I think you've lost the thread here, you seem a little confused. First you contradicted me now you're agreeing with what I said that 40 years ago they would not have thought it was changing for the better.

FWIW, I've been here a quarter century and have not seen change for the worse.

No, I don't think that's a slam dunk at all. I've spoken to a lot of old time B&R JC folks, and for most of them the 50s and 60s were the good old days and the 70s were rock bottom. People say in the 80s Hamilton Park was a 'needle park' and few dared enter. Newport wasn't begun until 1986, and they designed the parking deck as a castle wall against the riff raff west of it. It took a lawsuit for them to make entrances through it on Marin. So whether a typical JC resident would say it was changing for the better in 83 seems pretty unlikely.

Not so sure if 40 years ago people said it was 'changing rapidly' they meant in a good way, but perhaps.

So funny, I could have written that 15 years ago. Cheers!

>Dense development is only considered desirable when it is high income or senior housing.

That's one of the silliest things I've ever heard. Middle income high rises are possibly even more sought after than luxury in the NY Metro.

Besides, in most cases of opposition to density, the horrifying zoning proposal is usually up from single family to 2-4 units, not high rises. In JC people were ready to riot against allowing 4 floors along commercial corridors in R-1 zones, like Palisade Avenue.

I have, which is why I qualified the remark with 'often' instead of saying something like 'always', which would indeed be idiotic.

The NIMBY movement, particularly in California, has done a good job of convincing that segment that dense development poses more of a risk of gentrification than them being displaced from their low density rental homes by rising rents or sale of the property. In my observation this is not the case. Displacement gentrification precedes development not follows it, an area like the Heights is a prime example.

It's amazing how unreflective you are about using the exact same arguments frequently used against small multifamily and midrise. As always, NIMBYs want what they want and contort to justify it.

I read it. You are literally NIMBYing, it's exactly what you're doing. You don't want a building that is too big for a neighborhood, IN YOUR OPINION! The process of empowering everyone to weigh in and veto any and every development plan has gotten us to this point of housing shortage.

I prefer to let the market rather than the incumbent residents decide whether to build 2, 6 or 16 stories. Across the country, people that speak passionately about desiring to preserve their neighborhood's 'special character' are often merely presenting code for keeping it wealthy and white.

Great article about how a town on a SF commuter line fought passionately to keep out condos that might impact their views of the hills and the 'unique character' of their town.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/business/economy/housing-crisis-conor-dougherty-golden-gates.html

>The community doesn't support it.

Tough. Letting communities control density has contributed greatly to the current housing crisis in many cities. Nimbies are gonna NIMBY.

Yeah, right. Going to build 2 drawbridges over the Hack and Passaic to get the HBLR extension to Kearny & Newark? Not a fucking chance. Like the Hudson Pedestrian Bridge and Tunnel, this is what you get when someone with no common sense or knowledge of how big civil engineering projects work looks at a map and starts daydreaming.

Ah. That's kind of old news actually. In the late '90s there was a lot of breastbeating about Manhattan becoming unaffordable to the middle class. We now live in the result, the resurgence of JC, Brooklyn, Queens, and even the Bronx to some extent. I actually had a letter to the NYTimes published predicting exactly this.

I expect this to simply become a cycle like most property and business cycles. The problem is been there has rarely been serious retractions in the price of real estate in the city. If it drops a serious percentage, like 30%, there are people and businesses who would find it attractive and there would be an up swing. As it was before covid, New York City had priced itself out of reality for many. It was a situation ripe for disruption.

The city budget is a different issue, the waste, poor choices, corruption and mismanagement create a situation where everything costs far, far more than it should. Perhaps a crisis is just what is needed to reassess the status quo of budgeting.

I'm sure it's going to seem counterintuitive to you but cities are actually quite environmental, can you imagine the landscape if everyone in New York City actually lived in single family suburbs?

>This is all absolutely correct.

Haha, I love to see those words! Just to clarify for the crowd since obviously it's easy for unversed folks to get confused, you referred to 'MCC', meaning "metal clad cable". But there's at least 3 varieties we encounter.

1: Old steel armored cable, frequently called BX, though that was a brand name. It has no bonding strip and therefore is not legal to use as ground. Obviously not on the market anymore

2: 'AC cable', an industry term for steel armored cable with the bonding strip making it legal for grounding use

3: 'MC cable' armored in aluminum, which would make it not legal for grounding, so it comes with a green wire for ground, unlike AC. So a 12-2 MC cable has 3 conductors, black, white and green, same as a Romex (again name brand) or NM (non-metallic) cable

>I personally put ground pigtails in boxes to outlets/switches for added protection since paint on the outer part of boxes can act as an insulator. I don’t trust the contact a device will have with the box as grounding in these cases, and for $10 I don’t see why I would.

Better electricians pigtail everything, so if there's a receptacle failure it doesn't break the continuity, especially of the neutral, to the downstream boxes. Wago type push in connectors beat the hell out of wire nuts for this, and everything.

>there was a short that the electrician resolved.

A short in the outlet box or in the device plugged in? You're not being clear. It's perfectly legal under 'grandfathered code" to have an ungrounded outlet, what's illegal is to put a 3 prong receptacle there that is ungrounded.

Where a lot of confusion arises is whether the metal clad cable is legal to use as ground. The problem is the older cable is not, it does not have the bonding strip inside that later AC cable does. But some people will use the metal box/cable as ground anyway. It will show as properly grounded on a tester, but certain circumstances can fail to conduct enough current to trip the breaker.

A partial solution is to add GFCI receptacles to ungrounded outlets. Not perfect, but safer.

https://ask-the-electrician.com/installing-a-gfci-outlet-without-a-ground-wire/gfi-gfci/wiring-gfi-outlets/

No doubt something happened to you, but I think your understanding of household electricity is lacking. Under normal operation no device will shock you simply due to lack of ground. The only scenario in which you could blame the lack of ground is if the device had a defect or failure and had a short to it's frame, and the frame should have been grounded but wasn't and so became energized without tripping the breaker.

As someone commented, a GFCI circuit protector would likely have prevented this event, current code for new construction required GFCI and AFCI protection on nearly every circuit. This drives up the cost of typical home by at least $2000-3000.

So they were behind the crosswalk you were in, in a turn lane? That's fucking insane then.

Absolutely, but I've sat there at a multiway stop while someone in front of me waves through 3 cars that got there after they did. Not 1 in 4 JC drivers actually knows the rules for multiway stops.

Obviously I wasn't in a rush or I would have beeped them sooner.

I've noticed that BMW drivers are totally the worst.

If they were making a L on red doesn't that means you were crossing against the light too, right? I'm just guessing they entered the intersection legally, had to wait till the light changed to stop oncoming traffic (with a car or 3 running the red), and when they finally made the turn, there you were jaywalking.

Now, this may not have actually happened to you the way I guessed, but it happens plenty, with scofflaw pedestrians and cyclists playing their parts in making the streets a shitshow.

Thanks for such a long, thoughtful, and non confrontational response.

>I think there will have to be a law that ebikes can not ride more than 9mph on the sidewalk. Or $75 minimum fine.

Who's going to enforce this? Especially when these motor vehicles do not have any license plate identifying them, not that that's even very effective on cars these days when all sorts of clever methods of obscuring the plate are available, and even simple ones like a smoked plastic cover do not get ticketed by law enforcement.

I wish there was an answer other than law enforcement personnel. But it seems that we live in an era of entitlement where everyone tries to get away with absolutely every single thing they can, and the fact that it affects other people negatively seems not to matter, everyone is the star of their own movie, and other people are just extras at best.

Why does that have to be the choice? I would rather they behave like the motor vehicles they are, and obey traffic laws. I have less sympathy for them blowing lights & stops than someone who has to hump on the pedals of a bicycle to regain their momentum.

To be honest, I have sat behind someone unmoving at an intersection assuming that there was someone in front of them, only to realize after a while there wasn't. The drivers aren't only stupidly aggressive, they're stupidly timid too. This is why some people are quick to beep.

>I really do not understand why we think parks should be dog toilets.

"We" don't, but this battle has been going on a long time. The people who passionately argued against dog-free zones and dog parks insisted that there was no reason why 'we can't all just get along and share', when that meant they and their dogs could do whatever they wanted and we had to watch out for both aggressive dogs and where we sat or stepped.

I love dogs, but I've made the choice not to have one because I am not willing to put in the time commitment required for being a responsible owner. Unfortunately this does not seem to stop many, many dog owners.