HOUSING & TECH: Miami, Austin, and the Imperial City -- and Remote
Some reflections on the great internal migration and how we really ought to blame China
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What follows is my assessment of where the future will be built.
Every time has its go, go, go era and with it the debaucherous city.
Think New York in the ‘80s. Miami in the ‘80s. Is it now Miami again? I wonder…
In New York, cocaine was used as a performance enhancing drug. In Miami? Well, it’s hardly known for its productivity. Florida, as Congressman Matt Gaetz once put it to me, is “God’s waiting room.” You don’t usually do your best work waiting for the Grim Reaper on an oxygen tank watching CNN or Fox News. To quote comedian Jerry Seinfeld, “My parents didn't want to move to Florida, but they turned sixty and that's the law.”
Much digital ink and signaling has been written about people moving from New York and California to Texas and Florida. My personal favorite are those who voted for insane or inane policies in California and New York before decamping to Texas or Florida. Then again, I guess this is everyone’s favorite if we are being honest. One man’s locust is another man’s refugee, I suppose.
What is it about human nature that seeks to ruin the places it lives in before moving on to the next location?
Why is it that cities are the be all and end all of professional life?
The general depopulating of America is a phenomenon totally underexplored.
So too is its densification.
We might ask what extent the major cities act as IQ shredders and how the lifestyle liberalism of these places is not conducive to the good life. Perhaps we will on a subsequent post.
We might also ask how we might get the best collective bang for our cities’ cost on national fertility.
IQ is a precious resource and it should be directed to matters of national import where possible. We might discuss what that looks like in subsequent posts.
China, China, China!
It’s my contention that much of the success of Austin and Miami as alternatives to San Francisco and New York can be seen as follows: Housing is (relatively) cheap, taxes are light (because services are nonexistent) and neither Austin nor Miami have a Chinese problem.
How cheap are we talking? How Chinese are we talking?
Well, consider that home prices in New York (#1) and San Fransisco (#2) have a premium of 508.4% and 252.8% of the national average.
Both New York and San Francisco arguably have a governance problem that stems from their unaffordability, which, in turn, comes from both a city-wide unwillingness to build and a deluge of foreign (often highly corrupt) capital buying up real estate largely for cash.
Nobody really knows how much foreign money is driving up these prices but there’s little doubt that it does. (Zillow had an ill fated attempt to mimic this terrible turn of events.)
Here’s one analysis that attempts to quantify it.
Housing markets are preferred destinations for foreign investors looking for yields, vacation homes or safe havens, or for those dodging tax restraints and corruption crackdowns in their home countries. But demand for U.S. homes from foreign investors, especially Chinese, pushes up home prices, exacerbating concerns over housing affordability, according to new research from Wharton.
House prices grew 8 percentage points more in U.S. zip codes with high foreign-born Chinese populations from 2012 to 2018, according to a paper titled “Global Capital and Local Assets: House Prices, Quantities, and Elasticities,” authored by Wharton doctoral student Caitlin Gorback and Wharton real estate professor Benjamin Keys.
“The big picture is we have an affordability crisis for housing in the cities where the jobs are,” Keys said. “One of the real tensions in the U.S. housing market is that the places that are seeing sharp job growth are not creating new housing quickly enough to accommodate that job growth.”
You shouldn't be able to poison the earth or enslave your people and then take that money and price people out but that’s exactly what has been happening.
We might also ask to what extent Chinese landlords in these (and other) cities capture local city government through corruption and then use their prowess to price the native people out. (See especially Emily Alpert Reyes and David Zahniser, “FBI Corruption Probe of L.A. City Hill Focuses on Downtown Development Boom,” L.A. Times, January 14, 2019).
When you consider that the Chinese state is increasingly investing in our downtown you might also wonder what role the Chinese play in stoking anti-white resentments through #BlackLivesMatter. Are riots good for the Chinese objective of taking over downtown America?
Let’s consider that Chinese officials are using the activist group to cause civil strife here.
Nor do the Chinese seem to be particularly ideological, favoring the Proud Boys through their donations. The Chinese even seem to use crowdfunding as their preferred vehicle for influence raising the question of foreign funding of street protests.
Destabilizing our downtowns while they move in opioids seems to be the Chinese modus operandi. It’s already worked so well at harming the American heartland where the Chinese own an ever increasing percentage of the land.
To what extent some of the anti-police politicians in major cities are actually Manchurian candidates is a difficult question to gage.
Chinese-born Gene Wu, a former prosecutor in Harris County who refused to prosecute any crimes before becoming a state representative, and Michelle Wu, born allegedly of Taiwanese immigrant parents in Chicago, have ties to human smuggling operations masquerading as immigrant right groups.
This aspect of the politics — of importing new client states and new slaves — is under explored but remains with us since the days of the ban on the importation of slaves.
The international threats facing our cities
There have been a coordinated effort on the part of the Chinese to make our cities unlivable and our borders insecure. This has been going on for a long, long time. The Economist notes the connections between black activists and Maoist radicals.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the two most vociferous activists opposing Clearview.AI — the facial recognition company I cofounded — are Freddie Martinez of Open The Government and Julie Mao of Mijente, both of whom are very closely involved in supporting law breaking in the U.S. (Martinez is, in point of fact, a law breaker himself.)
Martinez’s violent streak should expose him as having a conflict of interest when it comes to discussing law enforcement technology. Don’t people have a right to protect themselves from would be assailants? But Martinez’s penchant for brawling is actually an asset.
Martinez is very close to Loevy & Loevy, an anti-cop law firm which has extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from Chicago over alleged police wrongdoing. How close? Well, Loevy & Loevy has represented him repeatedly in his efforts against the police. Loevy & Loevy also represented the Lucy Parson Labs and Open The Government, both places Martinez has worked.
The recent uptick in murders in Chicago should be blamed precisely on those who make it hard for the cops to do their jobs. This headline says it all: “More people were murdered in Chicago in 2021 than have been since 1996.” If you make it harder to solve murders you become complicit in their cover up.
As with violent crime so too with illegal immigration. Julie Mao, a proud Chinese-American “from an immigrant background,” works to help illegal immigrants enter and stay in the US.
Mao, too, is deeply conflicted from weighing in. These groups should be shut down. Clearview initially attempted to subpoena these groups but backed down under pressure. A pity.
Neither group ever speaks about the Chinese social credit score which The Washington Post reports is being extended out from China to the rest of the world.
Of course how much this takeover of downtowns throughout America is a nation state objective and how much it’s a mob objective (or both) isn’t immediately clear. It may not even be clear to the activists who are waging the fight, or to the billionaires who are profiting off of it.
How exactly would we classify the role that Ukrainian-Israeli-Cypriot billionaire Ihor Kolomoyskyi played in looting and slum lording downtown Cleveland properties after he became its largest landowner? As Kolomoyskyi has ties to both the Knesset and the Kremlin it’s hard to be sure who he even serves but it certainly isn’t the US of A.
Interestingly none of the U.S. Senate candidates for Ohio has anything to say about this Israeli-Ukrainian-Cypriot theft, raising the question of how America first are they really? Have they even be asked?
Nerds like cheap housing because it enables them to live like nerds. In a way high rents are a kind of tax that takes them away from thinking seriously about serious problem. It sucks up mental energy and focus. Being a homeowner is really terrible. Stuff breaks. Nerds want to think about things other than necessity. They are already in the metaverse so does it really matter where you work from? Remote and distant is off a piece.
Families, too, like cheap housing. Steve Sailer lays this out in his affordable family formation discussion. The cheaper the housing the more likely the vote is to be Republican.
I think the homeschooling issue is another indication. Many suburban voters have essentially given up on public schools. As homeschooling grows support diminishes for property taxes to finance education. You don’t need to worry about living in an area with “good schools” if you homeschool your kids. The long term implications of this flight from public schools are hard to model but it seems doubtful that they’ll be good for the ageing, graying public school teacher.
Of course when we consider the mass internal migration it’s helpful to consider something else. How will the places changes when people leave? To some extent Trump turbocharged this mass movement of the transient rich by passing the Trump tax bill that made it difficult to write off state and local taxes.
There are certain things you aren’t allowed to say about who is moving where. Maybe the reason San Francisco did so well for so long is that it was so male. The gay culture can be seen then as extreme male. San Francisco continued to be even more childless. The future does not belong to the childless but the present sure does. And in the long run we are all dead anyway.
I advised a female friend of mine who was looking for a husband to move to San Francisco. She moved and within six months she was engaged.
In New York there are way fewer men than women and you see the hook up culture form there as you do on college campuses that are majority female. Everything is transitory. Everyone is on the take and on the make and on to the next thing.
Miami, like Brazil, is the destination of the future… and always will be.
Let’s be real about Miami. Nothing good has come out of it and nothing ever will. Miami is a city of contrasts and of conflicts of interest. Sure, it’s fun, but it’s not the sort of place where you invent the future.
It has always been a money laundering center. And indeed its latest turn to embracing crypto is the city embracing Russian, Chinese, and Latin American dark money. Miami is America’s Dubai. It’s the sunniest of places for the very shadiest of people.
The price of bitcoin is really an index of illegal activity. If it really were a hedge against inflation as its supporters claim why has it gone down when inflation is supposedly going up? These criminal aspects of crypto currency were clear even in the beginnings if a few of us nerds bothered to pay attention. I myself was seduced by the Gospel of Satoshi but now I see it for what it is: an effort to supplant the SWIFT system and de-dollarize the world. I see NFTs as a new form of money laundering, long well known in the art world.
Bitcoin is an attack on the dollar — just as Peter Thiel said it was before talking about how much he loves bitcoin and its founder. Not incidentally Peter threw a New Year’s Eve Party at his new home in Miami.
Miami is connecting itself with the global shadow economy but this time with a tech sheen. To be honest I suspect that this is really what a lot of fintech started off as. Not for nothing does Peter Thiel freely admit that post-9-11 PayPal could not have been built due to the financial regulations that followed.
How much of the PayPal mafia is an actual mafia remains to be seen but the tell is that they all feel very, very comfortable in Miami. It’s not just the taxes or the weather. Miami has their sort of people in it. I don’t know about you but I don’t strictly believe a lot of the stories about the early days of PayPal.
Who is fleecing who is the perennial question of Miami. Mayor Francis “Pay Me in Bitcoin” Suarez is the son of Mayor Xavier “I didn’t steal that 1997 election” Suarez. The elder Suarez and his allies rigged elections and escaped from being convicted but the election was overturned. (Yes, that does actually happen.)
Is the father like the son? I wonder. It’s not looking good.
Among Suarez’s patron is Moishe Mana, an Israeli “billionaire,” who has developed Wynwood in Miami.
(Many of the Cuban politicians we know often have very pro-Israel billionaire backers. The most obvious example is Senator Marco Rubio, who was backed by Paul Singer, the pro-Israel donor who was outsourcing American jobs to Israel. We could deeper into this by focusing on Norman Braman, Len Blavatnik, and Larry Ellison who gave to Rubio’s Super PAC. When Senator Robert Menendez was indicted on corruption his primary benefactors were none other than a who’s who of AIPAC.)
Mana’s subordinates were just charged with and pled guilty to evading taxes. He’s also implicated in the Hunter Biden art sales where a text exchange lays it all bare.
Are the Feds building a case against Mana? One wonders… For his part Suarez opposed Trump and as did his patron Mana.
How long Suarez-Mana can keep the grift going is anyone’s guess. Gotta keep the Miami hustle alive.
The conflicts of interests abound and Mayor Suarez is no exception. Bloomberg pointed out his recent role being hired at a private equity firm and a lobbyist firm.
Corben has also pointed out the incestuous relationship between Suarez and Mana.
A relationship that Suarez himself seems only too happy to highlight.
That name Billy Corben may sound familiar. He is the documentary filmmaker behind Cocaine Cowboys (2006) which argues that much of the Miami skyline owes its existence to all the cocaine flowing into the city. Corben’s trailer makes it clear.
In New York it is said the Italians built the city, the Irish ran the city, and the Jews owned the city. In Miami it’s much simpler: the criminals control the city. There are many sorts of criminals and Miami welcomes them all. (That was the hidden story of the Nathan Reiber whose criming through Canada and onto Miami led to the rise and fall of Surfside condominium complex.)
Miami will sell you a condo it knows might kill you. There are many things that might kill you and besides, you came to party or to retire and so you accept that you have a foot already in the grave. The real estate barons, whose cocaine cash origins have washed away like the sand of Miami Beach, have a new mark — the ageing, largely Jewish not exclusively gay venture capitalist.
OK, I, too, love a party though I doubt that I’d be invited at any of the gay ragers that David Blumberg or Keith Rabois allegedly throws. (I am, alas, a toxic heterosexual. Gays take a whiff and they know my straight ways are poisonous.)
But being a leader means governing not partying and not Ponzi scheming. This is what former police chief (and Cuban) Art Acevedo found when he tried to change things. Acevedo remains a friend and a public servant even if he did just take that job from CNN.
Is Suarez? Time will tell. He wouldn’t be the first Miami pol to be brought down on corruption now would he?
Austin is a place where they still allow people to build things, at least outside of city limits. At least in theory if not totally in practice.
Once described by Governor Rick Perry as the “blueberry in the tomato soup,” Austin is my sort of place. Keep Austin weird, they say, as the real estate prices make Austin conformist. “At least it isn’t San Francisco” should be the motto.
Austin is where we put our intelligence bureaucrats. For those looking closely Austin is a Russian town. It is a Russian town because Austin has a CIA installation nearby the less said about which the better. University of Texas-Austin gave us the earliest facial recognition work.
We can, however, talk about the curious case of Mr. Nate Paul, whose offices were recently raided by the FBI, and whose assets have been all but carved up and sold off, especially to Carr Properties, a sort of deep state real estate firm. Paul was heavily tied in with Attorney General Ken Paxton, who, if the reports are true, is under FBI investigation.
We could talk about Mayor Steve Adler, who is a sort of Princeton (read: deep State) Jewish guy who is the sort of Democrat that likes to make a deal. His father worked at CBS News back when it was a CIA front. Does it annoy me that Adler worked so closely with the Anti-Defamation League, itself a creature of Israeli intelligence? Sure does.
There are bigger problems at stake, though. Austin’s homeless problem is out of control.
The DMV — DC-Maryland-Virginia — is the American metropole.
Americans don’t like to think of ourselves as an empire but that’s what we are whether we like it or not. And empires have imperial cities which suck in resources. The richest counties in America are surrounding our capital.
I myself have found the pull, splitting time as I do between Northern Virginia, Texas, and California.
Drain the Swamp? Please. The Swamp is a hot tub not a sewer and it’ll drain you long before you can get around to draining it. You don’t really want a government that is subject to crazy swings. You want a continuance of government.
The solution isn’t some Bannonite “destroy the administrative state” but to make the administrative state better at achieving its goals.
No, they’ll be no shrinking government. The demands of our empire require government get bigger and get smarter—and faster. Our adversarial empires — China and Russia — are husbanding their nation’s data into the service of the state. Are we?
As we’ve become less religious we’ve come to believe less and less in the government’s ability to deliver what it promises. Maybe it’s because government occupies for us the place once found in religious rites.
All governments rest on shared beliefs. Undermine the belief, watch the credibility fall and with it the government. This is what serious governments do to one another.
We believe the money is real but it is real only to the extent that it pays for things. Government is real only to the extent it is effective. Thatcher called it the “smack of firm government.” It must make its presence known.
The US federal government is going to have to start thinking seriously about technology — who pays for it, how it is developed, and the like — or the cost overruns for the middle class will continue to plague it.
Northern Virginia’s newly elected governor, Glenn Youngkin, suggests the capture of the federal government by private equity.
If government should be run like a business what sort of business ought it to be run like? Private equity.
Youngkin isn’t alone. There’s Gina Raimondo, a former venture capitalist, who is now banning hostile companies at Commerce. Or Mark Warner, a venture capitalist, turned chair of Senate Intelligence.
Expect to see guidelines become rules for how private endowments can keep their tax advantaged status.
Governments can open frontiers: the American West, The Internet, genetics, space, telecommunication, wireless.
It remains to be seen how Glenn Youngkin governs but his transition provides an opportunity.
Will he deliver the Carlyle Group’s agenda? Or his own?
Would Youngkin beat Kamala Harris?
And what was up with Joe Biden having Thanksgiving at the home of Youngkin’s boss, David Rubensein?
These are the sorts of questions around the imperial court and they aren’t for everyone.
Move to the Imperial capital, my young man.
Remote
Of all these options the most promising is remote. It’s the most family and nerd friendly.
To make remote work you need to find the geniuses out there and press them into national service. The best remote location was Los Alamos, New Mexico and that led to the atomic age. You gotta keep the nerds from everybody else if you want the good stuff done. Admittedly that was much easier when everyone didn’t have wifi.
How shall you find them? The levels of detection are growing but allow me to suggest a few options.
I find before I meet people nowadays I do a full level forensic dive on them. I go to their LinkedIn. I google them, yes, but I go beyond the first few pages. I ignore their Wikipedia. I even occasionally — okay more than occasionally — do their genealogy. If I could get a DNA test I’d take it that too. Information, information, always information. Talent acquisition is an information game and information technology can address it.
Is this all-seeing eye creepy? Yes. But it is the only way I know how to find talent from the rough. Think of it as a “sorting hat.”
And let’s face it there are a lot of talented white kids who are bright and passed over. Some of these meritocrats end up in the clutches of foreign influence operations. They are the fallen. Some of these people are friends of mine so it’s doubly sad.
The smart kid who comes from the countryside or suburbs will come to hate the country that did not make room for him.
We need to encourage these smart elites not to leave behind their homes. I also suspect that the one policy objective the Middle Ages had seems to have it right — that of the aristocrats giving land to local elites.
We might consider doing that once we expropriate the Chinese-bought American land.
Let’s rehomestead America, starting in both the inner city and the American heartland.