#FreeFuelGrannie’s Screenshots, Aaron Carr
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#FreeFuelGrannie’s Screenshots, Aaron Carr

Which is it, Aaron Carr?

Because Twitter would like to know, too.

Is it “over a hundred” screenshots you have of my alleged homophobic racist behavior?

Or is it just those three old tired screenshots you keep hauling out as some deep, repeated and proven evidence of my consistent and thickly bigoted behavior?

Because there is no seething hatefulness or prejudice in any of those screenshots, including that one single tweet of mine, the one which you keep deploying as concrete, definitive demonstration of my raging homophobia: that tweet, which is now hidden due to the suspension of my account, describes “twinks + bears = yimby force.” This tweet is shady as all hell, it’s flat out rude, for sure, but it’s not, by any definition, hateful.

The overwhelming optics of yimby show young, white men, many with beards, many with glasses: Zach Galifianakis and Where’s Waldo.

If you’re going to refer to your opponents as the lead paint caucus, then we’re going to refer to you as twinks and bears.

Which I only did that one time, Aaron.

And which I had acknowledged had offended you (an acknowledgment you yourself had even liked👇) yet you have always, conveniently, omitted this tweet’s existence. You pretend it never happened.

So I have a screenshot, too.

I tweeted out the below apology to you (after hours and hours of enduring a typical endless Aaron A. Carrversation) where you had called me a “con,” a liar who habitually deletes her tweets and a racist, despite not having brought with you even one receipt to demonstrate any truth to any of these accusations.

I have a screenshot, too, Aaron👋

In fact, you had defiantly refused to produce any evidence, as if substantiating your indictment against me was somehow beneath you.

The only “proof” you were able to provide (which was curiously not in reference to me being a con or a liar or a deleter of tweets or a racist) finally arrived at 12:22am, almost six hours after you had initially accused me of being a “con” at 6:41pm: it was just that one “yimby force” tweet, via a screenshot of a purposefully unlinked tweet.

And I suspect the photograph of that tweet was, in fact, not on your phone as a screenshot, as you had teased yet never delivered, but rather was texted or dm-ed to you as our 6-hour marathon dialogue dragged on.

This all raises suspicion.

You had made so many claims, declaring you had screenshots (now a familiar yet empty refrain from you) but the sole substantiation of it all was just one single screenshot, not the “many” tweets you had hissed about having.

And that one single screenshot was finally produced many hours into our conversation.

Why didn’t you provide that allegedly damning screenshot much earlier in the conversation? Why did it take you six entire hours to finally cough it up?

And why have you never supplied any other screenshots? You had alleged taking screenshots of my feed that very day, just about a year ago, January 27, 2021, but the screenshot you provided was from two months earlier, from mid-November 2020.

Odd.

You now claim that you have over a hundred of screenshots of me acting all racisty and homophoby and hatery in general: so, where are they, Aaron?

Where are those screenshots, Aaron?

They would add context to that one screenshot, wouldn’t they?

And I gave you that apology, almost immediately, which resulted in you blocking me, likely because you were caught. You got what you hadn’t expected to get from me, something the rest of us never get from you: accountability.

The fact that you yourself liked my apology also strongly implies you read the tweet: liking is an acknowledgment. But then you immediately blocked me, within seconds. You then blocked me via your Housing Rights Initiative account: I screenshot both of your blocks and tweeted them out.

Your action of using your HRI account to block me (and thus evade any confrontation) is just one reason why I block people who work for you at HRI: I don’t trust you, I don’t trust your yimby organization and I don’t trust the people you pay. That also includes the politicians you give money to: following your money is always an eye opening tell.

You wasted 6 hours, Aaron, accusing me of things you literally could not prove and then you blocked me on your two separate accounts for taking responsibility for the one sole offense you were able to produce.

What do you think that looks like, Aaron?

What do you think you look like?

Because you lie all the time.

You lied about me and the existence of all those screenshots (I mean, unless you have them: it’s ok, we’ll wait).

You lie about Manhattan being 30% landmarked when in reality “historic districts cover less than 4% of the lots and lot area in” NYC.

You also lied about the SoHo NoHo rezoning creating “700+ units of affordable housing at $900 a month for a family of 3.”

In fact, that fantasy has turned out to be a huge lie, and was likely bandied about in a lobbying effort to city council members as concrete truth so to sway the vote for the SoHo NoHo rezoning, and you told it many, many, many times.

So are you also lying about those 97 other screenshots you supposedly possess which can better document my racism, my bigotry, my homophobia, my hatefulness and my violence?

I mean, if you still have those screenshots, that is, as I know how much my content fully annoys you and remains beneath you to even research. But, just in the case that you might still have those scores of screenshots of my behavior, I reckon Twitter would want to see them, too, as I move forward with my appeal.

You’re selling “free fuel grannie” t shirts: the rest of us just want you to free the fuelgrannie screenshots.

The HandGrannie’s Tale
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The HandGrannie’s Tale

Oh, so it isn’t just me making eldercide jokes at my own expense.

Even all the way over in Canada, my role is now being played by Margaret Atwood.

Taking it to “fuelgrannie level,” the author of *cough* The Handmaid’s Tale is no newby to housing debate as she calls out the frosty and inhumane yimby take on old people daring to stay alive and thus occupying the very homes the yimbys would like to live in, now, thank you very much.

Aging in place is perceived as selfish: old people demonstrating the sheer arrogant audacity of staying in their own homes and not moving out so to meet the immediate whims of impatient, apartment-hopping tech bros are seen as “an absolutely massive public policy problem.”

Unsurprisingly, Atwood’s impertinent “boomering” was met with the usual twisty yimby arguments for their proponents to lose their homes or, at least, for their lives to end. Because old people, “nimbzombies,” don’t belong in “housing discourse these days” as their “feelings are bad ones.”

And any old people who are afraid of inevitable displacement are ackshually racists: those saggy segregationists, in fact, deserve to lose their homes.

Let’s bomb them. C’mon it’s funny.

Despite having literally made my own self the butt of such a joke, I was nonetheless suspended for sarcasm about old people being killed.

I had tweeted almost the same thing as Margaret Atwood.

Because despite the fact that she and I live in completely different cities, we both well know the ways and words of yimbys.

I mean, we all do, don’t we, at this point?

We all know too the deliberate twisting of words, the crybabying victimhood and the pouting tantrums of yimby: “😤,” “🍼” and “😩.” I couldn’t have answered better myself.

Margaret Atwood spells out the “😤,” “🍼,” and “😩”

You have their number, Peg: keep haunting them.

Victory Yap
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Victory Yap

Shake off your black veil and grab that baby bottle, kids: we have a funeral to attend.

Fuelgrannie is dead.

Ok, maybe not in real life, but I have croaked on Twitter which just might be better than passing away in real life, which Twitter isn’t, amirite?

Ding dong that witch is dead: RIP to a real one.

Emilia Defraudin apparently has died from joy.

Rebel with Good Cause Aaron Carr is selling #freefuelgrannie t-shirts.

Ceiling-gazer Meeeeelar puts me in a league of my own: save a seat in the front row for him, pweeeese.

Ben Wetz, however, is muting both the fuelgrannie funeral and any of its related keywords: SpiderYim is already over this particular trip to six feet under.

But Ben Wetz is amplifying me as he tweets about muting me.

Which presents the conundrum of the yimby victory lap: as they all howl for their opponents to just take the L, yimbys draw almost too much attention, sometimes even inadvertently positive, to their enemies, while also revealing their own bloodthirst for overkill.

Dresden, anyone?

The gloating may go over well in their limited bubble, but even a dead person like me can see the optics and downside of such off-putting bragging. The victory lap can bring its own backlash.

Yimby, as a movement, remains unpopular in New York City: it may be politically protected; it may garner obvious puff pieces from big press; but it struggles to attract much grassroots traction as many New Yorkers remain wary of a group of arrogant, condescending eye-rollers, who publicly infer to private jokes while struggling to connect with anyone outside their tight, mocking clique.

Housing is tapas to them: they move every year, tasting new apartments, trying on new neighborhoods, a living game of SimCity which can only be played by individuals making enough disposable income to crib-hop. Aka, not how the other 70% of us NYCers live.

And I have been calling out that inability to connect for years now: yimby doesn’t partner well; they don’t get their boots on the ground in any meaningful way, sticking mostly to their own closed meetings and whenever they do dare to show up for live, in-person public engagement with other humans, they are sorely outnumbered and jeered.

Because New York City can always smell insincere opportunism: we shudder at fake smiles; we know a scam from ten blocks away; we’re not dumb. We know when we are being excluded and when we are being played: a braggart’s pyrrhic victory does not win us over.

But whaddo I know? I’m dead.

So dance it up with my casket on your narrow shoulders, boys: no fuelgrannie in your backyard.

I’ll be here instead: in real life.

“On This Day, We Are All Fuelgrandchildren😤🍼😩”
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“On This Day, We Are All Fuelgrandchildren😤🍼😩”

News of the suspension of my Twitter accounts @fuelgrannie and @QueensStomp gassed up the Twittersphere yesterday, prompting not only the name fuelgrannie to trend (continuing into today, even) but also sprouted a new parody alt, the slyly monikered @fueIgrannie (“the ‘L’ is ~*secretly*~ an upper case ‘i,’ bruh!!!”), a peppery complement to the already existing saliferous parody @gruelfannie.

Relief and delight upzoned the spirits of density bros and their few fellow avocadgals: fuelimination got uninformed boyfriends talking, created bright revelry in a dark Omicron world and hatched Fuelkanda forever as a tender memorial to the demise of my presence on Twitter.

Memes about worshipping at the church of fuelgrannie just might go to my head and the curious support of folks who hate me and had blocked me years ago is coconut-pecan icing on a German chocolate cake.

Yimbys are understandably concerned about the social media censoring of sarcasm: after all, salty, spicy, sarcastic takes stack on top of each other as vertebrae to form the spine of yimby engagement: if my unwell, homophobic, whack job racist self can get banned for irony, well, then maybe we are all at risk for such consequences.

We’re all fuelgrannie now.

(Or is it fuelgrandchildren?)

But more yimbys than not still decry the whole “defend fuelgrannie” thing, with the more savvy ones obscuring my name so to discourage any topic trending; the most important result for them is that I have been banned and I need to stay off and away and silent. They had tried once before to permanently shut me up and hopefully this time it will ackshually stick.

Yet I’m not really silent, at present, not like I was the last time around. I wasn’t blogging much in 2019 and my name certainly never trended back then. I’ve had more traffic on this particular site in the past 48 hours than I had for most of last year and my relevance on Twitter oddly persists, despite the fact that my account is hidden and I am unable to engage.

So I’m not really gone, am I?

I mean, you’re reading me right now, aren’t you?

Fuelkanda forever, baby.

“Let’s Kill All the Old People Especially the Weirdos”
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“Let’s Kill All the Old People Especially the Weirdos”

Whelp, it happened again.

My Twitter account has been suspended, once more, as it had been back in October 2019, but this time is different as Twitter has suspended both of my accounts, @fuelgrannie and @QueensStomp.

While it remains disconcerting not to have a voice on the Twitter platform, I still have a voice on this website, my own platform, so I am gratedful for this space and also appreciative of how much activity this site is getting today. My piece about my first suspension has received more views today alone that it did for the entire year of 2021.

Unlike in October 2019, when Twitter could not provide any direct explanation for why my account was suspended (a likely targeted, coordinated attack by New York City yimby group Open New York as I detailed in a blog post back then), it was my reply last night to an account I had never seen before which ended up resulting in my suspension.

The account, @Ya3il8200, had tweeted, “struggling to see the difference between this weirdo [me] and an owner class nimby boomer [University of Pennsylvania professor @ValerieRoss14] who thinks nothing needs to change because they were able to buy their house for $50,000 back in the jurassic era,” and I responded with, “you’re right, janice: let’s kill all the old people especially the weirdos” to point out this account’s ageism, one of the more consistent themes in yimby engagement.

This was not a call to kill old people like me or weirdos like me: this was no physical threat but rather was a challenge to the inappropriate use of the “nimby boomer” and “jurassic era,” phrases which reflect the discrimination, intolerance and underlying violence against older people which I so often receive. I have been told to “not wake up” and to “get the bullet” on Twitter along with countless calls over the years for me to “take” my “medication,” “change” my “diapers” and “take a nap,” as efforts to silence my words and diminish my voice and personhood.

I am disappointed that Twitter could not discern the nuance of my reply or perceive the ageism which persisted in @Ya3il8200’s subsequent retort, “I promise you will get over the loss of the parking lot where that scoundrel Richard ‘Dick’ Rogers fingerblasted you after your senior prom in 1957.”

My school did not hold proms, nor was it attended by boys, so poor ol Dick Rogers, an imaginary person in @Ya3il8200’s mind, really missed out.

I’ve submitted appeals for the suspension of each of my Twitter accounts and I look forward to resolving this issue in a fair and reasonable manner as my engagement did not warrant a suspension.

So here’s to keeping the old people alive and vocal in this effort to stand up to abusive yimbys. This jurassic-era weirdo will always fight for my voice: as long as my old, wrinkled, redundant body has air in my saggy, well worn lungs, I’ll be keeping my mouth open.

No matter what the forum.

The Betrayal of SoHo NoHo by the New York Department of City Planning
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The Betrayal of SoHo NoHo by the New York Department of City Planning

(aka, why NYC needs you, elected NYC Councilmembers, to send this “plan” back to the drawing board for a more thoughtfully developed proposal which guarantees truly affordable housing and will also vigorously protect every unit of already existing, long-term, deeply affordable housing in all its forms which exists in Lower Manhattan.)

December 9, 2021

To the Members of the City Council of New York,

Please vote “no” on the Department of City Planning’s proposal to rezone SoHo NoHo and then please advise DCP to revise its purposefully vague plan to include, as top priority, specific protection against the displacement of over a thousand New Yorkers, many elderly, who reside in Lower Manhattan’s already existing deeply affordable units. There are almost 700 such units in SoHo and NoHo in almost 200 still-viable structures which will be threatened with a rezoning: we must protect these vulnerable New Yorkers above all.

As a former stabilized renter in SoHo and as a lifelong New York City renter, I ask all of you for a nuanced consideration of this flawed rezoning proposal and to acknowledge New York City Planning failed on its pledged deliverables of the Envision SoHo NoHo plan and process. The DCP has not done its job with its rushed and remote ULURP process, its conditional exclusion of public input and its repeatedly expressed obvious bias for real estate development interests.

This gratuitous and ruinous rezoning is defiantly being held up by its proponents as an opportunity for “equity” and “housing justice,” but there is neither “justice” nor “equity” for the vulnerable, mostly elderly, renters of SoHo, NoHo and the adjoining areas of Chinatown and Lower Manhattan who will lose their homes because of the zoning adjustment.

There is also no justice for the middle-income property owners, the artists of SoHo and NoHo, who, after working with the City decades ago to devise a form of affordable homeownership in repurposed industrial spaces so to ultimately age in place, will now no longer be able to afford to pay property taxes on the units they fashioned with their own hands back in the 1970s. Why is there no special consideration for these New Yorkers? They deserve to stay in their homes: as a city, we owe this to any threatened resident but most especially to this population who literally developed a globally adored tourist destination and now our collective payment to these people is to kick them all out.

It is disturbing what will happen to these elderly NYC residents, who have long been productive and industrious citizens: it is cruel, dishonest and dystopian.

The Envision SoHo NoHo process did not invite many of these constituents yet did, oddly, heavily involve real estate development lobbying group Open New York from its inception: Open New York, a pro-development group which has bragged about being the architects of the SoHo NoHo rezoning were considered by DCP to be valuable stakeholders, despite the glaring fact that none of them live in the area and despite the fact that their interests are purely about new development, not about consideration of existing housing or the value of the lives and experiences of the tenants who live in them.

The DCP-led ULURP public engagement hearings were held via Zoom while a global pandemic raged; the first of these meetings was in October 2020. I had signed up to speak but was number 354 to have make such a request and was thus not called upon as the session was deliberately limited to two and half hours: 365 people had signed up to speak that evening and DCP allowed for less than 10% of them to have had any voice.

How is that legal, NYC Council Members? How is it legal, in any way, to limit public engagement during a (wait for it) public engagement session?

DCP assigned the role of rezoning Senior Planner to Sylvia Li who referred to both the residents and structures of SoHo NoHo as “relics,” often and readily admitted she did not understand loft laws or other Lower Manhattan anomalies while also displaying an uncomfortable favoritism towards real estate development lobbying group Open New York. The entire process was a sham: right in front of the eyes of the rest of us.

You are our elected representatives: DCP doesn’t listen to us, so please be our voice and send this inadequate rezoning back to the Planning drawing board; this is not a vote to stop all development, it is instead a demand for better development from DCP, not their current lazy effort as this thoughtless initiative which will solely benefit the worst type of developers and create the least affordable and barely livable housing.

Please vote “no.”

Thank you.

Dresdon’t: The Argument Against the SoHo NoHo Proposed Rezoning
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Dresdon’t: The Argument Against the SoHo NoHo Proposed Rezoning

(My spoken statement to the September 2, 2021 City Planning Commission’s hearing on the proposal to rezone SoHo NoHo)

My name is Connie Murray, I’m a lifelong New Yorker and a former SoHo resident.

I oppose the city’s plan to rezone SoHo NoHo as this proposal will likely not produce any affordable housing despite that very promise being this project’s top selling point of allegedly providing more opportunities to low-income New Yorkers. This rezoning will also eliminate tenant protections for over 1200 residents in over 600 buildings in their already existing deeply affordable homes. These are vulnerable, elderly and immigrant residents: they deserve to be considered in this process, they deserve to be protected and we all have a moral obligation to keep these folks in their homes.

As well, MIH affordable housing is not all that its name is cracked up to be. Recent “affordable housing” listings on NY Yimby reflect salary requirements above $80k for small studios and 1-bedroom units which rent for upwards of $3000 a month. These are not apartments for working class families: who are these developers really building for? They never create 3-bedroom units and via advertorials in real estate media, developers are even marketing their alleged affordable housing to households earning over $100k annually.

This rezoning’s proponents focus so heavily on this fallacy of its opposition being wealthy but in fact it’s the residents who are not wealthy and whose homes will be threatened who are here today, speaking out against this proposal. The very wealthy do not care, they can move, they have other homes, they have endless resources. It’s the residents without endless resources who are opposed to this plan, the people who are mostly elderly and mostly those who built these neighborhoods into what they are today. And now they are being shown the door out of this magical place they created with their own hands, money, sweat, love and tears. What a vicious betrayal by this city.

Adding to that betrayal is the false narrative promoted by Yimby zealots that these senior residents are members of the Ku Klux Klan and that their neighborhoods should be bombed like Dresden. Elderly residents have been bullied out of public engagement meetings because their pictures were taken and posted on social media so to shame them as alleged racists who no longer deserve to stay in their homes.

They do deserve to stay; they don’t deserve these lies. So let’s protect them.