I was going to make a joke about licenses to use social media, but the establishment and its supporters would probably fall all over themselves in their rush to support that.
I don’t fish, but my understanding is that the fishing license is basically just a fee that covers the cost of restocking fish in the fishing lakes/ponds/etc. Is that not how it works?
They are safe, sensible, affordable, and an environmentally friendly transportation option for short trips in cities or suburban sprawl.
$4,500 for a local street electric vehicle is pretty good. These could work well in a lot of cities’ core neighborhoods that were originally built with small blocks.
Requiring property owners to repair broken sidewalks when they sell could fix half of L.A.’s busted walkways by 2034 — a win for disability rights, and for everyone.
Donald Shoup
January 10, 2022, 9:58 AM PST
Los Angeles has 10,750 miles of sidewalks, and roughly 40% are broken. Repairs would appear to be on the way: In 2016, Los Angeles lost a class-action lawsuit initiated by disability rights advocates who alleged that the city’s inaccessible sidewalks violate the Americans with Disabilities Act. The settlement requires L.A. to spend $1.4 billion over 30 years to fix its sidewalks.
In November 2021, Los Angeles Controller Ron Galperin released an audit that found progress has been agonizingly slow. Five years after starting the repair program, the city had repaired less than 1% of its sidewalks.
During the same period, it paid $35 million to settle lawsuits filed over pedestrian injuries caused by broken sidewalks. At this rate it will take 500 years to fix all the sidewalks, Galperin said.
What can Los Angeles do to accelerate the repairs? Answering this question is important for all U.S. cities. In 2003, the Supreme Court ruled that the Americans with Disabilities Act requires cities to keep their sidewalks accessible to persons with disabilities. Since then, Atlanta, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Sacramento, San Francisco, Seattle and hundreds of other cities have been sued for violating ADA requirements for sidewalks.
Fortunately, there’s a simple way to ensure that sidewalks will be accessible: Cities can require that the sidewalk abutting any property must comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act when the property is sold.
For more than two decades, I have studied these point-of-sale programs as a way to repair inaccessible sidewalks. Lawsuits may be needed to ensure accessibility for people with disabilities, but almost everyone will benefit. During Covid-19, millions of people began walking for exercise in their neighborhoods, so many of them now know from experience about the high cost of bad sidewalks.
California’s Streets and Highways Code requires property owners to repair damaged sidewalks fronting their property. Nevertheless, many cities don’t enforce this law because it’s politically difficult to compel property owners to pay for the repairs — which is why 40% of L.A.’s sidewalks are broken. Point-of-sale programs can help cities enforce the state law. More generally, all U.S. cities should consider a point-of-sale program if they lose an ADA lawsuit or want to avoid one.
To see how point-of-sale programs work, consider the ordinance that explains the excellent condition of sidewalks in Pasadena, adjacent to Los Angeles. Pasadena requires an occupancy permit for any residential property that is sold, and to receive an occupancy permit the property must have safe sidewalks:
PASADENA MUNICIPAL CODE Section 12.04.031
The city shall inspect the condition of the sidewalk abutting or fronting on a particular piece of property prior to the issuance of any single-family or multifamily occupancy permit. . . All such permits, prior to final issuance, shall require a notation that a sidewalk inspection was completed and that either the sidewalk is not in need of repair, that repair has been completed or that repair has been bonded to the satisfaction of the engineer.
How would this policy work in Los Angeles? Property owners would not have to pay or do anything until they sell their property. They need to fix only the broken sidewalks fronting their property, so they will see where their money goes. And the cost of sidewalk repairs should be small compared to L.A.’s median home sales price of $949,000 in 2021. After selling their property, owners who move out of the city will leave their neighborhoods in better shape at no cost to those who remain.
These pay-on-exit requirements aren’t new in California. When properties are sold, Los Angeles requires smoke detectors, water-conserving devices, and seismic gas shutoff valves. Berkeley requires insulation and water-conserving devices at sale, while Davis requires a full property inspection to ensure that residential units meet minimum building codes and health, fire and safety regulations. Like Pasadena, Piedmont mandates at-sale sidewalk repairs. According to Chester Nakahara, director of the city’s public works department, “the at-sale repair program has significantly helped to maintain the high quality of our sidewalks.”
To manage a point-of-sale program, the city can require property owners to submit a certificate of compliance with the sidewalk ordinance before the title is transferred. To obtain the certificate, property owners would request the city to inspect the sidewalk abutting their property. If the sidewalk is in good repair, the inspector issues a compliance certificate. If it’s damaged, the inspector estimates what the city would charge to repair it. The property owner can then have the city make the repairs or hire a private contractor to do the work.
In cases where the required repair cost would impose a hardship on low-income property owners, the city can pay for it. This subsidy shouldn’t cost the city much because most property owners don’t have low incomes. For other property owners, the sale provides the cash to pay for the sidewalk repairs.
How fast will a point-of-sale program fix L.A.’s sidewalks? On average, half of all properties in the city are sold in 12 years, so a program adopted in 2022 should repair half the city’s broken sidewalks by 2034. And since the property turnover rate is similar throughout Los Angeles (and also throughout the nation), a point-of-sale program should improve all neighborhoods at roughly the same rate.
If a sidewalk seriously violates the Americans with Disabilities Act, repairs shouldn’t wait until the abutting property is sold. Cities can repair the sidewalk and delay the owner’s payment until sale. In effect, the city will lend owners the money to pay for the sidewalk repairs for as long as they own the property. Owners who can delay paying until they sell their property may repair early because they know they will eventually have to pay anyway.
A pay-on-exit program may be the fairest and most politically painless way to keep sidewalks accessible. Property owners who are cashing in on capital gains and leaving the city, or at least the neighborhood, will pay most of the costs. Who better to pay for repairing an inaccessible sidewalk in front of a property?
Property has its duties as well as its rights. With pay-on-exit public finance, all property owners will do their parts sooner or later, and sidewalks won’t be obstacle courses for pedestrians. Prohibiting title transfers for properties with sidewalks that violate the Americans with Disabilities Act will put into practice the adage from Goethe: “Let everyone sweep in front of their own door, and the whole world will be clean.”
I don’t know how to explain this to you all, but having more people in congress without college degrees is a good thing. It means you would have fewer people like this:
Louisville charges a cheap $1 to $2 toll for people driving across the Ohio River on I-65. After doubling the size of the I-65 bridges from six lanes to 12, tolls slashed traffic by half, from ab…
Hey now, we get mailed our ballots now don’t even need to do anything but drop it in the post.
Did I fill mine out, or did someone steal it and I thought it never got delivered and so someone voted as me?
Nobody knows unless I file a complaint, and even then how do they know which stolen ballot was mine in what’s supposed to be a secret election?
I don’t know what California you’re living in, but last election—if you really cared about your vote getting stolen—you could sign up for notifications that tell you when your ballot was shipped, when it was received, and when it was counted. If any of these didn’t match up, like if your ballot was “delivered” and “received” when you don’t recall filling it out, you would know that something was wrong. Signing up took like thirty seconds.
The ban includes top policymakers such as those who sit on the Federal Open Market Committee, along with senior staff. Future investments will have to be confined to diversified assets such as mutual funds.
Fed officials can no longer have holdings in shares of particular companies, nor can they invest in individual bonds, hold agency securities or derivative contracts. The new rules replace existing regulations that, while somewhat restrictive, still allowed officials such as regional presidents to buy and sell stocks.
“These tough new rules raise the bar high in order to assure the public we serve that all of our senior officials maintain a single-minded focus on the public mission of the Federal Reserve,” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said in a statement.
Under the new rules, the officials will have to provide 45 days’ notice in advance of buying or selling any securities that are still allowed. They also will be required to hold the securities for at least a year, and they cannot buy or sell funds during “heightened financial market stress,” a news release announcing the moves said.
Streetcars are just buses that white people like. Really, their only use is for economic development because white people think they’re cute and will drive across the region to look at them and stop for ice cream while they’re there.
Btw fuck Gavin Newsom for vetoing a bill to decriminalize jaywalking, the single most obvious not-a-crime that we choose to handle through the criminal justice system for some fucking reason. The law literally exists to give bad drivers an excuse to hit people
This drives me crazy because it’s such low-hanging fruit. When we talk about criminal justice reform in a context of reducing the role of the police, most things that can be effectively decriminalized require lots of work to be done around them. We could decriminalize/legalize drugs, but doing that right would first require universal access to rehabilitation services, public education campaigns, harm reduction measures, etc. We could decriminalize/legalize sex work, but doing that right would first require new labor protections for sex workers, effective regulation of the industry, social services for those hoping to leave the industry, etc.
Jaywalking? If you fully legalized jaywalking tomorrow and did absolutely nothing else to prepare for it, it would be an improvement over the status quo. People will jaywalk exactly as much as they used to, but less people will be arrested and drivers will learn to drive more carefully in pedestrian areas. It’s such a slam dunk of a reform, and even that’s too radical for one of the more left-wing states in the US apparently
COVID relief money and the bipartisan infrastructure bill could create a tremendous opportunity for urban leaders to reinvent their cities.
It’s good to see this becoming more of a national discussion. Your city’s land use decisions can either be a drain on your resources, or they can add to them.
If you think of gentrification as coffee shops and bike lanes then you don't understand gentrification at all. It's about what's inside, not outside.
Another good piece on what gentrification actually is. People do some crazy mental switch to blame gentrification on people just trying to have a roof over their heads instead of blaming the politicians that ensured future displacement by restricting development.
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