Rent from Rigorious Intuition - Sixth comment thread

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Re: Rent

by stickdog99 » Thu Mar 28, 2019 4:39 pm

Think how far we have come: from Shirtwaist factory at minimum wage all the way to Shirtwaist dormitory at maximum rent.

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Re: Rent

by Cordelia » Tue Apr 09, 2019 10:44 am

Protests in Toronto making news in Washington (where the blatant disregard over disparity between extremes in wealth and poverty is never visible ).

Fine dining ‘with a view’ experience protested for being within view of homeless encampment

by John Gage

April 08, 2019

An anti-poverty group is staging protests against Toronto’s fine diners at the new pop-up restaurant experience Dinner With A View, which allows its guests to enjoy a luxury three-course meal while seated in a transparent dome with a 360-degree view.
The dining room is within sight of a homeless encampment.

“Toronto, like most cities, is in the midst of a housing crisis,” an organizer Yogi Acharya told the Washington Post. “There are people who are homeless who have nowhere else to go but under a highway. The brazenness of putting on meals like that not far from where people were hungry and cold all winter was jarring, and we believed it demanded a protest.”

The group, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty has labeled the restaurant “Dinner With A View — of the Rich.”

“Homes Not Domes” and “Evict the Rich,” are just a few of the signs held by protesters angry that this fine dining experience would be placed under an overpass that the homeless, just a mile away, had been evicted from recently.

The luxury dome experience costs a minimum of $550, Canadian, for a group of four people to enjoy a menu of Italian, French, and Mexican-inspired food.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news ... encampment

From the restaurant's website:

A completely luxurious dining experience in a highly unexpected setting. The adventure begins as guests are ushered into a unique outdoor space - a wondrous environment perfect for sharing via social.

Our domes are transformed into terrariums with distinct terrains. A terrarium is an elegant encapsulation of an ecosystem; a living biosphere captured in time. Here, we bring that notion to life inside our domes, each corresponding to a different region of the earth’s terroir: tundra, tropical, grasslands, arid and boreal forest. These extraordinary spaces are designed using resplendent materials such as live flora, luxurious textiles and elegant illumination.

The dining experience is anchored by the Chef’s savoir-faire, and the landscape from which our food is grown. For example, from award-winning René Rodriguez’ Mexican heritage to his exploration of French and Italian cuisine, the chef’s menu is truly embodiment of regional diversity.

The ingredients have been locally sourced by Chef Rodriguez, who designed and prepares a delicious 3-course blind menu, including meat, fish and vegan options.

Artistic spectaculars will frame the stage which will offer opportunities to capture that perfect photograph against an iconic urban background.”

https://www.dinnerwithaview.ca/en/about

'Dinner With A View' guests can join celebrity chef René Rodriguez in rubbing salt into the wounds of hunger and homelessness...







...in the other domes with their 'iconic urban background'.

The greatest sin is to be unconscious. ~ Carl Jung

We may not choose the parameters of our destiny. But we give it its content. ~ Dag Hammarskjold 'Waymarks'

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Re: Rent

by Pele'sDaughter » Wed Apr 10, 2019 7:57 am

I'm halfway convinced the design of those dining domes was intentional. Sort of a sick joke that even the patrons don't get. Maybe a little disdain for the uppity eaters. I can't quite wrap my head around it, if instead, it's upscale role playing of the worst kind in such a blatant display. Perhaps it's a bit of both.

Don't believe anything they say.
And at the same time,
Don't believe that they say anything without a reason.
---Immanuel Kant

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Re: Rent

by Cordelia » Thu Apr 11, 2019 5:36 pm

^^^I agree, and if their patrons didn't get it earlier, they do now (as they get a police escort to dine in their symbolic domes).

Dinner With A View: Toronto's middle finger to the poor

Anger and contempt: protest of chi-chi dining pop-up under the Gardiner exposes the ever-widening fault line between haves and have-nots

by Peter Biesterfeld

April 10, 2019




Most of the 300 or so people who showed up to protest the swishy Dinner With A View dining pop-up under the Gardiner on April 5 are long gone. But the angry sound from the drums of Rhythms of Resistance, the samba-inspired collective that plays for social justice, continue to resound in the night, ricocheting off the concrete pillars soaring over the Bentway.

The popular event space that operates as an independent charity leased space to the Amex-sponsored dinner promoted as a “completely luxurious dining experience – in a unique outdoor space,” with locally sourced cuisine “designed” by Top Chef Canada winner Chef René Rodriguez.

But the “part pop-up restaurant, part outdoor oasis” offering up $100-a-plate dinners inside heated geodesic domes (reserved for an additional $149 and a short distance from where a tent city of homeless people was evicted last month) only serves to expose the widening fault line between haves and have-nots in the city.

The domes, each an illuminated “living biosphere,” sit like intergalactic pods waiting for lift-off behind a steel security fence lined with a black curtain for privacy. Swaths of the curtain come down when people gathering for the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty’s (OCAP) protest, called Dining With A View – Of The Rich, begin rocking the fence to reveal the diners in their bubbles.

The sarcastic outburst of applause from demonstrators that follows is met with equally contemptuous clinking of the wineglasses of a few of the diners who toast the protestors.

“I’m repulsed that somehow we are not all offended and enraged,” says Sarah Shartal, a lawyer who works with people who are marginally housed.

“It tells us something about the state of our city, who feels welcome, who feels safe, who has power and in this case, who profits,” says Ryan Hayes, a researcher with Workers United Canada and one of the featured speakers at the protest.

“Dining in a bubble for people who live in a bubble,” offers another demonstrator.

But in the battle of sound systems, dinner music for patrons in their domes is overpowered by OCAP’s speakers booming out Phil Ochs’s 1966 anthem, Ringing Of Revolution: “And the merchants of style, with their red velvet smiles….”

Meanwhile, at the busy Strachan Avenue entrance to the domes, police are escorting patrons past protestors who are banging pans and shouting “Shame on you!” Placards that read “Your privilege is showing” and “You’re being pretty shitty” are hoisted above the crowd. Safely inside, one of the patrons turns to face protestors and holds up both middle fingers.

OCAP organizer Gáetan Héroux says the decision to protest the event reflects a deep-seated anger over growing inequalities in our city. Says Héroux, “Like hell you’re going to flaunt your wealth in front of us while we suffer.”

On the grassy knoll overlooking the domed encampment, James Cushing, a retired union activist with the Ontario Public Service Employees Union joins the crowd in giving a collective middle finger to those in the domes below.

“It’s pretty disgusting that this takes priority for the city over homelessness,” he says. “That upsets the hell out of me.” On this side of the fence, volunteers are serving up their own dinner – samosas, roasted vegetables, cold-cut sandwiches and chocolate cake – to a long lineup of supporters.

Zoë Dodd, an organizer with the Toronto Overdose Prevention Society (TOPS), delivers the most poignant speech of the night.

TOPS, a collective of volunteers who opened the first overdose prevention site 18 months ago in response to the opioid crisis – saving hundreds of lives – now finds itself fighting the Ford government, which wants to shut them down.

“We cannot just be on our Facebook pages and on social media or be at rallies,” Dodd says. “We need to be seriously organizing because our earth is fucking dying, and people are living in arenas."

She nods in the direction of the Fort York Armoury nearby where the city temporarily warehouses homeless people during extreme cold weather alerts. “We can’t pay our rent and our province is being destroyed by cuts. And fuck the audacity of these motherfuckers eating here in their domes. I hope they’re uncomfortable.”

MORE: https://nowtoronto.com/news/dinner-with-a-view-protest/

The outrage expressed by Toronto's homeless advocates needs to spread far and wide.

(I wasn't familiar w/the concept of 'Pop-up' restaurants until now. Previously the 'Dining w/a View' website showed more urban locations--including several in the U.S--for upcoming dates, but they've since been scrubbed from their site. Does that mean they're abandoning their dome project and will re-group in a different style of bubble, or that these will pop back up again when the pressure dies down? )

The Basics of Pop-Up Restaurants

Originally started as supper clubs back in the 1960s, pop-up restaurants have seen a resurgence. Just as their name implies, pop-ups often occur in unexpected places, for a limited time.

Many chefs open a pop-up restaurant as a way to showcase their talents to a wider audience, perhaps drawing in investors for a restaurant in the future. Other pop-ups are a test run by would-be restaurateurs who are thinking of opening their own restaurant. Pop-ups are also used by community groups as fundraisers. Some pop-up proprietors seek to offer high-quality food at more affordable prices, allowing more people access to gourmet dining.

https://www.thebalancesmb.com/pop-up-re ... ts-2888299

The greatest sin is to be unconscious. ~ Carl Jung

We may not choose the parameters of our destiny. But we give it its content. ~ Dag Hammarskjold 'Waymarks'

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Re: Rent

by alloneword » Thu Apr 11, 2019 6:16 pm

They remind me of 'Claustropheres', from (tosser) Ben Elton's (shitty - don't bother) novel 'This Other Eden':

Rather than adopt a more eco-friendly approach to life, most people have instead invested in a "claustrosphere", a dome-shaped habitat in which all water, food and air is endlessly recycled in a completely closed environment. A person can therefore survive indefinitely within a claustrosphere no matter what ecological horrors may happen outside.

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Re: Rent

by Sounder » Fri Apr 12, 2019 7:57 am

Cordelia wrote...

The outrage expressed by Toronto's homeless advocates needs to spread far and wide.

Then perhaps more 'pop-ups' would be a good thing.

At any rate, rent is high because washing hot money through real estate is so damn easy.

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Re: Rent

by Cordelia » Sun Apr 14, 2019 7:36 am

Sounder » Fri Apr 12, 2019 10:57 am wrote:Cordelia wrote...

The outrage expressed by Toronto's homeless advocates needs to spread far and wide.

Then perhaps more 'pop-ups' would be a good thing.

Dunno; maybe we'll find out since their website now shows Chef Rodriguez will take his dining in the dome zone to other cities including, early next year, the city w/ the fourth largest homeless population in the U.S, San Diego......



I’m reminded of way back in the early 1980's, when Washington D.C.’s leading homeless advocate, Mitch Snyder, and the Community for Creative Non Violence made National News by serving 30 members of Congress a homemade gourmet meal that included crab quiche and berry shortcake made with ingredients brought in from supermarket dumpsters.

“CCNV, a controversial but innovative group that occasionally tangles with the law, has also made a cause celebre of salvaging edible food from supermarket dumpsters. It catered for a congressional committee a highly publicized lunch including crab quiche made from what they scavenged: food from a dumpster, discarded for being beyond the ''pull date'' and cosmetically imperfect produce. As a result of that demonstration and attendent publicity, both Giant and Safeway Supermarkets in Washington have agreed to allow authorized feeding groups to pick up daily loads of produce, dairy, and baked goods slated for the dumpster, screen them for edibility, then distribute them to soup kitchens and other programs.”

https://www.csmonitor.com/1982/1210/121044.html

Had Snyder lived, would he be shocked by how much things have worsened post Reagan?

On a more positive note, in San Francisco last year one group took creative cooking, job training and homelessness to open another, more inclusive Pop-Up restaurant:

At These Pop-Up Dinners, The Chefs (And The Guests) Are Homeless

Farming Hope teaches culinary skills to San Francisco’s homeless, and then serves meals where homeless diners eat side by side with people who pay full price for the meal.



By Adele Peters

On a recent night at a pop-up dinner in San Francisco’s Civic Center neighborhood–with a menu including seared mushroom red potato tostada and roasted broccoli with honey sriracha, some of the guests had paid $55 for a ticket for the multi-course meal. Other people, who are homeless, paid nothing. They sat together and talked, eating food prepared by people who are also homeless.

The startup nonprofit behind the dinner, Farming Hope, wants both to provide new job training for people who are trying to work their way out of homelessness–so they can later land jobs in the Bay Area food world–and to bring people together around food in a different way.

“We want an environment where it’s not just a restaurant where no one who’s very poor is coming to eat, and it’s not just a soup kitchen, where it’s only homeless people eating donated food as quickly as possible,” says Jamie Stark, one of the cofounders of Farming Hope. “It’s a nice environment where people want to be, where there’s a unique mix of people, and where some of that empathy and understanding and human-centered thinking can spread.”

Stark and cofounder Kevin Madrigal met as students at Stanford, where both had an interest in food as a tool for social empowerment and social change. They incubated the nonprofit in a summer business incubator at Stanford’s design school. In January 2017, they began working with their first cohort of employees in San Francisco–people who wanted to find jobs and begin to move out of homelessness.

As they initially began to design the nonprofit’s approach, they interviewed people experiencing homelessness and identified a key component–to feel needed. “Homelessness is not just a crisis of economic poverty, it’s also a crisis of social poverty,” Stark says. “So kind of rebuilding that sense of being needed in a community is incredibly important if you’re actually going to do transformational justice work, and get people into a different space and into the life they want to live.” Helping homeless people work with food and serve it to others, they realized, would be one way to address that need.

The program teaches participants to grow some of their ingredients, working in community gardens–including a rooftop garden on a local homeless shelter–and then offers training in cooking and serving restaurant guests. They quickly pared the training course down to three months to match the length of time that someone can have a bed at a homeless shelter.

“When we started last January, we were having guys doing really well with us–and then they would lose their beds and be off in the streets and they would drop off, because they didn’t have the stability,” says Stark. “So we really realized we had to work faster and better identify the folks who were very ready to get into employment, but they needed a job on their resume, they needed the confidence and the money, and somebody who could write them a letter of recommendation before they could get there. And we needed to push them to do this in a short enough timeline where they wouldn’t have everything upended when they had to move yet again.”

After the program, the nonprofit will help participants apply for a jobs. In the video below, one person who went through the program talks about the job he got with Whole Foods. Of eight participants in the startup program in 2017, four went on to get long-term, full-time employment.

MORE: https://www.fastcompany.com/40563529/at ... e-homeless

The greatest sin is to be unconscious. ~ Carl Jung

We may not choose the parameters of our destiny. But we give it its content. ~ Dag Hammarskjold 'Waymarks'

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Re: Rent

by Cordelia » Tue Oct 01, 2019 2:53 pm

Homeless in San Francisco's 'Clinton Park'... between a rock and a hard place.

Everybody must get stoned: Clinton Park boulders are San Francisco’s clumsiest metaphor

By Joe Eskenazi | Sep 30, 2019


A sleeping man finds room between the anti-homeless stones placed on Clinton Park, purportedly by fed-up neighbors. Photo by Taylor Ahlgren
....

In San Francisco, perhaps the richest city in the history of cities or money, we’re fighting a proxy war over rocks. We’re doing this while the level of suffering on our streets resembles a scene out of a failed state. We’re doing this after the city’s neglect regarding unsafe and miserable conditions on this and so many blocks led residents to consider vigilantism as an attractive option (there was, apparently, no city permission sought nor granted prior to dumping tons of rocks on the sidewalk — this, in a city where installing a pink flamingo in the front yard likely requires several rounds of permitting).

https://missionlocal.org/2019/09/everyb ... t-metaphor

(clever 'prop'--empty carton of Rolling Rock.

The greatest sin is to be unconscious. ~ Carl Jung

We may not choose the parameters of our destiny. But we give it its content. ~ Dag Hammarskjold 'Waymarks'

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Re: Rent

by alloneword » Wed Oct 02, 2019 7:04 am

Watson's a bit of a dick, but this was still worth watching:

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Re: Rent

by Cordelia » Wed Oct 02, 2019 6:02 pm

^^^Very worth watching--Thanks!

S.F. Apodments for $1,200/month (more for upper bunk safety bars, or more for floor-level shoe space and under-bunk storage? What about the Pentpods? ).



https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/05/success/ ... index.html

The greatest sin is to be unconscious. ~ Carl Jung

We may not choose the parameters of our destiny. But we give it its content. ~ Dag Hammarskjold 'Waymarks'

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Re: Rent

by Pele'sDaughter » Thu Oct 03, 2019 10:12 am

(CNN)If you're in the market to rent a home in San Diego, this backyard shed could be yours for a whopping $1,050 a month. Yes, really.

The studio is located in the backyard of a home in the North Park neighborhood, which is one of the city's most walkable neighborhoods.
The listing calls the shed a studio, but neighbors aren't exactly convinced.

"I was amazed it was going for that much money," Joe Moreno, who lives nearby, told CNN affiliate KGTV. "Does it have plumbing? I mean, does it have facilities?"

The 200-square-foot studio apartment does have plumbing, an air conditioner, stove and small refrigerator. It doesn't, however, have a washer and dryer or parking, the listing said.

While the rent seems outrageous to some, the asking price is $300 per month less than a typical studio in the area. The company renting out the property, J.D. Property Management, doesn't expect to have an issue with the price, considering the former tenant paid $1,100 a month for two years.

"Maybe it is high for what it is offered at, but the reality is that the square footage and the location is exactly what this market needs," housing industry analyst Alan Nevin told KGTV.

Applicants interested in renting the shed must have a credit score of 650, an income of 2 1/2 times the rental amount, no history of evictions and rental references, https://www.zumper.com/apartment-buildings/p411204/4733-35-oregon-st-north-park-san-diego-ca.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/02/us/san-d ... index.html