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Owner-Occupied

The Life South property appears to have more lives than the Cheshire Cat. Gone are the hundreds of apartments as are the false claims this would be meaningfully age restricted. Now we hear about 40 or so townhomes that will be "owner-occupied." But will they? Really? Can we believe anything spewing forth from city hall? Well, if the Cheshire Cat were actually there, there might be one grain of truth.

Is it even possible to guarantee a development is owner-occupied and not easily converted to "investment rentals"? As it turns out, yes. Yes it is. However, this cannot be done without some effort and it cannot be done with a mere HOA, as restrictive as they seem to those who suffer under them. It will probably take a condominium, a much sturdier and respected legal entity. 

For insight and at least one existence proof, we need to look east. To Athens GA. Athens is a very interesting real estate market and in fact is interesting in almost all aspects. It is not uncommon for parents to buy a condo for children, often sequentially, attending UGA. Afterwards, many became student rentals. There is also a significant number of small time investors who will buy a condo for the rental income. You can identify condominium communities with significant rental units by the decayed appearance and associated depreciation over time. Just like a regular apartment. After all it is a business.

One condo community, perhaps a unicorn, has legal support for exclusive owner occupation of the community's home. This is supported in the founding legal documents of the Condominium (what a novel idea). From the Declaration of Condominium:

(A) SINGLE FAMILY USE. All units shall be restricted exclusively to a single-family residential use. No unit or any limited common element, or any portion thereof, shall at any time be used for any commercial, business, or professional purposes. The common elements shall be used exclusively for the recreational and service purposes for which they are intended. No units shall be used for any rental whatsoever, with the exception that (a) the rental of a unit shall be allowed during the period of administration of any Estate of the owner thereof, not to exceed three (3) years of rental, and (b) rental of a portion of a unit by the owner-occupant thereof. Upon the death of said unit owner, the property must be offered for sale to an owner-occupant, occupied by an heir, or leased only in accordance with (a) above. Each lease is subject to approval of the Board of Directors, and prospective lessees are required to indicate to representatives of the Board of Directors that they have read such Rules and Regulations. 

You can, sort of, rent your unit, but only if you're willing to die for that opportunity. Amending the Declaration of Condominium requires a supermajority of unit owners, providing the best insurance that it will remain owner-occupied. The units in this Athens condo carry premium prices relative to other communities simply because it is owner-occupied, and individuals, for their own wants or greeds, cannot change this. Owners know that without this provision, their wonderful, owner-occupied community can be converted to a rental community. And if it can be it will be. 

The question is simple. Will the city, thru its zoning process, require air tight legal structures to guarantee these units are exclusively owner-occupied? If they don't, their statements about "owner-occupied" are lies. One someone's behalf.

Homestead Season

We're entering tax season, income and property, as early in the year is your opportunity to investigate your homestead exemption options. The standard exemption you get for just living there, but there are many more. At least in DeKalb county. Some are for various service members, some are for disability, and some are age. The key element of some of these exemption classes is the homeowner is exempted from any and all school taxes, a vast majority of the total tax burden. 

Naturally, those adhering to the notion that more government makes a better world detest these exemptions claiming that everyone should pay because we all benefit from an educated population. There is an implicit, and false, assumption in this argument: that public schools, who are levying this tax, are actually educating all those kids. They address the fact that public schools are handing out diplomas to kids lacking the intellectual stamina to read all the way to the end of a sentence, by simply ignoring the fact. In their world, no fact that does not support their dogmatic beliefs simply does not exist. You can't argue with that. 

Beyond the standard exemption almost all the others are means tested, and for some olde fartes in daVille this inflicts the pain of envy, because in neighboring Cobb County, you simply age into it.

Combine these high taxes, the highest in the state, with bottom-of-the-barrel education outcomes and looming prospects of school redistricting and you must wonder about those homeowners who say they moved to Dunwoody for the schools. What were they thinking? Well, they weren't. That's the only reasonable explanation. Is the commute really that much worse? Hardly. The schools are better. Are the taxes higher? Nope. The schools are cheaper. Are the houses inferior? Not by a long shot. You don't have to jump through hoops for that homestead exemption. 

If you live here, fine. Just don't move here because the schools are so good and such a great deal. They're not.

No Other Option...Really?

Fortune magazine reports that Gen Z students are making it into college "unable to even read a sentence" and this worries professors. Their concern? It could lead to a generation of anxious and lonely graduates. 

Let that soak in.

Fortune doubles down:

"It's leaving colleges no choice but to lower their expectations."

Here's another choice: maintain (or raise) your entrance requirements and your expectations, and simply do not accept applicants who cannot even read a sentence. Professors have lamented that critical thinking is no longer a valid issue, which makes sense when you're dealing with folks who struggle and usually fail to find the period at the end of any given sentence. 

Then Fortune triples down:

"With students struggling, academies have been forced to adapt---a move critics describe as 'coddling'."

Of course when they cannot read a sentence asking them to read a few dozen pages is like asking them to climb Everest without a Sherpa, which is nearly as difficult as going half an hour without a screen. But folks, including some of the non-reading Gen Z cohort, are suggesting that college is not for everyone, and they are self-identifying as not college candidates. It is worth noting that college administrators seem to disagree, perhaps because their jobs depend on the myth that your life is worthless without a college degree. A degree that is increasingly not worth the cost and approaching objective, absolute worthlessness. 

Is it ego? Is it greed? Is it self-interest over all else? All of these? Why would anyone, Fortune magazine or the academies, not recognize the vast number of young Americans who are not college-ready, and that lowering standards to well below high-school levels is exactly the wrong thing to do?

Door Knockers

You've had a job, haven't you? Of course you have. Most likely you've had a job requiring a pre-employment drug screening. Equally likely that job did not require post employment, suspicionless drug tests. Almost as if a drug free workplace is a one day event, with that day coming before you're actually at the workplace. Afterwards nobody cares, so...toke up.

It is the same as politicians. They come out to press the flesh before the election, with feigned sincerity they do their best to fool you into voting for them. Afterwards they really couldn't care less about any of that, any of you. Sure, they may have these "public input" online push polls gathering "data" you'll never see, just so they can say they're still "in touch." Hardly.

Want proof? You need look no further than city hall. Do you think those nattering nabobs have a clue about your issues...your concerns? Only if you're as clueless as they are. Are you?

Life On The Train

Suppose there is a train, running at a constant speed down a straight, level stretch of track. The train sports an engineer and a conductor. Passengers are split equally between men and women, and includes a small group of blind men. All of the men sit on one side of the train while the women are seated on the other as the women detest Allspice and the men are not fans of Chanel No. 5. A specially outfitted car carries a circus elephant that had been left behind to recover from a head cold. 

Along the track there are four observers one at each end and two in the middle with those at the ends and one in the middle on the same side of the tracks. The engineer likes to blow the whistle constantly because he's an imbecile and it makes him smile. The conductor collects tickets and breaks up fights. Sometimes.

So, train's moving, whistle's blowing. The bloke standing at the end of the tracks behind the caboose, with the train moving away hears the whistle and knows it is flat. At the other end that bloke hears the whistle coming towards him and knows it is sharp. The blokes in the middle hear it coming towards them, then moving away. They hear a whistle that is sharp, briefly on pitch as it passes, then becomes flat as it moves away. The exact same train observed at the exact same time and three different observations. Which is correct? Do you take a vote? The two blokes in the middle heard the same thing, while those at each end heard something different to the middle and the other end. The conductor, and all the passengers, hear an incessant but on pitch whistle. So who's correct? Turns out they all are. Four observation locations, four different observations and all four are correct. At the same time. 

These observers aren't just listening they are looking. In the train windows and inside the train. The three blokes on the one side see passengers. They are all men, so they conclude it is a train full of blokes. The lone observer on the other side sees windows full of women, concluding it's a mobile hen party. The conductor walks down the aisle looking to one side and seeing women, to the other are the men. The conductor knows there are both men and women on the train. Do you take a vote? Three blokes saw a train full of men, one saw only women, and the conductor, who is actually correct, sees both men and women. But who gets believed?

The blind guys who have never seen an elephant, literally and figuratively, send their most trusted member to the circus car to feel out the situation. Almost half an hour later he returns and tells the blind that an elephant is a huge creature with two tails, a small one at one end, a large one at the other. They both "wag" and each has a wet spot beneath. He offered other details regarding leathery hide and tree-like legs, but it was the two tails that fascinated. Even some sighted, who had never seen an elephant, were convinced this was indeed a wonderful animal. Others, who had seen elephants, claimed the "big tail" was actually a very long nose, that operated like a monkey's tail...it could grab things. Unsurprisingly, no one who believed two tails was ever going to believe the Pinocchio story. 

Is there a point to this? That, dear reader, is for you to decide.

Be Prepared

For promises broken. 

Not like they haven't been already, but if you read the Blue Bag Rag you noticed Mother Mayor getting front page ink to let you know what's coming, even though they've already crossed more lines than Trump. We no longer have the city manager reporting to council. No, no. Not his idea of fun? Beneath him? Regardless, the city charter calls for the city manager, and the city manager alone, to show up. In fact, the city charter has no notion of a "department" of city manager and one of the few things council can actually do to rein in this madness is to eliminate that "department." Immediately.

Without delving into the dick-pic fiasco, the city police department is objectively inferior to what we had as unincorporated DeKalb. Well, if one of your key performance indicators is "cops show up in our neighborhoods to enforce laws" but maybe that's not your KPI. Is yours PR stunts like coffee with a cop? Really? 

Then there's the bloat. Mapping all the bureaucratic entities this city has spun up would be a full time job and it is one of the many jobs the city isn't going to do. Because that kind of transparency is unflattering.

So Mother Mayor has been sent out to grease the already slippery slope. Who's pulling those strings? In any event they are about to run, not walk, away from every founding principle, every promise made. All to gorge themselves on greed. Will enough ever be enough?

Proxy Voting

Proxy. This word gets tossed around quite a bit, and not just lately. Back in the early days of the civil rights movement ZIP codes were (and still are) closely associated with demographics. It was common for insurers and lenders to change rates or even refuse to serve certain ZIP codes, claiming they were not discriminating based on race.

But it sure looked like they were.

So some laws were passed. These laws removed intent from discrimination...it no longer mattered whether you intended to discriminate if the outcome was indistinguishable from intentional discrimination. If it looks like intentional discrimination then it was. And it wasn't just ZIP codes, insurers and bankers, it was employers inferring from names or colleges the race of an applicant with that affecting the hiring process. Recently there have been accusations that higher ed has been using these same proxy indicators to favor demographics they prefer. 

There are other proxies, codewords, for race. Urban is a euphemism for Black, despite the fact that a lot of non-Blacks live in cities, but should there be a dramatic increase in Whites, that is decried as gentrification. So...maybe? Products can also be proxies. Remember Colt 45 Malt Liquor? Cadillac cars? Or...how about this: fried chicken. 

Maybe the recent council votes were not about traffic and drive thru congestion. In both cases these were fried chicken emporiums. Were all the requirements placed on the applicants just a way of saying no? For reasons having nothing to do with traffic or walkability? Remember, if it looks like racism, it is racism. 

Hillbilly Fan

The Cuckoo Nut Telegraph is humming with news that some dumb donkey elected official added some ludicrous requirement to the Zaxby's proposal: they had to install a sign saying idling was limited to thirty seconds. This is not stupid on the surface, it is stupid throughout. What about electric cars that the dumb donkeys want us all driving? Do they even idle? And most modern cars automatically shut the engine off when the car stops. So...right...yeah, that pretty woman in the Maserati...who's gonna tell her not to keep her motor running? 

Then there is enforcement. This is private property and even if it weren't the DPD is notorious for NOT enforcing traffic laws. [scroll down] Were they planning to fine Zaxby's if they did not enforce it, and who was going to check that they did? 

And who brought this stupidity to the party? That would be none other than The Ice Cream Man, who allegedly tried to inflict similar stupidity on the Life South project. You have to wonder if he really does have 78's by Hank Snow. 

But is it just stupidity, for stupidity's sake? To be sure, politics and stupid are siamese twins, but there is another explanation that makes stupidity a tool rather than a motivation. 

Meanness. 

The all consuming meanness of a bully. An angry bully. Is this the dark tetrad taken from the online world into real life? A bully delighting in torturing victims? This is a distinct possibility as the vote indicates that even when the victim cried uncle, the bully just laughed.  And this will continue as no one else on council will lift a finger to stop it, and, after all, you voted for this. Are you happy now?

Sideways

No, not the dog, may he continue to Rest In Peace, but about the traffic lights at Roberts and Chamblee-Dunwoody.

See? These are sideways rather than the traditional drop downs previously installed. Why the change?

Rumor has it that the city (that would be bureaucrats that run this show) were concerned that the drop downs were too low and might hit the top of trucks as they zoom thru this intersection. This is a reasonable concern because trucks routinely speed thru this intersection. Frequently.

You may already know, or can see from the picture, this is a no-truck-zone. You can infer that this means the city (that would be bureaucrats that run this show) has no intention of enforcing the truck restriction and is in fact catering to the needs of trucks violating the law. 

Isn't there a law against helping people violate the law?

They won't enforce that one either.