Texas is really striving to make itself as unappealing as humanly possible. The cameras will magically have a feature that ignores any crime by Ken Paxton.
I will kill myself before living in Texas.
The AI they use to analyze the images:
I have identified a person of color. Blight detected.
Of course, it costs a lot of money and time to dispute the fine
Should point out that the theory gets causation completely backwards.
I mean it’s obvious it’s to make it too expensive for people who purchased the poorly maintained housing they could afford to be able to afford to keep it and make way for real estate investors to keep the housing vacant for profit or developers and gentrification. My neighborhood has so much vacant property owned by investors, though most of it is the opposite, too expensive for a regular person to own and live in and it keeps the supply low and thus prices artificially high for people who need housing. If they can keep people out of the poor neighborhoods, too, then prices will skyrocket as people have fewer options. Great way for capitalists to “fix” a real estate slump I guess.
No, for a number of reasons the city is facing a $51 million budget shortfall and instead of fixing the problem they’re doing shit like this to bring in new revenue. They’re even talking about putting up billboards in parks
Yeah, but one of the main ways a city can drive revenue is to increase the cost of property. Fines like that are small and short lived. Plus the people they’re targeting are unlikely to ever be able to afford to pay them. It’s not like speeding, red light, parking, or HOV tickets where rich people just consider it pocket change and just the cost of having a car and so they don’t change their behavior like poorer people might. So revenue is often steady. Plus targeting neighborhoods of fixed assets that most people will never actually even see is way different from targeting vehicles that could belong to people outside the community and generally people keep a little nicer since they are much more publicly visible. It’s much more obvious who is forced made to pay, and it’s much more obvious those people can’t and so there won’t be revenue, only an excuse to arrest, evict, or whatever other punishment the law allows when people accrue too much debt from the fines.
And property taxes are the primary tax revenue in Texas since there’s no state or local income tax and relatively lower sales taxes. I lived there for a while and the property taxes were nearly as much as the property I now own in another state that is valued at about 8 times as much.
