Uber co-founder buys record-breaking LA mansion for $72.5m
as drivers fight for wages
Los Angeles sees a spike in the homelessness population
while homes the size of football fields are selling for more than $100m
Sam Levin in Los Angeles
@SamTLevin Email
Tue 2 Jul 2019 23.12 BST Last modified on Wed 3 Jul 2019
00.50 BST
Two massive luxury real estate deals in Los Angeles have
shone a harsh light on the wealth gap in a region where tens of thousands of
people live on the streets while mansions the size of football fields sell for
more than $100m.
On Monday, Variety reported that the Uber co-founder Garrett
Camp and his partner Eliza Nguyen have purchased a Beverly Hills mansion for a
record-breaking $72.5m, in what is believed to be the largest-ever sale of a
home in the neighborhood.
It wasn’t even the biggest Los Angeles luxury real estate
deal reported this week. A 56,500-square-foot Holmby Hills chateau, once home
to television producer Aaron Spelling, sold for $120m, according to the Los
Angeles Times, making it the highest home price in Los Angeles county history.
The extraordinary mega-mansion sales come at a time when Los
Angeles is faced with widening inequality and escalating concerns about the
housing crisis and a dramatic rise in homelessness, prompting intense debate
about who gets to benefit from the growing economy.
The Holmby Hills property, known as the Manor, is 4.7 acres
and is considered the largest single-family home in Los Angeles. It was built
in 1991 for the television producer Aaron Spelling and now has 123 rooms,
according to the LA Times’ report on the sale, which has not yet been made
public. It’s the fourth sale of $100m or more in LA history, the paper
reported.
The Beverly Hills mansion purchase by Camp was completed
mere weeks after Uber’s IPO further enriched its wealthy investors and founders.
Camp, a Canadian entrepreneur with an estimated net worth of $4.2bn, already
owns a portfolio of luxury properties in Los Angeles, San Francisco and
Manhattan.
Camp’s purchase has drawn the ire of activists and drivers
who have long been protesting about Uber’s labor practices and advocating for
better working conditions
“This is a perfect example of the 1% stealing from the rest
of us,” Nicole Moore, a ride-share driver in Los Angeles, said of Camp’s $72.5m
purchase. “Drivers are living in their cars. We’re fighting for fair wages. At
least share that wealth with the people who have actually built your company.”
Moore, who is also an organizer with Rideshare Drivers
United, told the Guardian she works as a part-time driver in addition to a
full-time job in healthcare because housing costs are so expensive in Los
Angeles: “It’s an abomination. Income inequality has gone rampant.”
“This guy is buying lavish houses with our money, our
hard-earned money that they are unjustly taking from us,” added Karim Bayumi,
another Los Angeles Uber driver and organizer. “It’s exploitation.”
The purchase by Camp is particularly eye-popping given that
Uber continues to lose money and has also aggressively opposed drivers’ efforts
to organize and improve their working conditions, said Veena Dubal, an
associate law professor at the University of California, Hastings, who is an
expert on labor rights in the gig economy.
“It’s a slap in everyone’s face,” she said, arguing that
Uber was built on the idea of breaking labor laws and violating existing
regulations. “The capitalist system we have has unduly rewarded him with
extraordinary, in-your-face wealth.”
Citing drivers’ ongoing fights for workers’ compensation,
unemployment insurance, minimum wages and other rights, Dubal said that $72m
could go along way: “This amount of money could change people’s lives.” She
also noted that many Uber drivers rely on public benefits and government
assistance since their wages are so low, meaning taxpayers in effect contribute
to Camp’s exorbitant wealth.
“It’s our money that went into that house,” she said.
News of the $120m Holmby Hills sale came the same day that
officials carried out another major sweep of a homeless encampment in downtown
Los Angeles, the epicenter of the humanitarian crisis of people living on the
streets. Last month, authorities revealed that Los Angeles has experienced a
16% increase in the homeless population over the last year, with more than
36,000 people now homeless in the city.
The Rev Andy Bales, CEO of Union Rescue Mission, a Los
Angeles homeless organization, said $120m could be used to shelter thousands of
people living on LA’s streets.
“Everyone just wants to sweep human beings away,” said
Bales, noting that he encountered four homeless families desperate for shelter
on Monday, including a pregnant mother with three young children. “It doesn’t
do any good to sweep people, when there is nowhere to sweep them to. There are
no shelters, no services where we can direct people.”
Pete White, executive director of the Los Angeles Community
Action Network, a housing rights group, said it was painful to read articles
glorifying the huge mansion sale: “There is definitely a crisis of values in
Los Angeles.”
Camp’s Beverly Hills estate is now reportedly home to a
12,000-square-foot residence with seven bedrooms and a new guesthouse. The
Manor in Holmby Hills is said to include a large aquarium in a study, a
nightclub in a basement level, a tanning room, a solarium, a spa, a tennis
court, koi ponds, rose gardens and more.
Uber and the lawlessness of 'sharing economy' corporates
Companies including Airbnb and Google compare themselves to
civil rights heroes, while using their popularity among consumers to nullify
federal law
Frank Pasquale and Siva Vaidhyanathan
Tue 28 Jul 2015 07.00 BST Last modified on Fri 14 Jul 2017
21.50 BST
Travis Kalanick, Uber
CEO. ‘Nullifying companies like Uber claim they are striking a blow against
regulations they consider “out-of-date” or “anti-innovation” – their major
innovation, however, is to undermine local needs and effective governance.’
Photograph: Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters
In February, Airbnb chief executive Brian Chesky compared
his firm’s defiance of local housing ordinances with that of Gandhi’s passive
resistance to British rule. Meanwhile, a tweeter compared Uber to Rosa Parks,
defying unjust laws. Chesky quickly backed down after widespread mockery.
Companies acting out of self-interest comparing themselves with the noble
heroes of civil rights movements is as absurd as it is insulting.
But there is a better analogy from the US civil rights era
for law-flouting firms of the on-demand economy. It’s just not the one
corporate leaders claim. They are engaged in what we call “corporate
nullification”, following in the footsteps of Southern governors and
legislatures in the United States who declared themselves free to “nullify”
federal law on the basis of strained and opportunistic constitutional
interpretation.
Nullification is a wilful flouting of regulation, based on
some nebulous idea of a higher good only scofflaws can deliver. It can be an
invitation to escalate a conflict, of course, as Arkansas governor Orville
Faubus did in 1957 when he refused to desegregate public schools and president
Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce the law. But when companies such as
Uber, Airbnb, and Google engage in a nullification effort, it’s a
libertarian-inspired attempt to establish their services as popular well before
regulators can get around to confronting them. Then, when officials push back,
they can appeal to their consumer-following to push regulators to surrender.
This happened just last week in New York City, when mayor
Bill de Blasio moved to limit the number of Uber cars choking city streets
during the heaviest hours of congestion. Uber pushed out advertisements voiced
by celebrities including model Kate Upton and urged its wealthy users to write
to city hall in protest. Mayor de Blasio stood down. Consistently, these
nullifying companies claim they are striking a blow against regulations they
consider “out-of-date” or “anti-innovation”. Their major innovation, however, is
strategic and manipulative, and it’s meant to undermine local needs and
effective governance.
Between 2005 and 2010 Google shot photos of much of the
world – and many of its people – without permission for its Street View
project, often pushing the limits of privacy laws along the way. In addition,
Google hoovered up data from Wi-Fi networks that its cars passed through. To
this day, Google has not explained why it captured all that private data. It
worked. Despite some incidents in which Google had to reshoot the street scenes
most regulators backed down because the public had grown used to the service or
Google appeased them somehow.
Google’s strategy was to flip the defaults: Anyone who took
issue with a shot on Street View was welcome to apply to have it removed. So it
became our burden, not Google’s, to protect privacy. Google engaged in the same
strategy of shoot (digital images) first and answer questions later when
scanning copyrighted books. Some people got mad over these bold moves. Some
people sued. Google worked through the conflicts later – sometimes by winning
in court (as in the case of book scanning) and sometimes by losing rulings in
Australia, South Korea, and Japan, and Greece, where Street View was ruled
illegal in 2009.
The analogy is most obvious in the case of an American civil
rights law itself. Uber has ignored advocates for the blind, and other disabled
persons, when they claim Uber’s drivers discriminate against them. In response
to a lawsuit by the National Federation of the Blind, Uber bluntly asserts that
it’s merely a communication platform, not the type of employer meant to be
covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act. Some judges and regulators
accept that reasoning; others reject it. But the larger lesson is clear: Uber’s
aggressive efforts to avoid or evade disability laws are nothing less than a
form of corporate nullification, as menacing to the rule of law as defiance of
civil rights laws in the days after courts ruled against racial segregation in
the US.
In addition, Uber has confronted admittedly stifling
restrictions on taxi driver licenses in France by launching a service called
UberPop. Several authorities in Europe have ruled UberPop illegal, but Uber
kept it operating anyway as it appealed. Now France has charged Uber’s general
director for France, Thibaud Simphal, and the company’s director for Western
Europe, Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty with enabling taxi-driving by non-professional
drivers and “deceptive commercial practices”.
One could make a strong argument that France would benefit
from more taxi drivers and more competition. But that’s for the people of
France to decide through their elected representatives. The spirit of Silicon
Valley should not dictate policy for the rest of the world. New York, Paris,
London, Cairo, and New Delhi all have different values and traffic issues.
Local needs should be respected.
Consider what it would mean for such a universalising
approach to prevail. The business model of Uber would become that of
law-flouting bosses generally. Reincorporate as a “platform”, intermediate
customer requests and work demands with an app, and voila!, far fewer laws to
comply with. Worse, this rebel attitude signals to the larger culture that laws
and regulations are quaint and archaic, and therefore hindrances to progress.
That could undermine faith in republican government itself.
In the 1950s and 60s, Southern governors thought they’d
found a similar tactic to avoid the civil rights laws that they most despised.
Though the strategy failed, the idea still animates reactionaries. Former
Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, now running for president, has even suggested
that the US supreme court’s recent gay marriage decision should effectively be
nullified by sovereign states.
Of course, a republic can’t run without authorities who
follow the rule of law. Civil disobedience by citizens can be an important
challenge to corrupt or immoral politicians, but when corporate leaders
themselves start breaking the law in their own narrow interests, societal order
breaks down. Polishing their left-libertarian veneer, the on-demand economy
firms now flouting basic employment and anti-discrimination laws would like us
to believe that they follow in the footsteps of Gandhi’s passive resistance,
rather than segregationists’ massive resistance. But their wealthy, powerful,
nearly-all-white-and-male cast of chief executives come far closer to
embodying, rather than fighting, “the man”.
As Silicon Valley guru Peter Thiel has demonstrated, the
goal of tech firms is not to compete – it is to so monopolise a sector that
they basically become synonymous with it. Uber’s and Airbnb’s self-reinforcing
conquests of markets attract more venture capital (VC) investment, which in
turn enables more conquests, which in turn attracts more VC money. As that
concentration of economic power continues apace, it’s more vital than ever to
dispute Silicon Valley oligarchs’ self-aggrandising assertions that they follow
in the footsteps of civil rights heroes.
As allegedly “innovative” firms increasingly influence our
economy and culture, they must be held accountable for the power they exercise.
Otherwise, corporate nullification will further entrench a two-tier system of
justice, where individuals and small firms abide by one set of laws, and
mega-firms create their own regime of privilege for themselves and power over
others.
Frank Pasquale is a professor at the University of Maryland
School of Law and the author of Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms that
Control Money and Information (Harvard University Press, 2015).
Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of media studies at the University
of Virginia and the author of The Googlization of Everything – and Why We
Should Worry (University of California Press, 2011).
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário