What follows are a series of letters to an unusually open-minded and
creative city councilman.
October 9, 2009
Hello Mr. Brown,
I'm an old hippie who has owned a small house on the westside for the
last twenty years (where Isaac Boatright lives). I'm on a friendly first
name basis at the permit center and regularly call the land use enforcement
ladies, mostly due to grouchy neighbors. I have some ideas about building
regulation.
Being fairly low budget, and fifty, I've been in some hundred or so
remodeled houses in the Eugene Area. Only one was remodeled with a permit,
that I know of. Due to my special treatment, I have gotten to know the
building and land use codes really well, so I can say with certainty that
almost no building I've been in was inspected when remodeled.
I'm no advocate of enforcement of anything and actually consider it to
be straight up evil. I'm no advocate of better code compliance. My view is
that enforcement has long ago ceased to promote safety and wise construction
methods, and has instead become solely a blackmail or revenge device for
neighbors, evoking much paranoia and hatred, and no significant benefit to
safety or wise construction.
I am currently entirely in compliance and have a live permit for a three
bedroom one bath addition to my house. My neighborhood rapport is seriously
trashed and the busts against my place have resulted in no visible change
to my place, no important safety or sanitation improvement, no change in
personnel, but very serious financial and emotional costs and a huge amount
of direct labor on my part. Isaac's homemade house was one of the
casualties. The details of the main bust is on the internet at
http://www.efn.org/~wolfe/neighbor.htm if you have an interest.
Fearing my retaliation using their own heartless method, the neighbors
who dislike my lifestyle will not even admit to being my enemy, let alone
offer any sort of real clarity about our conflict. I wrote explicit letters
to the main suspects, but it just increased their paranoia.
I am recommending a change of the permit center to a certification
agency, specifically for houses that are to be sold, instead as a bully to
wreck the lives of people at stable permanent owner occupied homes like
mine. I suggest that the certification be voluntary.
I also recommend that Land Use enforcement be converted to mediation
service, wherein a person complaining would be coached in writing an
explicit understandable anonymous complaint, specifying the actual issues
rather than invisible code matters, to be presented and explained by the
enforcement person.
I can see overt enforcement of actual fire and sanitation hazards, but
with a six month schedule so as to derail use of such concerns as a
bullying device.
I have a related concern that I've presented before to a code
development committee several years ago. My hippie outlook has me having a
building solely to create a context to have a commune. I've had up to 22
people and I would say that my sanity and spiritual well being are best
promoted by a minimum of eight direct roommates and a maximum of thirty.
The current code permits five unrelated persons per dwelling unit and two
in a campsite on the same property.
That emotional maturation is discouraged and neurotic isolation required
by law is sick to me. There is an exception though for blood related
roommates. So I am suggesting that an owner occupied home could be likewise
considered an exception as emotionally stable enough to permit a large
group. In my former appeal I suggested an increase to a limit of eight.
My real view is that all households are self-limiting this way to no
more than can be sustained without referee by authorities. During my seven
month absence, my own house self-limited to two people, out of the seven I
left. I believe I am a required element to the large group, with or without
government influence, and a complete erasure of the rule would result in no
changes anywhere other than at my house. Almost no-one I've met has even
been aware of the five person rule til I told them.
I appreciate your store very much. The open-mindedness and good humor of
your employees has always been remarkable, and I figure you are related to
that. Isaac told me he encourages my letter writing to you and is open to
talking to you about it if you want to. Thanks for taking on the council
position, and no hard feelings if these ideas are too much or inappropriate
to take on.
Adrian Wolfe
October 24, 2009
Hello Councilman Brown,
I'm writing again in a less personal way to recommend nodal
development of businesses. I live in west Eugene, within a mile
of 5 auto parts shops, two major building supply places (half a
block apart), two major department stores, Two huge office
supply stores, two major groceries and several smaller ones,
three gas stations, etc. I have ample access to businesses.
But I do maintanence on a house in south Eugene, five miles
from the nearest auto parts place or building supply place, and
two miles from a gas station. A little while back the permit
center gave Lowes building supply a permit to construct their
store a half block from Home Depot, crippling both stores and
leaving south Eugene still forced to send a huge amount of
needless traffic past my house and out a bottleneck part of west
11th, due to remodeling homeowners.
I imagine that this situation is partly because the people in
south Eugene like to drive and hate to see large industrial
looking places near their home. I think the City Council needs
to force the matter, so as to reduce traffic and air pollution.
Perhaps the city could pay part of the cost of Home Depot moving
to south Eugene, to replace one of the groceries near 30th and
Hilyard. Maybe one of the new west 11th auto parts places could
be coaxed to move also. I think Auto Zone and Schucks Auto
Supply are both doing quite poorly, due to Knechts and Napa having
been there so long. Likewise Office Depot has made a similar
ridiculous bid right across the street from Staples, and I think
they are also failing.
I think that most of this ridiculous construction was in the
last four years. I read quite a while back of people advocating
nodal development in Eugene, but I guess it never took or it was
just political dancing. I imagine you live in south Eugene and
like to drive also, but give this a ponder.
Thanks for being a councilman.
Adrian Wolfe
2060 West 13th
Eugene 97402
255-3384
October 24, 2009
Hello Councilman Brown,
This letter is a bit overly wordy and maybe whiny, so maybe not good too
read on a frantic day. It is an appeal to a saner treatment of tramps
within the City public lands.
Homeless People
I've spent several years homeless in Eugene, and except for five brief
periods of four to six months or so, in my forty years in Eugene, I've
haven't had a private conventional bedroom. Except for four of those years,
my yearly income has generally been about 200 to 400 hours at minimum wage.
In the normal way that people have discussed economics with me, or written
about it, I'm a pathetic fellow.
But I don't see it that way. To me, poverty is a personal management and
emotional maturity issue that cannot be solved by adding money or
resources. I have never been what I call poor; never been broke or thrown
out of a living arrangement due loss of income, and I've owned a house
mortgage free for twenty years.
Thus when I look at an issue like the drunks that live in Skinner Butte
or Westmoreland Park, I don't view the drunks as poor or pathetic, or even
representative of a situation that needs changing. They're friendly to me
and not so emotionally dangerous as the more middle class park users, who
freak out about the damnedest petty things and always seem to be on the
clock. The drunks also have a sustainable very low carbon footprint
lifestyle. They're not polluting the air I'm using or paying other people
to create a boxcar load of toxic waste in production of stuff they're just
going to contribute to the landfill. They pee into the vegetation where the
nitrogen will actually be some benefit to something. There's no risk of them
calling the police on me or putting a curse on me in any way. I'm not
worried about passing their inspection.
What looks tragic to me is all the people forced by social pressure, and
the law against sleeping on public property, into moving into an expensive
place borrowed from a bank or landlord, that they're enslaved to pay for and
seduced into growing dependent on. I would rather see the City government
facilitating people living genuinely within their means, as I have.
I am also horrified by the sewer system and senseless disposal of pet
manure. Our food and lawns are grown using petroleum based fertilizer and
the natural fertilizer is all turned into a poison, and then dumped in the
Willamette river or into the landfill. The drunks often shit in the wild
where the dogs or possums will eat it. I shit into a plastic bucket and add
duff that I've collected, composting the mix when the bucket gets full. The
City of Eugene doesn't offer any sane constructive place to put manure or
urine, and will even fine someone disposing of either one sanely on public
land. This is madness.
I have gotten around these crazy limitations in my own life, but through
a level of personal management ability that I think is unreasonable to ask
of regular people. I wish that the city could legalize sleeping without
having to meet such an expensive standard, and deliberately design the City
manure handling service to have everyone's shit and pee be the valuable
resource that it really is, in a chipper truck leaf-pile compost heap in
the park. I'd like to see people valued for their easy-going public vibe
rather than their capacity to burn the ecosystem, the homeless people
appreciated for their gentleness and lack of hurry rather than scorned and
asked for ID.
I'd also really like permission for more of them to share my house. I'm
totally up to the management challenge, even if the tramps I invite are
not. I also see only benefit in the granting of permission for other people
to have shanty towns in their backyards if they're not up to the emotional
challenge of sharing their house. I think it a crime that the City of Eugene
forbids people to live within their means if they don't have a quarter
million dollar asset like I do.
I know that you are the manager from hell, but you must have seen, as I
have, how pathetic the average person is, in management ability, at all
levels of income. You've never scorned my diving in your dumpster. This is
the next logical appeal; to be able to legally sleep and take a dump in an
ecologically proper way.
Thanks for reading.
Adrian Wolfe
2060 West 13th
Eugene 97402
255-3384
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