The Right to Have a Peaceful Life in a Quiet Subdivision

Posted on by Audrey Spalding

Greenberg's yard art. Photo by the Post-Dispatch
Lewis Greenberg's yard art. Photo from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

A Ballwin-area retired art teacher was sentenced to jail time on Monday for non-compliance with two city ordinances. The ordinance offender, Lewis Greenberg, is charged with littering and storing hazardous materials.

The photo above is of Greenberg’s offense. He maintains that the structures in front of, around, and behind his house are art. Although art isn’t easy, these structures do look like abstract sculpture. The tangle of wood and metal, Greenberg told the Post-Dispatch, represents the Holocaust.

Greenberg’s neighbors, however, don’t appreciate his yard art. And, they haven’t liked it for a long time. In 2007, a woman from the area blogged: “OK, so where does Greebergs right trump the neighbors right to have a peaceful life in a quiet subdivision?”

Writes a commenter on the most recent Post-Dispatch article, about Greenberg’s sentencing:

If he wants a yard full of junk – then he can move out in the country where there are no rules. In a town and a subdivision where there ARE rules – he is BREAKING THE LAW and it needs to go….

Well, not quite. Greenberg’s art is on his property. He isn’t breaking a law just because what he has built on his property is unusual and doesn’t quite fit in with the Ballwin-area aesthetic. There is no right to uniformity.

Some neighborhoods do have codes, such as the one enforced in Shaw, that can limit what individuals can do with their property. It appears that, although the City of Ballwin has an extensive housing code, Greenberg’s neighborhood doesn’t have a rule to protect itself against his abstract yard art. Instead, the city has charged him with littering and storing hazardous materials — charges that seem like a stretch.

A survey of the Ballwin City Code reveals that the term “litter” refers to substances that could injure a person’s feet or car tires, trash and debris, earth left from an excavation, and traffic obstructions. Clearly, Greenberg’s lawn art doesn’t fall into the first, third, or fourth definitions of litter. And, although commenters hasten to compare his art to junk, can items strategically placed in order to construct sculptures on a person’s private property really be classified as trash?

As for the hazardous materials charge, it could be argued that children could run onto Lewis’ property and hurt themselves. However, unlike a person keeping dangerous animals on their property, if anyone hurts themselves on Greenberg’s property, it is entirely that person’s fault. Furthermore, if a person did hurt themselves while on Greenberg’s property, that person could attempt to find recourse through the court system. It’s not the city of Ballwin’s place to stop low-risk accidents from occurring through prior restraint. If it were, the city should immediately crack down on the construction of swimming pools.

I suspect that the neighborhood’s problem with Greenberg’s lawn art is not one of danger, but one of annoyance. It is unfortunate that the City of Ballwin is claiming to protect the safety of “the children” in an effort to censor Greenberg. Instead of reacting in this negative way, the annoyed neighbors could have realized what Mr. Plumbean and his neighbors realized:

My house is me and I am it. My house is where I like to be and it looks like all my dreams.

Fewer Missourians Employed in Movie Industry Than Before Film Tax Credits Began

Posted on by Christine Harbin

Last month, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy published a press release stating that fewer people are now employed in the movie industry in Michigan than before the state began to provide tax credits to filmmakers:

“Film incentive supporters often point to particular jobs generated by the program’s subsidies as evidence of its success,” [Mackinac Center Fiscal Policy Analyst James] Hohman said. “But the reality is that the state is redistributing millions of taxpayers’ dollars to one industry that happens to be employing fewer people.”

Unfortunately, this trend holds true for Missouri, as well.

Using the state cross-industry estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, I isolated the “motion picture and sound recording industries” category (NAICS code 512) for Missouri, from years 2002 to 2009. Using the 2002 Economic Census, I isolated this information for 1997. (I was unable to find this data for 1998 to 2001 online, but I will continue to look.)

Average Employment Film Industry

There were 4,143 people in Missouri employed in this category in 1997, and 3,949 in 2009. This means that more people were employed in the industry in Missouri before the state began offering targeted tax credits in 1998.

To further illustrate this decline in movie-related jobs in Missouri, I downloaded Industry Information by NAICS Sectors from the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center website. I isolated the following occupations: “Film and Video Editors” (OCC_CODE: 27-4032), “Actors” (OCC_CODE: 27-2011), “Producers and Directors” (OCC_CODE: 27-2012 and 34056), and “Camera Operators” (OCC_CODE: 27-4031, 34026, 89713). This produced the following graph:

Film Employment by Occupation

  • “Film and Video Editors”  increased, but only marginally. This occupation rose from 130 in 1997 to 300 in 2009.

  • The “Actors” category decreased most significantly. This occupation employed 1,540 Missourians in 1999, and 700 in 2009, which represents a decline of 54 percent. The lowest number of actors employed was 430, in 2003.

  • The number of “Producers and Directors” peaked at 1,170 in 1998, and didn’t return to this level until 2009.

  • “Camera Operators” neither increased nor decreased significantly during this period.

The data show that the film industry in Missouri hasn’t experienced significant job growth as a consequence of film tax credits. In fact, the number of Missourians employed in the film industry has decreased. Why, then, has the Missouri state government spent approximately $13 million over the last 10 years on this program? Why are there continued calls for expanding this program?

St. Louis Follows Kansas City by Moving Forward on Privatizing Animal Shelter

Posted on by David Stokes

The Suburban Journals has an updated piece on where the city of St. Louis stands with its animal shelter. According to the story, the city has learned from Kansas City that privatization can work in this area:

“The nonprofit groups appear to have worked well in other cities of our size, and this was kind of the route that they wanted to explore first,” Hane said.

Kansas City is among the cities where an outside group has taken control, Hane said.

The city deserves credit for its willingness to go with privatization here, but I don’t understand the favoring of a nonprofit over a for-profit model:

A veterinarian with extensive experience with animal welfare groups has proposed an alternative. He wants to run a for-profit operation at the Gasconade shelter – a proposal that runs counter to the city’s wishes.

I am not saying the for-profit idea should trump the nonprofit, just that the choice should be made according to who can best provide the necessary services, rather than whether the operation hopes to earn a profit. (The fact that the vet who wants to run a for-profit shelter was a little late in submitting his proposal should not be a big deal.) After all, the privatized shelter in Kansas City is run by a veterinarian, and is nominally a for-profit enterprise — although I think it operates in more of a gray area. I really doubt the vets who run the shelter are making a large profit doing their amazing work in caring for lost, abused, and neglected animals.

As a dog lover with great memories of Harvey, Casey, Marleigh, and other dogs my family and I have had, I love seeing the city realize that there options exist outside of the government for providing this necessary service. It is also great to see one big  Missouri city learning from another.

Rent-Seeking Snow Cone Stands Wage Fight to the Stain

Posted on by David Stokes

We have in O’Fallon, Ill., a rare example where the government gets it right — at least, so far. Two snow cone firms are engaged in a rather stupid fight over who has a permit to operate a stand at a bowling alley. The Belleville News-Democrat has the story here. The city seems to have made some minor mistake by generating two permits for a stand where the competitors think there should be just one. Instead of allowing the market and competition to work, the competitors want the city to outlaw the other stand. The city is taking the correct response to the dispute:

“The city doesn’t want to have to get between them,” Zoning and Planning Department head Ted Shekell said. “Let the best snow cone win.”

It is nice to see a planning and zoning official who understands that their role, if there is to be one, should be limited. But I do love the story and the dispute. I’ll let my friend “D,” who sent it to me, sum up all the great stuff included in one small story:

The story has it all. Misuse of needless licensing to stifle competition, a b.s. argument about protecting jobs, and sno-cones.

I can fairly claim to be more knowledgeable about the machinations of the snow cone oligopoly than most bloggers. I hope, for the sake of capitalist enterprise in the Metro East, that they experience a record heat wave this summer and both stands have a blow-out year — provided they only serve authentic Rio Syrup in their cones.

The snow cone market is highly variable and dependent on both season and weather. The obvious goal is to keep fixed costs extremely low and then the variable costs sort of take care of themselves. Sort of the exact opposite of the utility business model. If it is 102 degrees in July, trust me that people will pay just about any price for a snow cone. Unless, of course, some jerk in city government gives permission for someone else to also operate a stand nearby. Just who does O’Fallon think it is, that it refuses to prevent someone from operating a competing business? If governments at every level started acting like this, the next thing you know we’d be responsible for our own health care. …

P.S.: Here’s a link to the movie reference in the title of this blog entry.

SWAT Raids vs. Military Raids

Posted on by John Payne

A commenter on this Show-Me Daily post about SWAT raids wondered how much worse military raids in Afghanistan might be compared to SWAT raids in this country. An Army officer writing to Radley Balko suggests that it is actually easier to obtain permission for a SWAT raid in America than a military raid in a war zone like Afghanistan, and that SWAT teams here use more aggressive tactics:

I am a US Army officer, currently serving in Afghanistan. My first thought on reading this story is this: Most American police SWAT teams probably have fewer restrictions on conducting forced entry raids than do US forces in Afghanistan.

For our troops over here to conduct any kind of forced entry, day or night, they have to meet one of two conditions: have a bad guy (or guys) inside actively shooting at them; or obtain permission from a 2-star general, who must be convinced by available intelligence (evidence) that the person or persons they’re after is present at the location, and that it’s too dangerous to try less coercive methods. The general can be pretty tough to convince, too. (I’m a staff liason, and one of my jobs is to present these briefings to obtain the required permission.)

Generally, our troops, including the special ops guys, use what we call “cordon and knock”: they set up a perimeter around the target location to keep people from moving in or out,and then announce their presence and give the target an opportunity to surrender. In the majority of cases, even if the perimeter is established at night, the call out or knock on the gate doesn’t happen until after the sun comes up.

Oh, and all of the bad guys we’re going after are closely tied to killing and maiming people.

What might be amazing to American cops is that the vast majority of our targets surrender when called out.

I don’t have a clear picture of the resources available to most police departments, but even so, I don’t see any reason why they can’t use similar methods.

I can’t personally vouch for anything this officer claims about Army protocol, but if what he claims is true, it’s very disturbing.

Privatizing the Saint Louis City Water Division

Posted on by David Stokes

Yesterday, we released the lastest Show-Me Institute case study, about the potential for privatization of the St. Louis city water division. We officially unveiled it on The McGraw Show, on KTRS The Big 550 AM. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Monsieur Milhaven for that invitation. I had a lot of fun on the program, and I appreciate all the people who phoned in with questions.

I have two goals with this case study. First, to get the city to consider the gains it could realize by privatizing the water division, which is the only one of the three traditional utilities served by a public agency in St. Louis city or county. All three — water, gas and electric — are provided by private companies in St. Louis County, while gas and electric are privately provided in the city. (Kirkwood and Eureka are exceptions in the county.)

The other goal, equally important in my mind, is to convince the city of St. Louis to install water meters. It is nothing short of insane that the city still charges via flat-rate billing for residences. The only good thing about not having moved to meters yet — decades after most other large cities did so — is that the city now has the opportunity to skip using regular meters and move directly to electronic meters that don’t involve meter readers. Maybe that was the secret plan all along. …

The work in this study could just as easily be applied to Kansas City, and especially Springfield.

Re: [Shawtalk] Historic Code

Posted on by Christine Harbin

I live in the Shaw neighborhood in Saint Louis, and I subscribe to the area’s email listserv. Last week, a subject of much debate was the Shaw Neighborhood Local Historic District’s long list of Use, Rehabilitation and New Construction Standards, which describes which architectural details, roof shapes, roof materials, etc., that residents are allowed to use.

When a person walks through a neighborhood like Shaw that features aesthetic continuity, he sees only part of the story; historic codes like those in the Shaw neighborhood entail many unseen costs and negative unintended consequences, which I will attempt to enumerate in this post. For these reasons, historic building codes discourage the practical use of existing structures — the very thing they are supposed to encourage.

  1. Historic codes violate private property rights.
     
    They restrict individuals from altering, adding to, or demolishing the buildings that they own. By purchasing an older property, an individual assumes the risk that it could lose value in the future. Property owners have an incentive to maintain their investment, because otherwise the value of the property will decline.

  2. Mandating aesthetics should not be the role of government.
     
    Ensuring that a building is structurally sound is one thing, as David Stokes has written previously, but mandating how a building looks aesthetically is another. In my opinion, individuals should be free to enter into voluntary agreements of this nature, but only as a private matter (e.g., neighborhood covenants). I disagree that it should be the role of the government to ensure that the block “works visually,” as one person writes on Shawtalk:

    There is something to be said for architectural cognizance-for having the entire block look so different that it no longer works visually. Sort of like wearing a plaid shirt with flowered pants and a striped jacket-one can do it but it looks silly.

    Furthermore, mandating and regulating this conformity is largely redundant, because the majority will not choose to make egregious violations of social convention, such as paint their houses hot pink. As an analogous example, there is no law against cutting in line, but people choose to wait their turn out of social convention. People choose to wear jeans because many other people also wear them. Businessmen and politicians wear dark suits because their peers and colleagues do.

  3. Historic codes increase the cost of the materials required to rehabilitate a house.
     
    A homeowner has to search for windows, doors, and millwork that fit the conditions of the code. There can also be additional costs for compliance, such as, say, the need to build a different fence because the one you have is an inch too short. As a negative consequence of this increase in cost, homeowners have less of a marginal incentive to repair their property.

    Tangentially, supporters of historic credits argue that the regulations benefit the local economy, because the code-appropriate items are often made regionally or locally. This argument fails because it ignores the unseen. The resources that are devoted to making code-approved materials could be put toward other uses. It’s possible that local manufacturers do not possess a comparative advantage in manufacturing windows and doors, and that they could manufacture other products more efficiently.

  4. Historic codes discourages people from making technological improvements to their home, such as upgrading the energy efficiency.
     
    How new can something be and still be considered historic? Is modern plumbing historic? Is central air historic? Is an Internet hookup historic?

  5. Housing codes are passed under the guise of protecting quality, but homeowners have other avenues of redress.
     
    Another commenter observes:

    It also plays into safety issues as some people would do very flimsy and faulty work in an effort to sell the house without regard for how well the job was done.

    This is one reason that the judicial system exists. If a carpenter does flimsy and faulty work, the homeowner can take him to court. Furthermore, if a carpenter does flimsy and faulty work, the homeowner would discourage his friends and neighbors from hiring him. The carpenter would lose business as a consequence.

  6. Historic codes like Shaw’s favor home ownership over renting; cementing such preferences through policy also should not be the role of government.
     
    The Shaw Neighborhood Historic District Rehabilitation and New Construction Standards explicitly state the following:

    it is the intent of this ordinance to decrease the density of housing units within the neighborhood without demolishing buildings. Whenever feasible, buildings should remain with the same amount or less living units as the building was originally designed.

    […] Buildings should not be converted from single-family to multi-family. Two-family structures should not be converted to more than two units. Four family buildings should not be converted to more than six units with no units having less than six hundred net rentable square feet.

    First, this code prohibits a person from subdividing her property. This means that she cannot lease out her property and receive rental income. Second, this policy restricts renters and people of lower income from moving into the neighborhood.

    Through this policy, the government favors home ownership over renting. Owning a home is a significant investment that isn’t suitable for all individuals; by renting, many people who can’t afford the investment commitment and risk of a home can live within their means.

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