The Second Convoy

“Well, it wouldn’t be mobile homes: they would look more like ‘normal’ houses except being very small”

“So like a homeless village?”

“Yes, but done more nicely. Basically trying to be as nice as a suburban village except at much higher density. The homeless would own their small homes. There would even be a HOA [Home Owners Association] to apply rules for keeping things looking good”

“Co-governing homeless villages have not been doing well”

“This isn’t co-governing, just normal home ownership. Except the lots are very small. That is also how it is different from mobile home parks where you are renting your lot vs. owning it.”

“OK. So I buy 40 acres in Fremont for a billion dollars; develop it for a few tens-of-millions to have water, sanitation, and power for the area; you figure out how to get four thousand people to build (or move) tiny homes onto it and we everyone is happy?”

“Well… at least most of those four thousand would be quite ecstatic”

“And I get the warm fuzzies for giving away a billion dollars?”

The rest of the conversation — did not go well. My actual proposal was to do a proof of concept (POC) on a 4-acre plot, ideally in East Palo Alto or Redwood City, but Fremont would be fine also. Fremont just meant I had to cross bridges a lot, and ‘modern’ vampires don’t have problems with that or running water in general. If I did, I could always swing around the San Jose base of the peninsula.

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But Larry and others did not want to spend $100M (or less) on the land to house 400 people. Only special employees are worth $250K each because they can potentially cause a big-bump in stock price. Other people… “meh” .

Apparently these homeless are worth something though: about $1,500 each. Although no one wanted to buy the land needed for the homes, they were willing to donate to the cause. By the end of the evening I had $50M in the Firehorse (501c3) bank account and various electronic equivalents. A few even gave me paper checks, which made ‘El Toro’ feel like an armored car on the drive home. Maybe I should upgrade it a bit more.

Coffee with Jerry did ultimately enable a successful fishing trip, I just didn’t catch as much as I was hoping for. But the Skuna Salmon that Circus served must have been tasty.

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CONVOY

The convoy starts moving at 1 a.m.. Today is Saturday, July 2nd of the July 4th weekend, which we hope will be symbolic. It being a Saturday means the Tuesday–Thursday–Saturday dialysis groups will be affected first by our encampment, but all local dialysis patients outside will be affected by July 4th. Our fleet of 24 Freightliners (half electric, half diesel Cascadias) is pulling two dozen 40-foot containers. A dozen Ford 650 Box Trucks are carrying the tiny houses in collapsed form and other supplies. And a dozen Ford F-450 Duallies pulled various 5th-wheelers, but predominantly Living Vehicle (LV) Pro models for their solar power. Two tanker trucks are full of mostly diesel with some gasoline mixed in. Two more are full of potable water. There are also a large number of Jerry Cans of diesel and gasoline, along with lots of other supplies including water in 3.5 gallon storage ‘Lego Blocks’ redundantly dispersed around all two dozen containers. We spaced the departure of each truck by about a minute, with an escort SUV for each vehicle.

It took almost an hour to get the final of the 52 trucks on the road. The first half of the trucks had parked before the second even started, so we only needed a couple dozen escorts.

Our encampment — is the empty parking lot of the mostly vacant Peninsula Boardwalk shopping center. This used to be somewhat thriving with a Toys R’ Us and other magnet stores. But the universe killed those stores, and only a rarely patronized Sports Basement eventually took its place. The shopping center is notable in a few ways: first, it is right next to the 101 Freeway that is the major corridor up the peninsula side of the Bay Area. Billions of dollars and millions of people travel that road, many of them to Facebook/Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple. The parking lot is visible from the 101, so everyone will see our presence

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as of sunlight. It should be newsworthy.

Second, the shopping center is right next to the canal to what was a low-cost housing area on the bay. People lived in house boats in the canal and marina on the Bay side of the freeway. Presumably the name ‘Boardwalk’ was meant to conjure being on the bay or ocean. But that inexpensive housing approach was recently ‘transformed’ into $1M+ homes at much lower density, and the house boats kicked out. Affordable housing became insanely unaffordable housing in exactly the same area of the city.

Third, the parking lot is not being used even to 10% of its capacity because the car traffic to the shopping center is insignificant. All the people shopping there could easily use the nonfreeway side parking without having to compete for spaces. At worse they have to walk around or through the Kohl, like they would in any indoor mall.

Fourth, the parking lot is quite large, and we can easily create a 600-foot x 150-foot (2 acres) space within it. The perimeter is established by the Cascadias and their trailers, where each is 70 feet long. Including some amount of overlap and redundancy, the perimeter is 3 + 9 + 3 + 9 = 24 rigs. Two of the rigs on each end are make-shift sliding doors. A hill to the 101 forms the North-East border, the Sports Basement forms the South-West, there is a bridge over the canal in the North-West entrance, and the main entrance is the rest of the parking lot to the South-East. Our encampment isn’t a fort, but you also couldn’t wheel up an armored battalion and just roll over us. At least without it being quite a scene to those on the 101.

The perimeter of ‘Boardwalk’ is set up — as the last rigs (which become the doors) roll in. We are working rapidly to get the containers on the ground and stowing the chassis out of the way in

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