Richard Rider Rant: Fires, Home Prices

Six Items – Five on San Diego fires, last one on home prices.

1. RIDER COMMENT: San Diego Union-Tribune columnist Logan Jenkins has an outstanding column on citizen firefighting that I particularly liked. From the excerpt below, see if you can figure out why:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20071105/news_1m5jenkins.html

. . .
Though he lacks Halsey's formal firefighting training, Richard Rider, San Diego's libertarian emeritus, espouses a similar approach when professional forces are stretched beyond the limit.

In a mass e-mailing, Rider, a reluctant evacuee in the Cedar fire, defended his personal preference of fight over flight, finding support in the company he kept this time around.

"Was my two-man home defense team alone in Scripps Ranch after the mandatory evacuation? Not hardly! Turns out that quite a number of men (apparently it's a guy thing) quietly stayed at home, choosing not to answer the door when the police came by with their evacuation demand."

Rider advocates a coordinated corps of fire-savvy volunteers to fill the inevitable gaps when the flaming embers are flying through suburban streets.
. . .

Actually the full Jenkins column is an excellent read – look it over. Logan has a real flair for writing, which is why he gets paid maybe 20 times more per column that I do. Sadly the pay differential is justified. When all is said and done, I'm a journeyman columnist lacking the skills of a clever wordsmith such as Jenkins.

Logan also sent me an email that details the illegality of staying put in a mandatory evacuation. His research shows that it IS illegal, but essentially is unenforceable. Here are his comments:

Richard ... A quick note on what I understand about the mandatory evacuation law. Calif. Penal Code 409.5 is pretty clear that defying an official order to evacuate is a misdemeanor.

Checked that out with the DA's office yesterday. The thing is, it's never been tested in court, according to a retired fire official I talked to who took this matter to the governor's office 10 years ago. Fire and police agencies appear to have adopted the interpretation that those inside an evacuation zone can stay, those outside have to stay out. I think Caldwell repeated a policy based upon a practical interpretation of the law.

After all, no jury is going to convict someone for protecting his house. Plus, emergency personnel don't see much percentage in chasing down people to cite them for a crime they'll never be convicted of.

Does the mandatory evacuation pack teeth? In theory, yes; in fact, no.

For what it's worth, Logan

2. RIDER COMMENT: In a previous rant, I praised the folks who took in evacuated friends, family and co-workers in the massive 500,000+ evacuation/eviction in San Diego County during the fires. And these generous San Diegans deserved such praise.

But the 500K-600K evacuation figure (sometimes reported on national news and the AP wire as ONE MILLION evacuees) was a totally bogus number – yet another unanticipated shortcoming of the reverse 911 system operation. In this case, the INTERPRETATION of the automated call system’s data was the problem – not the hardware and software involved.

I just HATE it when I get snookered like that. After all, when one thinks about it, it was inconceivable that with that many claimed evacuees, so few would show up at the massive Qualcomm stadium emergency center.

In the Voice of San Diego, there is an article by Seth Hettena explaining how this blunder – essentially a new “urban legend” – took in every media outlet in the city, county, state and nation. Apparently the LA TIMES was the first major media outlet to question these inflated numbers, but only after they too had first fallen for the false figures. http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/articles/2007/11/05/opinion/01seth110507....

It was mindless – indeed, stooopid – bureaucratic formulistic guesstimating. How did they conclude that such a huge evacuation occurred?

Apparently they assumed that EVERY completed reverse 911 call they made – to businesses, FAX lines, unoccupied dwellings, answering machines, multiple lines, etc. – caused a family (calculated as 2.6 people on average) to abandon their home. It further assumes 100% compliance – something we’ve later discovered didn’t occur.

So when they called my home in Scripps Ranch, all six phone lines lit up at once – all delivering the same message to my answering machines and my linguistically challenged FAX. All told, that meant that over 20 people supposedly were evacuated from my house – a bit higher number than I can verify. Actually, take away that pesky zero, and they would have hit the number exactly.

3. RIDER COMMENT: The same insightful VofSD article by a former AP reporter referenced above goes on to establish a new maxim I hope to remember always: The distance between the reporter and his or her audience was directly proportional to the degree of inaccuracy in the coverage.

No media outlet can report such a massive, fast moving story without errors. Yet generally I felt the local media did a pretty good job reporting the facts, given the unreliable sources they had to rely upon -– such as Sheriff Kolender, the Board of Supervisors and CAL FIRE.

But the national media was something else. My wife and I were stunned to watch the NBC evening news segment at the height of the fires, describing how Southern California was burning to the ground. We kept looking at each other and saying time and again, "THAT'S not right" or "that’s not true!"

Perhaps you (like us) got those sympathetic calls and emails from friends and family around the country. They are calling in stunned disbelief at our tragedy – wanting to know how many of our family members died in the fires, and how soon we’ll be leaving gutted California for more habitable states.

Clearly the networks were far more interested in ratings than in accuracy. I’m just disappointed I wasn’t taping that "news" show so I could now detail the amazing hype and gross inaccuracies spewed forth by our trustworthy national TV pundits.

It really annoys me that the national media can so butcher and exaggerate a story, and yet never be held accountable for their astonishing inaccuracies. What we need is a new night of TV awards -– for the most inaccurate and/or biased reporting by national networks and newspapers. It would be one heck of a contest, let me tell you!

But for my readers, the lesson is clear: NEVER mindlessly trust what you see and hear on the national TV news. Indeed, be circumspect about ALL news sources – including mine! Anyone who has been part of a news event that later has been reported by the press and TV knows (as do I from personal experience) that between time, space and deadline constraints (plus bias, from time to time), the media simply cannot get a story completely right.

And that's the way it is.

4. RIDER COMMENT: Below is a link to the uplifting SD U-T's news story "Neighbors call him 'hero' for saving homes in fire." It recounts the tale of a former firefighter (now a law enforcement officer for the Forestry Department) who last month saved a BUNCH of his neighbor’s homes from fires -– doing it on his own with no personal firefighting gear, but with some fire hoses he grabbed from a Forestry Dept. depot.

In essence, this story is another compelling case for training up locals who want to stay and fight fires. Providing rudimentary firefighting masks and gear (even just selling it for cost to such stalwarts) so such volunteers would be better protected would be a good idea. Even better, perhaps providing fire hose to those who are trained up for the task, would have saved many, MANY homes in housing tracts, with little or no loss of life.
http://tinyurl.com/26nbcj

5. RIDER COMMENT: As you should recall, last week I contracted with the LA TIMES to do FIVE columns (one a day from last Monday through Friday) on the San Diego fires and related issues. I did a point-counterpoint debate with UCSD professor Richard Carson. It's up on the paper’s website (link is below). If the fire issue is of interest, you might want to read all five – really ten, commentaries.

As it turned out, Carson and I agreed about as often as we disagreed. Nonetheless, the give and take should be instructive for one and all.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-dustup-oct29-nov02,0,4069181.s...

6. RIDER COMMENT: Below is a link to a pretty good story in the business section of the San Diego Union-Tribune.

It points out that -– as I have been preaching -– the residential real estate slump is going to be deeper and more prolonged than most realize – especially in high-priced San Diego. The bottom line is that there is plenty of DEMAND, but most people simply can't qualify for the loans any more – indeed, they SHOULDN'T have before, and now come the defaults.

I like the story because it actually runs the numbers to show that most San Diegans simply can’t qualify for most homes at the current interest rates, high prices and tightened qualifications. Hence, much less demand while the supply of foreclosed properties continues to expand. Prices, as a result, will continue to head down, down, down.