Tag Archives: regulation

Rebuilding San Francisco?

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San Francisco is moving to alter certain requirements and political priorities in order to increase residential housing construction. San Francisco even has changed some actual rules so developers can build market-rate apartments with fewer requirements to provide affordable housing. One project coming out of these moves is this one:

In what would be the city’s most ambitious residential development in several years, local property developer Bayhill Ventures last month announced plans for a 71-story rental tower in San Francisco’s ailing financial district.

Cabrini Green come to San Fran, degentrifying the financial district? Only with the critical difference that this area will have even fewer police with which to enforce laws and keep folks safe than Chicago provided Cabrini Green.

It’s not certain that that outcome will be realized. However, the construction comes inside an established environment of a reduced police force; laws decriminalizing, among others, drugs and shoplifting; and prosecutors reluctant to prosecute. (Yes, I’m aware that San Francisco residents recalled an especially egregious non-prosecuting prosecutor, but his replacement is better only compared with that low bar.)

We’ll see.

Heat Pump Efficacy

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I’ve mentioned earlier the level of energy efficacy of heat pumps. Here is an example of the level of fiscal efficacy of heat pumps. The fronted lede:

A two-year project to convert a public housing building to an electrically powered heat pump system is nearing completion on the Upper West Side. The 58-year-old 20-story tower at 830 Amsterdam Avenue (100th Street), part of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) Frederick Douglass Houses development, is being retrofitted to provide heating, cooling, and hot water for residents—and to serve as a possible template for converting more of the 2,410 buildings NYCHA maintains citywide.

The strewn about and buried lede:

The $28 million project….
…
…to replace the aging boilers at 830 Amsterdam Avenue with a heat pump system, called variable flow refrigerant, that would deliver heat, hot water, and cooling to the building’s 159 units.

According to my third-grade arithmetic, and using up all my fingers and toes, that works out to $176,100 per unit.

Then there’s this:

If the 830 Amsterdam project is deemed successful, it could be repeated at other buildings operated by NYCHA or private landlords.

Successful by what measure? That’s certainly not a financial success.

Even accounting for the intrinsic fiscal inefficiency of government projects, this is an expensive template; more, it’s just foolish and negligently wasteful. And disastrous for the city’s taxpayers and for those private landlords. And that’s on top of the city’s taxpayers already seeing truly essential services, like policing and facilities for homeless residents (however inefficiently this one is done by a government), severely financially curtailed in favor of another virtue-signal, housing for illegal aliens in the sanctuary city.

Convenience and the FBI

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Stewart Whitson, late of the FBI and currently Foundation for Government Accountability Legal Director, decried in his Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed, a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau effort to completely eliminate the ability of credit-reporting companies to sell credit-header data to law enforcement agencies, including to the FBI. Those header data include a variety of identifying material but, as Whitson was careful to emphasize, no financial information.

This, actually, is one of the few things the CFPB would get right were it to follow through.

In support of his plaint, Whitson related an 8-year-old incident in which he and a partner were conducting surveillance on a suspect and observing his contact with a third individual. Whitson bragged about being able to use credit-header data—but no financial data, mind you—to contact that third individual, arrange a meeting, and through that, foil the suspect’s planned terrorist attack.

Without the credit-header data, we might not have been able to contact the occupant for a while, giving [the suspect] more time to carry out his attack.

Whitson bragged about FBI success with such purchases and then put his disingenuous question.

I worked on hundreds of terrorism-related investigations at the FBI, all of which relied on credit-header data. Why doesn’t the CFPB want law enforcement to have quick access to this information?

Perhaps because the purchases are, at bottom, violations of our Constitution’s inconvenient 4th Amendment, regardless of their convenient-to-government speed.

How inconvenient it is, after all, to follow the Constitution’s requirement for warrants before searches occur. That the FBI got lucky—or even that purchasing personally identifying data (the lack of financial data being a cynically offered red herring here) materially helped—in no way legitimizes the FBI’s bypassing Constitutional requirements.

Get the warrants. If it often takes too long to get them, and that’s a legitimate beef, work on streamlining the process through the political branches of our government: the House and Senate. The Executive Branch does not get to skip the hard work or usurp political branch authorities.

Not even when its FBI claims that anxious and enthusiastic mothers at school boards are akin to domestic terrorists or that traditional Catholics are behaving suspiciously.

“Emergency Powers”

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Progressive-Democratic President Joe Biden has invoked the Defense Production Act of 1950 as an excuse to pour more of our tax dollars into his global warming foolishness. He’s using the Act to pump $169 million into nine projects across 15 sites nationwide in an effort to accelerate electric heat pump manufacturing. There are some serious problems with this. In no particular order:

Biden claims that heat pumps only use electricity; they don’t burn coal or oil or natural gas. That’s a disingenuously narrow view of the situation. Heat pumps do use only electricity at their point of use. However, that electricity comes from somewhere—primarily coal- and natural gas-fired electricity generating stations. At the times the heat pumps are needed the most—in the depths of heating and cooling seasons—”green” energy sources generally aren’t available: at night, when the sun doesn’t shine; when the sky is overcast, and sunlight is limited; when the wind isn’t blowing enough or is blowing too strongly. This is a shortfall that’s disastrously exacerbated by Biden’s open effort to destroy our hydrocarbon-sourced energy industry. Oil-, natural gas-, and coal-fired power plants are reliable, efficient, and don’t care about sun or wind.

Further, heat pumps get increasingly inefficient where temperatures are routinely cold and where temperatures are routinely hot. They work, after all, by trying to pump heat (hence the name of the devices) from inside the house to the hot outside for cooling, or by trying to pump heat from the cold outside into the house for heating.

Another problem is that the Defense Production Act was passed to support government-managed manufacturing (for good or ill) during times of conflict. We’re not at war with anybody now, and haven’t been for a few years—not since the fight against terrorists in Afghanistan, when Biden made his panic-ridden exit from that. Using the Act as an excuse for funding global warming-related matters is an abuse of the Act that warrants its heavy modification, if not outright rescission.

Yet another problem flows from Biden’s claim that his invocation is to boost domestic production of these heat pumps, especially by domestic manufacturers.

These awards will grow domestic manufacturing, create good-paying jobs, and boost American competitiveness in industries of the future.

Yet he’s pouring those millions into companies like Copeland, Honeywell International, Mitsubishi Electric, and York International Corporation.

Mitsubishi is a Japanese company, headquartered in Tokyo. York is wholly owned by Johnson Controls, and Johnson, while claiming to be an American company, is headquartered and domiciled in Cork, Ireland. That’s a lot of “domestic” manufacturing money—our tax dollars—going to foreign companies. Even if they do the actual manufacturing in the US, they’ll be taking off their (significant) cuts in Tokyo and Cork on the way by.

Customer Choice

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New Mexico’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham has gotten to be enacted rules mandating battery cars and trucks in New Mexico.

Starting in calendar year 2026, 43% of all new passenger cars and light-duty trucks shipped to New Mexico auto dealerships by national auto manufacturers must be zero emission vehicles. Similarly, beginning in calendar year 2026, 15% of all new commercial heavy-duty trucks shipped to New Mexico auto dealerships by national auto manufacturers must be zero emission vehicles. These percentages gradually increase over time.

“Increase over time:” by 2031, those 43% rise to 82%. By 2034, the minima for Ford F-250, Ford F-450, and tractor-trailer type trucks rise to 55%, 75%, and 40%, respectively.

Disingenuously, Lujan Grisham says regarding those limits on choice,

The adoption of these rules is a victory for customer choice….

That’s the Progressive-Democrat’s definition of customer choice: the State taking on the burden of choosing, thereby relieving its subjects citizens of that burden.

No. I decline to use Lujan Grisham’s Newspeak Dictionary. I’ll stay with American English dictionaries and their definitions of “customer choice:” us ordinary Americans acting on our own selections.

That choice is clear, too, for the good citizens of New Mexico, who’ve already made theirs: less than 1% of the 650,000 vehicles registered in New Mexico, despite tax credits, are EVs. Those good citizens do, however, need to select better at the next ballot box.