My method sure hasn't worked very well... or has it?
I was looking for cheap warehouse space to start a business in, and did a nation-wide search for the largest, cheapest building in the entire continental US.
I found one that seemed too good to be true. a 220,000 sqft metal warehouse and office complex on 17 acres. I thought the price was a typo at $375k.The agent assured me that the price was correct, and I flew out to see the place.
It was in a little town called Pine Bluff, Arkansas.
I offered about 3/4 what they were asking, and they accepted the offer.
Fast forward 2 1/2 years, and I've had nothing but problems. Break in after break in. Can't work through the red tape with the city so my warehouse sits empty. It feels like they are actively working against myself and other entrepreneurs I talk to. At least 2 others who bought buildings and tried to open businesses left after getting nowhere.
Maybe I'm daft, but I ended up buying about 75 more properties here... all surprisingly cheap.
The town is killing me though. I haven't seen my kids very much lately - I don't think it's safe enough for them. I'm probably going to be moving back to Utah in the next couple of months because it's just too much out here.
Just skimming the Wikipedia page for that place shows red flags all over the place. The population has been sharply declining since 1970 and the homicide rate is 56 per 100,000 vs the national average of 6.5.
Clearly something is very wrong with the local government and population.
It's called poverty. Welcome to rural America. Went down the shitter when industry left and the rest of the country ignored it for decades, so now we have MAGA, drugs and crime, and a whole lotta cheap land.
Is this how local residents feel? I find this sentiment rather confusing. Rural places tend to be distrustful of central government. Meaning, they are happy to be ignored by “the rest of the country” since those outsiders don’t share their values.
Local residents do feel that way. They have no money, no education, no job prospects, and don't feel they get respect. The fact that their cultural values are also at odds with the "haves" (in their view) further cements the view. But in a very real policy and economic sense, they literally were abandoned when industry left. Wall Street and Tech zoomed on while their factories and mines closed with no recourse to be able to recover from the economic vacuum.
How are they gonna go to college? Nobody in their family went. Their friends didn't go. They have family they need to stay home and take care of (no child care, elderly care, limited food assistance) and work for, in whatever way that means. Even if they went, it's not like every millennial with a degree gets a job, even with record low unemployment. Transportation is also problematic, just to get to a school, or a job. Rap sheets keep people from applying or being accepted. There's usually no jobs program to help older people transition from obsolete industries.
It takes a lot of outreach to get anyone to trust the system, if they have a flexible enough situation to go. Most people just don't see education being a solution, so they aren't going to jump out on a shaky limb in the hopes it might catch them. Better the devil you know.
This hasn’t really been true for a while. Much of the quasi-libertarian stuff comes out of the conservative intellectual crowd, think tanks, lobbying groups etc. Some of it was also a holdover from the Reagan era, which was the last big right-wing populist movement, before Trump showed up.
It’s the anti-immigration, pro-manufacturing stuff that really comes out of rural areas. Stuff that creates jobs and cuts down on wage-dilution. If the Trump years were about anything, they were about the right collectively deciding they wanted an industrial policy and pro-labor (not pro-union, mind you) policy, instead of warmed over economic libertarianism.
Plenty of poor towns without such homicide rates and robbery. You are taking the agency out of the hands of the people committing the crimes and handing it to the circumstances.
Homicides and crime still occur, they're just not well-documented. There has to be someone collecting that data and then reporting it. That costs money, so many places just don't.
The poorest towns in America don’t have the highest crime and the richest towns don’t have the lowest. Attributing violent crime to poverty alone does a disservice to the people living in places with violent crime.
Pine Bluff's population is much larger than 1,800. I'll just quote the full Wikipedia excerpt:
Pine Bluff had 29 homicides in 2021. Pine Bluff had 23 murders in 2020 - a rate of 56.5 murders per 100,000 people. The national average was 6.5 murders per 100,000 people in 2020.
As of July 29, in 2022 there have been 17 homicides reported in Pine Bluff.
You have the kind of money to casually buy up all this real estate, but you still went bargain-hunting for a warehouse? This reads like some kind of LARP or joke.
I bought the warehouse before I really had the money to do it. I was scraping by on ramen for a while.
Buying the others was honestly WAY, WAY, WAY cheaper than you'd expect. I almost didn't feel like I had a choice it was so cheap. Spent about $130k at a tax auction to get them all.
It almost feels like land is the only thing they can't steal around here.
Pine Bluff's population has declined by 50% over the last few decades, presumably the reason they were so cheap is that there's a huge supply surplus? And given the murder rate is 10x the national average I don't see demand for property increasing. In short, run for the hills!
About $8k per year. Most were bought for just back taxes, so I basically paid 5 years taxes on them. A couple of them were bid up, so the taxes are less than 1/5 what I paid.
You bought the other ones because they're cheap... but what is the actual gain you expect to get from those properties? $130K is still money, is there a plan to recoup that investment or was this a FOMO purchase?
I think most places aren't one of the highest crime cities in the country? I don't think the mistake you made was moving from cities, it was moving to one of the worst towns in the country. Pine Bluff is the #4 highest crime area in the entire country!! https://247wallst.com/city/pine-bluff-ar-is-among-the-most-d...
Nicknames I heard were “Pine Box” or “Crime Bluff” (from a native who proceeded to stiff me of $150 so I should have known better than dealing with him to begin with)
Wow, Pine Bluff is quite a place to move to out the blue. Still, there's good interstate access and a local state U. Curious why the city is so reluctant to support new businesses.
You might try Jonesboro, Fort Smith, or Hot Springs if you're looking for cheap nearby places. North Little Rock or someplace in NW Arkansas too would have more nearby amenities, albeit at higher (though still quite affordable nationally) prices.
>Curious why the city is so reluctant to support new businesses.
I'm guessing the town wants him to do very basic stuff to get the property up to code, and he doesn't want to. Anther person pointed out in a comment that comment chain OPs twitter had posts about about holding somebody at gunpoint in apparent frustration. To me it sounds like OP knew absolutely nothing about commercial real-estate, absolutely nothing about local laws, and plopped down a bunch of money on a property without doing some homework.
It took me about 4 minutes to find out that he was robbed for the ~15th time, called the police, and held the criminal at gunpoint for less than ten minutes until the police arrived. Quite a bit different than "holding somebody at gunpoint in apparent frustration," and with how quickly I found out what actually happened I can only assume you're intentionally misrepresenting the facts.
>It took me about 4 minutes to find out that he was robbed for the ~15th time,
You do realize between his comments here, and a cursory look at his Twitter, he's told about 57 tall tales too many, right? If it was such a bad experience, why did he go on to buy an alleged SEVENTY-FIVE more properties there for starters?
Because the bulk, if not all, of this is probably entirely made up.
This is a process problem. The correct order to do things is: pull permit to fix plumbing, that permit will allow you to connect to the city water for testing purposes once you've proven the system will hold pressure (initial inspection), then when you're connected to the water an additional inspection will be done to verify working plumbing, if thats the only outstanding issue you can apply for a certificate of occupancy, otherwise you move onto other work.
Dealing with the government on things like this can be EXTREMELY frustrating especially if you're not used to running in those circles. Its a lot of things to learn and the people involved assume you know everything and when you get difficult they have a million ways to make your life more annoying.
The city will not issue the permits to do the work. FULL STOP.
I literally already have a city water connection and it's costing me a hundred bucks a month just to sit there unused because I can't get the permits to fix the plumbing... So what would you do in that situation?
According to the city website, there is a vacancy in the planning commission. Apply for it, you'll probably have a lot more success getting the permits you need if they see an official making the requests.
Someone should make a documentary about you. Just your Deuterium Deuterium Periodically Returning Orbit Fusion reactor is interesting enough (http://www.ddprofusion.com/), but doing it in Pine Bluff? I'm sold.
If anyone is interested in this, I'm open too the idea. I tried to have a videographer at the auction where I bought all the property, but they didn't show up.
My biggest fear/hope about that is that my life could suddenly become boring once the cameras started rolling. I'm not sure which one would be worse.
Sounds like you thought something was too good to be true, and then found out that it was too good to be true. And then you doubled-down, and now have a bunch of illiquid assets.
Did you buy the warehouse sight unseen? Did you do any research on the local community and crime rates?
Cheap land is cheap for a reason. It sounds like you found out the reason that land was so cheap.
After searching for, and looking at many of these types of properties in the last few years this is the conclusion I've come to. There is no free lunch.
I would expect big money coming into a small town to face serious static from local authorities unless and until you're cozied up to its political scene.
Start hiring people to work for your business and a lot of problems go away. If you are spreading the wealth around, the politicians are more likely to listen.
If you think about this from the perspective of the city council, there was this big warehouse that they thought was perfect for a company like Amazon, which would have given them hundreds of jobs. Instead, a random rich guy buys it and employs nobody.
Sure it's a problem, but it's very real. I have experienced an inverse correlation of town size vs. corruption: in my experience, the smaller the town, the more off-the-charts the corruption. YMMV.
I can think of many exceptions to this both on large and small "towns" and depending on what is meant by corruption. E.g., NYC is very large but not exactly friendly to business nor easy to navigate unless you have lots of money to spread around to "permit expeditors"" and oddly interested neighborhood groups and of course lots of lawyers and even then it's a roll of the dice on whether you'll be allowed to operate in an economically viable manner.
This individual claims to have swooped into town and bought SEVENTY-SIX properties with no documented experience doing this sort of thing.
I see nothing wrong with the fact that he's having trouble doing what he wants, he probably isn't coming close to remotely following proper procedure and clearly lacks experience, as he stated that he could barely even afford the first property - a 220k square foot warehouse he bought with apparently no business and no experience owning warehouses.
Given it's a town of 40k people, I doubt there's rampant corruption and more OP just doesn't have any idea how anything works at all. If any of his statements are true, this guy needs to stop what he's doing and learn how to adult.
The town has asked him for plans on how he will be using the building so they can apply the applicable building code. He's refused, citing the cost ($10k by his estimate) but he's since gone and bought 75 properties in town.
If you're going to refurb a giant warehouse to be a fireworks storage facility, that's different from building a daycare, which is different from "run an internet company and makerspace", etc.
Given his history includes free-energy crap (his own fusion reactor design) and running for Mayor of Provo, UT on a platform of disincorporating the city, I would guess the problem is that this guy is a libertarian and thus thinks rules don't apply to him.
Congrats on doubling down on a bad decision.
I'd suggest to list em all for sale, happily accept 60% of listed price and pray that the buyer doesnt bump into this discussion.
Hey I also took a big chance about a decade ago buying a package of nine buildings that no one wanted. They were fully occupied, no leases, as-is where-is, no FHA, poorest zip code in the state, democrat city. I had boots on the ground on day 1 and it felt hopeless at times. From people setting up lawn chairs in front of the houses to deal drugs, to packs of homeless loitering on the front stoops, to getting fined by the city for things out of my control, etc. I managed to exit 2/3 of the properties by seller financing to the tenants I learned were cash rich, credit poor. Also the values eventually shot up because another investor started renovating the abandoned mill buildings into loft apartments.
I want in a linear accelerator way to see what happens if pontifer and Alan of HeavyDSparks [1] all got together and rebuilt Alan’s hacker fortress together. Maybe include Andrew Camarata [2] to increase the chances to Get Things Done.
Personally the most interesting question I haven’t seen asked is how he searched for cheap properties.
I'm totally open to collaborations. One of the properties I bought at the tax auction is 27 acres with a bunch of tall trees on it. I was thinking about inviting people who weave space webs to come down and build something amazing.
Just before I closed on the warehouse, I reached out to the Megabots people to see if they wanted to move Megabots here, but didn't get a reply. The overhead cranes and large open interior spaces give opportunities not available anywhere else.
I literally had living spaces for artist and entrepreneurs on my original proposal, and I was hoping that it would become a destination makerspace where big names could come and access the amazing workshop I was planning to set up.
I was also planning to build a permanent robot combat arena here too, kind of like what they built in Norwalk.
Oh yeah, forgot to mention... It was just a search loopnet.com for buildings over 65,000 sqft sorted by price. You can do a map search, then "remove boundary" and zoom out to see everything nation-wide that matches your search.
I'm not in the US, but last weekend we had a family gathering and were discussing buying a place in a small village a bit further out from all the city action. On paper it checks out: prices are low, the scenery is beyond fantastic, quiet and you can still drive up to a city or some local town fairly easily. But then we started talking negatives: unemployment, poverty, higher crime rates than you'd like it to be,etc. Unless the place is populated by people of similar socioeconomic status, it's likely to be a tough going from day one.
I mean, is it unreasonable for the city to expect new drawings/specs for a new use of a building that has been unmaintained for at least 15 years? The fact that the property was sold for such a cheap price basically implies that the new owner should expect to invest a substantial amount of money to get everything up to code.
> Fenley said he selected the site because it was “the largest cheapest building in the country.” When he searched the commercial real estate website LoopNet for properties over 65,000 square feet and sorted by price, he thought the price tag of roughly $300,000 was a typo. The 17-acre industrial property was once home to steel manufacturer Varco Pruden but has stood vacant for at least 15 years and “fallen into disrepair,” according to the city’s Planning Commision.
> Pine Bluff City Attorney Althea Scott told the Cap Times by email that the Planning Commission had approved Fenley’s plans for the site in June, contingent on compliance with building and fire codes. But, she wrote, “the applicable codes can only be determined once Mr. Fenley has submitted the requisite engineer/architectural drawing(s) which identifies the anticipated use and occupancy of the structure. To date, required drawings have not been received.”
> Fenley told the Cap Times that such drawings would cost “tens of thousands of dollars,” and his communications with the city have led him to believe that he would need to bring the entire structure into compliance with current building codes before he could use any of it.
Additional context about Murfie; seems like it was sold for a huge discount: nearly a million CDs sold for less than $10,000. No wonder u/pontifier saw an entrepreneurial opportunity:
> Finally, after about a month, Murfie’s investors agreed to sell. Fenley purchased Murfie for only $6,000 plus $2,000 for Murfie’s attorney’s fees, according to the agreement obtained by The Verge. In total, he says the endeavor has cost him about $25,000 so far.
> Murfie’s 930,000 discs are still sitting in its Wisconsin warehouse. No one’s been inside since the landlord changed the locks some time ago, but Fenley says he’ll have access “shortly.”
You know this now, but most crime databases have Pine Bluff as one of the most crime-riddles metros in the country. It rates a "1" on a scale of 100, with 100 being best (safest). Bummer.
Promote yourself and your town. I'm looking for a new home in the same way as the OP, and my best hope is that a few dozen like-minded nerds will gentrify a small town, because they have been so undercut by cities of late.
As someone from a small town in a rural area, can you expand on what values you have in mind? What I saw was grinding poverty, bad schools, bottom tier education, and rampant drug abuse.
Coincidentally the novel/film Winter’s Bone author portrayed this area, north Arkansas and southern Missouri.
Directly or not. If you're a rich person moving into a poor town, the only way to not piss off the locals is to make them richer. If you can make the whole town richer, you'll be welcomed. Whatever portion of the locals that you don't make richer will hate you. If you don't want to piss off the locals, and you don't want to employ the locals, this is a very expensive plan.
Rural Vermont. The story is worthy of a screenplay.
Small town starts to tax a family for the commercial water line in a general store that closed in the 60's, that happens to be on the property, because, small town. Family has visions of a B&B, vineyard, wedding venue. Everything down the drain in the end, because lawyers are expensive.
Still there to this day: worn out stencil on the window of the 'general store'. "Sorry, we closed in 1968".
giving the town tax money isn't going to do it. you need to make the people in the town richer, and most of the people aren't going to see a dollar of that tax money. at least, not directly or in the short term.
The family in this situation had business plans that would have done just that, (B&B and a wedding venue), in a town of 300 where there is only a restaurant (catering) and a general store (everything else). The family sourced and bought everything not just locally, but from the town and surrounding farms (all dairy, meat, and produce)
The tax was imposed to get the family out of the town, and it worked - the family is not rich. In the end, they had to sell their family home (which had been in the family since the 1930's) and leave (which they did).
They were taxed out because the family is notoriously progressive, and the town is very much the opposite. There was cultural friction. Keep in mind that this was 20 years ago. These were very polite 60's era hippies, all college-edumacated and everything - and the (very small, very tight) town didn't want them in it.
The town hall imposed a (crazy) tax, and they had to leave.
Depending on where you are, some value preserving a local culture over 'getting richer'.
You don't. Gentrifying a place pretty inherently means removing at least some of the people who live there. Why would the people of a small town go for that? Unless you're planning on subsidising the existing residents' lives forever as rent goes up.
If you have the money and influence to "gentrify" somewhere... just build a new planned community in the middle of nowhere. The US has plenty of nowhere.
> Why would the people of a small town go for that?
Because people are leaving in droves, only old people there are dying off, kids moved to better places, and the economy is dead?
> If you have the money and influence to "gentrify" somewhere... just build a new planned community in the middle of nowhere. The US has plenty of nowhere.
Seems like a waste of resources. The US has had countless migrations within its borders during its existence. Why should we force people not to settle in places with dire economic circumstances and almost no future without outside influx?
> attracting people willing to pay double to move there
What active behavior are we actually talking about? Making the place nicer? I feel like there's got to be actual some breathing room between "savior of the murder capital Pine Bluff" and "big bad real estate investor gentrifying people out of their homes."
I don't know if you've ever lived in a place like Pine Bluff, but most people own. It's 52% in the city[0] and I imagine quite a bit higher (70-80% wouldn't surprise me) in the more rural areas. And keep in mind the way these statistics are calculated, all the vacant buildings count as part of that 48%, so the number of renters is likely ~1/3 or less the number of owners.
So unlike places with very high rents but also where it seems like 3/4 of all buildings are rented out, most people in Pine Bluff would be objectively better off if rents doubled overnight with corresponding increases to the economy and local services.
To be blunt, if you're renting you have no claim to the property or lodging beyond the term of the lease. That's the entire point. I do believe human beings have a right to housing, but you do not have the right to live in someone else's house if they don't want you there.
Nobody gets removed, they just have to leave. It's a subtle distinction but that's how it happens. Poor people don't own anything. Their furniture is mostly stacks of junk that is so bad that it would be hard or impossible to get someone to accept it for free (this is very nearly a tautology, since the poor person got this furniture for free to begin with, and it's was so bad when they got it that nobody else would give anything for it). They rent. At some point property values are high enough the landlord (or his heir) decides to sell. At the end of the lease, the property is no longer for rent. That's the end of it. However, keep in mind that poor people tend to move every few years regardless. They are right on the edge of falling out of the population of working people who are self sufficient, so it is very common that they end up being evicted, abusing drugs or alcohol (even if just for awhile), or just having too many kids to be able to afford childcare so they can keep working to support themselves. Properties no longer being for rent in some neighborhood has almost no effect on any given poor person who lived in that neighborhood as they are one step above transient anyway.
This isn't an apology, it's just a more accurate description of what happens, I've seen it first hand from the low prestige side of things when I was young.
Ehh. Being kicked out of your home is being removed, even if it's perfectly legal. Fixed-term rental contracts are nearly entirely immoral imo.
And while an accurate depiction of how this affects the people who were barely hanging on in the first place, there is a later step, where people who /have/ been renting all their lives in one area find themselves unable to continue to pay rent. You're not necessarily a homeowner if you're not at constant risk of homelessness.
I've seen this while squatting; our neighbours were people who had lived in the same community for 70 years, and their option once the landlord had decided to tear the building down and replace it with "luxury apartments" was far away from everyone they had known all their lives. There were several similar stories in the area.
I think it's an interesting moral question: How much are you responsible for someone else's failure to plan ahead or foresee consequences? What are the consequences if we make you responsible for other people for their entire life just because you have some economic interaction with them?
I think if you make renting someone an apartment a lifelong obligation to provide them with housing at approximately that cost then only a fool would ever rent out an apartment. The supply of apartments to rent would go to approximately 0. One strange consequence of this would be that the price of housing would plummet as a result as all the landlords left the market. When you went to buy a condo, instead of competing with landlords and money launderers you would only be bidding against other people who want to live in the apartment. I saw this first hand at the GHI housing co-op in Maryland, buying a unit there was dramatically below market cost because they did not allow anyone to live in units apart from owners.
If we come at this from a perspective of "people deserve to have a home where they are safe", rather than from an economic perspective, the moral question is why on earth we decided to allow and protect private landlords who have an interest in exactly the opposite.
I completely agree with you that allowing private landlords is against our collective interests as a society. I think there would be details to work out but I would be very interested to see a city or state ban the renting of housing as an experiment.
As for thinking from an economic perspective, I think anything else is doomed to fail. Unless we think about how people will behave to maximize their own outcomes in some system we risk making things much worse (even if we do think it through we still risk making things much worse, but at least we will have more confidence that we are doing the right thing). Socialist states are a great example of this, they plow ahead on the moral high ground (at least in their moral system) and manage to make their citizens poorer.
A few months ago my wife and I drove through Arkansas and saw a road side billboard for a white pride website and radio program (“Don’t be ashamed of your race”).
It also probably doesn’t help their case that the second photo that comes up on Apple Maps when you search the town is a billboard “Anti-Racist is Anti-White”
US 62, but I was going to guess Harrison, from the YouTube videos outside the local Walmart of people yelling at BLM protesters “Don’t our lives matter too?”
Not doubting that you saw a sign like that in the state, but what do racists in the Ozarks have to have to do with parent's business problems. Pretty bait-y.
Wow you’re really obtuse aren’t you. This is a comment more about the OP asking for prod/cons of small towns and me commenting on that. If you don’t have a problem with this kind of thing, by all means move there.
Do you share a username between HN and Twitter? Because somebody with your username on Twitter has been publicly talking about holding somebody at gunpoint in Pine Bluff, Arkansas earlier today(1), and has in the past advertised (2) a website with the tagline of “Matching vigilantes with victims for justice and profit “ (3)
Genuinely curious why you're intentionally misframing things this way. Is it political? Or you just don't like this guy for some reason? He's been robbed (from what I can see a dozen or more times), and in one instance called the police and held the criminal there until they arrived a few minutes later. Everything completely legal, above board, etc.
This is a perfect example of someone telling the truth in such a way to completely mischaracterize what really happened.
How could anyone asking questions about somebodythat bought a town be framed as being anything but political?
I’m sorry that you didn’t like my factual summary of events, but I provided direct references that were very easy to click on and read more about and I’m glad that you availed yourself to those resources.
Can you please be more clear with what you're trying to say then?
You obviously feel very strongly about pontifier and his past, given the amount of time you spent digging into his background, what is the point you are actually trying to make here? Be as direct as possible, please :)
I asked if the OP was the same person that was posting on Twitter, as what was posted there was a different tone from what was posted on HN. He answered in the affirmative.
I did not spend much time “digging into his background”, I clicked a link and read a few posts.
Why do you care? Be as direct as possible, please :)
TBF, there was an SWE on here a few years back and asked a sob story about how he cant find work and needs help, and a bunch of us pored over his request and posts, and it was only after I (and other) did basic DD - we found he was a convicted child sex offender.
:-(
So, we always want to help - I mean, FFS - people who develop tech/sw/hw/etc are actually looking at giving the fruits of their efforts out to the world, social support is no different...
But at times quick to help without judging the requestor past (HELLO PAC contributions :-))
I’ll bite - I only care because I think it’s important for others to see what your intentions are here.
Now that I’ve answered your question, can you answer mine? :)
If I wanted to, I’m sure I could Google some of your online identities and find a post your made in the past and then asked in a public forum if you’re the same person. I wouldn’t do that because I think it’s a bit creepy and impolite, but if I had a very specific reason for doing so, I might consider it. So I’ll ask again - what was your intention in connecting his identities here in such a direct way?
You said something about “bought a town” and it being “political”, can you expand on what that means?
I actually misunderstood the wording, I’m now aware that he only bought 17 acres + 75 more properties in the area.
As for the weird threat of embarrassment… what? I literally just asked if he used the same username on both websites.
As for why I asked, I’ll answer again: his post on HN had a different tone from his posts on the bird site, and I wanted to know if they gave context to his post or were unrelated. For example, I do not own “braingenious” on twitter, and I wouldn’t want someone to mix me up with whoever that is.
I initially found this thread because someone mentioned it on Twitter. Spoiler: I did not go out of my way to gain any information.
As for how this relates to politics, I’ll refer to his own recent post about local politics affecting his project.
Did you feel hatred for him after reading my post? That was not my intention. As I’ve stated, I was looking for clarity about posts with pretty different tones.
I invite you to not read questions directed at people other than you if you find them to be obnoxious.
It is also true that people who rob businesses are harmful to society. That is completely independent of the terrible outcomes caused by private vigilanteism.
I see, but I don't find a problem with that either though.
Seems no different than crime stoppers, it's usually just a reward for information leading to an arrest, it's not an actual bounty. It's not excluding that, but he's most likely hoping someone who knows the person who stole it will rat for the money.
And I think you'll have to provide examples of the "terrible outcomes caused by private vigilanteism".
Our society is not perfect. A large number of antisocial things are legal. It is completely reasonable to criticize somebody for doing a thing that is both legal and also antisocial.
I feel for this guy. He is getting screwed by a high-violence region. But his approach to solving this problem makes the world worse, not better.
I think it's important to keep the specifics in mind as these things live and die on the specific details.
A criminal came to his private property and attempted to steal. He was able to keep the person there - for less than ten minutes - until that person was arrested. Presumably that person is in jail now or at least on probation.
Please explain how just letting this person steal leaves the world better than having him get punished for his actions. When victims of crime shrug their shoulders and just say "aw shucks" it incentivizes more crime, which makes the world objectively worse.
I'm not talking about him protecting his property. I'm talking about the bensforbars thing. Paying people to track down specific criminals is very different than protecting ones property in the moment.
There is a major difference between a state organization with shared ownership and management through democratic processes and private business. The police have enough problems as an institution. Private vigilantes are going to be worse.
There is a major difference between an organization with shared ownership and management through democratic processes and an institution several decision-makers removed from that. It is not clear that private investigators without privileges of monopoly on violence should be worse.
Honestly, it looks like he isn't going about trying to work with the city very well. He also has videos on there of him lecturing public officials about how slow they are.
At the same time, he is trying to build a fusion generator, a science museum, an industrial space, and a few internet businesses that seem to need a secure facility. The planning commission probably has no idea what to do with him, and it doesn't sound like he is employing very many people from the local community. If I were on that city council, I would also be skeptical of the rich guy who bought a warehouse to play around but not actually run any serious business.
The "benforbars" site has all the hallmarks of a free-energy nutjob complete with comic sans font and MSpaint images.
Between that and the tweet whining about how hard email is to set up (!) this dude isn't qualified to run a Subway franchise, certainly not multiple internet companies.
I went through 6 months of his tweets and, yeah, he either doesn't have a grip on reality, has some sort of mental health issue, or is just constantly trying to run some angle.
- Yup, the free energy fonts and conspiratorial claims about video of his fusion reactor being suppressed
- It looks like he bought a bunch of people's property for pennies on the dollar, then raised funds from those same people to return their goods to them, then had them trucked across the country in shipping containers to be dropped at this derelict 'warehouse'.
- He claims to be solo creating a viable fusion reactor, which appears to be one of the umpteen intended uses of this warehouse
- Wonders why the town council isn't trying to help him, when in one of his own tweets admits that he didn't even bother to attend the meeting that was going to hear his issue.
- Thinks snipers are stealing from him.
- Apparently held a man at gunpoint
- Alleges, openly on the internet, that he's storing all sorts of valuable equipment and music media at this warehouse while admitting he isn't even in the state a good chunk of the time
- Tried to run for mayor of Provo, UT (population 117k) so he could "disincorporate the city"
- the whole benforbars thing
- Complaining about the inability to install minecraft on anything other than a linux machine (?)
You still don’t see it?! Stop with the defensive attitude and just listen. There is value in listening to what is going on around you. Put your ego aside and realize that at least some of what is occurring is not just someone else’s fault.
How can I run a serious business if I can't use the warehouse I bought?
Why can't I use it? Because the city won't let me.
I'm not the only one. This guy, Garland Trice, had his building demolished by the city because he failed to repair it. Why did he fail to repair it? Because the city would not give him permits.
It's SO RIDICULOUS here!
They've closed down the movie theater because they wanted to bring in their own theater. They drove a crypto mining facility away. They ran a tire recycler out of town...
If I hired 50 people, what would they do with no place to work?
I don't know much about this town, but I will say that your approach of yelling at people won't work. It rarely does. My suggestion is that you at least act like you care about their concerns. Go to their meetings. Even a few that are unrelated to your building permits. When their offices are open, go to ask them what they need to hear from you. Be nice. Ask people what they want. Make them feel comfortable. Be prepared to say "sorry" a lot.
Politics in small towns is about relationships. You need to build them if you want to build anything else. There's a reason you got this building for a deep discount: it's going to cost you a lot of time to get anything done. You didn't pay a lot of money for this building, and that was for a reason: you're going to have to pay in other resources.
Alternatively, if you're going to yell, you need to back it up with some persuasion. In this case, legal threats from actual lawyers (no pulling a C&D letter off the internet and changing a few things - you need your threats to be legit). That is going to get expensive very quickly, but it may work - small towns don't have a lot of legal resources and neither do their residents. The guy whose building got demolished for not doing disallowed repairs probably has a big payout waiting if he sues.
Yeah seems like it's all over the place, but certainly doesn't seem like the city is doing its job when there are multiple break-ins in short period of time of 1 property.
So? That's just encouraging people to assist the police when they can, which is what responsible people should be doing anyway. If you don't like criminals going to jail, that's a separate issue entirely.
Have you been screened for assholery? I feel like making a mental health diagnosis on the basis of real estate investments is a mistake that one could make in those circumstances.
Watch a couple of the YouTube videos on the other side of some of the links posted above. The guy seems very intelligent and genuinely nice. It’s also clear that he needs to seek mental healthcare.
Your comment is flamebait, but I'll respond anyway.
We can get a sense of where people like to live based on where they are leaving and where they are going. Of the five fastest-growing cities in America by absolute numbers, one is governed by a Democrat, one by an Independent, and three by Republicans:
Edit: I know it breaks etiquette to complain about downvotes, but this comment is not just material fact, it's my everyday lived reality. It's not safe to walk outside at night anymore on my block thanks to underfunded police and permissive progressive judges. I hear gunshots that I never heard before. The open drug use problem's getting worse, and schools have gotten way more dangerous for kids. Someone got stabbed on my street this weekend. The political cause and effect are clear. If that annoys you, bite me.
All cities are predominantly democrat mayors, so if it's the same fraction of "dangerous" cities, then it suggests the mayor isnt the source of the issue.
I found one that seemed too good to be true. a 220,000 sqft metal warehouse and office complex on 17 acres. I thought the price was a typo at $375k.The agent assured me that the price was correct, and I flew out to see the place.
It was in a little town called Pine Bluff, Arkansas.
I offered about 3/4 what they were asking, and they accepted the offer.
Fast forward 2 1/2 years, and I've had nothing but problems. Break in after break in. Can't work through the red tape with the city so my warehouse sits empty. It feels like they are actively working against myself and other entrepreneurs I talk to. At least 2 others who bought buildings and tried to open businesses left after getting nowhere.
Maybe I'm daft, but I ended up buying about 75 more properties here... all surprisingly cheap.
The town is killing me though. I haven't seen my kids very much lately - I don't think it's safe enough for them. I'm probably going to be moving back to Utah in the next couple of months because it's just too much out here.