NEW OR RECENT POST

On Tuesday, May 10, 2022, the City of Paris council members voted to demand rental properties in the historical districts to pay “registration” fees. On all rental properties? Even above ground-floor apartments and condos being recommended as a way to have more people living in the downtown area?   

The city grants – gives – taxpayer’s dollars to downtown owners who will improve the appearance of their buildings, but charges regulation, restrictions and fees for others to improve their property. Why?

Think about the thinking: Creating more regulations, restrictions, and fees on rental properties is the way to (a) create more affordable housing and to improve Paris; or (b) hope higher rents will keep the (wink) undesirable “low income” folks out of the neighborhood?

Will increasing rental fees win the war against blight, decay, and rot in the area’s older neighborhoods?

Let’s face it: Large areas of Paris are a disgrace; ugly to the eye and an insult to humanity. Especially, when the city allowed the property to decline to a point where it needs repairs.

We’re not against equally applied standards – or fines – to prevent litter, junk in front yards, weeds, maintenance neglect, etc., but restrictions, regulations and fees to tell owners what they must do?

“…com’on, man!”

Three short weeks before, the Paris Texas Chamber had suggested the city be prohibited, by ordinance or Charter change, from adopting or enforcing regulations that requires an owner of a vacant residential or commercial property to obtain a permit to do repairs to their property, (a) if it is necessary to protect public safety; or (b) to prevent further damage to the building.

So the city’’s guiding hands did the very opposite of what needs doing.

The city has planners and other sellers of services who find regulations, restrictions and fees successful ways to use the taxpayer’s money. Somehow, those ways seem to benefit them, seldom the community. Everyone knows the examples:

  • Incentives to builders for 5 little-bitty $200,000 affordable homes (1150 to 1250 sq. ft.); a million dollar guarantee

  • Approving really tiny (750 to 800 sq. ft.) homes in established older neighborhoods or in retail and commercially zoned areas

  • giving incentives to apartment complex purchasers or builders; and

  • Using an estimated $7-million to build a street for a residential development with a small retail or commercial area thrown into the mix.

None of those things, nada, are doing anything to improve the older existing, ignored for years, city discriminated against neighborhoods.

But $7 to $8 million, not counting the other incentives, used wisely, could – the catch here, of course, is being “used wisely”.

Millions of dollars to builders and a few wealthy corporations, but Paris will not purchase in bulk-at-a-discount building fix-up, paint-up, and clean-up materials to provide families willing to use sweat equity to repair or improve their home in an older neighborhood?

Why not?

As the Paris Chamber previously stated: There are only two reasons to penalize the improvement of property: Greed for fees or stupidity.

Paris does both, often at the same time, and calls it progress.

 

                       return to  Paris Texas Chamber of Commerce

A city plan – like most government plans – seems to take a good idea and make it an implausible concept or something impossible to implement.

It’s the nature of government.

The job of a city council, an economic or community development organization, most chambers of commerce, local school boards, county commissioners, a “community” newspaper, and, sadly, even churches or libraries, seems to be to take a great idea and make it almost good. Principles are forgotten; every decision becomes a compromise.

Most of the managers and directors of these organizations are affable, but can be sneaky or even mean little boogers. Operating on Other People’s Money, most are simply bureaucratic snowflakes: They like government. They think government is good, instead of it being a necessary evil that increases your tax bill every year.

They are Government in the same way Dr. Ego Fauci is Science.

The majority of them, like Fauci, hold their jobs by being good at puckering up and selling someday.

We say this, knowing that, once upon a time, one of our directors was one of them, but luckily, for us, he’s full of tender mercy.

He said he had a friend, in his younger days, who, at the age of 15, discovered girls. Sadly, he also says, this caused his friend to discover most of the Kentucky distillers at age 20. Then, he sadly adds, his friend discovered, at 58, there’s no such thing as someday.

As ol’ Ernest Tubb yodeled in 1945, “Tomorrow Never Comes” . . . .

That, of course, is history, which today’s “woke” snowflakes are busy trying to eliminate – something they have no control over – to demonstrate they are nice and wonderful people.

They have an excuse; just not a reason.

Other than censorship.

IF allowed, who censors the censors?

History provides the measure of how far we’ve come over time – it’s how intelligent people measure progress.

Censorship is regressive; bringing back the Inquisition, the burning of books, ruling classes, economic enslavement, denying educational opportunities, etc.

But if YOU don’t let them have their way, you’re a racist – AND a domestic terrorist.

Suddenly, it seems, common sense is being thrown out with history. But that’s another story for another time, another place. 

In July, in 1911, temperatures climbed into the high 90s along the Eastern Seaboard. It stayed there for days, killing 211 people in New York alone. News reports claim that the killer heat wave drove some people insane (with New York values it isn’t a long drive . . .)

It was in that year of 1911, that the first workable air conditioner was patented by Willis Carrier (The Rational Psychrometric Formulae). By the late 1930’s, air conditioning was being installed in approximately 2% of American homes.

Paris demands historically-accurate restoration of homes and businesses in the historical district, yet, allows air conditioning in homes constructed over 120-years ago.

That’s funny, if you can’t ignore historical accuracy.

Or wasn’t forced to pay for it.

 

return to The Paris Texas Chamber of Commerce

During – and before – the 1950s, Paris Texas was a good-looking community. In the 60’s, it was a community of economic promise. Going into the 70s, Paris was a growing community. Then, in 1982, as the politicians swapped the private enterprise system for State Capitalism – a partnership between Big Business and Big Government – a tornado hit, and changed the community’s condition.

The amount of destruction of homes and established businesses in older areas became an opportunity for members of the leadership to rebuild Paris, or enrich themselves.

But, the local leadership personally jumped on the new opportunities offered by state and federal grants and low-cost loans to invest heavily in vacant North and East areas along the relatively new NE Loop 286.

Today, inside the Loop, approximately three-fours of Paris is a “social and economic liability…a menace to health, safety, morals and welfare.” It’s an official “distressed area”.

That’s what the City of Paris claims, not the Paris Texas Chamber of Commerce.

It’s the result of decisions by those organizations in charge of community and economic development. And a local real estate group that, almost without fail, played a major role in the conspiracy for which the bill is now being presented.

(If you are in the real estate industry, tuffy-wuffy: It’s your bitter pill-of-fact. You – or too many of your fellow agents – swallowed perceptions and myths that are responsible for most of the stagnation in Paris. As a group, you supported – allowing – community organizations that are responsible for decades of no growth.

As professionals, you should have known better! We are not saying that all of you are clunks, but there is more than just a touch of troglodytic clabber in the mental makeup of those who allowed the perceptions and myths fostered by those in charge.

YOU gave them your money and your support. You didn’t say, “Wait a minute – How can I sell Paris as a desirable place to live or do business, if half the town is undesirable?

Over time, words get lost; even words like “on the west (or south) side…”

Excuses became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

For years, residential and retail developers were urged to invest in the vacant North and East areas. They were quietly warned in hemi-demi-semi-thunderous under-tones, with a racist sort of squeak that would kill knee-high cotton, that “nothing will go on the west and south areas of Paris” and “oh, you don’t want to live in those areas!” On behalf of investors and depositors, local banks led the way with lending policies on appraisals by approved appraisers who toed the line.

The leadership forgot that people don’t want cancer, and chickens do come home to roost.

Today’s problems were over 40-years in the making. Giving the downtown area another aspirin or a corporation cash will not cure them.

What Paris has done to itself is almost unimaginable.

And what we’re doing today is unimaginable.

We know not what path others may take, but as for the Paris Texas Chamber, we will never lie to ourselves about the community’s condition.