Also, the word is:
heptagon
And she’s a teacher?
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I only spent two days and nights in a yurt, but I think they’re great. Here in the UK I have a friend who stayed in a tent in her parents garden while she was between jobs/projects/locations. It lasted about six months, which is more than I’d care to spend in a tent in the UK. She is a formidable woman. Here in the UK a structure is legal (in terms of planning permission) if it’s less than 10 feet tall, on land you already own. Maybe this woman in SF isn’t legal, but is it worth anybody’s time arresting her for that?
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A better question is… how rich are her parents to have a yard big enough to accommodate a yurt?
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It was really Scott Wiener and Tony Atkins who made this happen. Newsom just signed the bills after he “survived” the recall. This is going to cause almost as much angst as the Rumford Act.
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My old ‘hood. (actually, my adult, disabled daughter still lives there.) The lots are 25’ wide and if memory serves, from the back wall of the house to the back property line is 75’. If her childhood home, her parents probably own outright and are sitting on a ton of equity. We bought in 2000. Without getting too much into details, can say that, based on real estate agent comps that come around pretty much weekly, the going prices are about 4.5 times what we paid then. I doubt I would’ve filmed and posted it if it were my space–my experience with the neighbors there would not lead me to believe they would tolerate, as I’m sure there’s more than several ordinances being at least ‘bent’ there. Rock-on though!
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Pretty fancy tent she has there. With cooking & sanitation facilities just yards away.
Beats a cardboard box under a bridge.
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Seems more of a solution to the parents problem of getting the kid out of the house than a solution to living in the Bay Area.
I do miss San Francisco where any weather issues can be solved by putting on a sweater.
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i WANT to love everything about this.
the Yurt/Yome, the outdoor shower, the mom jeans, the whole “tough and scrappy” thing
but? no toilet. not even a composting toilet??? … the walls are FABRIC. IF she brought home a romantic interest? NOT only do her parents have their kid living in a giant pillow-fort in the backyard, but they would also have to hear the kissy kissy sounds after a night of acoustic guitar?
I dont know. housing is expensive AF in the bay area. I get it.
as @gracchus mentioned - social capital.
anyhow! I wish her the best of luck. at least she is trying…
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most notably, a “non-permanent” structure must be moved every 90 days. and “moved” doesn’t just mean “shifted” if the building/planning department person who gets assigned the case is an asshole.
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I’m wondering how earthquake-resistant it is.
And I’m sorry, but she has the most irritating speaking style, combining Valley Girl slack-mouth, and, like, raising her tone, like, at the end of her sentences? And vocal fry. It doesn’t make her sound intelligent at all.
One thing that is happening is the buying up of properties by finance companies and very rich people to use as investments. Deliberately keeping housing values artificially inflated while some of those “high density” cities have very few actual residents in those units. Parts of London, for example, are effectively ghost towns. The finance companies are also busily buying up foreclosed properties and such in poor neighborhoods to give gentrification a chance to move in. Adding more housing stock may indeed just increase the rapacious behavior.
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Yeah, I’ve seen plenty of stories about that issue in London and some other cities. But what I’ve read about SF is that there’s a vacancy rate of about 3.3 percent, compared to 6.7 percent nationally for major cities. So I don’t think that’s a major driver of prices there.
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The most effective way cities can address that is to tax the owner if the unit or house is unoccupied for more than three months or 90 days out of the year. From the estimates I’ve seen, a lot of those units in desirable cities have residents in them for a maximum of 2 weeks out of the year (meaning that they’re not contributing a lot in any way to the local community).
Put that tax in place and the owners will either sell or rent them out, with market rates in both cases falling from their current astronomical levels (the countervailing force, at least in the U.S., is the idea that a home is primarily a retirement asset, the value of which should never be allowed to fall).
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I remember when I first heard people point out things like vocal fry and upspeak. From then on it would catch my ear. But I also found it led me to dismiss people who had interesting things to say. I also heard from those people how those labels helped to delegitimize what they had to say. Maybe people have those vocal characteristics because of where they grew up, or it helps them connect with their students or their peers? Maybe that’s how their voice is? For whatever reason, I feel like I’m better off paying less attention to it.
This might have been what changed my thoughts about it, but listening to it now it doesn’t seem specifically familiar. Regardless, it seems like a good discussion of the issue.
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Those options are worth exploring and the extra tax revenue could be put to good use, but I don’t think they’d be anywhere near sufficient on their own to make homes affordable to regular people.
Let’s say the estimate that 10% of London homes are vacant is correct, but through tax policy changes that vacancy rate is reduced to zero. According to most media reports the vacant homes are generally in the more expensive neighborhoods. How much would that reduce the median home price in the city? I’m still skeptical that teachers would suddenly find the place affordable. Additional policies specifically addressing the essential lower income folks will be needed.
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On their own, definitely not, as most cities putting them in place acknowledge. But it’s one of a number of measure that needs to be implemented in cities like London, NYC, San Francisco, Vancouver, Toronto, etc. that are increasingly unaffordable to most people but where a significant number of units are also sitting vacant for 50+ weeks out of the year. This tax addresses the specific problem of luxury ghost town neighbourhoods brought up by @BakerB.
That’s not by co-incidence. The vacant homes are in expensive or gentrifying neighbourhoods because developers choose to build or re-develop there to attract wealthy owners, including absentee ones. Putting a vacant home tax in place might reduce demand for these underutilised and already expensive luxury homes and send developers looking for other types of markets to target.
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From the Wikipedia article: “Linguist Robin Lakoff drew attention to the pattern in her book Language and Women’s Place , which argued that women were socialized to talk in ways that lacked power, authority, and confidence. Rising intonation on declarative sentences was one of the features Lakoff included in her description of “women’s language”, a gendered speech style which, in her view, both reflected and reproduced its users’ subordinate social status.”
This isn’t the only speech pattern that helped infer a woman’s subordinate status. Look at some of the videos from the fifties and sixties, where women speak in high, breathy, “sexy” voices. That’s become a relic, replaced by rising intonation. The problem with rising intonation is that the speaker seems to be seeking confirmation of their statements rather than making a declaration, and that makes them sound weak and indecisive. It sounds bad in men, too, but due to stereotypes, it’s worse for women.
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Think this is in the wrong place.
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We were discussing the way the yome owner was speaking during the interview. I can see how that seems like a detour.
