Your Silence shows your Consent.
It is easy to hope for the best, when you are prepared for the worst.
Thursday, October 15, 2015
Thursday 10-15-15
Texas Rancher Fights Back Against BLM Land Grab
"It is a land grab... As far as I am concerned, this is private property"
Aderholt’s family has had a deed to the land since 1941, and he had hoped to pass the property and the family business on to his sons.
“They come down here a lot and play,” Aderholt told KAUZ News Channel 6. “They help with the cattle and help building fences. They are very interested in hanging round here and helping me out.” But according to the Bureau of Land Management, the same federal government agency that confronted Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy in 2014, some of that land belongs to the feds, and they want the Aderholts off it. Furthermore, the BLM claims the deed that proves Aderholt’s ownership of the land, given to his parents by the State of Texas, is worthless. “The BLM is saying we should have never had a deed to it. That Texas should have never produced that deed,” Aderholt said. The rancher concedes the BLM is entitled to land “along the gradient boundary,” according to KAUZ, which Aderholt says is dependent on “the way the water washes and cuts into different properties.” But the BLM argues the real boundary lies a half mile inland from the river, which cuts into 600 acres of Aderholt’s land. KAUZ reports the BLM’s efforts could leave Aderholt and his family homeless, as his “house is located inside the 600 acres the BLM wants to claim.” Despite never bothering him for the last 70 years, the feds aren’t offering Aderholt an explanation for what they plan to do with the land. “They could own it, they could turn it to the public, they could condemn it, they could sell it back to me,” Aderholt says. “It is a land grab,” Aderholt insists. “As far as I am concerned, this is private property.” Watch: Although no gunshots were fired, what happened at the Bundy Ranch was a shot fired across the bow using the most powerful weapon in the infowar, the camera. It captured the iconic moment of the people taking on an aggressive government tyranny, a snapshot that still reverberates one year later. We look at the lies, the spin and the reality of a federal government openly defying The Posse Comitatus Act as it threatened and brutalized citizens of the community. Although the sheriff did nothing to protect the community, neighbor stood with neighbor in true posse comitatus, the “power of the community”, to expel the federal army from the community.
OAKLAND, Calif. — This summer, the median rent for a one-bedroom in San Francisco’s cityscape of peaked Victorians soared higher than Manhattan’s, sent skyward by a housing shortage fueled in part by the arrival of droves of newcomers here to mine tech gold.
And so, as the story of such cities goes, the priced-out move outward — in New York City, to Brooklyn and, increasingly, to Queens. For San Franciscans, the rent refuge is here in Oakland, where the rates are increasing as well — so much so that young professionals are living in repurposed shipping containers while the homeless are lugging around coffinlike sleeping boxes on wheels.
These two improvised housing arrangements have emerged in an industrial pocket of Oakland where the median rent has gone up by 20 percent over the past year. One, in a warehouse, is called Containertopia, a community of young people who have set up a village of 160-square-foot shipping containers like ones used in the Port of Oakland. Each resident pays $600 a month to live in a container, which can be modified with things like insulation, glass doors, electrical outlets, solar panels and a self-contained shower and toilet.
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Heather Stewart at Containertopia in Oakland, Calif. Ms. Stewart created Containertopia, a village of 160-square-foot shipping containers, with Luke Iseman.Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Containertopia was started last year by Luke Iseman, 32, and Heather Stewart, 30, who were then a couple. For Mr. Iseman, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and works in technology — most recently developing automated systems for watering plants — container living has been a social experiment in stripping down to the basics, one that he hopes to teach others to replicate.
“If we can do it in one of the highest-cost places in the world,” he said, “people can do this anywhere.”
Just outside the warehouse doors is another community, residing, too, in containers of a sort. Here, the homeless live in dwellings made by a local artist named Gregory Kloehn, set on wheels and made for the streets. Each is about eight feet long and tall enough for a person to sit up in.
“It doesn’t fit our mind-set of what a home is,” said Mr. Kloehn, 44, who began creating and giving away the portable homes, which are made of recycled material, in 2011. Oakland has about 3,000 homeless people, according to the East Oakland Community Project, a nonprofit organization that helps house people who live on the street; San Francisco has about 6,700.
Mr. Kloehn has made about 40 of the cheerily painted rolling boxes, coaxing people to leave their cardboard or tarp shanties on the streets.
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Gregory Kloehn, an artist, uses recycled materials to build containers, about eight feet long and on wheels, that people can live in. He gives them away to homeless people in Oakland, Calif.Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times
“In this city, with all its money, within it there is another layer: these nomadic people who are living off our garbage,” he said.
Containertopia and Mr. Kloehn’s mobile shelters draw from the tiny house movement, a shift to a more ascetic way of living that has inspired entire microhome villages in places like Olympia, Wash., and Madison, Wis., as well as isolated examples in countless backyards. Such residences are embraced by the ecologically and social-justice minded, but are often fought by local governments; they often do not comply with building codes or are plopped in areas where they should not be.
But that is where the similarities between the homeless dwellings and the shipping containers end. Though they are on the same block, they are worlds apart.
Ms. Stewart and Mr. Iseman initially set Containertopia in an abandoned lot in the area, which they purchased for $425,000 with several friends. They were forced out this spring after neighbors complained. (The lot is not zoned for residences; for now, the owners grow vegetables there while they decide what to do with it.)
Then, with 12 of their friends and a forklift, Mr. Iseman and Ms. Stewart moved the container homes indoors to a warehouse. Mr. Iseman’s container, painted azure inside, cost about $12,000 to make habitable, with a lofted bed and a picture window carved into one flank. Ms. Stewart is still at work on hers, spackling drywall and carving a kitchen countertop from a redwood board she milled from a giant trunk.
Norris Reed with his tiny home in Oakland, Calif., created by the artist Gregory Kloehn. The fireplace is the door.Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times
The shift from house to container dwelling has made them reprioritize almost everything. Ms. Stewart quit her job in digital design to manage Containertopia and sold most of her possessions.
“I can work an office job and pay my rent every month and be stressed about not being able to do anything else, or I can live in a ridiculous warehouse,” she said. “The choice is obvious.”
Mr. Kloehn, the artist, is best known for his own container home, a Dumpster turned studio apartment on the lot of an arts collective in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where he spends part of the year. His other home is a studio in Oakland in the same industrial neighborhood as Containertopia.
Several years ago, Mr. Kloehn became fascinated with how homeless people appropriated what few resources they had — namely, other people’s trash — to create shelters. He decided to do the same, cobbling the small dwellings together with an artist’s skill.
“I’m just kind of ripping a page from the homeless people’s books,” he said. “They’ve been making homes out of this stuff for a long time.”
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Gregory Kloehn with one of his “tiny house” creations in Oakland, Calif., for people “who are living off our garbage.”Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Another artist, Elvis Summers, started making similar tiny homes for the homeless around Los Angeles. But that city determined those homes were illegal; many of the structures were moved onto private property before sanitation workers could remove them from the streets.
Mr. Kloehn says that cracking down on the boxes is misguided. If the box homes were banned, “would they be in an apartment?” he asked of the dwellers. “Would they be in a condo? Or would they be nowhere?”
In Oakland, the portable houses have been largely tolerated. Several residents said they were occasionally asked by the police to wheel them elsewhere, but were otherwise left alone.
A block from Mr. Kloehn’s studio, and around the corner from Containertopia, sits one of his homes for the homeless, brightly colored with a trompe l’oeil paint job that makes it look like a microsize suburban home.
“This house is a blessing,” the woman living in it said. She declined to give her name because she said she was ashamed she lived on the streets, having once had a steady job and a real home.
She added, “This is my way of trying to get back to how I used to be.”
An AS&E 'Z Backscatter Van,' with an inset view of its X-ray vision.
Police Commissioner Bill Bratton won’t let the NYCLU — or anyone else — bully him for details on the NYPD’s super-secret X-ray vans. The top cop was asked Tuesday about the counter-terror vehicles, called Z Backscatter Vans, in light of the NYCLU’s request to file an amicus brief arguing that the NYPD should have to release records about the X-ray vans. “They’re not used to scan people for weapons,” Bratton insisted. “The devices we have, the vehicles if you will, are all used lawfully and if the ACLU and others don’t think that’s the case, we’ll see them in court — where they’ll lose! At this time and the nature of what’s going on in the world, that concern of theirs is unfounded.” He declined to give more specific details about the devices themselves. “Those are issues I’d prefer not to divulge to the public at this time,” Bratton said. “I will not talk about anything at all about this — it falls into the range of security and counter-terrorism activity that we engage in.” The website ProPublica filed suit against the NYPD three years ago after an investigative journalist’s requests for police reports, training materials and health tests related to the X-rays were denied. Modal TriggerThe Z Backscatter vehicles, also used by US Customs and Borders Protection, can scan for drugs and explosives.Photo: AS&ENew York State Supreme Court Judge Doris Ling-Cohan ruled that the department should have to turn over the records, despite the NYPD’s arguments that disclosing that information could interfere with investigations. “While this court is cognizant and sensitive to concerns about terrorism, being located less than a mile from the 9/11 site, and having seen firsthand the effects of terrorist destruction, nonetheless, the hallmark of our great nation is that it is a democracy, with a transparent government,” the judge wrote in the December 2014 decision. The NYPD appealed that decision — and now the NYCLU has requested to file an amicus brief urging the appeals court to uphold the lower court’s original ruling. “People should be informed if military grade x-ray vans are damaging their health with radiation or peering inside their homes or cars,” said NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman. “New Yorkers have a right to protect their health, welfare and privacy.” Little is known about how the NYPD uses the high-tech machines, which reportedly cost between $729,000 and $825,000. The vans are also employed by US Customs and Border Protection to scan for drugs and explosives.
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