I’ve have a lot of thoughts bouncing around in my head lately. Rather than go dark and ponder on things for a week, bear with me as I analyze a problem coming to a neighborhood near you!
The Superrich Bought Up This Idaho Town and Regular Folks Now May Have to Live in Tents
h ttps://www.yahoo.com/news/superrich-bought-idaho-town-regular-085413034.html
By Kate Briquelet, 8 June 2021
Affordable housing in Ketchum.the Idaho resort community adjacent to billionaire and celebrity playground Sun Valley.has been a problem for decades.
For my international readers, Sun Valley is the Idaho version of Pebble Beach in California or the Hamptons in Florida. It’s a residential area where land values have passed infinity, to the point where only the most wealthy can afford to buy housing there… and even they rarely live there themselves because there are few services. Either they bring a platoon of cooks, gardeners and other servants with them or they only visit for a few weeks of the year.
Often enough, the owners never visit at all, using the land’s sky-high value as a sort of bank. It’s a shame when you think about it. The best homes that a prosperous nation can offer are rarely enjoyed as homes.
You won’t find a burger joint or Walmart in between megamillion-dollar mansions. Modern transportation being efficient, such enclaves are now frequently supported by neighboring communities. With predictable consequences:
But the situation is becoming so dire in the wake of COVID-19 that city officials are considering an unusual range of quick fixes.including building tent cities and RV parks for the common folk in the ultra-rich mountain town, where the average median home listing price is hovering above $900,000.
Residents and housing activists say their friends and neighbors, some whose families have lived in Ketchum for generations, are being priced out as landlords sell buildings to well-heeled buyers and out-of-town investors. The problem is exacerbated, they say, by property owners renting homes for a bigger profit on sites like Airbnb to short-term remote employees escaping Silicon Valley and big cities.
No, STUPID-19 is not a game-changing black swan. At best, it hurried the process along. Neither are city officials considering unusual fixes. Slavery and dispossession are exactly what results when the wealthy take over a neighborhood. Yes, I meant SLAVERY because tent cities are not acceptable for the Idaho winter. Dump Greta Thunberg’s bony ass in the Sawtooths for a January, watch if she still says propane is a bad idea.
The wealthy want expensive land and cheap labor.
The middle class wants expensive labor and cheap land.
City officials want to provide cheap housing so that cheap labor can afford it? Sellouts!
.There’s a joke going around: you either have three houses in Ketchum or three jobs,. said Kris Gilarowski, a hospitality worker and father of two who recently launched a Facebook group titled Occupy Ketchum Town Square to address the housing crisis.
Socialist agitation is not a solution.
And those losing homes and apartments aren’t just service industry workers, but teachers, nurses, and other professionals who are fast becoming the hidden homeless in the picturesque city of roughly 2,800 people.
There lies the tragedy of unchecked centralization of wealth. Everybody gets sorted into the “have” and “have not” piles. The correct solution?
NOBODY IS ALLOWED TO LIVE THERE UNLESS THEY WORK THERE.
It’s that simple. Big money comes along and offers you $1,000,000 for your $200,000 house? You tell him no and sell to a young family instead. A Gay Area renter offers you $3k for a $750/month rental? Tell him where to shove it, like his boyfriend does.
The solution is that simple but if you don’t worship God then you probably worship money. Why wouldn’t you?
As local TV station KTVB reported, some temporary housing solutions weighed by city officials include .a plan to allow Ketchum’s nurses, teachers, and service workers to sleep in tents in the city park as rent and housing costs continue to soar out of their grasp..
Thus demonstrating where the city officials’ loyalty lies. Not with their people.
The discussions come at a time when one developer is seeking approval for an affordable housing complex downtown called Bluebird Village but facing backlash from residents who claim the building will be an eyesore and absorb valuable parking spaces.
Had they mentioned “rent control” or “Section 8” then I would also have objected. ‘Affordable housing’ now means different things in different contexts.
They also follow another developer’s $9 million sale of an affordable apartment building called KETCH, leaving residents unable to pay new rates imposed by the new landlord. (At a recent city council meeting, one KETCH resident said the new owner increased rents by 50 to 60 percent. .He wants me to be paying $1,700 for 425 square feet. It’s insane, it shouldn’t have happened,. the woman said.)
It’s nationalism writ small. When your neighbors do not care about your well-being, they follow the yellow brick road, so to speak. This is a class migration rather than an ethnic migration but similar rules apply.
.One of the biggest oppositions to Bluebird and any affordable housing, really, was aesthetics,. Reid Stillman, a mayoral candidate who works in advertising and is scrambling to find rental housing himself, told The Daily Beast. .That is so embarrassing when we’re dealing with human lives..
.We have this older generation worried about the look and color of the brick of the building,. Stillman added. .What they don’t understand is these are the people that serve them food, sell them clothes, bag their groceries. and you’re not allowing them to have affordable places to live because you’re worried about the color of brick in town..
Ah, Baby Boomers. They aren’t the sum total of all evil, just the ones for which evil worked best. The first generation of Marxists does very well because the first parasites get to feed on a healthy host. Successive generations of parasites suffer diminishing returns, which is the pattern producing Antifa and BLM. It’s hard to eat your society’s seed corn when it’s already gone.
You see similar behaviors in atheists. The first generation to reject God still had a moral upbringing so few of them go full necro-nihilist. A couple “winner takes all, survival of the fittest” generations later, however, and 1Gen wonders why the kids fantasize about slitting throats. “Don’t they know that such behavior is wrong?”
Meanwhile, Gilarowski said he’s heard from long-term residents who received notices of rent hikes anywhere from $600 to $1,500.and one well-paid hospital worker lived in his car for three weeks because he couldn’t find a place to live.
*singing* Welcome to the Hotel California….
It’s not our people you should fear. It’s our money. You can keep Californians away just by imposing a “work here to live here” requirement. No Federally-defined form of discrimination needed.
Gilarowski shared another horror story at a special city council meeting last month to address the crisis: A couple was living in a tent in Sawtooth National Forest for 94 days through January before they found affordable housing.
Seriously, tent cities in the Sawtooth Mountains winter is a bad idea.
.I do support the city of Ketchum opening up some public spaces, so people could temporarily park an RV, pitch a tent, because then we can’t hide from these people,. Gilarowski said at the meeting. .These are the people that work at your school. These are the people that work at your local business. These are the people that serve you. I know some of you put up your $8 million houses . but you don’t have compassion for working class people. You say you’re for community housing but “not this project, not that project…
In an interview with The Daily Beast, Gilarowski alluded to the wealth infused in Ketchum and neighboring Sun Valley, including Allen & Co..s annual media conference, sometimes referred to as a “summer camp for billionaires..…
.There’s so much wealth here and it’s kind of embarrassing to hear that people, families, decide to live for 94 days in a national forest, hidden,. Gilarowski said.
The wealthy didn’t get wealthy by treating you proles as equals and paying you triple wages. On the rare occasion it happens, such as Henry Ford thinking that his workers should be able to afford the automobiles they build, the wealthy guy becomes a hero… but there’s no profit in that, now is there?
Ketchum Mayor Neil Bradshaw raised a variety of possible solutions to the housing crisis at the council meeting: using city funds to rent hotel rooms this summer and encouraging local residents to rent out spare rooms. He also floated using public lands, including parks or parking lots, for temporary tent sites or RV parking.
Bradshaw said Ketchum’s Rotary Park could house a number of tents, has public restrooms and was across from a YMCA, which has showers. .It would require a certain level of qualification to stay there, so the people would have to show they are working for a local business and contributing to our economy in a certain way. It wouldn’t just be for roadtrippers passing through Ketchum,. Bradshaw told the crowd.
Per http://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/news/2020-03-23/ketchum-mayor-on-covid-19-isolation-order-the-streets-are-deathly-quiet , Bradshaw considers himself a “man of the world”, has lived in London and San Francisco, and last year cooperated with a total isolation order upon his community… confining people in the small town to their homes instead of just closing to outsiders, then bragging about how kind they were being to each other.
But Stillman blamed Bradshaw and city officials for not acting sooner and called the tent city for nurses and teachers .a joke..
Not a funny joke, either. I say again:
![](https://gunnerq.androsphere.net/wp-content/uploads/archive/1.jpg)
.We have homeless people,. Stillman countered at the meeting. .They may not be on the street and you may not see them, which is good for you and good for business. But they’re living on couches, they’re in our friends. houses, they’re in tents up north, they’re camping down south, they’re doing anything they can to get to work here in town.
.We’re not just talking waitresses and waiters,. Stillman added. .We’re talking nurses, and medical supply people, teachers. My best friend works at Montessori school.he.s a teacher, he has nowhere to live..
Stillman said his own landlord sold his apartment building and he must be out by September. .I make good money and I still can’t find a place,. Stillman said. .So it’s not just affecting one income level . To live in a tent in Rotary Park is a joke especially for people who need WiFi, have to work and have to make a living. That’s a joke..
.Not only am I going to be homeless with a good job Sept. 1, but my friends who are in the service industry who don’t make a lot of money, they can’t pay $2,900 a month for a two bedroom in Ketchum. This isn’t San Francisco, Neil,. Stillman fumed.
Merely San Jose… sorry, that wasn’t funny either.
In an interview on Monday, Stillman told us Ketchum suffers from a disconnect among the city’s classes, a situation that stymies action on workforce housing. He said there’s everyday permanent residents who have three to four jobs just to live in the city, second-homers who travel in for vacations, and extremely wealthy people who own a house in Ketchum which they visit only a week or so out of the year.
.Not everyone has a seat at the table,. Stillman said. .I feel our current leader caters to a certain population and there’s not an open line of communication with longterm residents..
It sucks when your own people sell you out, whether locally, nationally or ethnically. That’s exactly what I’m dealing with in my headspace these days.
Bradshaw told The Daily Beast that the tent housing was only one idea suggested during a community workshop and bristled at The Daily Beast, and local media, playing up the specter of tent cities. He said Ketchum city planners are also looking into whether elderly homeowners could rent out rooms in their homes in exchange for tenants helping with yard work or other chores…
What a tone-deaf piece of shit he is. “If you can’t afford $3k per month in rent then maybe you can do some chores in return for a Baby Boomer letting you use their spare bedroom.”
… and into altering city code to allow RVs on private property or using federal funds for rental assistance.
Somebody thought being mayor would be a free ride with no hard decisions.
The city’s hands are tied, Bradshaw said, because its taxing authority is limited.other hotspots for the uber-rich like Aspen, Colorado, for example, enjoy a real-estate transfer tax that Idaho lacks.and it’s unable to limit Airbnb, VRBO and other short-term rentals because of a 2017 state law.
.We have a very wealthy population and most of them are very supportive of affordable housing although, you know, always wanting something else that’s maybe not quite in their backyard,. Bradshaw said.
That’s. The. Problem. And it’s why a man needs the moral strength to say No to easy money.
In recent months, a retired doctor named Gary Hoffman parked a trailer throughout Ketchum and covered it with a massive sign that declared, .What The One Percenters Ignore: Affordable housing has always been the lifeblood of a vibrant community. A town dies when its most productive people cannot afford to live in it.” Hoffman’s banner also demanded in all caps: .Worker housing now!.
The 79-year-old physician owns a pair of mobile home parks just outside Ketchum and a rental cabin on a 28-acre ranch about 24 miles south of the city.
After the tenant of the cabin announced she was moving out, Hoffman placed a rental ad in the local newspaper, for $650 a month, and received 85 phone calls in 48 hours. .It went to the second person who called. So I had 83 more calls to field,. he said.
Now that’s what I’m talking about! He could have charged triple that but instead, did a good deed. He’s not going broke. His world isn’t ending because he didn’t negotiate the best possible deal.
How did America become so mercenary?
The doc saw it as an opportunity to galvanize more residents into fighting for affordable housing. .Everybody I talked to after that, I said, .What the hell are you doing to get things changed around here? What are you doing besides bemoaning the fact that we don’t have housing? Are you going to meetings? Are you writing letters to the editor, are you protesting, are you picketing, are you going down to Boise and haranguing the legislators who said Airbnbs and VRBOs are wonderful in resort communities?..
On Monday, Hoffman was busy doing his own roofing repairs at the mobile home park since he couldn’t find construction workers who were immediately available. .There’s a lot of construction already, everybody who’s got a contracting construction company is working to the max,. Hoffman said.
The mobile home parks are some of the area’s only workforce housing, where tenants pay an average of $550 a month. Many of Hoffman’s tenants work in construction, landscaping or basic clerical work, speak Spanish as a first language, and “do the work nobody else wants to do,. he said.
Aww, he was that close to having my respect. He’s still doing a good deed, though, what with not being greedy.
.People look at the parks I have and they say, .My God, you could double your rents.” People are working, they live there,. Hoffman told us. .Why would I do that if I don’t need the money? And I don’t, so there you go..
Big money comes along and offers you $1,000,000 for your $200,000 house? You tell him no and sell to a young family instead.
That wouldn’t work. What young family wouldn’t then immediately resell the house for an $800,000 profit?
“That wouldn.t work. What young family wouldn.t then immediately resell the house for an $800,000 profit?”
Good point @ RPL. Perhaps “You tell him no, and RENT to a young family instead, at a reasonable price.”
“Aww, he was that close to having my respect.”
@GC, to be fair, the Doctor doesn’t control immigration policy. And, if he just chose not to rent to those who speak Spanish as a first language, he might be violating federal housing regulations against racial discrimination. (Although I am no attorney.)
I wouldn’t have said anything in a border state, but Spanish-only in Idaho of all places… sigh.
He does deserve credit for putting his community ahead of simple profit.
Idaho, North Dakota, you can’t escape.
A 14-year-old girl was murdered in a “random attack” in Fargo, North Dakota. And sure enough, the killer was black: https://www.valleynewslive.com/2021/06/07/records-suspect-says-he-was-high-meth-during-brutal-stabbing-teen-girl/
In the 2010 census, Fargo was 90.2% white, and 2.7% black. Yet the killer was black. What are the odds!
altering city code to allow RVs on private property
GunnerQ has the right idea. The problem is the local law-makers. At almost no cost, they could open this up to the free market, with the exception of restricting perhaps 80% of housing to permanent residents.
1) Stop interfering with private land ownership. If your neighbour wants to let someone park an RV in the back yard, why do you get a say? If you want to control your neighbour’s yard, you should have to buy it first — then you can control it.
2) Step interfering with development of new lots. If housing is so expensive, they could easily allocate more land for development. Yes, it might be 5 miles outside of town due to geographical limitations such as steep hills that would be too expensive to develop. But a transit bus could travel those 5 miles in only a few minutes. When towns or cities artificially limit the number of lots available for development, this restriction on supply will obviously affect pricing.
3) And best is Gunner Q’s suggestion to limit home occupancy to those who work in the town. I’m not sure how they would handle retired people… But why does a retired person have to stay there? Maybe that person should move out of town. They have no need to be in a prime real estate location. This is the same argument against continuously closing schools and paying to build new ones, as each community within a city ages.
“If your neighbour wants to let someone park an RV in the back yard, why do you get a say?”
There is the issue of infrastructure, which is where such restrictions come from. RVs dodge the building code, which is fine because they can be easily moved if needed, but when placed on a property usually tap into the power grid and water/sewer lines. Which then get overused, especially in a resort type of community that can suffer large, seasonal population spikes. If the mayor allowed unrestricted RVing this year then next year’s problem will be a backed-up sewer system.
I hear that a couple towns in the South used to triple in size when NASCAR was holding a race. But that was only for an extended weekend that RVs could tank their way through.
You’re on the right track, however. City planners should be concerned more about the residents than the wealthy out-of-towners using Ketchum for a flophouse. I saw this happen in San Francisco. It’s very easy to get a job in SF; the problem is that rent alone is double what those jobs pay. The wealthy will truck their groceries in from 50 miles away before they pay a grocery clerk $80/hr so he can afford a tiny condo.
If you ever wondered why urbanites got into the habit of ordering everything online, this is why. They drove up the cost of living until the merchant/servant class can’t live in the same neighborhood, then buy everything online including toothpaste because they won’t tolerate the slightest hiccup in housing prices.
Of course, now everybody buys online because the Plandemic destroyed that merchant class wholesale…
I buy most everything online. It’s partially because of the insane traffic on the Westside of Los Angeles. It’s not just the time it takes to drive anywhere. It’s the stress of dealing with all the aggressive drivers — and all the bicycists and motorized scooters weaving in and out of lanes.
Much more hassle-free to click, and have it appear on my doorstep.
If I lived in Mayberry, USA, I might shop in stores. But urban density and diversity leaves me feeling increasingly atomized, and desiring to cocoon myself in my home.
More news from the You Can’t Escape It file — An elderly woman killed in a carjacking in rural California: https://www.abc10.com/article/news/local/woman-killed-during-attempted-carjacking-in-stanislaus-county/103-53e3330c-19db-4350-9625-2cad4cf8f302
Guys, I have to disagree with everyone here, except for Red Pill Latecomer. Red Pill Latecomer, your first comment is completely right.
The source article: The Rich cannot control prices. Period. If people are suddenly priced out of housing it’s obviously because govt has prevented the market from supplying additional housing at prices people are willing to pay (the article is rife with references to the govt controlling the development of property, one way or another). it wasn’t The Rich buying up the property and “driving the price up”, it was The Rich buying up property while the govt prevented the development of new property.
GunnerQ: The govt has no business whatsoever disallowing people from owning property simply because they do not “work there”. Secondly, “infrastructure” wouldn’t be an issue for people in RV’s (or anyone else) save for the fact that our infrastructure (water, power, you name it) has been commandeered by govt. Sometimes they call it a co-op, but it’s still govt at some level. If infrastructure was only available on the open, free market then it would never be a problem. People would always have access to whatever infrastructure they were willing to pay for.
Joshua4355: You were right on in Points 1 and 2. If you want a say on what goes on with my property, you are welcome to buy it from me. Your second point is right on: the high prices are due to govt interference (else the market would have supplied more housing).
GunnerQ: Last one here: What’s the deal with RV Park guy? If he doesn’t charge triple because he’s not greedy… how does he decide what to charge now? Why would charging triple be greedy? Maybe his tenants are greedy for wanting lower rent than people that were willing to pay triple to live in a mobile home park. Personally, I find his virtue signaling to be very suspect. Either he couldn’t really get much more than he’s already getting or there is some other perk to having the tenants he has. Maybe he isn’t reporting all of his income or something. Who knows, but I don’t trust the guy.
“The govt has no business whatsoever disallowing people from owning property simply because they do not .work there..”
It should. A government that does not prioritize the welfare of its longstanding, contributing residents is exactly the criticism we make every time we complain about mass migration and Chinese influence. This is just on a smaller scale. If the town is reduced to foreign owners, government sellouts and wage slaves living in a tent camp then globalism wins again.
“What.s the deal with RV Park guy? If he doesn.t charge triple because he.s not greedy…”
Greedy was a poor choice of words on my part. It’s less about greed and more about selling out one’s community. A newcomer looking for a job? Probably not a threat. A Big Tech executive wanting to remote into his San Francisco office? Probably a child molester. Get what you can from the newcomer and tell Mister Billions to choke on his Marxism.
Honestly, Gunner, it’s a bad idea. If the govt disallowed people from owning property if they didn’t have a job there, people like you and I would never be able to own property in two places at once. But the rich would find some way to make a case that they worked wherever they wanted to. I think it would hurt more than help.