September 20th, 2018

Today, we want to look at another major labor industry----restaurants and cafes-----and the novel SULFUR SPRINGS has that character in a Latino woman as owner/waitress, bartender, cook, and all around employee of ROSITA'S CANTINA.  When we speak of rich developers as politicians as MAYOR MARION or rich developers as JAYNE the Wall Street bank investor being criminal drug cartel players we are looking UP the income ladder.  When we discuss the wild-cat independent miners/small business owners we are looking further down that income ladder.  The owner of ROSITA'S CANTINA throughout the first half of the novel was brave in opening her cafe to CORK as she respected his fight against Latino drug cartels, his fighting to protect his family.  She as a Latino business owner and legal resident understood the LATINO bad guys as coyotes/as drug and sex trade killing 99% of Latino citizens.  So, our 99% of Latino citizens understand the need to capture and punish those Latino bad guys.  The value of a BORDER PATROL and/or an ICE Federal agency going after those Latino bad guys plays against the corrupt 5% freemason/Greek players installed to foil this FAKE WAR ON DRUGS.

WHO DECLARED AN OPIUM WAR ON US CITIZENS EARLY LAST CENTURY?  GLOBAL BANKING 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS.  WHO WORKS FOR FOREIGN SOVEREIGNTY OF MALTA KNIGHTS OF MALTA OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS?  CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA. 

Those global banking 1% never had any intent of stopping drugs ---they are profiteering from sacking and looting civil societies.


'As they gather scraps of information about Peter, Cork and Rainy are warned time and again that there is a war going on along the border. “Trust no one in Coronado County,” is the most common piece of advice they receive, and Cork doesn’t have to be told twice'.

Indeed, especially in our Latino nations after several decades of WORLD BANK/IMF/OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS deliberate civil unrest/civil war---there is confusion over WHO TO TRUST as was true in SULFUR SPRINGS.

Below we see raging global banking 1% THE GUARDIAN with an article on city development from a CITYSCAPE group funded by GLOBAL BANKING 1% ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION.  Whether the trust in developers partnered with criminal cartels in small towns like SULFUR SPRINGS or our mid-size US cities---below we see the same in UK and Europe----the trust around property developers has everything to do with CRIMINALITY AND EXPLOITATION -----not people's concerns over one person being rich.

'Sign up for the Cityscape: the best of Guardian Cities '


When our 99% WE THE PEOPLE look for public policy opinions in raging global banking 1% FAKE NEWS media like THE GUARDIAN they will never hear GORILLA-IN-ROOM 99% populist issues.



The truth about property developers: how they are exploiting planning authorities and ruining our cities


Oliver Wainwright   Urban futures with Oliver Wainwright
Cities  THE GUARDIAN

Wed 17 Sep 2014 04.52 EDT Last modified on Fri 11 May 2018 08.17 EDT


Affordable housing quotas get waived and the interests of residents trampled as toothless authorities bow to the dazzling wealth of investors from Russia, China and the Middle East

“I always said you should never trust a bank with property, or a property developer with money,” says Peter Rees. The former chief planner of the City of London should know about such things, having presided over the results of both. Over the last 30 years, he has ushered in a menagerie of their monuments, from the Gherkin and Cheesegrater to the Walkie-Talkie and Heron Tower, during which time he has seen a significant shift in the balance of power. “When I arrived in the job in the 1980s, the big banks were in control of London,” he says. “But now it’s the big house-builders. We’ve gone from being ruled by Barclay’s bank to being controlled by Berkeley homes.”
Left unchecked, the banks went off the rails in spectacular fashion, as they sprayed money into the great mortgage mirage. And now property developers have been allowed to follow suit. Fuelled by the dazzling wealth of investors from Russia, China and the Middle East, who they turned to when the banks stopped lending, their steroidal schemes are causing irreparable harm to our cities.

Across the country – and especially in superheated London, where stratospheric land values beget accordingly bloated developments – authorities are allowing planning policies to be continually flouted, affordable housing quotas to be waived, height limits breached, the interests of residents endlessly trampled. Places are becoming ever meaner and more divided, as public assets are relentlessly sold off, entire council estates flattened to make room for silos of luxury safe-deposit boxes in the sky. We are replacing homes with investment units, to be sold overseas and never inhabited, substituting community for vacancy. The more we build, the more our cities are emptied, producing dead swathes of zombie town where the lights might never even be switched on.

Developers have bounced back from the crash with bigger plans than ever before, acquiring vast areas of land with the ambition to operate like the great estates of yore. Framed with the cuddly terminology of “long-term stewardship” and “adding value”, they are merely mimicking those aristocratic fiefdoms, recasting the city as a network of privatised enclaves. The landed families of Grosvenor, Portman and Cadogan have been joined by a breed of corporate giants like Lend Lease, CapCo and Ballymore. The latter is overseeing the £2bn transformation of Nine Elms into a high-security zone of luxury flats around the new American embassy, that will apparently “draw inspiration from the attractive residential and commercial estates which evolved over time in cities like New York and Boston”. CapCo is building its £8bn kingdom across a 30-hectare swathe of Earls Court, while Lend Lease is ruling Elephant and Castle, Argent is reshaping Kings Cross, and most of Victoria is now controlled by Land Securities. The list goes on.

They have been accompanied, and often outbid, by a newer kind of international development force, supercharged by the untold riches of sovereign wealth funds, national pension funds and the gushing pump of petrodollars. The Qataris, who bailed out the Shard and snapped up the Olympic Village, have been joined by the growing appetite of Malaysian and Chinese investors. Malaysian consortium SP Setia acquired Battersea power station for significantly more than its competitors could muster, while China’s recent property supermarket sweep includes such sites as Wandsworth’s Ram Brewery and a £1bn deal for the Royal Docks. These inflated land deals, with foreign buyers ready to pay over the odds, are spawning a new form of equally oversized and exclusive developments.



Bankers have faced our collective wrath, but what about developers? The economy goes in fickle booms and busts, cycling merrily through bubbles and crises, but cities, built in concrete and steel, generally stay put. What we are making now, we will all have to live with for a very long time. The iniquities of the banking crash have been intricately unpicked, but the wilful destruction of the places where we live and work remains something of a mystery. We may rant and rage against ugly additions to the skyline, but what of the mechanisms that are allowing it to happen? How did it come to this?



The principal reason can be traced to the fact that awarding planning permission in the UK comes down to a Faustian pact. If the devil is in the detail, then the detail is Section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, a clause which formalised “planning gain”, making it in the local authorities’ interests to allow schemes to balloon beyond all reason, in the hope of creaming off the fat of developers’ profits for the public good.



Introduced as a negotiable levy on new development, Section 106 agreements entail a financial contribution to the local authority, intended to be spent on offsetting the effects of the scheme on the local area. The impact of a hundred new homes might be mitigated by money for extra school places, or traffic calming measures. In practice, since council budgets have been so viciously slashed, Section 106 has become a primary means of funding essential public services, from social housing to public parks, health centres to highways, schools to play areas. The bigger the scheme, the fatter the bounty, leading to a situation not far from legalised bribery – or extortion, depending on which side of the bargain you are on. Vastly inflated density and a few extra storeys on a tower can be politically justified as being in the public interest, if it means a handful of trees will be planted on the street.

“Council chief executives will allow schemes to be pumped up as much as they can go before they get political push-back from councillors,” says one planning officer from a London borough that has suffered from a recent a spate of towers. “And the worst schemes happen when there is no political resistance at all.”


It is a system that is all too open to political pressure, given that any officer who advises against a new development can be conveniently framed as “anti-growth”, heartlessly preventing a promised tidal wave of new public amenities from flooding into the borough. Based on negotiation and discretion, the result is entirely down to the individual planning officer’s ability to squeeze out as good a deal as they can get, a battle that all too often ends in the developer’s favour.


The results of such botched bargaining can be seen sprouting up across London’s “regeneration” hot-spots, such as Elephant and Castle, where the council is attempting to transform the maligned mess of the roundabout into an “exciting destination”. With shimmering golden fins rising into the skies, the 37-storey tower of One the Elephant promises to “set new standards for contemporary London living”. It is one of the flagship projects by Australian developer Lend Lease in the £3bn transformation of the area. But take a closer look, and it seems the new standards it is setting comprise an impressive ability to avoid providing any affordable housing at all. Such second-class accommodation would of course require its own “poor door” entrance and circulation and, according to a council report: “The cost of construction would increase with the introduction of a further lift, as well as separate access and servicing arrangements.”


Bypassing Southwark’s requirement for 35% affordable housing – which would have meant around 100 units – Lend Lease has instead contributed £3.5m in lieu towards the construction of a community leisure centre next door, which will cost £20m to build. A triumph for the public good, you might think, until you realise that the equivalent cost of building 100 affordable units would have been around £10m, three times what the developer paid. Pressure group 35 Percent – which campaigns for the borough-wide policy of 35% affordable housing to be enforced in Elephant and Castle – estimates that, in the six biggest schemes in the area, developers have avoided paying £265m in off-site affordable housing tariff payments required by policy. And of the 4,282 new homes being built, just 79 will be social rented (ie. managed by registered providers for those on low incomes).

The same story is repeated the other side of town, where Haringey awaits the momentous arrival of Tottenham Hotspur’s new £400m football stadium. This bulbous mothership was promised to bring 200 new homes, half of which would be “affordable”, and an abundance of public benefits to the area. But, once again, the affordable component has been mysteriously waived, replaced with 285 flats for solely private sale, while the Section 106 contribution has been reduced from an agreed £16m to just £477,000 – a token contribution towards transport improvements.


The system has spawned a whole industry of S106 avoidance, with consultancies set up specifically to help developers get out of paying for affordable housing at all scales of development. Section 106 Management, set up by solicitor-turned-developer Robin Furby, is one such company that offers a service to small-scale developers, promising “to establish the profitability of your project and thereby reveal unviable Section 106 obligations”. Its website displays a list of case studies proudly showing how much they have helped developers dodge, and boasting of planning permissions achieved “without any contribution towards affordable housing” at all, saving “tens, if not hundreds of thousands of pounds”.


So what exactly does it mean when a property developer pleads poverty? “If the profit margin for your scheme is pushed to below 17.5% by Section 106 payments, you should talk to us,” says the website. Other consultants promise to safeguard 20% profit margins and upwards, before any Section 106 contributions are even considered. If a scheme is declared “unviable”, it simply means “we’re not getting our 20% profit so why should we bother”.


The power of the policy to leverage affordable housing has been further eroded since the introduction of community infrastructure levy (CIL) in 2010. A non-negotiable fixed-rate tax on new development, CIL was intended to introduce more transparency and give developers a level of certainty about how much they would be expected to contribute towards infrastructural improvements. But, in reality, it has provided another excuse to dodge Section 106 obligations. A further change to the town planning act last year has made Section 106 agreements renegotiable, allowing review and appeal of all existing obligations, in a misguided attempt to promote growth – which simply makes it easier for developers to wriggle out of their promises, as happened in Tottenham and elsewhere.


“Not surprisingly, developers are now even keener to renegotiate the S106 after they’ve got planning permission, finding they can’t negotiate the CIL,” says Peter Rees. “In most cases, they manage to prove that they can no longer afford to pay for the affordable housing that they agreed – it’s simply ‘not viable’ any more.” One planning officer puts it succinctly: “There has never been a worse time to give schemes consent, in terms of securing public benefit.”


In all cases, how developers prove what they can afford to pay for comes down to the dark art of “viability”. The silver bullet of planning applications, the viability appraisal explains, through impenetrable pages of spreadsheets and fastidious appendixes, exactly how a project stacks up financially. It states, in carefully worded sub-clauses, just why it would be impossible for affordable housing to be provided, why the towers must of course be this height, why no ground-floor corner shop or surgery can be included, why workspace is out of the question; indeed, why it is inconceivable for the scheme to be configured in any other form. Presented as a precise science, viability is nothing of the sort; it is a form of bureaucratic alchemy, figures fiddled with spreadsheet spells that can be made to conjure any outcome desired.

“Councils just don’t have the expertise to challenge viability reports,” says one senior planning officer. “We can’t argue back.” Instead, they can commission viability assessments, produced by the same consultants that work for developers, to determine whether the report is accurate – but not to propose an alternative. The figures may well stack up, but it doesn’t mean the scheme could not be designed in a different way, which would still guarantee the developer’s 20% profit margin.


“You only have to modify one of the variables very slightly to get completely different outcome,” says one planning consultant. “You can very easily go from something being rip-roaringly viable to completely unviable by tweaking something very modestly. If a planner doesn’t understand that, they’re not going to do very well.”


Evidence suggests that is all too often the case, judging by the number of planning officers’ reports that diligently conclude a scheme would simply be unviable if it was obliged to fulfil the policy objectives. With calculations often undisclosed for reasons of commercial confidentiality, councils are forced to blindly accept the developers’ figures as the ultimate de facto truth, allowing their own policies to be flagrantly breached.


“I’ve never been confident in reports that I’ve received on viability,” says one planning officer, describing how the big property consultancies operate as something of a cabal, with one wary of challenging another’s figures. “Every consultant that’s advising a local authority is hoping to advise a developer tomorrow. If they put the boot in on a big development scheme, they simply won’t be hired again.”


A relatively new field, viability has been given increasing weight by the government’s National Planning Policy Framework, introduced in 2012, which slashed 1,300 pages of policy down to 65, as part of the coalition’s triumphant bonfire of red tape. The NPPF introduced a “presumption in favour of sustainable development”, which sounds innocuous enough – but as Rees points out, “the definition of ‘sustainable’ has nothing to do with green issues or energy at all. It means one thing: commercially viable.”


Immune from public scrutiny, viability assessments have rightly come under fire for clouding the accountability and transparency of what should be a statutory public process. Their confidentiality is closely guarded, in order to preserve developers’ trade secrets, but where the sale of public assets is concerned, there is increasing pressure for the books to be opened.


One such case recently ended in victory for housing campaigners, when after two years of fighting, which culminated at a tribunal, Southwark Council was ordered to disclose the viability assessment produced by Lend Lease over its controversial redevelopment of the Heygate Estate. The 15-year project is seeing more than 1,200 mainly social-rented homes on the post-war estate replaced with over 2,300 units, only 25% of which will be classed as affordable, with just 79 flats for social rent. Many leaseholders were subject to compulsory purchase orders so low they have been forced to move to the far reaches of outer London, their decent-sized two-bed flats valued at under £150,000, while the new homes of “Elephant Park” will be sold for prices reaching £420,000 for a one-bed apartment.


The figures explaining why this was the only feasible way to develop the site were safely locked away in the viability appraisal, which Southwark fought tooth and nail to keep secret. The borough has been particularly keen to keep financial details under wraps since it accidentally disclosed it had sold the entire nine-hectare site for just £50m, having spent £44m on moving residents out – while estimating its gross development value at £990m.


“Without some commercially sensitive information remaining private, developers could simply refuse to work with councils, leaving boroughs without the housing and regeneration we all need,” says a spokeswoman for Southwark Council. The borough brought a legal challenge against a decision by the Information Commissioner’s Office last year ordering the council to disclose the full details of the viability report, after a freedom of information request was denied. Southwark argued that full disclosure would “damage regeneration”, while Lend Lease, in a defence that verged on farce, pleaded the human right to “peaceful enjoyment of its possessions”, arguing that disclosing the viability assessment would amount to “unjustified interference with this enjoyment”.


The tribunal concluded that the information must be disclosed, stating that “the importance … of local people having access to information to allow them to participate in the planning process outweighs the public interest in maintaining the remaining rights of Lend Lease”. It sets an encouraging precedent for campaign groups battling similar situations elsewhere, from Greenwich Peninsula to Earls Court – where the information commissioner has supported further disclosure of viability assessments on gargantuan regeneration schemes.

The Heygate decision comes after increased scrutiny of Southwark council’s cosy relationship with Lend Lease, following reports in Private Eye of perks enjoyed by Peter John, the Labour leader of the borough, at the expense of the Australian giant. From a pair of £1,600 Olympic opening ceremony tickets to a £1,250 trip to the lavish Mipim property fair in Cannes, these sponsored outings were reported to have joined a lengthy list from the previous year of Proms tickets and dinners at the Ivy, paid for by at least 10 other companies.



Developers getting into bed with local authorities might usually happen behind closed doors, but at Mipim the conspicuous chumminess was proudly on show along the Croisette for all to see. In the wake of headlines decrying public money being spent on councils attending the champagne-soaked jamboree, their private “development partners” have been more than willing to step in and foot the bill. With a borough’s presence at Mipim costing up to £500,000, developers happily pay for glistening city models, trade show booths and yachts, where cakes iced with their logos are handed out by mayors. More than 20 local authorities took part this year, with developers sponsoring everything from a “Croydon on the beach” cocktail party to an entire “Manchester bar”, where public-private relationships could be cemented by free-flowing booze.


“The boroughs might be proud that they’re not here at the public’s expense,” says housing campaigner Jake Freeland, who held a protest in Cannes this year. “But that’s precisely the problem. They’re in the pockets of the investors, and they’ve come here to sell off our city.”


Developers have long thrown parties and funded foreign trips as a way of lubricating their plans through the system, but the quest for permissions now extends into the statutory planning process itself, through the rise of deals known as planning performance agreements. Introduced to help fast-track large, unwieldy schemes through the system, PPAs see the applicant pay for a new dedicated position in the council’s planning team to focus solely on their application, guaranteeing a faster turnaround and a better “bespoke” service.



Capital and Counties Properties (Capco) paid over £2m to Hammersmith and Fulham council under a PPA to have its £8bn redevelopment of Earls Court assessed, while similar deals were reached for Westfield and Hammerson’s £1bn plans for another mega-mall in Croydon, as well as Argent’s £2bn redevelopment of King’s Cross.

“There’s nothing wrong with planning performance agreements,” says one planning officer. “It’s just like allowing people to travel club class. You pay for a better service.” Quite whether club-class planning should be offered by a statutory pubic service is questionable, but developers have few qualms about throwing money at an authority, spitting out as many applications and fees as are necessary to see a project through. “We pay vast sums of money to have things determined quickly,” says the director of one major development company. “We pay the planner’s salary, cover their lawyers’ fees and everything, but we wouldn’t expect preferential treatment. It’s not a bribe.”



Under the coalition’s localism agenda, the wheels for private-sector encroachment into public planning have been further oiled, with the introduction of neighbourhood plans. Presented as a means of empowering communities, they have in fact left the door wide open for canny developers to move in, host a few community coffee mornings with felt-tips and post-it notes, and engineer a plan to their own advantage. There is no requirement for those who draw up the plan to even reside in the neighbourhood and, although they need a 50% “yes” vote at referendum, there is no requisite minimum turnout.
But such a tactic would require at least cursory engagement with the community and the council, something which many developers are increasingly choosing to bypass altogether. Since the introduction of the NPPF, there has been a sharp rise in the number of planning applications won on appeal, as many applicants choose to go straight to the inspectorate, conscious of the new “presumption in favour” of development.


Rather than being the last resort option, after negotiations with the local authority have broken down, the process of planning by appeal has become a tactic in itself. One developer is particularly candid on the matter: “Planning decisions are so often the result of political wrangling at committee anyway,” he says. “Why would you waste months negotiating something to get the planning officer on side, when they can’t guarantee delivery at planning committee?” On appeal, it comes down to a battle between planning lawyers, the judgement often determined by who can afford the best representation. When the Rolls Royce legal team of the private developer meets the quivering case officer of the emasculated public sector, its not hard to guess the outcome.



Developers with bigger ambitions are choosing to bypass the local authority in a different way, by going straight to the top and playing for a “call-in” – waving their schemes under the nose of the mayor of London or secretary of state. Such a situation has emerged at Mount Pleasant in north London, where the Royal Mail Group has proposed a fortress-like scheme of 700 flats, only 12% of which will be affordable. The site straddles the boundary between Camden and Islington, both of which have a target of 50% affordable housing. Boris Johnson ignited local fury when he called the scheme in earlier this year to be determined by his planning team, describing it as a “beautiful design … and a wonderful place to live” before the local boroughs had even turned it down.

“It is hardly surprising that the mayor has called this in,” says Duncan Bowie, lecturer in planning at the University of Westminster. “The mayoral planning process is based entirely on achieving the maximum number of housing units on any given site, aimed at selling to an international market. The London-wide target of building 42,000 new units per year is predicated on a lot of very high density developments that don’t even comply with the mayor’s own policies on density.”


The same thing happened at Convoys Wharf in Deptford, where a £1bn proposal for 3,500 units (of which just 15% will be affordable), in the form of three towers rising up to 40 storeys, was called in by the mayor after the Hong-Kong based developer wrote a blustering letter complaining of planning delays. The scheme was approved in April, against the advice of the local authority and the cries of heritage groups.


“It’s common practice to play the mayor off the borough,” says one senior planning officer. “We recently had one vastly oversized scheme that we’d spent months trying to tame, then we had a meeting with the GLA planning team, and their first response was ‘why not make it taller?’” Driven by tick-box housing targets, the GLA merrily rubber-stamps whatever comes its way, yet most of these schemes are doing nothing to help the housing crisis, given the fraction of “affordable” homes they include are still out of reach of most, at up to 80% of market rent.


“Developers have quickly latched on to the fact that, even if they can’t get local authorities to approve schemes, they can get them through the mayor or the government,” says Peter Rees. “The bigger the better. And they know that they’ll happily allow towers to be built outside designated clusters.”



As deputy prime minister, John Prescott personally approved both the Shard and the Vauxhall Tower, the latter against the decision of the planning inspector and after strong warnings from his advisers that it “could set a precedent for the indiscriminate scattering of very tall buildings across London”. How right they were. With a 50-storey shaft already on the skyline, the council was in no position to refuse further skyward ambitions. The GLA, keen to seem “strategic”, quickly declared the area a “cluster”, beckoning in a thicket of towers and opening the floodgates for the emerging Dubai on Thames. A wall of glass stumps is beginning to sprawl along the river from Wandsworth and Battersea to Nine Elms and Vauxhall – and beyond.

“It is an absolute fiasco,” says Mark Brearley, professor at Cass Cities and former director of Design for London. “It is the outcome of not really taking much notice of plans and being fairly relaxed about negotiating the best outcome, and not placing too many obligations on developers. Nothing hangs together as a result, nothing makes sense at ground level. As a piece of city it’s a farce.”


A similarly galumphing form of urbanism is appearing across London, from the gauntlet of City Road to Stratford High Street. Many of the worst offenders are the result of our slippery two-stage planning system, in which general outline permission can be given, while further details are postponed to a later “reserved matters” application. In a system based entirely on negotiation, it is a fair way of allowing developers to test the water and see what they can get away with, before spending money on detailed work. Yet it also allows crucial elements, like ground-floor uses, the location of entrances, the nature of materials and even massing and bulk, to slip through the net, allowing designs to be watered down to pale imitations of what had been agreed. And the hands of the local authority are hopelessly tied.


“Once an outline permission is granted, it makes it very difficult for us to refuse a scheme further down the line,” says one officer. In Stratford City’s “International Quarter”, part of the promised spoils of the Olympic legacy, consented tower proposals have recently gained a substantial number of extra storeys. Similarly in Wandsworth, a proposed pair of towers have put on a growth spurt and lost their planned mix of uses, reverting entirely to high-end flats.


Conditions that have been agreed are relentlessly renegotiated at reserved matters stage. Good architects are employed to win outline planning, then ditched for a cheaper alternative; high-quality materials are substituted for flimsy plastic panels – all in the name of viability.


Just like the banking crisis, the problem of botched urban development has long been encouraged by a system that is open to exploitation and all too susceptible to careless regulation. But it is also not something that can be easily fixed. “There’s only so much mileage in vilifying developers or planners,” says Brearley. “Making cities is imperfect and messy, and has been for thousands of years. But we should be able to do better than this.”

It comes down, he thinks, to the fact the UK planning system is overly reliant on individual negotiation between private developer and public servant, which is usually far from a level playing field. “It makes a very opaque and confusing system that relies on having people that are very sophisticated at brokering deals,” Brearley adds. “And those people will generally settle in places where they’ll earn more money. The people negotiating on behalf of the public are simply not sophisticated enough.”


One former planning officer is frank about the reality of the imbalance in our confrontational system. “If you throw enough resources at a planning application, you’re going to manage to tire everyone out,” he says. “The documentation gets more and more extensive, the phone calls get more frequent and more aggressive, the letters ever more litigious. The weight of stuff just bludgeons everyone aside, and the natural inclination is to say, ‘Oh yeah okay, I’ve had enough of this one,’ and just let it through. It’s like a war of attrition.”


And it is a war in which the side representing the public interest has been systematically drained of expertise. The number of architects employed in the public sector has fallen from over 60% to less than 10% over the last 30 years, while planners have been relegated to third- and fourth-tier officers, with some boroughs contracting the service out altogether. As part of the Farrell Review into architecture and the built environment, a “Plan First” initiative has been proposed, by GLA regeneration manager Finn Williams, on the model of Teach First, to try to lure the best graduates into planning. But it faces an uphill struggle to overturn the years of neglect and transform a system that is fundamentally anti-plan-making.


“To this day our planning system is the wrong way around,” says Rees. “It evolved to protect the countryside from the encroachment of the towns, rather than to make the cities better. It isn’t about building great places, it’s about protecting non-places.” And in the process, it has allowed our cities to cannibalise themselves and become those non-places it set out to protect.



Bullied and undermined, planning authorities have been left castrated and toothless, stripped of the skills and power they need to regulate, and sapped of the spatial imagination to actually plan places. As one house-builder puts it simply, “The system is ripe for sharp developers to drive a bulldozer right through.” And they will continue to do so with supercharged glee, squeezing the life out of our cities and reaping rewards from the ruins, until there is something in the way to stop them.

________________________________________


In the novel SULFUR SPRINGS the woman owning ROSITA'S CANTINA was fine with CORK and his fighting against the 'bad guys' UNTIL Cork found the bad guys to be the RICH DEVELOPER as Mayor and the RICH DEVELOPER as Wall Street financial investor.  Then that small business owner felt her business would be a loser without that funding from RICH PEOPLE.  Sulfur Springs was completely captured in criminality, fear, brutality but the economy created fueled business for local small business owners who sided with those RICH CRIMINALS.

This is what we hear today in BALTIMORE CITY-----our 99% of Baltimore City citizens have been captured to SULFUR SPRINGS societal structures they don't understand a local economy can be fueled by 99% of citizens NOT NEEDING RICH DEVELOPERS.


“Developers have quickly latched on to the fact that, even if they can’t get local authorities to approve schemes, they can get them through the mayor or the government,” says Peter Rees. “The bigger the better. And they know that they’ll happily allow towers to be built outside designated clusters.”

ROSITA'S CANTINA became angry at CORK when the criminals being her customers were being uprooted.  CORK, RAINY, PETER and those BORDER ANGELS fighting the criminal structures understood SULFUR SPRINGS minus those BAD GUYS would blossom as a local town.


Across the US we are seeing global banking 1% NGOs pretending to be social benefit saying TRUST US-----when of course they are the same global banking 1% ROBBER BARONS having created US CITIES AS FAILED STATES with systemic criminality.  What we see below in Richmond VA----is the same policy talking points found in all US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE development----the AFFORDABLE HOUSING TRUST----as here in Baltimore-----as would be in SULFUR SPRINGS ARIZONA had those 'bad guys' not been taken out by CORK, RAINY, PETER, BORDER PATROL
Rosita's Cantina owner thought MAYOR MARION and JAYNE the Wall Street financial developer would help her business when in fact both these HILLARY NASTY LADIES would have brought SULFUR SPRINGS into further dysfunction killing Rosita Cantina ----not helping it.




Neighborhood Revitalization


City of Richmond Affordable Housing Trust Fund The City of Richmond is committed to improving neighborhoods and the lives of the people who live in them. Safe, decent and affordable housing for low and moderate income households is fundamental to the City's vision of a vibrant and inclusive community and to the City's overall economic development goals. The primary purpose of the Affordable Housing Trust Fund (AHTF) is to provide financial resources to address the affordable housing needs of individuals and families who live or work in the City by promoting, preserving and producing quality long term affordable housing; providing housing related services to low and moderate Income Households; and providing support for non-profit and for profit organizations that actively address the Affordable Housing needs of low and moderate Income households.



The AHTF is intended to provide flexible local funding that complements other funding for housing related activities and provides gap financing to move challenging projects forward. In this regard, the Fund will leverage other public, private and philanthropic funding. The AHTF is not intended to replace locally allocated federal program funds


In 2004, the City of Richmond established the AHTF as part of strategy to work with the nonprofit and for profit development community in accessing and producing much needed long term affordable housing for (low to moderate income) residents of the City. The AHTF accesses a variety of funds for affordable housing support services and production. Nonprofit and for-profit residential developers can leverage AHTF funds with other private and public affordable housing financing sources to facilitate affordable housing counseling services and production in the City of Richmond.


Affordable Housing Trust Fund Oversight Board Richmond's system of boards and commissions provides a way for residents who have special experience or interests to participate in the City's decision-making process by advising the Mayor and City Council on numerous issues. Appointed by the Mayor and City Council, the Affordable Housing Trust Fund Oversight Board (Board) consists of ten (10) members. The Board reviews regulations, program policies and operational procedures as proposed by the Chief Administrative Officer or designee. 


The Affordable Housing Trust Fund Impact Report for 2015-2016 can be accessed in the Quick Links box. At this time, the City is not accepting applications to the Fund.

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This is NOT A TRUST ECONOMY. CITY LABS is a media outlet tied to global banking 1% ONE WORLD ONE TECHNOLOGY AND ENERGY GRID ----you know, DEEP, DEEP, REALLY DEEP STATE ----same as those Arizona mafia back in Clinton era 1990s.  Krueger took his ideas for plot and characters from real live history of this Arizona region during that Clinton era global banking 1% criminality surrounding the US border.  Throughout the novel his plot centered around TRUST in each group of characters.  Our US cities cannot have TRUST when we have yet to have JUSTICE----when the same ROBBER BARON CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA and the global banking 5% freemason/Greek pols and players are still in our local, state, national government.  Nothing tied to POPULIST 99% TRUST is MOVING FORWARD in US CITIES DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES---as Richmond, as Baltimore, as Philadelphia, as Pittsburgh, as Akron, as Detroit, as all US mid-size cities.

Today, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas are still captured to global banking WORLD BANK/OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS----now MOVING FORWARD OPEN BORDERS tied to global 1% foreign corporations bringing there global 99% labor pool being enslaved and poor adding nothing to local economy.


'William Kent Krueger is the award-winning author of SULFUR SPRINGS'.

The second half of novel had ROSITA'S CANTINA hating CORK for attacks against organized crime in her town protecting her 'clients' over building civil society in SULFUR SPRINGS.  By the end of novel after CORK brings all those rich criminal players to justice------ROSITA'S CANTINA owner could see a brighter future for her town and future clients.


So, today we are being saturated with FAR-RIGHT WING GLOBAL BANKING 1% media outlets with articles telling us what TRUST around DEVELOPERS looks like.


The Invisible Network That Makes Cities Work

1. Ian Klaus    CITY LAB

Apr 23, 2017


Despite fears of declining social capital and lack of faith in civic institutions, the “new trust economy” is thriving in urban areas.





Do you trust your neighbor? With your spare keys? With your dog? To not look when you change clothes with the blinds open? And has that behavior changed?
As patterns of communication, social interaction, and economic exchange shift, so too does the nature of trust. You can’t see trust. You can’t touch it. But like the copper below city streets and the wires above them, a network of trust undergirds urban neighborhoods and communities. And it’s undergoing something of a revolution.



Economists who write about trust love behavioral game theory experiments that measure the risk-reward premium of trust. The Trust Game, a version of Daniel Kahneman’s famous Dictator Game, allows counterparts to loan or give each other money in the hope of receiving some or more back in return. The game has been used to measure everything from “beauty premiums” to the heritability of trusting behavior.
The game being played out in cities today, however, is not only measured in phone surveys or iterative lab experiments. Instead, cities are the sites of ongoing natural experiments in the future of trust, being conducted by citizens, academics, bureaucrats, venture capitalists, graffiti artists, and chat robots. And some of the results of these experiments are encouraging.



Interpersonal trust, particularly but in no way limited to urban spaces, always seems on the verge of collapse. Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam’s famous essay and book on declining social capital (a phenomenon highly correlated with trust) is more than twenty years old now. Many are convinced that the rise of digital devices and the self-curated universes within them has only exacerbated the decline Putnam described. In a recent London Review of Books, Iain Sinclair wandered through what he called the “Last London.”  There in the hipster coffee shops of Shoreditch, he found Londoners laboring before their laptops in “an occult circle of pale screens and fearful concentration”—the updated version of T.S. Eliot’s London Bridge commuters. “Why,” he asked, “do these digital initiates always look as if the screens hold bad news, as if the power is on the point of shutting down permanently, leaving them disconnected in outer darkness?”

Trust games are also being played by designers who turn digital conversations into modern public squares.



And yet, in what Edward Glaeser called Jevon’s Complementarity Corollary, the revolution in information and communication technology hasn’t rendered face-to-face interaction—or the cities that facilitate such meetings—obsolete. If anything, technology has enhanced their value. And mobile phone data appears to suggest that our devices are frequently used to arrange meetings rather than replace them. (Many of Sinclair’s coffee-sipping zombies were probably doing just that.) If these studies are right, the need for proximity has not been destroyed by new technology, nor has the desire to build trust through human exchange. Rather, technology can help human connection or render them more important than ever.


True to that potential, trust games are also being played by designers who are turning our digital conversations into modern public squares. Future Cities Lab is a design studio and architectural think tank in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood. “Datagrove,” their 2012 installation for the ZERO1 Art and Technology Biennial in San Jose, made nearby data streams visible in light and sound. Trending Twitter feeds were rendered audible through small speakers. The installation, according to the Lab, functioned “as a social media ‘whispering wall’ that harnesses data that is normally nested and



But perhaps the most notable urban trust experiments between individuals are being performed by Uber and Airbnb. Who would let a stranger stay in their house, early (regretful) skeptics once asked, or get into a stranger’s car? In his recent book Upstarts, Brad Stone charts the technological, commercial and political battles of the tech giants. “Airbnb and Uber didn’t spawn ‘the sharing economy,’ ‘the on-demand economy,’ or the ‘one-tap economy,” writes Stone, “so much as usher in a new trust economy.” Early scandals for these companies focused on trashed houses and mistreated riders, but for the most part the trust challenge was overcome. Enhanced insurance policies for drivers and renters helped reduce risk on all sides, but there is much more at work. Trust between riders and drivers, renters and rentees is not based on a centrally distributed permit, medallion or license, but rather on digital reputations.
And what of the experiments in “vertical trust,” the kind that exists between individuals and institutions, including city governments? Here too, the instinct is for pessimism as trust in large institutions is on the decline. At the municipal level, police departments in particular face many of the trust challenges befalling institutions that are either centralized or rely on coercion. Nonetheless, municipal governments are also sites of dynamic trust experiments.



From identifying potholes to proposing ideas for newly elected mayors, cities are engaging the knowledge and needs of residents. Such efforts, often supported by public private partnerships, or in collaboration with universities such as the Ash Center at the Harvard Kennedy School, seek to facilitate both engagement and action. Last month, on the 5th anniversary of New York City’s Data Law, the city launched a new portal for its open-data efforts to help “data novices” more easily access it. “Refreshingly,” writes Stephen Goldsmith, a professor at the Ash Center, “we also see that a citizen’s judgment concerning the trustworthiness of the local government can be facilitated by public transparency and social media use, resulting in more participation in solving the community’s problems.”


“Civtech” has come to be a catch all for such efforts, but the term leaves much to be desired. In The City of Tomorrow, Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel give the concept an alluring tweak. “Futurecraft in urban space,” as they call it, refers not to the new technologies and platforms but to the practice of developing, enabling, and utilizing the technologies and platforms. Crucial to successful practice is “bidirectional interface,” by which participants can access information as well as add and change it—two-way conversations, in other words, but with way more than two people.


Nearly a decade ago, Clay Shirky published Here Comes Everybody, which foretold of a radical future in which organizing could proceed, as the subtitle has it, without organizations. Not dissimilarly, trust building today indeed favors everybody over traditional organizations, a phenomenon being played out in cities around the world.
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ROSITA'S CANTINA was for SULFUR SPRINGS----that small business association member. When we allow our local towns/cities' government and economy be made CRIMINAL AND CORRUPT----we have our small business owners roped into that corrupt system. This is the PATRONAGE/PLAYER economy as we have here in Baltimore.


We have watched for a dozen years as our Baltimore small business associations like ROSITA'S CANTINA work to install MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE for only the global banking 1%. Our local small business associations are pushing for US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES filled with GLOBAL FACTORIES and GLOBAL MINING----killing the future for small business families. Was ROSITA'S CANTINA owner happy in a SULFUR SPRINGS loaded with criminals filling 99% of citizens with fear scaring any tourism away?


WE DO NOT BELIEVE OUR US 99% WE THE CITIZENS OF BALTIMORE and our new to US immigrants WANT TO MOVE FORWARD these criminal cartel controlled ECONOMIES-----



Is FORBES really going to tell citizens what is BEST in economic associations? Of course not. In SULFUR SPRINGS---those local small business owner WOKE UP when CORK showed a future without the BAD GUYS.

Our biggest global banking 5% freemason/Greek players black, white, and brown players are those small business patronage owners. We cannot FIX BALTIMORE when it continues to be a SULFUR SPRINGS.


WHEN A MAYOR MARION OR WALL STREET BANKING JAYNE ARE SAYING THEY ARE 'WOKE'-----'TRUST ME'----99% OF WE THE PEOPLE NEED TO STAND UP AND BE US CITIZENS.

Dec 27, 2016, 04:13pm


The 6 Essential Local Small Business Associations You Should Belong To

Jared Hecht Contributor i
I write about small business lending, finance, and entrepreneurship.

If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re probably used to going it alone. You live and breathe your small business: you’re responsible for every big success, and you decide how to try overcoming each obstacle you face.


That doesn’t mean other people can’t help you, though. Local associations are an invaluable resource for small business owners—and if you don’t belong to any, then you could very well be missing out on the resources, experience, advice, knowledge, and skills that entrepreneurs regularly share.
Whether you have a specific business problem you need to solve or simply want to expand your network, joining one or several local small business associations can push you forward as an entrepreneur. Check out these 6 essential associations first.


1. SBA Community Groups


The Small Business Administration does more than offer low-cost SBA loans to business owners: they’re also a great resource for all kinds of advice and networking opportunities. You can take classes in business management and financing, for example, and meet other entrepreneurs in your area.




Whether you use your SBA community group as a resource in and of itself, or as a jumping-off point to get help from your local peers, this is one business association you definitely shouldn’t miss.   
Also, be sure to check out the SBA’s listings of events and learning center programs, Find your local community groups—along with your nearby regional and district SBA offices, Small Business Development Centers, and more—on the SBA’s locator page.  



About the Author
Ian Klaus

• Feed

Ian Klaus is non-resident fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He was previously Senior Advisor for Global Cities at the U.S. Department of State and Deputy U.S. Negotiator for Habitat 3.

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Here we see to what our once SOVEREIGN US CITY SMALL BUSINESS ASSOCIATION is morphing -----we see this structure being built here in Baltimore and it is simply bringing global 1% of foreign corporations and those global 2% of players into US cities creating subsidiaries of those foreign global corporations.  We discuss MOVING FORWARD US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES building global corporate campus FOOTPRINTS that will expand into GLOBAL FACTORIES the size of US cities-----well, below we see that expansion where every local economy that develops remains captured by those same global banking 1% families.

So, Baltimore City as SULFUR SPRINGS will lose all its sovereign US citizens and businesses--it will lose all its minority contractors tied to LATINO small businesses because global banking 1% are ASIAN/GLOBAL BANKING 1% ASIAN----and global banking 1% ARABIC.  We KNOW MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE will not include an ARABIC RICH...

Global banking 1% today have all those far-right wing global banking 5% freemason/Greek players dancing around the skirts of these global 1%.  It's a sad sight to see from what used to be AMERICAN CITIZENS.  So, are 99% of US white citizens afraid of having US cities filled with global 1% of Asian, Arabic, and African 5%  players?  NO------our 99% WE THE WHITE citizens are fighting to keep US SOVEREIGNTY with RIGHTS AS US CITIZENS tied to being a western developed nation and I AM MAN AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT.

IT DOES NOT MATTER WHETHER A GLOBAL BANKING 1% IS EUROPEAN, ASIAN, ARABIC----WHAT MATTERS IS LOCAL DEVELOPMENT TIED TO KEEPING OUR US SOVEREIGNTY AND RIGHTS AS CITIZENS.


This sovereignty issue is the same for our US 99% of black, white, and brown citizens AND our new to US immigrants.


These global banking 1% foreign corporations are being recruited to create subsidiaries which are then sold as minority SMALL BUSINESSES----no US 99% WE THE PEOPLE need apply.


Small Business Association
for International Companies

P. O. Box 55244
Washington, D.C. 20040
Phone (202) 421-8995
Small Business Association for International Companies is a membership organization established to promote the meaningful utilization of U.S. small businesses at U.S. government agencies providing foreign assistance.


SBAIC Networking Reception Sep 10 2018
by Timothy Fitzgerald




SBAIC understands our business network is our net worth and at our Network Reception on August 2nd, there was plenty of investment. More than 100 SBAIC members, conference attendees, and large prime business representatives turned out at our Networking Reception that immediately followed the State Department’s OSDBU Conference at Don Tito Restaurant in Arlington, VA.



At our Network Reception, SBAIC created a gateway environment which allowed everyone to create and nurture authentic relations. It was an opportunity for people to introduce one another to someone who could impact their life. After all, deep relationships are the foundation of an awesome network.



Mr. Glen Schuhmacher, Vice President Operations – International Division at Engility Corporation and Platinum Sponsor, summed up the event when he said, “This was a great event and we will continue to sponsor them in the future”.


We sincerely thank our sponsors, without their support the event would not have been possible!

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Magic 95.9 BALTIMORE is of course global banking 5% freemason/Greek player media outlet as are all Baltimore media. We want to give some examples of how all of what was REAL LEFT SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE power-to-the-people symbols/populist groups have these few decades been corrupted just as has our government agencies.  We speak often of civil rights, labor rights, veteran's rights, women's rights et all NATIONAL NGOS as having far-right wing global banking 5% PLAYERS as leaders---killing the 99% in each group.  What we are seeing today in our US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones from what were US black, white, and brown freemason/Greek players is a rush to build a connection with the incoming global 1% foreign corporations and those foreign subsidiaries now being called our US SMALL BUSINESS ASSOCIATION.  As long as our US 5% freemason/Greek players continue to hold on to the feet of global banking----being PLAYERS and not US sovereign citizens they will always be under the bus after only a few decades.  Whether that 5% player is white, black or brown---they will always end up as LOSERS.

Below we see our black cultural empowerment tied to hand symbols----DAP handshake had a 99% black populist origin for our US black military members when integrating our US military.  No doubt it was intended as black DIGNITY AND PRIDE---these few decades of ROBBER BARON criminality tied to global banking 5% freemason/Greek players have corrupted that BLACK DIGNITY AND PRIDE----as well as those handshakes now completely tied to FREEMASONRY.  No doubt we see this expanded DAP coming from global banking 1% freemason STARS who could care less about our US 99% of black citizens or new to US African immigrants.

Origins Of The Black Handshake Known As “The Dap” @CivJones
Posted October 22, 2014


It started of a as a symbol of unity and sign to black soldiers during the Vietnam war that they had each others back. LaMont Hamilton  a photographer and visual artist from Chicago began a series of photographs called Five on the Black Hand Side that traces the origins of the black handshake known as the dap. Historically, the dap was a symbol among African American men that expresses unity, strength, defiance, or resistance and a complex language for communicating information. Read more information on the history of the dap and to find out why it was banned in the army here. 

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When our US Executive government agencies these few decades have been controlled by CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA filled with ROBBER BARON global corporate frauds and corruption----we can be sure when CLINTON/BUSH era 2000 creates SBAIC and its tied to STATE DEPARTMENT we are not sending overseas---nor bringing to US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES------99% populist small businesses no matter how many times media states these are poor disadvantaged businesses.
Our US 99% of citizens in US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES must STAND UP against these MOVING FORWARD economic and development structures -----they do not help our global 99% of new to US citizens.
USAID-----has been an arm of global BIG AG----MONSTANTO-----Bill Gates and Blackwater PRINCE now as leaders----nothing good is MOVING FORWARD from these global banking 1% players.
'at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)'

US citizens are losing every local economic structure ----this being our US small business association captured to global banking.




Small Business Association
for International Companies

Small Business Association for International Companies (SBAIC) is a membership organization established to promote the meaningful utilization of U.S. small businesses at U.S. government agencies providing foreign assistance, such as the: U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), and the U.S. Departments of State, Defense, Health and Human Services and Agriculture.
SBAIC currently has over 200 small business members spread across nearly 25 U.S. states, of which more than half are small disadvantaged businesses (i.e., HubZone, minority-owned, 8(a), woman-owned, veteran-owned). Our members work in every development sector, including agriculture and food security, democracy, human rights and governance, economic growth and trade, education, environment and global climate change, gender equality and women’s empowerment, global health, science, technology and innovation and working in crisis and conflict. With an average of 15 years of U.S. federal government experience, each of our members brings a wide range of expertise in business intelligence and analytics, capacity building, disaster response, economic development, education, gender analysis, IT, knowledge management, public financial management, tourism, workforce development.
Our small business members are prime contractors on 80 percent of the work we implement, and many of the contracts are equivalent in size and complexity to those held by larger entities. Contracts range from $100,000 to $42 million. These contracts are managed using U.S. government compliant financial and program management systems. Staffed by development entrepreneurs, former U.S. government staff and large-business executives, our small businesses operate with a combination of seasoned oversight, agility and innovation characteristic of smaller organizations.
SBAIC was established in the early 2000s by a dedicated group of U.S. small businesses working in international development to promote small business utilization at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). After tremendous growth in both membership and stature under Indira Ahluwalia’s leadership from 2010-2012, there was a need to formalize the organization. During Betsy Bassan’s time as Chair from 2013-2015, we registered as a tax exempt organization, created an annual dues system for our members, and established a Board of Directors to spearhead the annual strategic planning process for setting SBAIC’s advocacy agenda and Committee goals and activities. In 2016, Carlos Rivera was elected the Chair of SBAIC and under his leadership we expanded our attention from solely focusing on USAID to include all 20 U.S. government agencies providing foreign assistance.



Growing U.S. Small Businesses Globally