Mark: [warmly] Hey. Good morning, this is Ashley River Radio, I'm Mark.
Lauren: [warmly] And Lauren.
Mark: It is Wednesday, September second, and there is a city meeting tonight that you can just... walk into. No sign-up, no speaker card. We'll get to that in a minute.
Mark: [amused] Also, fair warning, at some point we spend about four minutes arguing about a fifteen dollar network card, so, uh — pace yourselves.
Lauren: [dry] It's a good card.
Mark: [laughs] It's a fifteen dollar card off eBay.
Mark: So, weather. We had fog this morning, right? I'm coming over the Ashley about quarter to seven doing thirty with my hazards on, behind a guy doing twenty —
Lauren: [interrupting] Doing twenty.
Mark: Doing twenty. And I can't pass him, because I can't see what I'd be passing into.
Mark: But it burns off. Ninety-one today, wind's one to eight. So, uh — calm. Nice day.
Lauren: [flat] No.
Mark: [beat] What do you mean, no?
Lauren: One to eight is the bad version. I have said this on this show.
Lauren: If it's blowing fifteen, whatever builds this afternoon moves off and it's somebody else's rain in twenty minutes. At one to eight it just... sits there. Parks over four streets and empties out.
Mark: [conceding] Mm. And it dumps four inches on Avondale and everybody two miles away thinks you made it up.
Lauren: Right, and you get accused of exaggerating your own driveway.
Mark: >> Okay, speaking of moisture. I ran a hose reel bracket overnight in the garage.
Mark: Came off the plate in layers, man. Like I can peel it apart with my thumb.
Lauren: [pause] Mm.
Mark: It's the humidity. That garage is a swamp from June to November.
Lauren: [flat] Mm-hm.
Mark: [defensive] It's the filament. It's not the machine.
Lauren: I didn't say anything.
Mark: You did an entire thing with your face.
Lauren: [amused] Four hours. For a bracket. That you could have bought.
Mark: I checked the radar before I locked the truck, though.
Lauren: [dry] You did.
Mark: Learn from me.
Lauren: >> [dry] Alright. So the fog is about the only thing left in West Ashley older than the pool, and they've already knocked the pool down, so let's start there.
Lauren: This is the Post and Courier. The W.L. Stephens Aquatic Center — city demolished it mid-July, and there's a drop-in meeting tonight, five-thirty to seven-thirty at Carr-Richardson Park. Drawings on the wall, actual humans standing next to them.
Mark: Drop-in meaning what, you just show up?
Lauren: That's it. Look at the boards, corner somebody, leave. No speaker card, no three-minute timer.
Lauren: Thirty-eight million dollars, out of the seventy million bond that passed in twenty twenty-three. Twenty-six thousand three hundred and eighty-five square feet — they were very specific about that.
Mark: [amused] Not twenty-six four.
Lauren: Twenty-six three eighty-five. Twenty-five meter pool, deep enough for boards, nine to eleven feet. A therapy pool. Multipurpose room, inclusive playground, tennis and basketball.
Lauren: And they're resurfacing the Miracle Field and putting in new fencing.
Mark: Wait — the Miracle League field? That field gets used, that's a real thing.
Lauren: City capital projects person, Beth Brownlee, said the old one was built in the seventies and was outdated. Which — yeah. It was a seventies pool.
Lauren: And Waring — councilman for that district — did an Instagram video saying almost five generations in those neighborhoods swam there. His line was, "This was the only city pool for fifty years in West Ashley."
Mark: [flat] Fifty years, one pool.
Lauren: >> Okay, so the part I keep chewing on. Completion is mid-March, twenty twenty-eight.
Mark: [beat] Twenty-eight.
Lauren: So do the subtraction with me.
Lauren: It came down in July. That's this summer gone, next summer gone, the summer after that gone. Three summers, and it opens in March, so really you're talking about kids getting back in the water in twenty twenty-eight.
Mark: Yeah, no, that's — three summers is forever when you're nine.
Lauren: And the households that already have a pool in the backyard won't notice one week of it. Not one week.
Mark: Nobody in a neighborhood with a pool loses a goddamn Saturday over this.
Lauren: Right. The whole cost lands on the families who don't have a ride to somewhere else.
Lauren: And what those families get told is wait three years.
Mark: [thoughtful] Okay, so — mine's different. Mine's the schedule, and it's boring, and it's the thing that'll actually bite.
Lauren: Okay, go.
Mark: A twenty twenty-eight date announced in twenty twenty-six means twenty twenty-eight if nothing gets touched. And things get touched. I've sat in the meeting where the number comes back high and somebody starts going down the scope with a pen.
Lauren: [flat] And what's the first thing off the list?
Mark: On a rec center? The therapy pool and the parking. Every time.
Mark: Because the twenty-five meter pool's the picture on the rendering. The therapy pool's a line item on page nine.
Lauren: [flat] The therapy pool is the only reason half those people are showing up tonight.
Mark: I know. That's why I'd stand in front of somebody tonight and make them say the words out loud.
Mark: >> Which — that's my advice if you're going. It's a drop-in, so bring one question. One. Not a speech.
Lauren: [amused] Here we go.
Mark: I'm serious. Same rule I've brought back from every permitting hearing on James Island. You win by being boring and specific. Bring the number.
Mark: Ask the person holding the drawing.
Lauren: [dry] Works great when the room already wants to say yes.
Mark: [exhales] Okay, but —
Lauren: No, I mean it. Boring and specific is a fantastic strategy if you've got standing. If it's a street of rentals, your very specific question goes in a drawer.
Mark: ...Yeah. I've seen the drawer.
Lauren: You have seen the drawer.
Mark: >> Alright, related but different.
Mark: Did you see the city closed on the Morrison Drive property?
Lauren: Saw the headline. Didn't read it.
Mark: Post and Courier had it. Eighteen million dollars for two point four acres at Morrison and Huger — the old Longshoremen's site, right by Taco Boy. Closed August thirty-first, they announced it the first.
Mark: About a hundred and ninety homes. Funded out of a TIF, and it's using that new workforce housing zoning they passed in the spring.
Lauren: That's the thirty-five hundred by twenty thirty-two thing.
Mark: Cogswell's goal, yeah.
Lauren: [pause] So a hundred and ninety.
Mark: [flat] Yep. That's the number.
Lauren: Against thirty-five hundred. And thirty-five hundred is already a small number next to what's actually missing out here.
Mark: Sure, but a hundred and ninety's a hundred and ninety more than —
Lauren: [interrupting] It is, and I'm glad. I want a rent number.
Lauren: The release has a quote in it about homes "designed to a standard this city can be proud of." Great. There's a design standard in there and there is no rent in there. Which incomes, and for how many years does it stay that way?
Mark: They haven't even picked a developer, to be fair. Design and engineering requests went out last month, that's it.
Lauren: Then say "we'll publish the affordability terms when we've got them." Say that instead. Right now it's one word doing an awful lot of lifting.
Lauren: [flat] It's bullshit until there's a number attached.
Mark: [beat] Okay, but the thing in there I actually think is good — they're front-loading the design and entitlement work before they hand it off.
Lauren: Okay, explain why that matters, because I don't think most people —
Mark: Because entitlement delay is money. Real money. I've watched a project sit twelve, fourteen months waiting on approvals with financing costs running the whole time, and when it comes out the other side the pro forma doesn't work anymore, so the units get smaller or the rents go up. If the city eats that part up front, that's a genuine subsidy that doesn't look like one.
Lauren: [thoughtful] Yeah, no, I follow that. My worry is you build a faster pipeline with no floor on it and all you've done is deliver market-rate quicker.
Mark: Mm. Yeah, that's the risk.
Lauren: Speed's neutral. Speed helps whoever's already at the front of the line.
Mark: >> One more thing on that site and then I'll drop it.
Mark: They made a whole point of saying it's on high ground, which — for once, yeah.
Lauren: And — I want to be clear, that's the right call, somebody should get credit. We've spent forty years putting the cheapest housing on the wettest dirt in this county.
Mark: [surprised] Look at that.
Lauren: [dry] I contain warmth.
Lauren: And then immediately — who's still getting sited on the low ground while we're all applauding this one? Because that hasn't stopped.
Mark: They've also got the Lowline and the rapid transit corridor promised into those same few blocks. Promised.
Lauren: [skeptical] Are either of those real?
Mark: [amused] They're real in a document. I'll believe the transit part when a bus is running on it and somebody I know rides it to work.
Mark: >> Okay, hard turn. Live 5 had a thing on North Charleston rewriting its whole development ordinance. Eighteen months.
Lauren: The zoning code, basically.
Mark: Zoning and development rules, all of it, rolled into one document. And their planning director, Tim Macholl, said the current code is — his words — "still a remnant of the nineteen seventies."
Lauren: [laughs] There it is again.
Mark: And the growth numbers they're planning against are wild. Over the next twenty years the region's projected to add more than two hundred seventy thousand residents.
Mark: A hundred and two thousand new households.
Lauren: [beat] In twenty years.
Mark: He said, uh — the line was, you can't just keep paving over and building more parking lots and more streets. You've got to stack it where people don't have to get in the car.
Lauren: [flat] Which — yes. Obviously.
Mark: And they're bringing local businesses in to weigh in on it, which I actually like.
Lauren: [beat] Mm. So who shows up to an eighteen-month process?
Mark: ...People who can send somebody.
Lauren: People who can pay somebody to sit in daytime meetings for a year and a half. A law firm. A developer. Anybody with staff.
Lauren: Renters are not in that room, because they're at work.
Mark: Okay, but this is the fight worth having. Parking minimums, lot sizes, what you can build by right — that document decides the next decade. I'd rather argue that once than one damn subdivision at a time forever.
Lauren: Agreed. But the meeting schedule is the filter, right? If you want people in there who aren't paid to be there, you pay them a stipend. Cities do it. It's not exotic.
Mark: [conceding] And that'd cost them — what, nothing? Rounding error.
Lauren: Comparatively, nothing.
Lauren: >> Speaking of nothing. McMaster signed the earmarks bill. Three hundred and fifty million.
Mark: Standalone this year, right? Not in the budget.
Lauren: Pulled out into its own bill.
Lauren: House directed about two hundred twenty million, Senate a hundred and thirty. He put out a statement about how they've worked over the years to make the review more transparent and accountable.
Mark: And the Freedom Caucus is screaming about it.
Lauren: They are, and I'm not joining them. Everybody's dunking on the orangutan exhibit. I could not care less about the orangutan exhibit.
Mark: [laughing] Okay.
Lauren: My problem is the shape of it. Every one of those got funded on its own. Nothing had to beat anything else out.
Lauren: So a drainage basin and a stadium upgrade never once sat on the same page next to each other where somebody had to choose.
Mark: [beat] Wait — you're saying you'd rather they fought over it.
Lauren: I'm saying that's what a budget is supposed to be. If nothing competes, what got funded is just whoever'd been there longest and asked.
Mark: [pause] Yeah, no, I hear that, and — half-defending here — earmarks are the only way a small district ever gets a damn thing. Agency formulas, the money just goes where the people are.
Lauren: That's fair.
Mark: Also, three hundred fifty million for the entire state, and this city just spent eighteen million on two and a half acres.
Mark: That tells you everything about what dirt costs down here, man.
Lauren: [flat] It does.
Mark: >> Okay. At least the earmark list is itemized, which is more than the guy in the flooring post got — no, wait, that's later. Forget it.
Mark: Tell me about the two builds you would not stop sending me all weekend.
Lauren: [delighted] So — I read two homelab posts back to back and it's the same hobby and two completely different religions, and I need to know which one you think is the sane one.
Mark: Alright.
Lauren: Post one, homelab subreddit. Guy spends four months collecting gear and planning, then does the whole physical build over three weekends. One man, by himself.
Lauren: Ethernet through the walls. Wall jacks. A six-port faceplate in the bedroom.
Mark: Wait, wait — six ports. In a bedroom.
Lauren: Paintable raceway along the baseboards where he couldn't get in the wall.
Lauren: He planned one twelve-U wall cabinet, NAS turned out too tall, so he added a second six-U rather than cram it. Mounted plywood to the wall for support and painted it to match the room. With leftover paint.
Mark: [laughing] He color-matched the plywood.
Lauren: His stated philosophy — and he says this — is "cry once and do it right the first time."
Mark: And five VLANs.
Lauren: Five VLANs.
Mark: [flat] Lauren. That's you. That is a stranger describing you.
Lauren: [dry] It's a well-run house.
Mark: It's five networks in one house! You run the network on hard mode and the yard on whatever-happens mode.
Lauren: [conceding] ...I hit something with a shovel two summers ago and it's structural now, we've been through this.
Mark: [amused] It's structural.
Lauren: The one genuinely good decision in that post is separating storage from compute. That's it. That's the bit that's still right in five years.
Lauren: The rest is furniture.
Mark: Okay but the labeling —
Lauren: The labeling and the raceway, yes, fine, admirable. The rack is vanity. I know exactly what I'm looking at.
Lauren: >> Post two. Same subreddit, completely different animal.
Lauren: Somebody bought a fifteen dollar network card off eBay. Cavium — it's an old dual-port ten-gig card that everyone had written off as dead. Like, since twenty twenty-one there's people on the OpenWrt forums going, this thing's a brick, you can't do anything with it.
Mark: Why'd they think it was dead?
Lauren: Because when the machine goes and looks at the card it gets nothing back. All Fs, straight across.
Lauren: Which usually means the hardware's gone.
Mark: And it wasn't.
Lauren: It was never configured. Nobody'd ever turned that part on. He worked out how to set it up from the card's own side, and now it's a working dual ten-gig with none of the manufacturer's firmware on it anywhere.
Mark: [rushed] Wait — fifteen bucks and it just works? Both ports?
Lauren: Both ports, basically full speed, comes up by itself at boot.
Mark: [delighted] That's fucking great, actually.
Lauren: And the phrase I keep coming back to, the one that made me send it to you at eleven at night — fully reversible.
Lauren: Nothing flashed. You can put the card back exactly how you found it.
Mark: [beat] Okay. So which one's sane.
Lauren: [amused] No, you first.
Mark: The rack guy. Easy, not close. That build still works in three years when he's busy or bored or he's got a kid. Somebody else can support it.
Mark: The fifteen dollar card works because one specific human being on Earth understands it. One kernel update and it's fifteen dollars again.
Lauren: [flat] The four hundred dollar card from a vendor is also one firmware decision away from being a paperweight.
Mark: Okay, but —
Lauren: No, this is my whole thing. When theirs breaks, you can't fix it. You file a ticket. You wait.
Lauren: Somebody in a building you'll never see decides whether your hardware keeps working.
Mark: That's a support contract, that's not a conspiracy.
Lauren: It's a lease with better manners. Same as the disc that turned into a key. I'd rather own the thing.
Mark: [pause] Own it, and be the only person who can operate it.
Lauren: [exhales] ...Yeah. And that's the concession, and I resent it.
Lauren: That card doesn't cost fifteen dollars. It cost fifteen dollars plus however many hundred hours, and now he's the support department for everybody who buys one off that same eBay listing. Forever.
Mark: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Lauren: Don't.
Mark: I didn't say anything.
Lauren: You did a whole thing with your face.
Mark: [laughing] That guy would absolutely rent the drum sander himself, is all I'm saying.
Lauren: [flat] That's not a good segue and I won't be pretending it was.
Mark: >> [laughs] HomeImprovement subreddit. Guy gets a quote to sand and refinish six hundred square feet of nineteen seventies red oak that's been sitting under carpet.
Mark: Eighty-two hundred dollars.
Lauren: [flat] For six hundred feet. Of sanding.
Mark: That's almost fourteen bucks a foot. Just refinish — no install, no new material.
Mark: And he checked with neighbors who had the same work done last year and they paid three-fifty to four-fifty a foot.
Lauren: [beat] Are you shitting me?
Mark: Three, four thousand is what he was expecting. And the contractor was on site maybe ten minutes. Walked around, took a couple measurements, emailed a number the next morning.
Mark: He asked for a breakdown and got one sentence. "Includes sanding, staining, sealing, moving furniture, and disposal."
Lauren: [dry] That's a polite way of saying no.
Mark: [laughs] You think?
Lauren: Ten minutes on site and no line items?
Lauren: A vendor did that to me at work two years ago. They didn't want the job, they didn't want to say they didn't want the job, so they handed me a number that made me leave on my own.
Mark: [thoughtful] Okay but I half-disagree. I've watched good crews price high on purpose in a busy season and mean every dollar. If they're booked into February, your six hundred feet is worth eighty-two hundred or it's not worth hooking up the trailer.
Lauren: [flat] Then say that.
Mark: They never say that.
Mark: And the thing I'd want to know — does that include pulling the carpet and the tack strip? Nobody counts the tack strip. It's a rotten little job, staples every four inches, six hundred square feet of it.
Lauren: [surprised] Huh.
Mark: >> Now. He also says he's watched fourteen hours of YouTube and he's talking himself into renting a drum sander.
Lauren: And what do you say.
Mark: No. Flat no.
Mark: The gouge happens in the first four seconds. You set it down while it's spinning and you've dug a dish out of the middle of the floor. Middle of the floor. You look at that thing forever.
Lauren: [pause] ...I'd try it.
Mark: [incredulous] You would not.
Lauren: I have oak of exactly that vintage under whatever's on my floor right now. Allegedly. My standing policy is not to investigate.
Mark: [laughing] Structural.
Lauren: And if I did try it, it'd be your fault, because you own the tools and you talked about it on a podcast.
Mark: [flat] Noted.
Mark: [excited] >> Second post, same sub, and this one's actually good. Twenty-three foot patio, two bids.
Mark: Local landscaper, ten grand. Three to four inches of compacted limestone, flagstone, some product to lock it in place. Two-year settle warranty. And he takes a credit card with no fee.
Lauren: [flat] Okay. Sure.
Mark: Big company, thirteen five.
Mark: And the spec is the whole thing — geotech fabric, six to eight inches of compacted crushed limestone, an inch of bedding sand, pavers, polymeric sand in the joints, and a pitch of one inch per ten feet.
Lauren: [beat] So thirty-five percent more.
Mark: For the pitch and the base depth, which is the whole job. Everything else is decoration. And the guy's brother caught the real tell — the landscaper thinks geotech fabric is for weeds.
Lauren: [curious] It isn't?
Mark: No, it's — it keeps the dirt underneath from pumping up into your stone base when it gets wet.
Mark: If you think it's a weed barrier you have no idea what your base is doing, and in two years you've got a birdbath.
Lauren: [thoughtful] Okay, that's actually a good catch.
Lauren: But I'm not paying thirty-five hundred extra for a printed scope. Take that page, hand it to the ten thousand dollar guy, ask him to write the same words and sign it.
Mark: [warmly] Huh. That's actually not bad.
Lauren: And the credit card line is the poster telling on himself.
Lauren: "Takes a card without a fee so I could chargeback." He's picking a contractor based on how hard it'd be to claw the money back.
Mark: [laughs] Which — honestly, respect.
Lauren: [dry] He's planning his exit before the first nail goes in.
Mark: >> And then the thing that made me put my coffee down. "Permit fees: TBD by the city in which the work is being done."
Lauren: [flat] On the thirteen-five bid.
Mark: On the expensive one! With the beautiful spec! I see that line in real bids constantly and it means nobody picked up the phone and called the goddamn county.
Mark: It's a placeholder for "we'll find out after you've signed."
Lauren: [dry] So half the expensive bid is line-item theater.
Mark: [grudgingly] ...Some of it is theater, yeah.
Lauren: Everything in this episode was built in the seventies and is now being priced, rewritten, or torn out. The pool. North Charleston's whole code. That guy's oak floor.
Mark: [amused] And your house.
Lauren: [flat] And my house. I'm aware. I live in the exhibit.
Lauren: >> Okay, two quick ones and we're done. Charleston subreddit — the James Island pine straw guy.
Mark: Oh, I saw this. This thing was everywhere.
Lauren: Knocks on the door, offers to spread pine straw at six dollars a bale. Wife says sure, that's a good deal. Twenty minutes later he's back at the door with a bill for a thousand and eight dollars.
Mark: [incredulous] A thousand —
Lauren: Says he laid a hundred and sixty-eight bales. On a bed that's under a hundred and fifty square feet.
Mark: [rushed] In twenty minutes. That's — what, eight a minute? That's a bale every seven seconds, including walking.
Mark: You couldn't unload them off the truck that fast. It's horseshit.
Lauren: A bale's four bucks at Lowe's.
Mark: Three ninety-eight, poster said. So he's charging six for a four dollar bale and then just making up the count.
Lauren: The poster gave him fifty dollars to leave. White F-250, Georgia plates.
Mark: [laughing] Fifty bucks to make him go away.
Lauren: [flat] And that's the business. It's not the math, Mark. Nobody's fooled by the math.
Mark: [beat] Meaning what?
Lauren: Meaning the whole model is knocking on doors until somebody who's home alone answers one. That's the product. The poster wrote it right in there — the guy got intimidating, started filming him. He's counting on somebody who'd rather pay than have that conversation on their own porch.
Mark: [flat] Yeah. ...Yeah, okay. That's worse.
Lauren: >> Last thing. Holy City Sinner had this.
Lauren: South Carolina's ending what they're calling the orphan tax.
Mark: I don't — what's that?
Lauren: When a kid loses a parent and goes into foster care, they may have Social Security survivor benefits. The state has been taking that money to reimburse itself for the cost of the kid's care.
Mark: [pause] Taking the dead parent's benefit.
Lauren: To pay itself back for the foster care. Yes.
Mark: [flat] Jesus.
Lauren: Three hundred and one kids in this state. DSS is putting one point six million in its budget request to replace it. That's what it costs to stop doing this.
Mark: That's the price of not taking money from orphans.
Lauren: And it's going out as good news. Whole press release, McMaster quote about our responsibility to protect that child. I'm glad it's ending, genuinely, but this is a correction. Somebody should say sorry.
Lauren: Three hundred and one goddamn kids.
Mark: [beat] One point six million. Against three hundred and fifty million in earmarks signed the same week.
Lauren: [flat] Seven days apart.
Mark: [exhales] Yeah.
Lauren: Alright. That's us. Thank you for listening.
Lauren: If you're anywhere near Carr-Richardson tonight, the pool meeting is five-thirty to seven-thirty, it's a drop-in, and Mark says bring one question.
Mark: One question. Ask about the therapy pool. Out loud.
Lauren: We're back Friday. And check the radar before you lock your doors.
Mark: [laughing] Learn from me.