But yeah, the total lack of security is astonishing, you'd think he could afford to hire a security guard: the main theft happened after he got the windfall and could easily have paid for it.
He bought 74 parcels of land in the town, including a house which he moved into, for around $140k.
And there are benefits to those houses. He could, for example, pick nicer ones and hire people for security and give them free rent in a house as part of their job. With what he paid, he could even give them a "rent to own" mortgage!
He could include the house, and even just minimum wage. Minimum wage is a livable wage in a very, very economically depressed area (look at what housing costs here!), but at the same time, minimum wage + free housing or rent to own housing is a great wage.
He could start a hacker hostel. Those houses give loads of opportunity.
He just needs to stabilize things a bit. But security would do that. Especially if security = 20 people. He just needs a real business plan, or at least to move towards something.
Another way to look at it is, imagine if he used the house to hire security, maintenance people, groundskeepers, cleaning personelle/janitors, and on and on.
Now, he's a major employer in the area.
Now, those left that are honest? Are actively fighting to protect their jobs!
Where I live, the city is legally bound to seize and then auction off houses for unpaid property tax.
There are even interesting things, such a legally mandated grace periods, and the original owner can buy back up to one year after auction.
And this sure sounds like a place where property taxes might default.
- Towns don't "turn around" spontaneously.
- people don't usually gamble every dollar they have
That's why this gentleman is a great object of curiosity. He's the perfect story of sheltered, with money, hitting reality and being flummoxed.
Then after discovering that he is a far above average target, and getting a windfall and bringing all his gear and customer's property to the site, he gets no security?
Definitely seems to be a few cards short of a deck and have more money than sense. I hope he doesn't get himself or his family killed if one of those robberies goes bad.
> “It'd be freaking fantastic to own a hotel, and like, have rooftop parties and turn the whole top floor into a penthouse for me. You know? Like, that's, like, how would I not want to do that?
Dude? Who the fuck are you going to be partying with? The town is full of criminals who steal from you. A makerspace? Where are the makers? An art studio? Where are the artists? Your town is "MAGA, drugs and crime" as an HNer put it in the previous article about this saga. Where is all of this culture going to magically come from, besides your imagination?
This guy seems like the true "If You Build It They Will Come" believer, but he's not even building anything. And even if he does Build It, the place seems like too much of a shithole for anyone to actually come.
Also, if you research the town, it looks like a big casino was just built there, at the cost of $350M. Which would suggest that the RE investments this guy made might just pay out, and that the town leadership was in fact maliciously trying to get rid of him (so that someone else would profit from the appeciation).
Yep, according to Wikipedia, you're absolutely right. Strike the "MAGA" part from my comment!
But, plopping a casino into an already-crappy town is not going to make it less crappy.
And, to be fair, if his plan was to help the city, plopping a makerspace or art studio, or a science museum isn't going to move the crappiness needle either. There's no silver bullet building that fixes poverty and misery. It's not like SimCity where you sprinkle your city with evenly spaced bonus-providing buildings and suddenly all your metrics start going up.
If his plan wasn't to help the city, but to arbitrage the low property values into a profitable business, then he should have bought strip mall properties and installed the usual turnkey check cashing stores, liquor stores, payday lenders, and so on. Not easy businesses, but at least they are understandable to the city and have a chance at being profitable.
If his plan was to just speculate on real estate and hope that some miracle happens that raises property values, that's just high stakes gambling. Good for him if it pays off and he can flip these properties to another sucker for a profit.
If it wasn't any of these, then honestly I don't get what his plan was. I'm going to buy a bunch of random real estate in a dilapidated city and... then... do what? Sit there getting robbed every time you move anything of value into those properties?
Though in terms of openness to, say, LGBTQ, it definitely isn't going to be the most welcoming place.
https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/exit-polls/president/natio...
That is a serious question - what is their thinking or feeling that drives them to this?
Maybe it's just because I don't live in a depressed area like this, but I simply don't understand the city's motivation for being a pain in the ass here. I mean, pretend you're the mayor or city council of this town. Industry has left. The jobs have left. Your schools suck. The state and country is ignoring you. Your citizens are spiraling into poverty, drugs, and crime. A wacky entrepreneur moves in, and would like to take a shot at revitalization.
And you're worried about architectural drawings and building codes?????
Even if the guy is has weird ideas, why would you make it your job to get up his ass when he appears to at least be trying to do something positive?
It's hinted in the article that the local government has its own (lame) revitalization plans, which will also not work, and sees this guy as competition. So silly. No wonder it sucks living in these hopeless places.
The most important reason why building codes exist is for safety. The buildings have been abandoned for some time and are likely in deep disrepair. It seems the city wants to know that if their children go to the science museum, it won't collapse or burn down. This guy is not an architect or engineer, and hasn't even hired one. If the city had building codes but didn't enforce them, and some tragedy happened, they might even be liable legally. They would definitely be liable politically if a big tragedy happened.
Also—like other people have said, if the city are assholes, that sucks, but he’s still going to be fighting a steeper uphill battle on his plans and investments without them behind him—suck it up and learn to work with them or it’s going to be that much harder to not only get started on his current plans, but also his longer term plans of revitalization.
Maybe a great piece of software can be built as a single person working alone, fighting the odds and pissing people off, but I can’t see that approach working for building a town full of people.
IMO this is not a case of a nimby board standing in the way of an eccentric trying to innovate. The problem is that he has made himself known to this board as an unserious crank who does not show the board respect for their processes. He has been approved for several different uses at the site and failed to follow through on any of them. He demands special permissions while actively campaigning against their plans. If he could show a good faith effort to help the town build upon what the electeds are doing he might have a fighting chance, but he instead goes around talking shit about them anywhere he can.
For a less hypothetical scenario, its not hard to see the parallels with another wacky entrepreneur and a submarine that eschewed traditional safety concerns
Building codes, like several other categories of regulations that can at times feel oppressive or arbitrary, tend to be written in the blood of accident victims. See, for example the ghost ship fire in my recent memory of why they are important even if (especially if) you are using an under utilized space
Another notable quote is Euclid v. Ambler, where SCOTUS legalized the US zoning system and in their opinion said it was good to ban apartment buildings because they were "parasites".
Of course, this is partly about not liking poor people as well as minorities, but if you leave it in place this long it eventually becomes a ban on your own children living in the same state as you.
These things were introduced at the same time as racial convenants (where a developer would construct a neighborhood and require its houses to only ever be sold to white people), and mostly for the same reason; they merely weren't repealed when that one was. For the racial details, see the book "The Color of Law".
* What exactly was his plan for the building? I don't see anything coherent. One moment it's a makerspace, another it's a music warehouse, then it's a science museum. Was there a coherent plan? $281k is a lot of money to spend with no real plan.
* The city allegedly giving him grief. I'm still not sure if this was preventable or not considering the bit about how he failed to submit building plans. If your plan is to own a significant chunk of this city, you're going to have to play better politics than repeatedly being asked to leave at public functions. Palm-greasing would be a far better strategy than righteous anger. Maybe a fraction of that $900k could've opened a nice park they always wanted. Maybe the PD needs a new bearcat. Something.
* Living in a tent on the lot instead of hiring security. This bit was straight out of some episode of a sitcom. This is a depressed flyover country town. If you couldn't afford security then you couldn't afford the building. Again, a good chunk of that $900k would cover round-the-clock security for at least a year. Righteous indignation over the crime isn't an actual cost-cutting measure.
* The land is cheap for a reason. The way a town gets revitalised is external value flows in. How would the makerspace-warehouse-museum thing bring that value into the city? Even if all this did pan out, I'd predict an entirely new problem he'd have, which is no willing customers outside of a 200 mile radius.
I don't get why people make cockeyed "investments" like these when the S&P 500 is sitting right there at a nice 8% a year. No bums, no politics, no thinking it through at all really. Just buy it and don't touch it. If your idea can't do better than that intersection of earnings and effort, don't bother with it.