Happy Wednesday, fam!
Am I allowed to say “fam” at my age? Probably not without making my kids cringe in embarrassment … so all the more reason for me to do so!
A bit of housekeeping, as they say, letting you know the newsletter will be on vacation next week, so don’t go refreshing your inbox all day, stalker. I have plans and they don’t involve writing the newsletter. You’ll live.
Let’s chat Pittsburgh! Or, let’s chat, Pittsburgh! Punctuation matters, fam.
1. I just…
Some Ben Roethlisberger fans have taken a weird delight in Cleveland Browns player Deshaun Watson’s absolutely wild number of sexual assault accusations because they believe it should shut people up about Ben Roethlisberger’s past accusations, which … no. Just because someone is accused MORE than he was doesn’t negate the fact that he was credibly accused multiple times in the past. While doom-scrolling these weird “You all better shut up and stop calling him ‘Rapelisberger’ now!” tweets by his fans, I stumbled on this reply by a Steelers fan and I cannot stop thinking about it.
Twitter is a wasteland. First, trying to link karma with sexual assault—saying Cleveland fans are experiencing said karma or that Watson committed sexual assault because of the power of karma—is gross, and attempts to trivialize what is an awful awful thing and I cannot strongly enough encourage all Steelers fans to cut that shit out. Despite what Danny Rojas says, football is NOT life. There are actual victims involved in these accusations, and labeling Roethlisberger’s accusations as “unsubstantiated bullshit” flies in the face of the fact that he was not only fined by the NFL for his behavior, but was also given a six-game ban. How soon we forget that. Stop excusing bad behavior based on the colors of the jersey the accused is wearing.
Second …
Reep.
Sew.
I can’t. I can’t I can’t I can’t, fam.
Read a book!
2. Absolute jagoffery from every corner
Jagoffery. Jagoffery. Why is spellcheck not underlining that BUT IT JUST UNDERLINED SPELLCHECK?!? Jagoffery. Let me Google real quick and I hope you’re enjoying this stream of consciousness writing today because who has time for editing? Not me. Survey says … not a word! I mean, it appears in the Urban Dictionary according to Google, but I didn’t click on it because I don’t want to know what specific sexual weirdness is a Jagoffery. Also, should Sexual Jagoffery be my new band name? Discuss, fam. (It will be a miracle if this post makes it past your email filters, so hopefully you go looking for it in your spam, stalker.)
Wow, I’m in a weird mood today. Blessed.
So let’s talk jagoffery in the form of Pittsburgh’s slumlords. First, I encourage you to read this entire exposé on the absolutely shameful landlord practices in the city as well as the regulations the city has in place to curb slumlording … i.e. barely none.
The article is full of pictures and anecdotes (helped along by the additional reporting of Pitt News reporter Colm Slevin [love that name]) that illustrate just how bad the situation is, laying most blame at the feet of the slumlords and some blame at the feet of Pittsburgh’s trash/nonexistent/unenforced rental regulations.
Pittsburgh is compared to other cities that have stricter regulations and inspection procedures to show that it doesn’t have to be this way. It could be better. I want to point out one particular excerpt that made my jaw drop, about one of the more longtime notorious slumlords in the city, Atallah Khalil:
The building has long been a frequent stop for inspectors. A health department inspection in 2005, two years after Mr. Khalil bought the property, deemed one apartment unfit for human habitation. Three years later, Judge Ricciardi, who presides over many landlord-tenant cases in Oakland, fined the property owner $260,000 for failing to fix persistent code violations in the building.
Now see, that giant fine would have served as a great motivator for Khalil and other landlords to make sure their properties aren’t, you know, deadly and unsafe. Large fines like that would be a meaningful deterrent to slumlord behavior. Except …
“You’re putting your own tenants at risk of their lives,” Judge Ricciardi told Mr. Khalil at the time. A Common Pleas judge reduced the fine to $1,060 after Mr. Khalil appealed.
Excuse me. I just need to perform some excessive headdesking brb.
And we’re back with a headache. Should Excessive Headdesk be my new band name? Or Excessive Headache? Discuss, fam. Either way, we are very very punk rock.
So, I did the mathy math via a convenient online calculator because my brain doesn’t believe in math of any kind (lies, all lies), and what that is, from $260,000 to $1,060 is … a … ready? Hold onto your jagofferies.
NINETY NINE POINT FIVE NINE TWO THREE PERCENT REDUCTION IN THE FINE.
99.5923%.
This is like the last speeding ticket you got going from $200 to ONE DOLLAR AND FIFTY THREE CENTS. We should all be so fortunate.
I am losing my mind over this. How the hell are you going to make landlords keep their properties in repair and safe when you won’t even fine more than 1/3 of the monthly rent of one single dwelling they own?!? Someone find me some more punctuation! And as this illustrates, now 14 years later, Khalil is still up to the same shit. I guess we should have seen if the fine could have made him do better back then?
Not mentioned in the report is the fact that in 2008, another landlord was fined $200,000 only for an appeals judge to COMPLETELY erase the fine. Zero dollars. Friends and math-believers, that is a 100% reduction. I did the fake maths. Should Math Believers be a band name?
There are more instances of drastic fine reductions happening, like from $270,000 to $15,000 for a landlord in 2014.
Now, the slumlords in Pittsburgh are of course trying to stop any recent attempts to regulate their upkeep of their units, not wanting to accept the fact that if they would just be decent less-greedy humans who cared about the living conditions of other humans, the regulations wouldn’t be needed. You reep what you sew!
We shouldn’t accept that nothing has changed regarding slumlords in Pittsburgh for decades and that’s just the way it has to be. We should be shaming the city and these landlords and judges and lawyers who won’t fix the problem. Shame them to ruin.
3. Speaking of mathy maths
I normally don’t care about the lists that Pittsburgh makes because so many of them use dumb methodology (“We calculated the best cities for hot dogs by timing how long Instagram users pause their scrolling for hot dog posts!”) or are straight-up ads. But this one … this one, by the reputable Weather Channel, gave me pause:
I think you will join me in saying, I DEMAND A RECOUNT. Seize the voting machines, Mr. My Pillow Guy.
We are to believe that Youngstown, Detroit and Syracuse have more cloudy days than we do? I will stage an insurrection to prevent these results from being certified. And besides, how did they even come to this ranking? “We determined which cities are the cloudiest in America by going with our guts and using a divining rod.”
The data pulled by the Weather Channel comes from over 600 cities and nearly 22,000 data points, Polaris said. The data crunches daily records from sunrise to sunset over a three-year period.
Well, that sounds … legit and mathy (assuming you, unlike me, believe in math).
According to KDKA meteorologists, in the first 100 days of 2022, Pittsburgh saw only four sunny days while 46 were partly cloudy and 48 were mostly cloudy.
I am outta here. Someone help me pivot my couch.
I kid. I love you, Pittsburgh, even if your weather is fit for most people’s personal hells. Pittsburgh is absolutely where the devil goes to escape the heat of hell.
4. Refugee-made food!
I’ve been enjoying eating at Pittsburgh’s refugee-owned restaurants in support of JFCS’s upcoming World Refugee Day celebration at Schenley Plaza, which I remind you I am helping them promote for free. None of this is a paid ad in any way. I’ve long preached that we should allow more refugees into Pittsburgh and that we should be welcoming to them when they arrive, so this is me putting my money and my platform where my mouth has been. So far I’ve visited Himali Kitchen on Route 51 in Brentwood with sister Pens Fan, and The Afghan Kabab House in Carnegie with sister Tina Fey (for those from the old PittGirl days who know my sisters by their nicknames), and at both places I found lovely lovely people and delicious dishes I want to eat again and again.
JFCS actually has a convenient Google Map of immigrant and refugee-owned establishments in the region, so if you’re also wanting to put your money where your mouth is, check it out. And again, here’s the info on JFCS’s World Refugee Day celebration. Please try to visit and show we are welcoming to refugees in our city.
Welcome to all.
Don’t be like New Jersey’s Dr. A Broccoli.
Not very welcoming, indeed.
5. And I just don’t have time for anything else today but I’ve given you lots of band names to consider, so you’re coming out even. Have a great two weeks and remember to not go looking for me next week because you will not find me. I don’t think I’ve said anything too controversial in this edit— Oh, wait. Yes I did. Sigh. If you are a diehard Big Ben fan who is angry at me for calling the past sexual assault allegations against him credible and substantiated, you can send your complaints to …
Press 3 for “Here’s some ointment for that burn you reeped because of what you sewed.”
I’ll never stop.