Austin Contrarian

Super Duper Neighborhood Objectors and Appealers Organization

A reader has pointed me to this registered neighborhood organization.  (Go to the city registry and scroll down to Super Duper).  The organization's "main contact"  identifies himself as the "Great and Powerful Oz."  The "organization's" declared boundary includes virtually all of Austin and much of its extra-territorial jurisdiction.  

Anyone in Austin can form and register a "neighborhood organization" and define its boundaries as arbitrarily as he pleases.   The Great and Powerful Oz figured this out and evidently is enjoying a little joke.

Except this joke is costing the rest of us.  City code entitles "interested parties" to notice of public hearings before the city can act, and registered neighborhood organizations are "interested parties" when the property falls within their boundaries.   This applies not only to Council hearings, but to boards and commission hearings, such as the Board of Adjustment and the Planning Commission.

Notice is expensive.  City staff must print and mail a separate notice for each hearing.  There can be  dozens of hearings per week -- zoning changes, variances, site plan approvals, subdivision approvals, and a host of others.  And the Super Duper Neighborhood Objectors and Appealers Organization is entitled to written, mailed notice of each and every one.  (If you doubt SDNOAO is entitled to notice, go to the city's GIS, pull up the zoning map, check the circle next to "neighborhood association," and click "identify" on any point on the map.)  

The Great and Powerful Oz might object that lots of other organizations get free notice of citywide hearings (e.g., ANC, the Homebuilders Association of Greater Austin, the Homeless Neighborhood Organization.)  If they can ask for free notice, why not me?

Rather than attempt to distinguish between "legitimate" and "nonsense" organizations, the City should simply charge notice recipients a fee.  I'm sure that applicants are entitled to free notice.  Nearby property owners may have a good argument for free notice as well.  But everyone else should monitor the city's posted notices  like the rest of us, particularly since the typical organization cares about only a small fraction of the hearings.  If they want premium service, they should pay for it.

Update:  Karl-Thomas Musselman identifies the Great and Powerful Oz as 1993 Special Election City Council candidate Bill Gammon.  (The registry lists Oz as William Gammon without further ID.)

Links

1.   Frumination works out the highway and parking capacity Manhattan would need to replace its morning rush hour subway capacity:

At best, it would take 167 inbound lanes, or 84 copies of the Queens Midtown Tunnel, to carry what the NYC Subway carries over 22 inbound tracks through 12 tunnels and 2 (partial) bridges. At worst, 200 new copies of 5th Avenue. Somewhere in the middle would be 67 West Side Highways or 76 Brooklyn Bridges. And this neglects the Long Island Railroad, Metro North, NJ Transit, and PATH systems entirely.

Of course, at 325 square feet per parking space, all these cars would need over 3.8 square miles of space to park, about 3 times the size of Central Park. At that point, who would want to go to Manhattan anyway?

See the neat map at the bottom of his entry showing how much land Manhattan would have to devote to parking.  Commuters of course would abandon Manhattan long before things reached this state.  But Manhattan would not be Manhattan in either case.  

Pointer from a reader.

(NB: Tyler Cowen thought this was interesting enough for a link . . . to Kottke, who merely quoted a snippet of Frumination's entry.  Jerk.  (Cowen, not Kottke.))

2.  A Detroit neighborhood reverts to prairie (images from DetroitYES):

(H/t the Urbanophile.)

3.  Professor Chris Nelson, Director of the Metropolitan Research Center at the University of Utah, projects  that the homeownership rate will fall to 63.5% by 2020, sparking intense demand for rban infill and redevelopment.   (Via Calculated Risk; no link to paper available.)

I think our homeownership rate is too high, a result of tax subsidies and land-use policies.  It ought to drop.  But it won't drop by several percent.   Richard Green, a professor at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California (and no conservative), fisks Nelson's study. 

What does blogging crowd out?

Matthew Kahn wonders whether blog reading crowds out book reading.  He believes there are two types of blog readers:  the nerdy "Wikipedia" types who like variety and suffer from slight attention deficit order, and the "deep readers" who want to dig deep in a few subjects.  He speculates that books are substitutes for the Wikipedia nerds and complements for the deep readers.

I read more books since I've started reading blogs.  I don't buy more books, but I read more of the books I do buy.  I've always bought books on impulse but then let them sit on a shelf.  The real reason I read more books now, I think, is that I blog myself.  Books stimulate ideas for new posts, of course.  But, more importantly, I can only say the same thing a few times without getting bored.  I long ago exhausted my own stock of ideas so I have to rip off others'.  

What does my blogging crowd out?  Baseball.  Football.  I used to watch two or three baseball games a week.  I don't anymore.

Some TV, but, honestly, not that much.  My prime TV watching time has always started at 10 pm with the Simpsons.   I used to watch TV before 10, but I can't really remember what I watched, so I guess I'm watching TV more "efficiently."

Blogging crowds out some work.  I used to hustle harder for new business when I was slow.  I haven't sat down to estimate my lost earnings from blogging -- that might make me quit (blogging, that is, not work).  Still, work is work; there hasn't been too much to take from there.

I think my blogging has mostly crowded out dead time.  I don't know whether I used to just sit around staring blankly at a wall or what, but when I do the math, the time I spend on blogging and reading exceeds -- by a lot -- the time I used to spend on activities since crowded out.

My Alan Dershowitz moment

Tom Kirkendall and Scott Henson cover the DOJ report detailing the Harris County jail's deplorable conditions.

Reading their posts, I was reminded of my own experience with the jail's shoddy policies -- as an attorney, fortunately, rather than as an inmate.

Way back when I was a cub lawyer in Houston, a partner in my firm was appointed counsel for a Harris County jail inmate who had filed a pro se civil rights lawsuit.  The partner promptly appointed me. The client was a Muslim who wanted to observe Ramadan, which required him to fast during daylight.  The jail fed inmates during the day, though, and refused to bend the rules to accommodate this inmate.  It thus gave him a blunt choice:  forget about Ramadan, or starve yourself for a month.  The jail also refused to let his imam drop off a Koran; it required inmates to order all books straight from the publisher.

By the time we were appointed, the federal judge, Sim Lake, had already entered a temporary restraining order requiring the jail to feed our client before sunrise and after sundown.  Our job was to prepare for the permanent injunction hearing.

So I deposed Harris County Sheriff Johnny Klevenhagen.  This was only my third deposition, and I must not have done it right, because I pissed off Klevenhagen so badly that he walked out midway through the deposition.  And did not return.  The county attorney and I just stared blankly at one another.  He shrugged.  I left.

To this day, I don't know why Klevenhagen got so mad.  (Really, I do.)  The line of questioning was innocuous enough:  "Q.  Don't you have inmates who spend all day at court?  A.  Yes.  Q.  Don't you have to feed them?  A.  Yes.  Q.  How do you do that?  A.  We prepare sack lunches for them.  Q.  You mean, sandwiches in plastic bags and such?  A.  Yes.  Q.  Well, why can't you set aside a couple for my guy to eat?"  And he walked out soon thereafter.

We had a status conference with the judge a few days later.  I told him about the deposition and the sheriff's answers (and sudden departure).  The judge listened patiently and then turned to the county attorney.  "You know, I'm not going to tell you how I will rule, but you need to settle."

And so the county promised to feed my guy before and after sunrise, let his imam give him a copy of the Koran, and kicked in $5,000 for his trouble.

I'd like to chalk this up to my Dershowitz-like skills but, really, this was a no-brainer.  The standard, if I recall, required the jail to balance its administrative convenience and security concerns with the inmate's legitimate religious interests.  Since feeding my client created no inconvenience or security concerns, the jail had no excuse.  It was not a close call.  The county attorney knew it, but had to put up a fight because that's what his client told him to do.

I wasn't really surprised, then, to see that the Harris County jail still can't get things right.

The state of the art in toy packaging

Toy packaging has gotten awfully sophisticated when the manufacturer has to provide instructions for removing the toy from the package.   

I suppose this is better than those infernal wires.  I always spend five minutes twisting them one way and then the other before getting up to find the wire cutters.

The Wire

I usually wait for television shows to become trendy before I start watching.  Even better, trendy among those I think share my taste.  It saves me a lot of time.

The Wire finally generated enough buzz for me to invest the time.  And it hasn't disappointed.  It dissects Baltimore's inner-city drug culture without condescension or glamorizing the business.  I feared it would be politically correct, but it is not.  The characters are complex and interesting.  (It has an irritating habit of killing off some of the most complex and interesting, though).

The first season was great; the second just so-so; the fourth season was very good.

But the third season was brilliant.  My thoughts -- and spoilers -- below the fold.  

This is irritating

I bought a Kindle 2 a couple of months ago.  I love it.  I love being able to download a newspaper or book as I'm walking to lunch.  I love being able to download a book within one minute of deciding I'd like to read it.  I love being able to flip it on when I'm standing in line to board a plane.  I love being able to find a book I've bought rather than having to rummage through drawers or bookshelves.  And I think it's easier on the eyes; it has a light-gray background that provides a softer contrast than the plain white of most books.

I have three complaints.  First, there are lots of books that aren't available in Kindle format, including books I'd like to keep handy -- The Death and Life of Great American Cities is not available, for example.  

Second, it does not handle charts or diagrams or equations well.  The screen is too small for some images, which get garbled during compression.

Third, it does not handle pdfs well.  I read a lot of pdfs, both for work and for blogging.  I e-mail them to Amazon, which converts them to Kindle format and beams them to my device.  But, again, both text and images often get garbled during compression and conversion.

I would gladly have paid more than the $359 I did pay for a device that did not have these problems.  And so it is quite irritating to see that Amazon has now released Kindle DX, which supposedly fixes the second and third problems.  Since I'm not about to spring for a $489 upgrade, I'll just have to content myself with my  nice but now second-rate device.

I'd write this off as the peril of being an early-adopter, but Amazon released the Kindle 2 just a few months ago.  If I'd waited later to buy it, I'd be more than irritated right now.   

Cheap houses

Carpe Diem claims the average sales price of a Detroit home fell to $13,638 in January.

I had trouble believing that so I checked out a Detroit MLS site.  Go here to browse 88 pages of homes listed for $20,000 or less.  Included is this stately mansion for $19,900 and this 6-bedroom Victorian for $18,500.  This This quaint three-bedroom, one-bath is listed for $1 under $2 per square foot.  Imagine the disamenity of a city that cannot entice new residents even with a (practically) free house.  The market-clearing price for much of Detroit's housing stock is probably negative, but the price obviously won't go that low and the market won't clear. 

(Is there an arbitrage opportunity here?  How much would it cost to move these houses to, say, Chicago or Milwaukee?)

If you want a visceral sense of the loss, see this photo gallery, "The ruins of Detroit."

Simpson's paradox

Counterintuitive fact o' the day (and one I'm a little embarrassed I just learned).

Let's say you run an experiment on a sample population.  You do this by dividing the population into two subgroups and running the experiment on each separately.  The experiment succeeds for each subgroup.

If the experiment succeeded for each sub-sample, then it necessarily succeeded for the combined sample, right?

Nope.  Sometimes an experiment's apparent success on two samples disappears  when the samples are combined.  This is Simpson's paradox.

Example:  A pharmaceutical company wants to determine whether a new drug performs better than an old drug.  The manufacturer tests New Drug on 300 patients in Chicago and 300 patients in Cleveland.  In Chicago, 240 of the patients get New Drug and the other 60 get Old Drug.  Ninety of the former (37.5%) and 20 of the latter (33.3%) recover.  Thus, New Drug performs better than Old Drug in the Chicago trial.

In Cleveland, 60 of the patients get New Drug and 240 get Old Drug.  Thirty of the former (50%) and 110 of the latter (45.8%) recover.  Hence New Drug performs better than Old Drug in the Cleveland trial, too.

But New Drug's apparent superiority disappears once the samples are combined -- 120 of the 300 that took New Drug recovered (40%) while 130 of the 300 that took Old Drug recovered (43.3%).  Thus Old Drug did better than New Drug in the aggregate sample even though New Drug did better than Old Drug in each of the two sub-samples.*

Weird.

(*Example lifted from Simon & Blume, Mathematics for Economists)

The Postal Service and those red envelopes

The U.S. Postal Service might cut out one day of service a week because it's going bankrupt.

I really wouldn't care . . . except for Netflix.  It's not like I watch a movie every night, but when I do want to watch the next flick in my queue I don't want to wait four days for it.  

I imagine the Netflix execs are sweating this one.  Sure, Netflix could cut its labor costs by a sixth if the post office were to cut out a day of service.  But I'd be less satisfied with the Netflix set up and would probably go back to Simpsons and Family Guy reruns.  And if I'd hate losing that sixth day of service, I'm sure most other customers would too.  I bet Netflix would gladly keep paying for six days of labor rather than have the Postal Service screw with its successful business model.