Clearly something is very wrong with the local government and population.
Is this how local residents feel? I find this sentiment rather confusing. Rural places tend to be distrustful of central government. Meaning, they are happy to be ignored by “the rest of the country” since those outsiders don’t share their values.
It takes a lot of outreach to get anyone to trust the system, if they have a flexible enough situation to go. Most people just don't see education being a solution, so they aren't going to jump out on a shaky limb in the hopes it might catch them. Better the devil you know.
This hasn’t really been true for a while. Much of the quasi-libertarian stuff comes out of the conservative intellectual crowd, think tanks, lobbying groups etc. Some of it was also a holdover from the Reagan era, which was the last big right-wing populist movement, before Trump showed up.
It’s the anti-immigration, pro-manufacturing stuff that really comes out of rural areas. Stuff that creates jobs and cuts down on wage-dilution. If the Trump years were about anything, they were about the right collectively deciding they wanted an industrial policy and pro-labor (not pro-union, mind you) policy, instead of warmed over economic libertarianism.
The absence of data != no activity.
> White (non-Hispanic) 7,284 17.66%
> Black or African American (non-Hispanic) 31,744 76.95%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Bluff,_Arkansas#Demograph...
Pine Bluff had 29 homicides in 2021. Pine Bluff had 23 murders in 2020 - a rate of 56.5 murders per 100,000 people. The national average was 6.5 murders per 100,000 people in 2020.
As of July 29, in 2022 there have been 17 homicides reported in Pine Bluff.
You have the kind of money to casually buy up all this real estate, but you still went bargain-hunting for a warehouse? This reads like some kind of LARP or joke.
Buying the others was honestly WAY, WAY, WAY cheaper than you'd expect. I almost didn't feel like I had a choice it was so cheap. Spent about $130k at a tax auction to get them all.
It almost feels like land is the only thing they can't steal around here.
(Clay Davis has entered the chat)
Have you considered selling?
You might try Jonesboro, Fort Smith, or Hot Springs if you're looking for cheap nearby places. North Little Rock or someplace in NW Arkansas too would have more nearby amenities, albeit at higher (though still quite affordable nationally) prices.
I'm guessing the town wants him to do very basic stuff to get the property up to code, and he doesn't want to. Anther person pointed out in a comment that comment chain OPs twitter had posts about about holding somebody at gunpoint in apparent frustration. To me it sounds like OP knew absolutely nothing about commercial real-estate, absolutely nothing about local laws, and plopped down a bunch of money on a property without doing some homework.
You do realize between his comments here, and a cursory look at his Twitter, he's told about 57 tall tales too many, right? If it was such a bad experience, why did he go on to buy an alleged SEVENTY-FIVE more properties there for starters?
Because the bulk, if not all, of this is probably entirely made up.
I mean, the guy claims he's developed a fusion reactor, all by himself apparently, for crying out loud. https://twitter.com/pontifier/status/1488959967235219458
https://www.actdatascout.com/RealProperty/Arkansas/Jefferson
And see the property I bought and what I paid for it.
You can find out more about my fusion reactor at http://www.DDproFusion.com
My YouTube has tons of videos of my experiences here. http://YouTube.com/pontifier
I even started recording all my interactions with city zoning at https://murfie.com/dist/list.html
You can accuse me of being a lot of things... Oblivious, overoptimistic, naive... maybe even incompetent or delusional. But I am not a liar.
I can back up everything with evidence.
Stranger than fiction
It looks like he wants to but the city won't let him. e.g. https://twitter.com/pontifier/status/1534754382885052417
Dealing with the government on things like this can be EXTREMELY frustrating especially if you're not used to running in those circles. Its a lot of things to learn and the people involved assume you know everything and when you get difficult they have a million ways to make your life more annoying.
I literally already have a city water connection and it's costing me a hundred bucks a month just to sit there unused because I can't get the permits to fix the plumbing... So what would you do in that situation?
You got a great bargain, now these expenses are the price of doing business.
Im not offering advice... but I see this often.
My biggest fear/hope about that is that my life could suddenly become boring once the cameras started rolling. I'm not sure which one would be worse.
Did you buy the warehouse sight unseen? Did you do any research on the local community and crime rates?
Cheap land is cheap for a reason. It sounds like you found out the reason that land was so cheap.
If you think about this from the perspective of the city council, there was this big warehouse that they thought was perfect for a company like Amazon, which would have given them hundreds of jobs. Instead, a random rich guy buys it and employs nobody.
I see nothing wrong with the fact that he's having trouble doing what he wants, he probably isn't coming close to remotely following proper procedure and clearly lacks experience, as he stated that he could barely even afford the first property - a 220k square foot warehouse he bought with apparently no business and no experience owning warehouses.
Given it's a town of 40k people, I doubt there's rampant corruption and more OP just doesn't have any idea how anything works at all. If any of his statements are true, this guy needs to stop what he's doing and learn how to adult.
If you're going to refurb a giant warehouse to be a fireworks storage facility, that's different from building a daycare, which is different from "run an internet company and makerspace", etc.
Given his history includes free-energy crap (his own fusion reactor design) and running for Mayor of Provo, UT on a platform of disincorporating the city, I would guess the problem is that this guy is a libertarian and thus thinks rules don't apply to him.
Personally the most interesting question I haven’t seen asked is how he searched for cheap properties.
Just before I closed on the warehouse, I reached out to the Megabots people to see if they wanted to move Megabots here, but didn't get a reply. The overhead cranes and large open interior spaces give opportunities not available anywhere else.
I literally had living spaces for artist and entrepreneurs on my original proposal, and I was hoping that it would become a destination makerspace where big names could come and access the amazing workshop I was planning to set up.
I was also planning to build a permanent robot combat arena here too, kind of like what they built in Norwalk.
My full proposal is here: https://www.murfie.com/dist/serendipic.pdf
I mean, is it unreasonable for the city to expect new drawings/specs for a new use of a building that has been unmaintained for at least 15 years? The fact that the property was sold for such a cheap price basically implies that the new owner should expect to invest a substantial amount of money to get everything up to code.
> Fenley said he selected the site because it was “the largest cheapest building in the country.” When he searched the commercial real estate website LoopNet for properties over 65,000 square feet and sorted by price, he thought the price tag of roughly $300,000 was a typo. The 17-acre industrial property was once home to steel manufacturer Varco Pruden but has stood vacant for at least 15 years and “fallen into disrepair,” according to the city’s Planning Commision.
> Pine Bluff City Attorney Althea Scott told the Cap Times by email that the Planning Commission had approved Fenley’s plans for the site in June, contingent on compliance with building and fire codes. But, she wrote, “the applicable codes can only be determined once Mr. Fenley has submitted the requisite engineer/architectural drawing(s) which identifies the anticipated use and occupancy of the structure. To date, required drawings have not been received.”
> Fenley told the Cap Times that such drawings would cost “tens of thousands of dollars,” and his communications with the city have led him to believe that he would need to bring the entire structure into compliance with current building codes before he could use any of it.
Additional context about Murfie; seems like it was sold for a huge discount: nearly a million CDs sold for less than $10,000. No wonder u/pontifier saw an entrepreneurial opportunity:
https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/5/21121594/crossies-murfie-m...
> Finally, after about a month, Murfie’s investors agreed to sell. Fenley purchased Murfie for only $6,000 plus $2,000 for Murfie’s attorney’s fees, according to the agreement obtained by The Verge. In total, he says the endeavor has cost him about $25,000 so far.
> Murfie’s 930,000 discs are still sitting in its Wisconsin warehouse. No one’s been inside since the landlord changed the locks some time ago, but Fenley says he’ll have access “shortly.”
You know this now, but most crime databases have Pine Bluff as one of the most crime-riddles metros in the country. It rates a "1" on a scale of 100, with 100 being best (safest). Bummer.
Is there a tool that can do that, or did you piece together data from multiple sources?
I've heard most of the commercial real estate that's publicly listed is just the deals that the pros have already passed on.
Or go a level above local government and get some bigger guns?
Having grown up in a small idyllic town, there was beauty in the slow struggle to live there.
OP would do well to try and learn the culture before seeking to change it. There’s value beyond “cheaper houses” and “craft beer” in these places.
Coincidentally the novel/film Winter’s Bone author portrayed this area, north Arkansas and southern Missouri.
How does one do this in such a way that it's welcomed by people who already make their home there?
(I can imagine a lot of ways this could go work out badly, but don't immediately know a good approach.)
Directly or not. If you're a rich person moving into a poor town, the only way to not piss off the locals is to make them richer. If you can make the whole town richer, you'll be welcomed. Whatever portion of the locals that you don't make richer will hate you. If you don't want to piss off the locals, and you don't want to employ the locals, this is a very expensive plan.
Small town starts to tax a family for the commercial water line in a general store that closed in the 60's, that happens to be on the property, because, small town. Family has visions of a B&B, vineyard, wedding venue. Everything down the drain in the end, because lawyers are expensive.
Still there to this day: worn out stencil on the window of the 'general store'. "Sorry, we closed in 1968".
The tax was imposed to get the family out of the town, and it worked - the family is not rich. In the end, they had to sell their family home (which had been in the family since the 1930's) and leave (which they did).
They were taxed out because the family is notoriously progressive, and the town is very much the opposite. There was cultural friction. Keep in mind that this was 20 years ago. These were very polite 60's era hippies, all college-edumacated and everything - and the (very small, very tight) town didn't want them in it.
The town hall imposed a (crazy) tax, and they had to leave.
Depending on where you are, some value preserving a local culture over 'getting richer'.
If you have the money and influence to "gentrify" somewhere... just build a new planned community in the middle of nowhere. The US has plenty of nowhere.
Because people are leaving in droves, only old people there are dying off, kids moved to better places, and the economy is dead?
> If you have the money and influence to "gentrify" somewhere... just build a new planned community in the middle of nowhere. The US has plenty of nowhere.
Seems like a waste of resources. The US has had countless migrations within its borders during its existence. Why should we force people not to settle in places with dire economic circumstances and almost no future without outside influx?
Not necessarily. You could buy a house that's empty.
What active behavior are we actually talking about? Making the place nicer? I feel like there's got to be actual some breathing room between "savior of the murder capital Pine Bluff" and "big bad real estate investor gentrifying people out of their homes."
So unlike places with very high rents but also where it seems like 3/4 of all buildings are rented out, most people in Pine Bluff would be objectively better off if rents doubled overnight with corresponding increases to the economy and local services.
To be blunt, if you're renting you have no claim to the property or lodging beyond the term of the lease. That's the entire point. I do believe human beings have a right to housing, but you do not have the right to live in someone else's house if they don't want you there.
Nobody gets removed, they just have to leave. It's a subtle distinction but that's how it happens. Poor people don't own anything. Their furniture is mostly stacks of junk that is so bad that it would be hard or impossible to get someone to accept it for free (this is very nearly a tautology, since the poor person got this furniture for free to begin with, and it's was so bad when they got it that nobody else would give anything for it). They rent. At some point property values are high enough the landlord (or his heir) decides to sell. At the end of the lease, the property is no longer for rent. That's the end of it. However, keep in mind that poor people tend to move every few years regardless. They are right on the edge of falling out of the population of working people who are self sufficient, so it is very common that they end up being evicted, abusing drugs or alcohol (even if just for awhile), or just having too many kids to be able to afford childcare so they can keep working to support themselves. Properties no longer being for rent in some neighborhood has almost no effect on any given poor person who lived in that neighborhood as they are one step above transient anyway.
This isn't an apology, it's just a more accurate description of what happens, I've seen it first hand from the low prestige side of things when I was young.
And while an accurate depiction of how this affects the people who were barely hanging on in the first place, there is a later step, where people who /have/ been renting all their lives in one area find themselves unable to continue to pay rent. You're not necessarily a homeowner if you're not at constant risk of homelessness.
I've seen this while squatting; our neighbours were people who had lived in the same community for 70 years, and their option once the landlord had decided to tear the building down and replace it with "luxury apartments" was far away from everyone they had known all their lives. There were several similar stories in the area.
I think if you make renting someone an apartment a lifelong obligation to provide them with housing at approximately that cost then only a fool would ever rent out an apartment. The supply of apartments to rent would go to approximately 0. One strange consequence of this would be that the price of housing would plummet as a result as all the landlords left the market. When you went to buy a condo, instead of competing with landlords and money launderers you would only be bidding against other people who want to live in the apartment. I saw this first hand at the GHI housing co-op in Maryland, buying a unit there was dramatically below market cost because they did not allow anyone to live in units apart from owners.
As for thinking from an economic perspective, I think anything else is doomed to fail. Unless we think about how people will behave to maximize their own outcomes in some system we risk making things much worse (even if we do think it through we still risk making things much worse, but at least we will have more confidence that we are doing the right thing). Socialist states are a great example of this, they plow ahead on the moral high ground (at least in their moral system) and manage to make their citizens poorer.
Sounds like a sure plan to get your tires slashed, if not your head bashed.
Hard pass no matter what the price.
Taken on I62 on the drive into Harrison.
1. https://twitter.com/pontifier/status/1559001472746098693?s=2...
2. https://twitter.com/oriwa_/status/1559042188608405505?s=21&t...
and
https://twitter.com/pontifier/status/1538230779658002432?s=2...
This is a perfect example of someone telling the truth in such a way to completely mischaracterize what really happened.
I’m sorry that you didn’t like my factual summary of events, but I provided direct references that were very easy to click on and read more about and I’m glad that you availed yourself to those resources.
You obviously feel very strongly about pontifier and his past, given the amount of time you spent digging into his background, what is the point you are actually trying to make here? Be as direct as possible, please :)
I did not spend much time “digging into his background”, I clicked a link and read a few posts.
Why do you care? Be as direct as possible, please :)
:-(
So, we always want to help - I mean, FFS - people who develop tech/sw/hw/etc are actually looking at giving the fruits of their efforts out to the world, social support is no different...
But at times quick to help without judging the requestor past (HELLO PAC contributions :-))
As for the weird threat of embarrassment… what? I literally just asked if he used the same username on both websites.
As for why I asked, I’ll answer again: his post on HN had a different tone from his posts on the bird site, and I wanted to know if they gave context to his post or were unrelated. For example, I do not own “braingenious” on twitter, and I wouldn’t want someone to mix me up with whoever that is.
I initially found this thread because someone mentioned it on Twitter. Spoiler: I did not go out of my way to gain any information.
As for how this relates to politics, I’ll refer to his own recent post about local politics affecting his project.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32474436
This has been a courtesy post because you have not answered “Why do you care?” and have failed to be direct. I will not engage with you any further.
Always a losing strategy in my experience.
I invite you to not read questions directed at people other than you if you find them to be obnoxious.
No, why would I?
the guy confronted him and held him there until the authorities arrived.
are you implying people should not protect their livelihood and let trespassers loot even if they could stop them?
why should those property owners who are fully in the right morally and legally do that when the trespassers are flagrantly breaking the law?
Seems no different than crime stoppers, it's usually just a reward for information leading to an arrest, it's not an actual bounty. It's not excluding that, but he's most likely hoping someone who knows the person who stole it will rat for the money.
And I think you'll have to provide examples of the "terrible outcomes caused by private vigilanteism".
None of this negates anything I said previously.
I feel for this guy. He is getting screwed by a high-violence region. But his approach to solving this problem makes the world worse, not better.
A criminal came to his private property and attempted to steal. He was able to keep the person there - for less than ten minutes - until that person was arrested. Presumably that person is in jail now or at least on probation.
Please explain how just letting this person steal leaves the world better than having him get punished for his actions. When victims of crime shrug their shoulders and just say "aw shucks" it incentivizes more crime, which makes the world objectively worse.
What is the alternative? Paying people to track down criminals is how law enforcement works almost everywhere.
did i get that right
At the same time, he is trying to build a fusion generator, a science museum, an industrial space, and a few internet businesses that seem to need a secure facility. The planning commission probably has no idea what to do with him, and it doesn't sound like he is employing very many people from the local community. If I were on that city council, I would also be skeptical of the rich guy who bought a warehouse to play around but not actually run any serious business.
Between that and the tweet whining about how hard email is to set up (!) this dude isn't qualified to run a Subway franchise, certainly not multiple internet companies.
- Yup, the free energy fonts and conspiratorial claims about video of his fusion reactor being suppressed
- It looks like he bought a bunch of people's property for pennies on the dollar, then raised funds from those same people to return their goods to them, then had them trucked across the country in shipping containers to be dropped at this derelict 'warehouse'.
- He claims to be solo creating a viable fusion reactor, which appears to be one of the umpteen intended uses of this warehouse
- Wonders why the town council isn't trying to help him, when in one of his own tweets admits that he didn't even bother to attend the meeting that was going to hear his issue.
- Thinks snipers are stealing from him.
- Apparently held a man at gunpoint
- Alleges, openly on the internet, that he's storing all sorts of valuable equipment and music media at this warehouse while admitting he isn't even in the state a good chunk of the time
- Tried to run for mayor of Provo, UT (population 117k) so he could "disincorporate the city"
- the whole benforbars thing
- Complaining about the inability to install minecraft on anything other than a linux machine (?)
- Various email/server complaints
Yeahhhh
It feels like looking at myself in a fun-house mirror. There are probably huge pieces of these events that I'm not communicating well, or at all.
Thank you for your comment. I'll try to be better at communicating the meanings I intend.
Why can't I use it? Because the city won't let me.
I'm not the only one. This guy, Garland Trice, had his building demolished by the city because he failed to repair it. Why did he fail to repair it? Because the city would not give him permits.
It's SO RIDICULOUS here!
They've closed down the movie theater because they wanted to bring in their own theater. They drove a crypto mining facility away. They ran a tire recycler out of town...
If I hired 50 people, what would they do with no place to work?
Politics in small towns is about relationships. You need to build them if you want to build anything else. There's a reason you got this building for a deep discount: it's going to cost you a lot of time to get anything done. You didn't pay a lot of money for this building, and that was for a reason: you're going to have to pay in other resources.
Alternatively, if you're going to yell, you need to back it up with some persuasion. In this case, legal threats from actual lawyers (no pulling a C&D letter off the internet and changing a few things - you need your threats to be legit). That is going to get expensive very quickly, but it may work - small towns don't have a lot of legal resources and neither do their residents. The guy whose building got demolished for not doing disallowed repairs probably has a big payout waiting if he sues.
...
We can get a sense of where people like to live based on where they are leaving and where they are going. Of the five fastest-growing cities in America by absolute numbers, one is governed by a Democrat, one by an Independent, and three by Republicans:
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/fastest-...
Of the top 10 fastest-growing states, 7 out of 10 are governed by Republicans:
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/slideshows/these-are...
http://www.whovotesformayor.org/compare
explain why people think progressive mayors are crazy.
A small percentage of mostly older people vote for most mayors.
If more people vote, younger views get represented.
Seems like one of the best things he could do to improve his town, is to encourage people to vote and be represented.
https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/the-most-dangerous-cities-i...
Edit: I know it breaks etiquette to complain about downvotes, but this comment is not just material fact, it's my everyday lived reality. It's not safe to walk outside at night anymore on my block thanks to underfunded police and permissive progressive judges. I hear gunshots that I never heard before. The open drug use problem's getting worse, and schools have gotten way more dangerous for kids. Someone got stabbed on my street this weekend. The political cause and effect are clear. If that annoys you, bite me.
I found one that seemed too good to be true. a 220,000 sqft metal warehouse and office complex on 17 acres. I thought the price was a typo at $375k.The agent assured me that the price was correct, and I flew out to see the place.
It was in a little town called Pine Bluff, Arkansas.
I offered about 3/4 what they were asking, and they accepted the offer.
Fast forward 2 1/2 years, and I've had nothing but problems. Break in after break in. Can't work through the red tape with the city so my warehouse sits empty. It feels like they are actively working against myself and other entrepreneurs I talk to. At least 2 others who bought buildings and tried to open businesses left after getting nowhere.
Maybe I'm daft, but I ended up buying about 75 more properties here... all surprisingly cheap.
The town is killing me though. I haven't seen my kids very much lately - I don't think it's safe enough for them. I'm probably going to be moving back to Utah in the next couple of months because it's just too much out here.