Rise of New Wealth on First Hill.
Rise of New Wealth on First Hill. Charles Mudede

Pill Hill Luxury Tower Officially Opens Today: Puget Sound Business Journal reports that when the 24-story Luma condominiums open today it will be the "first modern-design condo building to open in Seattle's historic First Hill neighborhood in 34 years." It will also be just for rich people, as its units range from $565,000 to $1.36 million. The tower will also remind us that developers can only build for rich people because there is no (or too little) money to be made in building for poor or ordinary people. This is something even Marx knew back in the 19th century. He saw that any investment in housing demands lots of time to recover and make a profit. Developers rarely have that kind of time. They need a return sooner than later. This leaves them with two alternatives: sell to the rich or bank on a sharp increase of their investment's value. Markets can't wait, but governments can. This is why we need to build houses that can wait for the poor and the working classes.

Portland Is Less Diverse than Salt Lake City: But unlike Seattle, its black population is not declining sharply. In fact, The Oregonian claims that "the number of black Portlanders increased 4 percent between 2000 and 2010" and the "metro area had nearly 5,000 black-owned businesses in 2012, a 42 percent increase over five years." So, though the city is very white, and getting whiter, it is not all bad news for blacks. The post does a lot of white soul searching. It claims that there is a ton of white guilt about the increase in housing prices. That guilt is understandable because in 2015 the Portland Housing Bureau found that there wasn't one Portland neighborhood that had a two-bedroom apartment that an "average African American can afford." Not one.

Seattle Has Become Like an Old Friend Who Now Hangs Out With the Wrong Crowd and Has Stopped Having Sex: This is what one gathers from the ninth image of Seattle PI's altogether bizarre post "Is it time to abandon Seattle?" The post pictures Seattle as a horny person about to plunge into a hot youngish woman on a ripe-red seat. This is what the city used to be. Those were the days. It's now overworked and impotent ("no more lazy, moody, sexy evenings").

Sawant Provides an Excellent Assessment of the Political Situation in the US at this Moment: Sadly, the assessment, which is in the venerable leftist journal The Nation, reaches a conclusion that makes sense in the mind but not in reality. Sawant recommends that progressive Americans vote for a person, Jill Stein, who has no chance of winning instead of one, Hillary Clinton, who does. True, Clinton is a neoliberal, but she is still far better than Trump, who Sawant correctly calls an abomination and rabid bigot. But here is the truth of the matter. If Trump wins because many on the left voted for a doomed candidate, it will hurt Sawant and the very important socialist movement she helped bring to the mainstream. Those on the left who are close to the center will dominate leftist politics for a generation. They will point to the insane presidency of Trump and to the purism of Stein's supporters and, by this connection, will pull the massive gravity of the Democratic party away from the progressives. Socialists would gain more ground if Hillary is in power. There can be no doubt about this.

But What Will Happen to the US Political Situation After Next Week's Presidential Debate? This question in addressed on this week's Blabbermouth podcast with Dan Savage, Rich Smith, and Eli Sanders.

We Can Expect SDOT to Be Wrong About Parking: That government institution is really nothing more than an entire agency devoted to cars. It should be called the Bureau of the Automobile. It is for this reason we can expect it to reject any proposal that has even a whiff of the war on cars, and the new parking idea currently supported by the housing non-profit Capitol Hill Housing has just that whiff. Josh Feit at Publicola explains that CHH wants "to implement new parking meter fees in Capitol Hill above and beyond the current 8am-to-8pm, Monday-Saturday, $2-$4, two-hour limit rules there." The thinking is that more expensive parking will discourage the construction of apartments with parking, and this will help push housing prices down. The post also mentions the great parking professor Donald Shoup. Despite the clearness of CHH's reasoning, Mayor Murray and even Kshama Sawant are against the proposal and have sided with the Bureau of the Automobile. (The former argues the taxes are regressive.) Feit has all the sad details.

Woman Is Killed By a Heart Attack After a 3-Car Crash: The investigators think the trouble began with a speeding car that ran a stoplight. It collided with another car that was obeying the traffic light. This collision was met with a second collision. The driver in the vehicle slammed by the speeding car suffered a heart attack after the crash and her life came to an end at the Renton intersection.

Speeding Car Explodes and Tumbles Into a Bike Trail: This is what a person witnessed: The driver of a car "traveling at 90 mph in a 35 mph zone" lost control of his vehicle, which then swerved into oncoming traffic, hit a pole, exploded, and tumbled down the Burke Gilman Trail. Bits of the car burned all over the place. And to the amazement of other witnesses, the driver walked out of the wreck with his life still intact. Another witness had this to say to KIRO 7: "I'm so happy it has a positive ending."

A Second Night of Protests Rocks Charlotte: What sparked the protest and mayhem in this City of big banks was the shooting of black American by a black police officer. The family of the dead black man, Keith Lamont Scott, claims he was shot while holding a book; the police claims he was holding a gun. What we can say about the conflicting stories is that the police are in the habit of seeing things that other people don't. North Carolina's governor has declared a state of emergency.

The World's Largest Telescope Will Be Completed This Week and Begin Searching for Life on Other Worlds: The massive thing is in China, a country that is rapidly pumping greenhouse gases into the only known biosphere. Instead of looking for ways to protect life on this planet, it hopes to find life on other planets. All of this provides evidence for the hypothesis that humans are the dumbest brainy animal in the universe.