Brave New World

So. A scientific study, by a UW human, has confirmed what chimps knew 15 years ago, namely, a) housing regulations add to the cost of housing, and b) Seattle has housing regulations up the kazoo. Now watch developers try to blur the distinction between housing regulations and general building regulations.

What can we learn from this study? In order to answer this important question in a way that will burn up my week's allotment of 666 words, I'm going to belabor an analogy: Suppose books were supplied in a new world the way housing is supplied in ours, and you wanted one.

You might think, "I'll just go to a library and see the book for free." But in this new world, libraries are to books what shelters are to homes. In our world, when you ask for a bed, you get a mat -- the bare minimum. So, in our imaginary world, if you want a book you get one with a front cover, a title page, a reverse to the title page with the copyright date and ISBN number, and a back cover. If you complain, the library kicks you out for being a troublemaker.

So then you figure you should go to a bookstore. This world has book agents, instead. The book agent will take you out to look at books in the market. You'll see a lot of books that aren't really what you were looking for. All the books your book agent takes you to see will be too expensive. They'll cost about 10 to 20 times what you thought a book should cost. You'll want to know why.

A professor at the UW will do a study. He'll learn that books are so expensive because there are so many book authoring regulations.

For example, all authors have to apply for a permit to write a book. The permit won't be approved for a year or two, while regulators verify that the book will not violate any paper-use regulations. Of course there will be a synopsis, but that will have to run by the general public for comments. If any comments are received the comment period may be extended. If no comments are received in the time provided, the comment period may be extended.

The proposed book must comply with the state's Book Writing Management Act of 1990. During the comment period anyone may file a Petition for Review of the synopsis with the Hearing Board established by the act. The Hearing Board will study the proposal for the new book and determine how it fits among existing books.

Too many books on the same topic would be prohibited, as violating density provisions. In our world, Amazon.com lists over 9,000 murder mysteries. In the new world that would be trimmed down to a manageable 90. Books on altogether new topics may be prohibited because those topics have been designated as critical areas needing to be conserved for future generations of writers and readers.

Low supply will drive up prices. Readers will be forced to rent rather than buy. But the book writing regulations will also limit the availability of books to rent and drive the cost of renting up. Rich people will mitigate the high cost of renting books by joining together in condobiblia associations to purchase rental books. The rest of us will have to settle for renting cut-up pieces of used books. For what in our world you would pay for a brand new copy of War and Peace, in the new world you could afford to rent a chapter per month of a used copy. You'll finish the second epilogue in 2028.

You might decide you'd rather confine yourself to alternative street papers sold by homeless people. But in the new world vendors will be forced to apply for permits, increasing the cost of your weekly from $1 to out-of-reach, and the street paper will not exist.

In other words, the new world will look like Tacoma.

Criminal Song Requests Rampant

Last week, the P-I ran a story titled "Solutions sought at crime-plagued Steinbrueck Park". The story had a picture of a shirtless man bending forward talking to a woman holding a map. It looks like he's giving her directions, but the caption says he was a homeless man and was persistently yelling at the woman, who was a German tourist. It said he was demanding that she sing a song for him on his guitar.

The article also had a nice chart, which showed how the number of park notices handed out in the park have increased 1997. It said that according to the police there has been an increase in the total amount of crime, which has been mostly non-violent and similar to that of other cities!


[Above: Other charts that the P-I did NOT use tell a radically different story, however.]

The title says solutions are sought. Let's solve these problems in this column!

The problems: The yelling man. An increase in park notices, and in arrests for mostly nonviolent crime, similar to that of other cities! (Aren't Sodom and Gomorrah other cities?) Plus, homeless people coming back to the park, even after they've been told to leave and not come back! Plus, how does a homeless man get a guitar, when he should be saving every dime to move into a room? I'd like to be able to lie around all day shirtless, making Germans sing for me. Wouldn't we all?


[New Orleans: Yet another "other city" we don't want to be!]

We need to know a cause, and one look at the chart and I knew what the cause was. Me!

That's right. I stopped being homeless at the end of 1997, and thereby deprived the streets of my good example! None of this trouble ever happened when I was on the streets. People even wrote it on their backpacks. WWWD: What Would Wes Do? Would Wes take his shirt off and tell a lost German to sing for him on his guitar? Duhhh... No! No, he would not! So we won't either!

OK, that was today's irony quota. Ha, ha, no, that was just stupid.

Let's try to find some other "real" or "intelligent" explanations. I mean, this is serious business. "I want to hear 99 Luftballons! Now!"

My first clue as to what has been going on was to look back at when the Parks Exclusion law was passed. Hmm. It was passed in 1997. Aha! So the number of park notices has dramatically increased ever since there was a law to give them out! Damn those homeless people, getting laws written against them!

Then I remembered that Real Change, the people who print this crap, are putting on a book sale and that hundreds of books will be sold at Trinity United Methodist Church in Ballard at the end of the month. As a result the office is packed with donated books. I cracked one open. It was a psych book by some Dr. Phil or Dr. Jesus. I opened it to a random page and it said if something someone does annoys you, you might think how their actions mirror yours.

So the idea is, we look at the yelling shirtless man, and ask if we ever did anything to him or people like him that was similar. That might be the key to his behavior.

And I had it! Throughout the 90s, we took almost away all the public benches downtown, and made it so he couldn't lie on the ones that were left. In 1994 we passed a law that prohibited people him from sitting or lying on downtown sidewalks, and by 1997 that law was out of litigation and began to be enforced, by armed men.

[Right: "Cease lying down, or I shall be compelled to take all appropriate measures!"]

So we want to create laws that use the police to yell at the homeless for us and drive them from "our" sidewalks and benches into parks. Then we want to moan that there's a homeless man at Steinbrueck Park who drives tourists from "his" end of the park to the other.

The solution: Arrest the mirror?