Why Not Occupy City Hall Instead?
More millionaires and billionaires exploiting the rest of us regular citizens working to create a green post-capitalist Northern California. The New York Times reports on ice cream mogul Juliet Pries's multi-hundred thousand dollar fight against San Francisco city officials resisting her plan for another unhealthy, environmentally unsustainable enterprise worsening the commercial blight of her Haight Ashbury neighborhood.
Ms. Pries said it took two years to open the restaurant, due largely to the city’s morass of permits, procedures and approvals required to start a small business. While waiting for permission to operate, she still had to pay rent and other costs, going deeper into debt each passing month without knowing for sure if she would ever be allowed to open.
“It’s just a huge risk,” she said, noting that the financing came from family and friends, not a bank. “At several points you wonder if you should just walk away and take the loss.”
Ms. Pries said she had to endure months of runaround and pay a lawyer to determine whether her location (a former grocery, vacant for years) was eligible to become a restaurant. There were permit fees of $20,000; a demand that she create a detailed map of all existing area businesses (the city didn’t have one); and an $11,000 charge just to turn on the water.
In the end, money and lawyers did the talking, despite the lack of an environmental impact statement. Now San Francisco has another nondescript dessert eatery with a large carbon footprint rather than an attractive, naturally mouldering abandoned building.
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Comments:
Jun '10
Re: Why Not Occupy City Hall Instead?
This will all lead to bribery, just as Russian society has learned.
May '11
Re: Why Not Occupy City Hall Instead?
I don't understand why people choose to do business in such a hostile and exploitative environment. We've got some prominent Ricochet members from San Francisco, perhaps they can share something about the city that I'm missing that would make something like this worthwhile.
Dec '10
Re: Why Not Occupy City Hall Instead?
She should just be happy that she was a nobody with no real money to steal.
They just ignored her.
When I was working in construction management, they knew we had real money, so they extorted all sorts of totally unrelated stuff out of us in exchange for permits (or sometimes just to be left alone long enough to get the job done).
We extended giant water mains for hundreds and thousands of feet away from our buildings to get a 2" meter tapped right next door.
We built damned near a mile of 42' wide street with curb, gutter, and sidewalks (that nobody would use) in exchange for being allowed to rebuild another half mile of road in front of our building about four feet lower so that we could get access to that street.
We paid to have a two year traffic study done by a third party for the city gov't to satisfy a mandate put on them by the state gov't, in exchange for being allowed to build that mile of street that we had to build to lower the other street.
And on and on and on. It was an enlightening experience.
Aug '11
Re: Why Not Occupy City Hall Instead?
Didn't they hear how good Genghis Khan was for the environment? He laid waste to so much territory that hundreds of unsustainable farms, villages, towns, and cities were reclaimed by the natural environment which is still ruling over much of the formerly inhabited, despoiled areas.
I hear the areas around Chernobyl are looking pretty sylvan, too.