Month: March 2018

by William Skink

Missoula’s housing crisis garnered two stories in today’s Missoulian, one about community pushback against townhomes, and the other about cost-prohibitive regulations that make developing tiny homes onerous to build.

The first story represents the NIMBY (not in my backyard) resistance to increasing density with new development. In this conflict residents say the character of their neighborhoods are being destroyed. While people may understand, intellectually, why a town with limited room for growth needs to increase density, it becomes a different issue when the actual construction begins.

The second story represents how creativity and innovation are killed by regulation. In this conflict developers trying to maximize profit have no incentive to take a risk by developing tiny homes.

Nicholas Cole, the architect responsible for this project of 8 tiny homes being built in East Missoula, is learning the hard way that innovation and creativity are cost prohibitive with Missoula’s current regulatory environment. From the link:

Cole and his business partner are in the process of finishing up construction on eight 495-square-foot single-bedroom, one-bathroom homes on a small lot in the 200 block of Speedway Avenue in East Missoula. The little dwellings are on foundations and each includes high-efficiency heating and cooling, Ikea furnishings and a window layout that’s designed for both privacy and lots of sunlight.

But as the first person to actually construct the type of village that’s gaining traction across the country and in Missoula as a possible way to solve the housing affordability/shortage crisis, Cole feels like there are a lot of kinks to work out before tiny homes truly catch on.

That’s because, due to county regulations, he says he was forced to spend roughly $40,000 in building permit fees and had to dedicate almost twice the amount of space on his lot to parking as he did to living space.

It’s ironic that a town like Missoula–which pushes alternative transportation every chance it gets–enforces inflexible regulations requiring this 8 home project of 500 square foot homes to include space for 16 vehicles. A variance sought by Cole was turned down.

I used to be more weary of developers complaining about regulations. They just want to make as much money as possible, was my thinking. While I still think that’s mostly accurate, this story highlights how much additional cost is put on projects by permitting and other regulatory requirements.

Cole emphasizes these homes aren’t being built to be affordable. The rent he is planning on charging people to live in one of these 8 sheds is $1,000. Cole explains how his approach is different than other developers:

Cole, who owns NC Design Studio, says he paid about $3,600 for each of the eight homes for the sewer impact fees, plus an additional impact fee.

Cole said all his permit fees are built into the cost he has to charge for rent and is quick to point out that he doesn’t consider his homes low-income at all.

“A lot of these rentals in town are run down,” he said. “A lot of developers come and they build the cheapest thing possible, and we’re trying not to be like that. But also our rent is going to reflect that. Our rent is higher than a lot of people are charging. I think we’re going to be $1,000 a month plus some utilities. I bet if I put these for rent on Craigslist, I’d have all of them rented out in a day. We’ve already had people asking about them.”

He said he could have built a multiple-story block of apartments, but as an architect he wanted to design something unique that fit in with the neighborhood of single-family, one-story homes. He believes he found the reason why more developers aren’t building tiny homes: It’s cost-prohibitive.

Personally, I’ve had some recent exposure to how absurd regulations can be. We’ve been talking to contractors about walling in a space to create another bedroom in our home for one of our kids. The way the project is shaping up, the room won’t be officially considered a bedroom if/when we decide to sell. While we were initially disappointed about this, the contractor explained why it’s actually a good thing. If the room was considered another bedroom, he said, we would be forced to spend between $30,000-$40,000 on sewer upgrades. For us, that would definitely make the project cost-prohibitive as it would more than double the cost.

All this reminded me of what Kim Olson, aka the Empanada Lady, had to deal with to make her delicious empanadas. Her story is what first got me thinking about regulation differently. This is from a 4&20 Blackbird post from 2012:

The “empanada lady” wasn’t on the agenda, but she and Steve McGregor, of McGregor Mobile Foods, showed up to say that an odd rule is keeping them from using the kitchens they rent.

Officials approved the kitchen she uses at Bear’s Brew sometime in the past two years, she said. But when a business changes hands, the building needs to meet code.

And in this case, that means putting in a thousand-gallon underground tank to catch grease, Olson said. But she said she produces – at the most – just 2 cups of grease a week.

There’s another problem, too, said McGregor. That’s the high cost of one of those grease traps, at some $80,000.

The rule is meant to keep grease from going into the wastewater system, but McGregor said it also puts a severe hurt on small businesses.

“For the local guy, it doesn’t work very well,” he said.

I still think regulations are necessary, but now I also think regulations can be maddeningly inflexible, financially cost-prohibitive, and ultimately a deathblow to creativity and innovation. With all the factors fueling Missoula’s housing crisis, this is one area that definitely needs some serious scrutiny.

by William Skink

UPDATE: Propublica has retracted a portion of their reporting on Haspel.

Will Christian Crusader Pompeo and Bloody Gina face any opposition from the resistance? Early indications are no:

The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), on Wednesday cited a “very good working relationship” with Haspel, currently the agency’s deputy director. Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.), a red-state Democrat who also sits on the Intelligence panel, said he was “very much open-minded.”

Even one of the Senate’s harshest critics of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and the architect of the so-called torture report, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), signaled a surprisingly open reception to Haspel that could pull others off the fence.

“We’ve had dinner together. We have talked. Everything I know is she has been a good deputy director,” Feinstein said on Tuesday, adding, “I think, hopefully, the entire organization learned something from the so-called enhanced interrogation program.”

Gina Haspel oversaw a CIA black site in Thailand where prisoners were tortured. That is a war crime. Gina Haspel also participated in obstruction of justice when she destroyed video evidence of said torture. That is also a crime, but I guess for establishment Democrats it’s no big deal.

To provide cover for this criminal Trump selected to head the CIA, the excuse used by Nazis at the Nuremberg trial is being used: she was just following orders.

How can Democrats go along with this? Are they just following orders as well? If Democrats don’t mount any opposition to these new members of team Trump what does that mean?

Mike Krieger thinks this means Trump is moving toward war:

Trump’s push to install Mike Pompeo as U.S. Secretary of State is a crystal clear indication that he’s begun the process of building his war cabinet. The next steps, likely to begin over the course of 2018, is to walk away from the Iran deal. I suspect relentless war propaganda to be unleashed simultaneously as the neocon/neoliberal/mass media war-monger alliance plays its well established role in selling the American public on another pointless and destructive war.

If Haspel and Pompeo glide through their respective confirmations that should tell discerning citizens something troubling (that’s of course assuming discerning citizens actually exist).

If the resistance won’t make a peep now about these sociopaths, what will they do when the war drums really start pounding?

by William Skink

When you hear someone criticize Fox News, but ignore MSDNC, don’t trust anything they say. Corporate news across the political spectrum is the problem, not one set of biases vs. another.

For example, die hard viewers of MSDNC get fired up over the violence in Syria, but express virtually no concern over the slaughter and starvation of people in Yemen. Why? One reason is because MSNBC is ignoring what is happening–with US military logistical support–in Yemen. From a recent FAIR report:

For the popular US cable news network MSNBC, the largest humanitarian catastrophe in the world is apparently not worth much attention—even as the US government has played a key role in creating and maintaining that unparalleled crisis.

An analysis by FAIR has found that the leading liberal cable network did not run a single segment devoted specifically to Yemen in the second half of 2017.

And in these latter roughly six months of the year, MSNBC ran nearly 5,000 percent more segments that mentioned Russia than segments that mentioned Yemen.

Moreover, in all of 2017, MSNBC only aired one broadcast on the US-backed Saudi airstrikes that have killed thousands of Yemeni civilians. And it never mentioned the impoverished nation’s colossal cholera epidemic, which infected more than 1 million Yemenis in the largest outbreak in recorded history.

This is disgusting, but not surprising. MSNBC functions just like Fox News, but the brilliance is viewers of MSNBC consider themselves well-informed and politically enlightened. They are not.

Don’t tell that to Josh Manning, the COMBAT Veteran who has appeared on MSNBC and CNN. In his recent piece of partisan propaganda at Montana Pos(t) he takes aim at Fox News:

By now the world has learned Fox News operates as an extension and propaganda arm of the conservative movement. But all the groveling Fox does will pale in comparison the what will happen when the Sinclair Broadcast Group becomes a larger force in broadcast news. Sinclair–which owns stations in Missoula, Butte, and Bozeman–is poised to take over more stations as it weaves through the Trump-stacked Federal Communications Commission and antitrust laws the Department of Justice is unlikely to pursue. If Sinclair wins it can become the propaganda arm of our authoritarian state, which is the ultimate desire for any dictator. The initial indications of what Sinclair will do as a media giant are becoming more evident and frightening.

Be afraid, noble Democrats. And please forget the Telecommunication Act Bill Clinton signed into law, and Jon Tester’s vote to confirm the dude dismantling Net Neutrality.

Another point of criticism you won’t get from Democrat-supporting corporate media is the disturbing trend Josh Manning is a small part of: Democrats are becoming the party of military and intelligence candidates:

An extraordinary number of former intelligence and military operatives from the CIA, Pentagon, National Security Council and State Department are seeking nomination as Democratic candidates for Congress in the 2018 midterm elections. The potential influx of military-intelligence personnel into the legislature has no precedent in US political history.

If the Democrats capture a majority in the House of Representatives on November 6, as widely predicted, candidates drawn from the military-intelligence apparatus will comprise as many as half of the new Democratic members of Congress. They will hold the balance of power in the lower chamber of Congress.

Now that the State Department is being run by a “former” CIA director, and the CIA is being run by a war criminal involved in the torturing of enemy combatants and the destruction of evidence, let’s see how much criticism they receive from MSDNC.

I do agree with Manning that controlling the message results in controlling the masses. I just don’t differentiate anymore between Democrats and Republicans because the corporate power that keeps the political duopoly going needs this sense of political division to hide how power in this country actually functions.

 Actual footage of Progressives trying to convince other Progressives to vote for Jon Tester. 

 

by William Skink

In a comment from my zine post, Lead Based Saint offered some speculation on when things really started going wrong in Missoula. From the comment:

I think a big turning point in the trajectory came in 2003 when Mayor Kadas broke a tie vote and committed the City to another $1 million ($3 million total?) to finish the baseball stadium. Correct me if I’m wrong, but at the time I believe he was on the board of Play Ball Missoula, which was the group seeking the funds. Once that line was crossed, it’s been a free-for-all.

That comment got me thinking–and reminiscing–about where I was back then, in 2003. I lived in the slant streets and had just graduated from UM. It was a great neighborhood to live in.

I walked and biked with my two dogs down Hickory, to the river trail, all the time. Big Sky’s taproom was right there, so I’d often pick up a growler. I remember watching the old sawmill site slowly transform. And I mean slowly. It seemed like the giant crater shaped out of the earth with steel pilings sticking out sat like that for a long time.

Before the sawmill district was resurrected as a park, lots of condos, and a baseball stadium (with more to come) it was a visual reminder of Missoula’s disappearing past. There were old, decaying structures once active milling timber, but way past their prime they were primarily used by homeless people and teenage graffiti artists.

I get that something was eventually going to be done with this nice piece of real estate next to the river, but how that eventuality happened now seems like a harbinger of things to come.

I went poking around and found an Administration and Finance Committee Report from 2/19/03 that provides some interesting context:

Mayor Kadas stated that he would like to give a background regarding this project. He stated that the project approved originally was going to cost $8 million dollars and of that $8 million the City would contribute $1 million. Since the original approval for this project there have been delays and because the site itself, it is a more expensive site to operate than originally thought, there are costs for taking removing two feet of asphalt and the additional dumping charges and because there are now better architectural and engineering plans there is a more precise cost. The cost has gone from the original $8 million dollars to $11 million dollars. He stated that Play Ball has been able to do under the present decline in the economy and the lawsuits that were filed they have been able to raise $6 million dollars in contributions and pledges, which includes the City’s first $1 million dollars. Mayor Kadas feels that substantial progress has been made under adverse circumstances. He believes that the land in question would not have been donated to the City if it had not been for the connections that were made by Play Ball Missoula with Champion International to convince them they needed to make that contribution and it would be used for a Ball Park if at all possible. He also said that the original offer to the City by Champion International was that the land only be used for a baseball stadium. Mayor Kadas requested the change to allow for any use on the site and Champion eventually agreed to the change. The only reason the City received the land was through Play Ball’s efforts.

About ten years ago my wife and I renovated the house we lived in, not far from where Play Ball was scheming for a baseball stadium. It was an old house, so there were unexpected problems that emerged, resulting in a much bigger bill than we expected. Guess what we did? We paid the fucking bill. I didn’t feel entitled to go to the city and ask for money because our project went over budget.

Going over budget was just the beginning for Play Ball Missoula. In 2011 Mayor Engen and the Missoula Redevelopment Agency had to rescue the stadium project because it was drowning and debt:

The proposal has the MRA making four annual payments of $500,000 to help pay off the debt. That part of the deal and related agreements are headed later this summer to the Missoula City Council.

The city already has put land and $2 million into the ballpark and surrounding infrastructure, so the total municipal investment could be some $4 million, said Mayor John Engen. The stadium is expected to appraise at some $9 million, so he said it represents an enormous return both in finances and community spirit.

The mayor stressed the dollars will come from redevelopment coffers – not property taxes.

“This is not money that can be used to repair potholes, to hire police officers, to feed the hungry or homeless,” Engen said. “It’s redevelopment money. It is statutorily committed to uses just like this one.”

Yeah, since we can’t use all this redevelopment money just laying around, lets throw it at this project and have the city take over maintaining a property that never brought in the revenue to make it viable in the first place. Great idea.

Things got uglier when banker Hal Chase died. Investors had their debts called in and a few refused to pay. Litigation followed.  Then, in 2013, that pesky issue of funding maintenance came up:

Mountain Baseball has paid all its $120,000 annual lease payment for Missoula’s riverfront stadium, but Friends of the Civic Stadium has not paid any money toward maintenance, according to the Missoula Redevelopment Agency.

Mountain Baseball owns the Missoula Osprey Pioneer League baseball team, and it’s slated to pay the $120,000 rent on Ogren Park at Allegiance Field for 25 years. The payments will go to pay off $1.55 million in revenue bonds that were part of the city’s controversial contribution to the ballpark.

“They do four payments over the summer because that’s when their revenue is coming in,” MRA Director Ellen Buchanan said this week of Mountain Baseball.

Friends of the Civic Stadium, on the other hand, has not raised any of the $25,000 yearly payments its agreement with the city of Missoula required starting in January 2012, but the group anticipates an upcoming event will bring in funds, Buchanan said. Friends of the Civic Stadium is the nonprofit that formed to raise money for stadium upkeep after Play Ball Missoula went dark.

I wonder how the money for maintenance is raised these days? Does revenue cover expenses at the baseball stadium?

Who cares, the baseball stadium is now just one of many nice amenities enticing investment in the hip, new Sawmill District. How it came to be is down the memory hole, right?

For those who do remember, how Missoula played ball matters because it was a sign of things to come. Thank you, LBS, for sending me on this trip down memory lane.