Editor,
Thank you for taking time to write & publish such a moving tribute to Jimmy. I’m sad to hear of his passing.
During the year or so I worked Saturday & Sunday evenings at the Hartland’s front desk, Jimmy and I struck up an unlikely friendship.
On weekends, Jimmy had little or no assistance. By the time I arrived late Saturday afternoon, he was often hungry, visibly thirsty and soiled…primarily because he saw himself a “gent” and was too proud to seek help from female staff.
The routine we developed varied little. Jimmy would have me look in his wallet for money that was never there. He would then say “coke.” I then would run to the shop, return with a can of coke and then hold it for him as in drank it in 2 or 3 big gulps.
With help from others, I always managed to dig Jimmy up something for dinner…which he ate pie-eating-contest style in the conference room. After getting him cleaned up from that spectacle, he’d then park himself on the couch and amuse himself by constantly making me change the TV channel for him – a game he artfully played up until he was certain he had gotten under my skin.
He was uniquely smart. a master at leveraging whatever resources he had available to survive and enjoy life. His impact was far greater than most might expect.
Brian O’Brien
Editor,
This is becoming an old game. A person becomes a landlord and their previous convictions are jettisoned quicker than you can “You’re evicted.” Scherotter may have forgotten it but every advance in social legislation in the past 150 years was achieved because the market was not working. From child labor to public accomodations to zoning to building codes to workplace safety to safe food and drugs, just to mention a few areas for starters, governmental intervention was necessary to overcome the ills of the market. Housing is not a pristine exception. From building codes to fair housing laws an owner’s rights are not absolute as you will find out if you neglect to pay your property taxes. Housing supply is limited by planning and zoning and funny, I never hear our poor-mouthing landlords complain about that sort of state intervention. Perhaps because it raises their property values ? For every Reaganesque welfare millionaire anecdote people like Scherotter relate, true or false, there are dozens of contrasting ones of people who only managed to live in cities because of rent control.
Rent control always exempts new housing, seemingly in perpetuity as I discovered as a rent board commissioner in Oakland in 1997. The arguments that Scherotter makes against the living wage have been made by the Right against the minimum wage since the 1930s ! When it was a quarter an hour. Capitalism is NOT a law of nature like evolution but a human invention and it can be modified or changed by human intervention too. See Everything For Sale by Robert Kuttner for a Social Democratic view of where the market works and where it doesn’t. It’s not the black and white scenario that simple minded lefties who become in old age simple minded righties think it is.
Sincerely,
Michael Hardesty, Oakland
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