Sunday, September 18, 2022

Force a Bubble Economy, Until There's Nothing Left To Pop

Something has been bothering me since I heard to real-estate podcasters call themselves locusts on their show- even if a town or a city miraculously came down with a good administration, would it do any good in the long run?

Consider the positive side- your town is attracting people, so rents go up and this attracts the above-mentioned locusts.  They no longer just invest in their own backyard.  They follow trends, identify markets across the U.S., and are happy to do all this stuff long distance.  

If your town is attracting people, that may mean you've figured out how to run it a little better than most, but here comes the real estate bubble.  How do you keep the growth to an appropriate level?

Most cities don't do the proper research to proper up-keep.  They'll push for the flashy new development because it looks good, but they don't try and match it with what the expected tax results will be.

This because officials are like kids taking cookies out of the jar- not Grandma, who owns the jar and likes to keep it full.  

Since they don't have a long term ownership interest, the temptation is to spend today with disregard for tomorrow.  Maybe they worry a little bit as to whether or not they'll be around when their pensions inevitably get cut, but it doesn't not appear to be a big enough worry to stop the madness.

There's the negative side too, as we have noticed recently with Jackson, Mississippi.  Much has been made of it being an 80% black city, with various sides conveniently using that statistic to back up their biases.

But what that number represents is those that basically couldn't get out.  It wasn't just white flight- pretty much anyone with the means got out.  They are the ones left holding the bag.

Unfortunately, those who run the government are in the habit of doing what has been going on since the end of WWII.  They show no sign of wising up, and realizing the error of their ways.  Since the exploitative behavior started so long ago, the current generation of officials could think that this is just what they are supposed to do- within certain parameters, of course.  If they really did just turn off the water to milk the federal government for a billion dollars- well, that would be going pretty far.

But I have no doubt that they've turned their police department into a revenue generating operation, and are making their poor suffer.  That's what most places have done to keep the court industry running.

Should Jackson officials suddenly achieve enlightenment, they would want to act a lot like Singapore- think about how to attract talent and keep it there.  Despite being black, they would almost immediately be called white supremacists.  Protests about 'gentrification' would no doubt happen, and then there would be howling if anyone got wind of the rest of the reforms necessary to attract people with means to such a city.

As always, there are things that could be done, yet nearly every avenue via which to do it seems to get shut down.  They'd probably be calling Jane Jacobs far right if she was alive right now.

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