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Guns, inflammatory, Opinion, Politics

Muggers, at last!

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If you get this title, you are way behind the times.   It’s probably culturally opaque to anyone who is less than about 65.

Before we go further, this post is about guns.   If that is going to make you mad, stop reading here.  Unless, that is, you like getting mad.   If so, then, be prepared for my one-strike policy on comments.

I’m going to write more about guns, from an intensely personal perspective, and that will provide more context, but events drive me to write this now.

The title is a line from The President’s Analyst (1967).  The film was a commercial failure then, but I liked it, and I think it is almost timeless in several ways.

“Muggers, at last!” was spoken by Jeff Quantrill (Joan Darling), the mother of a family of gun-toting, martial-arts-trained liberals with whom Dr. Sidney Schaefer (George Coburn), the President’s analyst, has fallen in while evading operatives from the CIA, the FBI, Russia, China, and The Phone Company.

Dr. Sidney Schaefer: These guns. Karate. Why?

Husband Wynn Quantrill: The right wing extremists. Disarm them and us liberals will disarm.

When the operatives finally find Schaefer, going out to get Chinese with the Quantrills, Jeff and Wynn (William Daniels) are beside themselves with joy to be able to use their weaponry and skills.  While Wynn blasts away with a huge handgun, Jeff expertly dispatches several intelligence operatives with the Karate.  Schaefer could not be in better hands.

I think of this line and the scene often when reading comments about “Good Guys with Guns”.  (By now, that term may be trademarked by the NRA.)  In the wee hours Friday, Steven Jones got hit in the face during a fistfight with some fraternity boys near the campus of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona.   I think we can be certain that alcohol was involved.  During the altercation, a group came out of the fraternity house and chased Jones, who ran to his car and retrieved his handgun (equipped with a cool flashlight).

By this time two of the eventual victims had stopped following him, but they turned around when Jones yelled that he had a gun.    Jones said that he then shot them both.  Two others were also shot.  One witness, a friend of Jones, said that one of the victims asked Jones why he had brought a gun before Jones shot him multiple times.  One young man was killed and three were wounded.

Jones said that he then provided first aid to the dying and wounded.

Jones sounds like a “Good Guy with a Gun”.  He apparently has no psychopathy, at least in the formal sense.   I’m sure he will plead self defense, and that may be effective.

What I have related comes from news reports.  If I were on a jury, I would give Jones the benefit of the doubt.  But, I’m not, and I won’t, because I think his behavior is typical of an attitude that is unfortunately very common among Gun Nuts.

Can anyone really doubt that Steven Jones was looking for trouble?  That he was looking for glory, looking to be a hero, almost desperate for the “righteous shoot”?   Why else the call that he had a gun?   In this sense, Steven Jones is no different than Chris Harper-Mercer, who a few days ago killed nine fellow students and wounded nine more in a quest to become “somebody”, to become famous.   And, neither of them was motivated any differently than a two-bit gang banger.

The bottom line here is that if Steven Jones had not had a gun, no one would be dead, unless Jones was man enough to beat them to death with his fists, or maybe a stick.  Somehow, I think that if he had not had a gun in his car he would have kept running.

Will the NRA and the Gun Nuts style this as a righteous shoot, and Jones as a “Good Guy with a Gun”?

How many people die each year because a “Good Guy with a Gun” goes looking for trouble?

2015 council election, Boulder, Opinion, Politics

Does Boulder have too many jobs?

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Does Boulder have too many jobs? If you are out of work, then Boulder needs at least one more job. If you are a commercial developer then Boulder needs as many jobs as you can convince the planning department to let you squeeze onto your particular piece of land. If you are a real estate investor, including all of us who own homes, or if you are a newspaper, or a car dealer or a lifestyle publication (“Inspired by community”), then Boulder can never have too many jobs.

But, if you commute to work here and would like to live here, or if you just care about having a real community where nurses, teachers, firefighter and mechanics might hope to live, then the answer is yes, Boulder has too many jobs. According to materials produced by the City’s Department of Planning, Housing and Sustainability as part of the revision of the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan, Boulder now has 2.2 jobs per household. By itself, that number may not mean much, but let’s put it in context. In previous draft documents, the planning department provided estimates that Boulder has twice the number of jobs per household as the Denver metropolitan area as a whole. OK, maybe that helps explain some of the reason that housing is more expensive here, but is a two-to-one ratio really that far out of whack? What about other areas?

Data about this are hard to find for the average person (like me), but a 2008 study by the University of California provides some information. Boulder has more jobs per household than any of the 15 California communities with the highest ratio of jobs to households. I guess, if I understand the report correctly, Boulder is already off the charts. The California areas that are closest to Boulder in this respect are Orange County and San Francisco, but those areas only have about 1.5 jobs per household. So, Boulder has one-third more families chasing the available housing stock than does San Francisco. And, San Francisco has the BART. Orange County, by the way, does not have oranges any more, except in museums.

What does the future hold? Will the market fix this? Will increasing density fix this? Can we build our way out? Again, the planning department provides some data. When Boulder builds its last office building and its last residential property under its current zoning “capacity”, what is called “build-out”, the City will have nearly three jobs for every household. This is twice the ratio for the most job-rich California communities.

More than fifty years ago Boulder set out to become a compact and, most important, a finite community, one that rejected the bigger-is-always better model. This idea was opposed at the beginning, and has been opposed ever after by those who profit from growth, but also by people who feel that a community must grow to remain vibrant. That view holds that a town is either growing or it is decaying—a community and an economy cannot thrive without growth. Among the arguments against controlling growth is that limiting growth in an attractive place like Boulder will inevitably result in a wealthy enclave. If not rectified, the jobs/pop imbalance in Boulder will lead to that outcome, which will discourage other communities from trying to control growth. Much of the value of Boulder’s leadership in community planning will be lost or discounted. Lost as well will be the vitality of our community.

The “jobs/pop” issue is not new and it is not a surprise.  People have recognized this problem since at least the 1980’s. Several attempts have been made to re-zone land to provide a balance, or to impose other processes that would lead to a better balance between jobs and dwellings. All have failed. Although I don’t believe the real-estate investment sector had a hand in the origin of the jobs/pop imbalance, it has consistently, energetically, and effectively opposed fixing it. That opposition has been effective in creating a current sense of inevitability fatigue about the jobs/pop issue.

I’m tired, too, but the stakes are high. Even at this relatively late date it is possible to fix this, but it will be hard and it won’t happen without the kind of foresight and gumption that once moved Boulder to do other hard things. Certainly, a form-based code, as pleasant as that sounds, will make no difference. Those who advocate increasing density in order to moderate the price of housing in Boulder need to recognize that the population of Boulder would nearly have to double at build-out in order to bring us just to the same relative demand for housing as San Francisco.  That would require 19 more Boulder Junctions.

2015-10-09 14.35.02
Boulder Junction

Leonard May has proposed a few sensible things we can do to preserve affordable housing, but there is more that we can accomplish by working on the demand side of the housing supply-demand equation. I suggest that we re-focus our primary community-shaping efforts, and money, from Open Space, which has been very successful in creating a compact community, to an Urban Space program that would implement some of May’s ideas but would also put resources to a long-term program of converting commercially-zoned land (and even existing commercial developments) to multi-family housing. This will lead to a higher build-out population for Boulder, but in my view that will be well worth the value of recovering a vibrant community. While we are at it, we would have the perfect opportunity to build “15-minute” neighborhoods that will have many benefits.

Given the self-interest of current home owners (I am one) and that of the real estate, retail and publishing sectors, I can’t be too optimistic that Boulder will find a way to fix this. Maybe in 50 years Pearl will be as notorious as Rodeo Drive, and Boulder will have Maserati and Ferrari dealerships (“It’s the lifestyle”). If this future concerns you, if you have a shred of optimism, and if you want to at least try to move Boulder in the right direction, cast your votes to discourage development of new jobs and to encourage development of new housing. For me, that means voting for 301. As for candidates for City Council, I suggest first Leonard May, who has been most specific in his proposals, Tim Plass who has suggested rezoning commercial land to residential and Suzanne Jones who also recognizes the problem, which is the first step to a solution. Beyond them, I have no idea.

When I first wrote this, I suggested voting against 300.  I’ve now reconsidered and I will vote for this measure.   While I’m concerned that neighborhood referenda could block sensible ideas that would increase affordable housing (everyone will have to give a bit), I think the power 300 gives neighborhoods would be balanced by a new awareness of city-wide issues and (at least I hope so) a new responsibility and motivation to help find solutions to our most fundamental challenge.  That power could also be a positive force in overcoming opposition to those solutions from the development sector.

Bicycles, Boulder, inflammatory, Opinion, Politics

Speeds

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Wherever the law is, crime can be found.  Aleksander Solzenitsyn

I feel a little awkward featuring this quote, because I was introduced to it by Ta-Nehisi Coates in his article on incarceration and the Black family.   But, it is entirely relevant to the topic, and perhaps the contrast between his use and my use will emphasize that most of us face only first-world problems here in Boulder.

It’s also worth remembering that just before the initiation of Right-Sizing on Folsom Boulder Police shot and killed a young CU math student who was evidently under the influence of “bad LSD.”  Samuel Forgy was naked and armed with a hammer.  He was 22.   Only a couple of anguished people wrote “wait a minute, folks” letters about Forgy’s death.   They were drowned in a sea of anger about a minute or two delay on whatever errand, and about government overreach and arrogance.  The irony of that last thought in the face of Forgy’s death leaves an acid taste.

But, back to the first world (or, perhaps the zeroth world, in Boulder).    One thing we got out of the Right-Sizing project is a little data, and one of the things we learned was that 15% of drivers exceed the 30 mph speed limit on Folsom north of Bluff by at least six or seven mph.  The average speed there exceeds the speed limit by two or three mph.  These speeds are a couple of mph lower than before the Right-Sizing, which is one of the objectives of the approach.

Boulder Mayor Matt Applebaum reportedly asked City transportation staff why, instead of installing the three-lane configuration, they didn’t just lower the speed limit.  I don’t know how the staff answered him, but I hope they told him that reducing speed limits has very little effect on speed, because that is true.  Raising speed limits has more effect, but less than you might imagine.

It turns out that road conditions, traffic conditions and the road configuration determine how fast people drive.   Hence the logic of the three-lane configuration.

The one thing that raising the speed limit does do is reduce the frequency of noncompliance.   Right now approximately half the drivers on this stretch are violating the speed limit.  If we raised the speed limit to 36 mph only about fifteen percent would be in violation.

This most recent spasm of anti-bike rage in the local paper is different from those that periodically preceded it only in the intensity of the anger expressed.  I think that intensity is more a function of the time than anything else, and has little to do with actual attitudes toward cyclists.  One thing that was the same-old-thing, though, was the complaint that bicyclists wantonly run stop signs and commit other infractions, and should be called to account.  This is often a prelude to calling for visible license plates and taxation of these freeloading miscreants.

Whenever I read these letters I think, “What’s the big deal, lots of motorists breaks the speed limit.”  Now we have the data.

So, I suggest we give bicycles the same latitude taken by motorists.  On Folsom that’s 36 mph versus a speed limit of 30.   At a stop sign that translates into 6 mph versus a speed limit of zero.  Take a deep breath, and chill.