms 640px-Náströnd_by_Frølich

 

MacShafted

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Give me back my index cards and my typewriter, please! Granted, the Mac is better than the PC. That does seem to be so. But it’s still a computer and it still is designed to inject as many headaches and hassles into your life as possible.

I have to say, at least Apple has some customer service. With a PC, you’re on your own. Still…yesterday, two of the three CSRs who tried to solve the problem had no idea what they were talking about; a third figured it out — or rather, the two of us did, together — but only by sheer persistence. And during the course of that marathon hassle, I learned that if I update my OS to the latest Scenic Wonder, “El Capitan,” it probably will disable my Office for Mac programs.

Holy sh!t.

It sucked FIVE HOURS out of a day burdened with a huge editorial project (with two others in the wings) to learn that the reason my e-mail program was crashing random incoming mails is that MacMail was not deleting messages consigned to “Trash,” as it was supposedly programmed to do.

A few years ago, I set MacMail to delete items in the “Trash” folder once a month. Then, as they came in, I flagged spam messages and Twaddle, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest notifications to go direct to “Trash.” In theory, all of these attention-distracters were being disappeared automatically.

In reality? Not so much.

After an interminable exchange over the phone with one of Apple’s factotums, we discovered that something over three thousand messages had accrued somewhere in the accursed Cloud. And because all Apple computers now function to some degree in the Cloud even if you haven’t bought into the idea that you should store all your data there, all this stuff was building up like dental plaque somewhere in the Cloud.

Fixing this entailed a trip to the Apple store, explaining to a “Genius” what was going on, listening to his theory, discovering that it was wrong, being told it was something on the Cloud that he wasn’t allowed to mess with, making an appointment to talk by phone with someone somewhere in the bowels of Apple Corp, (is that Core?), jawing with her for quite a while, thinking she’d figured out how to fix it, discovering she hadn’t; calling back, hassling to get another person on the phone, explaining the whole mess over AGAIN, and then hanging on the phone for two hours while we tried to figure out the problem.

Ultimately we figured out that something over THREE THOUSAND junk messages were hiding in Computer Hell.

They could not be killed off by highlighting all and deleting all. It looked like I was going to have to delete them one at a time, guaranteeing a permanent case of carpal tunnel syndrome.

Finally we figured out that I could highlight & delete about a dozen at a time. So it took all afternoon to clean all these out. This was after I’d sunk god only knows how much time, a few days earlier, disabling and deleting all my “Rules.” At one point, the Cloud was cloning deleted messages and re-saving 21 iterations of each. It took FOREVER to get rid of them.

It looks like MacMail is probably working again. You can tell by the volume of spam and junk pouring into the inbox… Lovely.

The guy on the phone suggested waiting two or three days to be sure all messages are getting through before trying to reinstate anti-spam “Rules.” So now my Inbox is filling up with junk faster than I can kill it off.

What. a. NIGHTMARE. hassle.

Meanwhile, the gigantic task of indexing 350 pages of Anglo-Saxon art history got put on hold.

Yesterday I intended to enter another marked-up chapter’s worth of index entries in Wyrd. Instead, I carried an unread article to the Apple store so I could start marking it up. Despite making an appointment with their “Geniuses,”  you still end up sitting around a noisy, crowded store for quite a while before you get service. Conveniently, though, they let you sit at a table while you wait, making it possible to cram in some work. In between episodes, I continued to mark up page proofs.

And these are some page proofs. This particular author finds himself fascinated with a specific Old English word-suffix combination, from which he believes he can deduce any number of enlightenments about monastic culture and theo-political thinking during the Benedictine Reform. At one point, the guy surveyed existing literature and counted 137 occurrences of this linguistic combination.

Holy sh!t. Can you even imagine how OCD you’d have to be to do that?

On my end, speaking of OCD, I have have found Word for Mac’s keyboard commands for the letter eth (ð) and the letter thorne (þ) to be somewhat wanting. For the eth, Wyrd’s keyboard command creates a thing that looks like an italic version without the crossbar; for the thorne, it creates…nothing. It does, however, do a nice job with Æ and æ. That’s something. I guess.

Fortunately, WordPress has these characters, which can be copied and pasted into a Wyrd file, thereby making it possible to do the job without begging the client to replace substitute symbols out of his specialized software.

And speaking of Wyrd…the guy who was helping me on the phone remarked that my system needs to be updated to the latest operating system, cutely named El Capitan. I said that I had not updated to the newer Big Cats or to the latest Scenic Delight because I had lost the use of a key program in an earlier update and I do not wish to lose the use of any more programs. He allowed as to how El Capitan could disable Wyrd 2008 for Mac. This would require me to update to Wyrd 2013 (or, more simply, to close down my business altogether…). I hate, hate, HATE  the fucking “Ribbon,” and I have exactly zero desire to work with my own and my clients’ files in Microsoft’s “Cloud,” nor am I going to end up paying far, far more than the program’s real value by being forced to buy a monthly subscription.

When you look it up, you find that issues with Wyrd 2008 are mixed: some people say the program still works, others say it’s broken. There’s not much you can do about this, since Microsoft stopped supporting 2008 some time back, partly by way of herding its sheep customers into the Cloud Corral. Eventually you learn that the program will work if it was already resident on the upgraded machine, but you can’t install it anew under El Capitan:

Users report that they cannot install Microsoft Office 2008 (out of date) on El Capitan. If Office 2008 was already installed on Yosemite and you upgrade to El Capitan, it will work.

And in the unholy hassle department, here’s what we’re told you have to waste time doing to “get ready” for El Capitan:

  • Use Software Update to keep all Apple software up to date, including the OS.
  • Apply all free updates to other software you use.
  • Set up an external hard drive and use Time Machine.
  • Add more RAM if you can.
  • Fix damaged and duplicate fonts.
  • Use Disk Utility to repair permissions on your hard drive. (This is safe to do, and quick.)
  • If you are running a version of Mac OS X earlier than Snow Leopard, you will have to install Snow Leopard first. You can buy an installer disc for Snow Leopard from Apple’s web site for $20.

Read on, and you learn the thing disables any number of programs, including anything that’s called a “Power PC” program (whatever that is). And of course, it assassinates yet another expensive Adobe program.

Mac is hardly alone in blithely robbing consumers of programs they need through “recommended” or “required” upgrades of its operating systems. Microsoft’s 2010 Office upgrade, for example, would delete all of an upgrading user’s Access and Outlook files, without asking permission to do so.

Y’know…if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! What the frack is the point of these endless time-consuming upgrades that don’t do much except complicate people’s lives?

Truly. This is the sort of thing that makes me crave — more and more often! — to go back to my IBM Selectric and my Smith-Corona. At least they couldn’t be “upgraded” by some arrogant corporation.

Trust no one.

Tempus Fidgets

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Sometimes it’s hard to believe how fast time flies. The older you get, too, the faster it seems to fly.

Neighbors catty-corner across the street are getting ready to move. Their Realtor has stuck a “For Sale” sign in the front yard with a “Coming Soon” addendum. This seems to be the newest style: sticking up a sign before the house is actually listed.

Out of curiosity, though, I looked it up on Zillow, mostly to see if the out-of-state landlord who used to own it still did own it and had gotten lucky with the tenants.

Apparently not. Looks like the folks who live there probably own the place. They (or someone) bought it in 2010.

The previous owner had purchased it in 2004, right at the run-up to the Bubble. That, by coincidence, is when I moved in here: twelve years ago!

Can you imagine? I can’t… TWELVE YEARS!

The neighborhood has really changed since I moved over to this street.

The New York landlord rented that house to Queer John and the Boys, a funny but off-the-wall bunch who, not having any ownership interest in the shack, never did anything to fix it up. Queer John was a sweet sort of down-at-the-heels guy, assertively gay and friendly on his good days. Not all his days were good, alas: he suffered from bipolar disorder, so his ups were stratospheric and his downs were subterranean. In a manic phase, he went out and bought two identical SUVs and shortly was pursued into the ‘hood, driving a vehicle that had something caught on the rear bumper, by three squad cars, a paddy wagon, and a couple of motorcycle cops.

{sigh}

One evening Queer John and one of his roommates had a home invasion. They claimed three guys and a woman had broken in, the men by forcing their way in the front door at the same time the woman and the third guy climbed in an unlocked back window. One of the men chased him up and down the street waving a pistol, until Dave (proprietor of Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum) came outside and scared the perp off.

They called the cops, who, seeing QJ’s flaming queerness (he really could be pretty flamboyant), refused to pursue it. They said QJ and roommate must have hired the woman and gotten rolled by her pimps.

We think not.

Another day, the Psychotic Son-in-Law, spouse to Other Daughter (the Cat Lady), went fully ballistic when Queer John told Pretty Daughter’s girl and boy child (at that time, yea verily 10 years ago, they were still children; they lived next door to the rental) that they could swim in the house’s pool, as long as their mom or another relative was present. Son-in-Law jumped to the conclusion that Queer John intended to molest the children and charged over there threatening to kill QJ and anyone else who got in the way. It took some doing to call him off and stuff some meds down his throat.

So on the Night of the Swarming Cops, poor old QJ was hauled off, never to be heard from again. The New Yorker rented the house to a pair of slobs. The woman worked for Bobby McGee’s, a local fixture-type restaurant. Apparently she used to bring the garbage home, because she’d show up in my alley with the trunk of her big old Buick-like tank of a car chuckblock full of stuffed trash bags, which she would jam into the garbage bin shared by me and Sally. It used to enrage Sally. I just thought it was weird. They were weird. WT in the most classic sense. They made Queer John and the Boys look genteel.

Eventually the New Yorker sold the house, at a significant loss (the crash having crashed by then), and these quiet people moved in. They haven’t done anything to make the house look any better, but at least they keep the yard tidy and their behavior is plain-vanilla.

In those days, Carlos the Knife would chase his 80-year-wife Inez and his daughters around, brandishing the kitchen cutlery. And he thought it was funny to let his daughter Maria’s batshit crazy mutt out. The dog chased Pretty Daughter’s girl child up a mailbox column; I shouted the dog down and chased it off long enough for the girl to get back inside her house with her little dog.

Carlos and Inez have since passed away. Maria lost the house, and a lively couple with four cute kids bought it. They just finished painting the house a pretty color. The kids are the center of everyone’s attention down in this corner of the ‘hood. We love them.

Son-in-Law succumbed to his schizophrenia and moved out from Other Daughter’s care. That was probably good for OD, but not so great for SiL, because she did take care of him. At one point the cops swarmed into Terri’s yard so as to jump her fence into OD and SiL’s yard, because they thought he had killed her.

He had not.

It’s mighty quiet down there now, except for the stray cats.

Dave, proprietor of the used car lot, marina, & weed arboretum, also lost his house. He’s living in a condo not too far away. A bottom-feeder picked up the deed off the courthouse steps. His crew cleared out the toxic waste, and he sold the place to a woman fix-and-flipper, who came in, painted, put in a new kitchen, renovated the pool and the yard, and sold the place to a pair of accountants with a teenage son. Son is now in college, the house is weed-free and tidy, and no junk is parked in front.

Sally moved to an old-folkerie some months ago, selling her house to a young couple who plan to have four children. Last month they produced their first. They updated the interior a little but have done nothing to the outside, which could use a new coat of paint…but it’s not too bad.

Pretty Daughter’s kids are grown. The boy has gone off to school in Flagstaff. The girl, alas, fell in with bad company and dropped out of high school. Two young men are living over there now, allegedly the girl’s cousins. Haven’t seen the girl for awhile, but (admittedly) haven’t looked. The guys are a hoot, though.

A whole lot of young people have moved into the ’hood, and they’re doing great things to the place. Most of the houses are hugely improved, with new paint jobs and freshened up yards. Some people have gone so far as to bulldoze the gravel “landscaping” and replace it with actual lawns — that’s nice! Presumably this bunch is paid well enough to afford the water bills. 🙂

The lightrail is now running. The city pulled out a row of houses facing Conduit of Blight Boulevard so as to lay tracks and new utility lines. This looked like a disaster at the outset, but the new young residents, who have the energy to fight city hall and some of whom must have some clout (if for no other reason than that they’ve organized a very active neighborhood association), managed to wrangle the city into building a wall between us and Conduit of Blight and even got them to landscape it!

So our part of the train route looks a lot better than it did. It’s annoying to hear the train honk every few minutes…I’m so glad I moved away from there. If I’d stayed in my first house, I would’ve been about four lots away from that thing, which would have made the war-zone traffic and cop noise just that much worse. One of several reasons I moved was the prospect of two years of train construction, to begin with the demolition of houses on my street and to end with a boondoggle train blatting its way along from five in the morning till midnight…make that 3 a.m. on Saturdays.

The new young residents call the cops on the hookers, which of course keeps the cops busy. But I haven’t seen any of the girls flagging anybody down on our side of Conduit of Blight recently. There’s a linear red-light district about a half-mile to the west of Conduit of Blight, conveniently passing behind a school. Must be nice for the ladies…they can drop the kids off on their way to work. The City keeps promising to clean it up. We’ll believe that when we see it.

The whole neighborhood is looking a lot better, all spruced up the way it’s getting thanks to the young urbanites.

The house that’s about to go up for sale is now valued at about $378,000, which is insane. I bought my house for $235,000, and it’s been renovated. That place, I think, has not — or if it has, the wear and tear has done worn and torn it.

Well, it may be crazy, but if it sells for anything even in that ball park, it won’t be turned back into a rental. With any luck, that house, too, will get a paint job and a fix-up.

That’s the news from lovely uptown Phoenix, where mediocrity is a virtue and all our children are below average.