March 4, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
08:22
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| Hey everybody, come on in here. | |
| My voice is cracking. | |
| That's what happens when puberty catches up to you. | |
| So this will be a special single topic periscope on the subject of blight removal. | |
| And let me tell you what blight is. | |
| Blight Is a huge problem in the urban areas where there are enormous blocks, big areas where the buildings are run down and they're used by criminals. | |
| Nobody lives there. Nobody lives there legally. | |
| But they're used for crime and all manner of bad things, and they're dangerous. | |
| Now, many of you know, I've been working with Bill Pulte on the Blight Authority, which is a private operation that works with local cities to try to clear the blight using federal and private money to do that. | |
| Now, let me show you a potential process to turn what has already worked in Detroit, where blight has been removed, and in Pontiac Mission, where blight has been removed. | |
| This is Bill Pulte's good work. | |
| And I want to show you how we might turn that into a larger process to help more people in more places more quickly. | |
| And it would look like this. | |
| So imagine, and again, this is not a process that exists. | |
| It's a potential process. | |
| I'm just putting it out there to get some ideas about it. | |
| And the idea is this. | |
| You start with a city identifying it has a problem with blight. | |
| It works with the locals. | |
| It works with the neighborhoods. They put together a list of properties. | |
| Many of these properties are contiguous, meaning you could have huge swatches of area that would all be cleared at the same time. | |
| You would declare sort of a health and safety emergency. | |
| There's precedent for that because that actually has been done in Detroit. | |
| So Detroit actually declared a blight emergency. | |
| And so we have precedent. | |
| And so once you have your batch of properties, and you've worked with the locals, and you've got support at the grassroots, and you've identified these properties that need to be cleared, then here's the part that's the new part, the part that I'm putting out here as an idea. | |
| This is something that Bill and I have discussed, but we would love to get your input. | |
| See if this seems like a productive... | |
| Imagine if the government could declare, I'm going to call it a transitional domain instead of eminent domain. | |
| I'm just making up a catchy name. | |
| Eminent domain is when the government comes in and says, we need to put a, let's say, phone lines here or we've got to do something with a highway. | |
| So we're just going to take this property, we're going to pay you a fair market value for it, but we're going to pay for it and then it will be owned by the government or owned by a utility, for example. | |
| But in this example, the government would not maintain the property. | |
| They would simply use this mechanism of declaring that the government owns it to clear out all the red tape. | |
| So this is primarily a temporary process to get rid of the title problems, the red tape, all of the nonsense. | |
| You just say, here's the property. | |
| The government owns it now. | |
| If somebody had title to it, it was worth basically nothing. | |
| But maybe there would be some small payment just to make it all legal. | |
| The idea is that the government will only hold it temporarily just to clear out all the red tape and stuff and then eventually it will go back to the city. | |
| So at that point, once the land titles and the red tape is all cleared, this is where the Blight Authority, or any form of it, could put together private and federal funds. | |
| There are already funds that exist for exactly this sort of thing, so some of it, well actually a lot of it exists, and you could get more, presumably. | |
| And then the clearing is done. | |
| Now here's the interesting thing, and the thing that makes this an opportunity that makes sense now, that may not have made sense in the past. | |
| And it has to do with how much blight there is. | |
| If your city had just little patches of blight, you know, the house next to you is bad, there's one down the street that's bad, There's no economies of scale. | |
| It's hard to do one here, one there, because you really have to gear up with heavy equipment. | |
| There's a lot of work to do to prepare, to get the neighborhood involved, to understand what's happening, etc. | |
| But once you have gigantic swaths of blight, Then you can say, let's do them all at once. | |
| You bring in the same crew and you just tear through it. | |
| And that's the way Bill Pulte has pioneered that process, taking advantage of the fact that you couldn't do this until the blight got so bad That fixing it became economical because there was so much of it. | |
| In other words, you could just do it all at once and you've already got the equipment there. | |
| It's an easier process. | |
| So once you have this thing cleared, you can imagine that the city could open it up for bids. | |
| And say, make us an offer. | |
| We've got all this land. | |
| We'd like to use it productively in some way that's an unambiguous benefit to the locals. | |
| So people would come in and say, hey, I've got an idea for affordable housing. | |
| It's a new way. | |
| It hasn't been done before, etc. | |
| Somebody comes in with an idea for indoor farms. | |
| Let me put an indoor farm here. | |
| I don't know if it's economical, but it's a startup. | |
| What do you think? We'd like some inexpensive land. | |
| Or it could be any kind of a business, etc. | |
| Another good thing you can do with it is simply make it available at almost nothing to the neighbors who remain. | |
| Because for every empty lot, there's at least somebody who's nearby, unless that lot is landlocked by other blight. | |
| But the neighbors who might want to improve their own home value might say, I'll take a lot. | |
| It's right next to me. | |
| I'll double the size of my existing property. | |
| Maybe someday I'll put a rental on there. | |
| Or anything else. | |
| Alright, and then if some of those proposals are accepted, then you see some new construction. | |
| So if you're joining me late, this is not a process that exists, except for the part about the blight clearing, which is happening now. | |
| But it's more onesies and twosies, meaning pick a city, do what you can to make it work, and then you have to move on to another city. | |
| But if you wanted to systemize it and make it more of a nationwide process, Because this part is actually worked out. | |
| So we know how to bring a big crew in and clear out a lot of stuff. | |
| The cities have a pretty good handle on where all their blight is and they do want to do something about it and they're very anxious to get help. | |
| So anytime Bill Pulte calls a mayor, the mayor returns the call because it's one of their biggest problems and they're looking for solutions. | |
| So this is the idea that's sort of the new part. | |
| Would this be possible? | |
| Would it be legal? Would it be practical? | |
| I don't really know. So I put that out to you, and I'm sure people will send me comments in all the ways that people do that on Twitter, etc. | |
| And if somebody has some insight on this, let me know. | |
| That's all for now. | |
| I'm going to leave it for just a tight little topic because it makes it more shareable. | |
| And that's all for now. |
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