Jason Henderson: Big Thinker

A reader writes:

This Henderson guy is amazing, he just moved to SF and already is solving all its problems! Thank god he arrived just in time!

He came from New Orleans where he left them with the blueprint for post-Katrina development based on all the New Urbanist cliches: 

"Bus rapid transit, with priority bus lanes, signal priority, proof-of-payment and low-floor platforms would be constructed throughout the city. The city would also build a comprehensive network of bike lanes" etc, etc.

But his Big Vision is that "the balance of the New Orleans population (approximately 500-600,000) would relocate to Baton Rouge, Hammond, and Lafayette"!

(One wonders how this genius can stomach being relegated to teaching undergraduates at a second rate junior college when he has the vision for saving whole populations.) Will these relocation areas be called "re-education camps" or "reservations"? Will blacks and Mexicans get priority for all this wonderful new housing hundreds of miles away? Will there be no parking lots at the grocery stores because everyone will be walking, biking or taking BRT?

You can read his brilliance here: Saving New Orleans

Rob's comment:

Thanks for the link, Anon. Actually, Henderson has been here for several years. Oh yes, we're so lucky to have him and all the other "new urbanist" carpetbagging Big Thinkers to show San Francisco how to deal with its traffic: 

"the funding for the rebuilding of New Orleans, including densification of Baton Rouge, Hammond, and Lafayette, should be financed by a nation-wide 50-cent-per-gallon tax on gasoline"

People must be punished/fined for driving motor vehicles to pay for this bullshit. Of course that tax will never happen, but Congestion Pricing in SF will be the ultimate trump card played by Henderson, the Bicycle Coalition and their enablers in PC City Hall. 

The SFCTA is working on Congestion Pricing now, and the Golden Gate Bridge system is a trial run for the system City Hall plans to install---for our own good! 

More importantly for City Hall, it will provide an endless flow of revenue to support the city's burgeoning bureaucracy, especially for the MTA, which already has more than 5,000 employees.

The main obstacle to Congestion Pricing is the people of San Francisco, who perversely oppose being charged to drive downtown in their own city.

City Hall will get around that by not allowing SF to vote on the issue, just like they did with the Bicycle Plan and the ongoing redesign of city streets on behalf of the 3.4% of city residents that ride bicycles.

Actually, it's worse than you think: Henderson teaches at SF State, not at a community college. SF State has evidently gone downhill since I went there. I've been reading his book, Street Fight, and will eventually deconstruct it chapter by chapter, which is a tedious task, given his clunky, pretentious prose. 

Henderson didn't like the original plan for the Haight/Stanyan Whole Foods because it had too much parking.

Henderson tried to rewrite the history of UC's ripoff of the Extension property on lower Haight street.

Henderson also opposes parking for all the new housing being built in the Market and Octavia neighborhood.

In defense of Tommy Robinson

Robinson under arrest

Wake up and smell the jihad, kuffar

from The Blog of the Re-Enlightenment

...Tommy Robinson is completely committed to defeating Islamism. We all know he has a dodgy past but that’s nothing unique amongst the general population and it’s certainly nothing unique amongst political activists. His past doesn’t disqualify him from speaking out against Islamism and it doesn’t make his opinions any less valid...I can’t stand class-based victim narratives but even I have to conclude Robinson has committed the ultimate crime of being a working class white lad and expecting to have an opinion on Islamism, which will be the defining issue of the century people reading this blog post will die in. I dismissed Robinson because of his background and because of the EDL’s image. I should have known better than to be such a snob...Here’s something you might not know about Robinson: because of the numerous death threats against him and his family he was offered a new identity and a new location by the state. He refused. If that doesn’t represent moral and physical courage of the highest possible order then someone can tell me what does. He refuses to leave his home town through intimidation...

In case you’re wondering whether Luton is significant or insignificant, it’s significant: it’s where the four 7/7 bombers started their rail journey into London. Oh you do remember 7/7, don’t you? I do because I got the Tube to work that day. I was sitting at my desk, probably surfing the internet or pretending to look busy when I heard a massive bang. That bang was the sound of my fellow Londoners being murdered in Russell Square.

The death threats aren’t a figment of his imagination: he has been given a number of “Osman warnings”, which are warnings of a death threat or high risk of murder that are issued by the police. And a few weeks ago six jihadis were sentenced to over 100 years in total for plotting to bomb an EDL rally.

In his videos I’ve seen in Robinson a greater understanding and commitment to our fundamental civil liberties than I’ve detected amongst 99% of the lawyers I’ve worked with in my career. Robinson is warning everyone of the storm that’s already here and yet people refuse to listen to him through a combination of snobbery and a fear of being associated with this country’s Great Unwashed Underclass.

Yes, the EDL has an image problem and so does Robinson. So what? Are we hoping Islamism will be defeated by a perfectly manicured group of PPE students with Double Firsts from Oxford whose highest calling in life is to become a faceless Special Advisor in the Ministry of Lies?

There isn’t a huge field of candidates willing to speak out against the backward ideology that is Islamism because the consequences are so severe. We’re not just talking about physical danger from Islamists; we’re also talking about the perpetual slurs from their apologists and also the instinctive assumption from everyone else that anyone who’s white (and especially working class) can’t possibly be approaching this from anything other than a racist and hateful angle. You really can’t be too picky when looking for people to defeat Islamism. You pretty much have to take who you get. We’re lucky to have anyone, let alone someone as good as Robinson...

Boomers leaving the cities

Beck Diefenbach for Reuters

From Joel Kotkin on New Geography:

...Our number-crunching shows that rather than flocking into cities, there were roughly a million fewer boomers in 2010 within a five-mile radius of the centers of the nation’s 51 largest metro areas compared to a decade earlier...more expensive, denser cities like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Jose, Calif., saw the worst boomer flight, suffering double-digit percentage losses. Ultimately, some downtown places might be a “wonderland,” as The New York Times puts it, for a small group of highly affluent residents. But for most they are outrageously expensive...Cities need to understand that, for the most part, their appeal remains primarily to young, largely single people, students and couples before they have children; cities’ real challenge, and opportunity, lies in trying to keep more of this youthful cohort in the city as they age and expand their households...