Harrahs Casino in Fort Lauderdale, FL with Reviews - YP.com

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Maybe I'm on a roll today Maybe I just have a lot to say
you have to read this with a open mind, not as a republican or a democrat, but as a human being to be able to understand. take the blinders off for a sec and just hear me out without passing judgement
I used to keep my Conspiracy Beliefs to myself mainly because I'm a pretty private person and dont really like sharing my beliefs and I know how it is perceived by other people, how "impossible" it is for something like that to happen, you’re wrong and seen as a crazy person... which if you think I’m crazy then I guess we weren’t ever friends in the 1st place
The NWO has always been my "favorite(not in a good way)" conspiracy, or the one ive always researched more than others
There is a Global Power Struggle going on amongst the elites behind closed doors
But I’m seeing people I know start to open up their minds and go down some of these same rabbit holes that I have been in for years... some of these people being the people who were commenting on my original COVID post months ago about how way off I was, and how serious and deadly the virus was going to be...., and seeing that has inspired me to share my own thoughts from my research
I’m not asking you to believe in the conspiracies. I’m just asking you to think about with a open mind. Look at the connections. Connect the dots yourself and do your own research and form your own opinion.
But before doing so you have to understand 2 things... 1. The MSM controls us by triggering us to immediately react to our emotions, mainly with death & race being the big 2, because we are a reactionary society (which in turn forms as a habit, so we've essentially been trained, and then we start responding to people out of reactions but thats a different story for a different day)

1. You have to understand that when it comes to the money involved with the elite... it’s an amount so large, that we can’t comprehend how powerful that amount of money is and what it can do for you, Because the elite are the wealthiest of the wealthy, and when you have that much money and powerful friends to go along with it, you have power and control, you can buy anything or anyone - all you need are the right people and systems surrouding you - money is the root of all evil correct? follow the paper trail

Now I’ll start with my 1st red flag
When the COVID pandemic started, I was in Fort Lauderdale, Florida playing baseball every morning with about 200 other dudes. With how contagious the virus was and continuing to spread like wildfire, South Florida was deemed as one of the hot beds for the virus During this time I spent in Florida, I also went to the Casino about 10 times (and yes I came out ahead for the whole trip) which was said to be one of the most contagious places you could go My family, including my 2 grandparents came to visit me for a week, where we also went gambling 3 different times. So after a month (middle of February - March 20th) of swapping sweat with 200 other guys everyday, consistently going to a gym which was in SoFlo, and as many times as I went to the casino... - I came home as soon as the stay at home quarantine orders were going into place because we had gotten shut down from playing baseball. I was bound to bring to virus home and get sick right? Then I got home and I started working Door Dash and Instacart, where I was coming into direct contact with people every day, all while not wearing a mask nor gloves, just sanitizing my hands between each delivery. Now through all that,... and when I say this dont get distracted from the point im trying to make... thankfully obviously, but from being in such a hot bed of where the virus was spreading, not only did I not get sick, but neither did 1 of the guys I was down in Florida with
I thought this virus was SOOO contagious?
Now, I'm not saying the virus isn't real. I think the virus is very real, but I think it was intentionally mishandled to spread fear amongst the public so that the masses could be controlled through the media and directed the direction the media is wanting to push them to just like herding sheep - fear mongering -and unfortunately the people who had underlying issues and were put on ventilators had to suffer from being intentionally murdered by suffocation (what a coincidence that so many people (including me and my immediate family - I lost 15 pound in January from being sick) were complaining of the same symptoms as COVID in November, December, and January... and if you really want to dig, some even go as far back as last summer June - August. but when tested for flu, they all came back as a Respiratory Infection... the virus was already here.... Why?
Now on to some of my bullet proof points to show you "the new normal" as the media outlets are calling it. What could be so different that it is having to be recognized as "the new normal" after a pandemic? Do you mean its a New Normal because of the changes the New World Order is going to create globally?
Hmm.. things are getting interesting, now lets take a look

• To start, they scared people into locking themselves in their house, which keeps you from coming in contact with all the bacteria we encounter daily that adds to the building of our immune system... remember we still have a flu season ahead of us, along with countless other viruses.. H1N1, bird flu, MONO, etc.

-They’ve created “the new normal” and programmed it to be repeated over and over again by media outlets across the country... What could possibly be so new about it?
-They’ve programmed you to wear a mask everywhere you go, which leads to you breathing in your own carbon dioxide, which has lead to multiple cases of people getting infections in the lining of their lungs from breathing in their own Carbon Dioxide for such a long period of time (where could I get such information like this if the MSM isn't telling me, straight from peoples 1st hand encounters who were sharing their story) and breathing in the Carbon Dioxide for an extended period of time can cause Asphyxiation... hmm that word looks familiar, isn't that the same cause of death that George Floyd suffered from? (dont get your panties in a wad, im merely connecting the dots for you, im not saying GF death wasn't wrong, or that it was staged, or that he died from his masks, just giving you the puzzle pieces)
-Unemployment has now soared to an all time high, at a time when the African American unemployment rate was at a all time low
-Stock market began crashing
-Small business were told that they couldn't operate, only big corporations were being pushed to open up, who are funded by the elite (Target - George Soros) (NWO)
-Cities are now burning
-Now there is racial tension everywhere you look, its almost as if they are trying to divide us... do you know why?.. (To divide and conquer, but you can only divide and conquer if their are 2 parties (Democrat/Republican) that are split up and put against eachother, so they will cause a distraction over here so we can do something while you aren’t paying attention over here) (remember when those Astronauts went to space in the middle of a pandemic "Social Distancing", at the same time Joe Biden tells black people they arent black if they dont vote for him, and then mere days later race wars are burning the country?)
-During the last few days of protest, there is a vast majority of human beings of all colors who are protesting peacefully, along with cops protesting with them. But they arent showing you the way people are coming together and uniting, no they are showing you the looting and rioting to make you believe there is a racial divide so that we will stay divided and continue pointing fingers at who's fault it is
-Speaking of riots and protests, These are being pushed by the extreme left and right to make you believe that there is a divide. Remember that man in all Black destroying Autozone windows in broad daylight during the Peaceful Protests That same night, what was the big corporate store that got looted again? oh thats right, TARGET! which Is directly funded by George Soros who owns more than 550,000 shares of Target stock, 544,000 were bought in the 1st quarter of 2011
-Remember the funding of The WHO by Bill Gates? why would someone want so much stake in the World Health Organization. Is it so that he can manipulate the COVID numbers as he sees fit to make sure the sheep are herded in the right direction. and why is someone who's claim to fame is creating the internet (technology) be so involved in a virus/pandemic. Could it be his obsession of Population Control which he has openly talked about for years, as well as saying that every human should be vaccinated (when he doesnt even vaccinate his own kids)((his wife did an interview on tv where she was openly wearing a upside down cross, Satanic Symbolism?)) its also interesting how 2 of his closest buddies are Dr Facui and George Soros.. hmm...
-Then we have the President, before you read this, you can't read it with the hatred you have for Trump, read it just as "the president" with no other name or image attached. The President begins to take hydroxychloroquine which is proven to fight COVID, but yet the MSM continue to berate the president and discredits the affects of hydroxychloroquine. Why would they do that? to continue the divide? to make the president look bad in front of the nation? if the most protected person on the planet is taking a medicine that is proven to be working against a virus at pandemic levels... wouldnt you share the same medicine with the nation to protect your citizens? hmmm
-Property taxes will now go up due to the destruction from riots which were caused by extremist from the left and right... when people don’t have any money because they are unemployed or because the government told them their livelihood wasn't essential? But dont worry, You can file unemployment and we'll send you enough to get by, just to keep you happy and distract you from your freedoms disappearing
-The WHO has now been discredited with the information they have been giving out. The virus no longer spreads on surfaces and along with the inflation of numbers to frighten the population
-34 out of 50 states had more flu deaths in 2018 than Corona. Why did we shut down? 2 more of those states.. Georgia and Washington had COVID deaths that were similar to 2018 Flu Deaths. so 36 out of 50 states had less or equivalent to the same amount of deaths as the Flu, but were worried about a virus that has higher odds than getting struck by lightning? What about all the people that got killed in Chicago over Memorial Day weekend... crickets
-Blue states have continued to stay closed despite the numbers showing that its okay to open back up. Why would they stay closed and continue to affect their citizens, health and income. is it because they are intentionally trying to divide you?
-lets not forget for you mask wearers, stay at home people. and germaphobes, once you are acclimated back to society, you'll be at more of a risk to getting sick due to your immune system being low from not coming in contact with bacteria... Remember how many more people die from Flu than COVID? (Population control?) (wear your mask forever?)
-Now you’re wondering why they would be going through all of this and what the end game is. Seeing how our rights have been continued to be taken away, your freedom of speech is being censored online, they have taken away your ability to work and have instead made people rely on the government to survive, through their corporate companies which put more money in their pockets and have crushed the every day average farmer that feeds the whole nation, instead they cut food supply, raise meat prices, and are trying to only use corporate farms where everything is injected with hormones and who knows what else ( is a war over the shortage of food coming next? ) Once America starts becoming a Socialist country, they are closer to a world control with NWO, Next up… America becomes a country of Communism and now the Elite control the world, How? They are in control of the most powerful country in the history of mankind, they have enough money to last for lifetimes (money is power) and they also control The WHO where they decide which vaccinations and medicines you get, along with having a “DR” on board
And for all of you Truth Seekers who continue to “fact check” every post because “you read it on the internet so it can’t be true” …. Okay Becky, if the MSM on TV is being controlled to create a certain narrative, what makes you think that the same narrative wouldn’t be pushed on social media by censoring posts that go against the direction they are trying to point you to. This is America, Don’t we have something called the Freedom of Speech which allows us to say what we want, where we want, including the internet
Now after reading all that and people still continue to think something isn’t up? 🤔 There are too many coincidences, and that’s only in a matter of 3 MONTHS!!!
Are You Awake Yet?
Now what I encourage you to do, research for yourself, and not through the MSM either where they control the narrative, I’m talking about research from actual humans, who have 1st hand accounts and you can pull from peoples personal experiences and form your own opinion.
This isn’t a matter of Political Parties.. Democrat vs Republicans. This is the Human Race vs The Corrupt Elite and if you can't see that then "You are part of the problem" We as humans need to recognize this before it’s too late and human life as we know it is gone
Are you scared or Are you ready to fight?

[UNEDITED]
I saw that many of you non-swedes wanted to be able to enjoy the recent interview he did in Swedish. I have not had time to edit the text yet so it will be filled with spelling mistakes and such but if I have time later on I might fix that. The interviewer is called Mats Nileskär and he alternates between asking questions and explaining stuff so that's why sometimes it's just him retelling things that lean said earlier. Anyways here is the transcript:
Mats:
There was once a sixteenyearold full of love for screw, drill and Florida trap. Full of fascination for fantasy figures and the cinematic. He rapped honest, drowsy, tentatively and almost apathetic to strange, mind expanding beats. Music that didnt exist in reality. Yung leans journey from his laptop in his room in Södermalm, to sold out shows and rock star dreams in the country of Hip Hop. It is one of the most beautiful stories in the history of Swedish music. And like all beautiful stories it holds plentiful of darkness. Yung Lean could have ruined everything and been scarified on the emo rap scene. Instead he became the influential survivor. Yung Lean and the producer friends in Sad Boys changed the world and intertwined with something beyond their own existence.
Lean:
I usually don’t sit and count who my influences are. Because I have always had a lot of my own influences that I have payed homage to. But sometimes I don’t think about stuff and then I get a dm on Instagram. Like I got a dm from Trippie Redd that read like “Shoutout to one of my biggest influences.”
Music break
Ugly God. Like lots of rappers that I wouldn’t think were fans of me. Then there are these that are a bit more obvious like maybe suicide boys, Pouya. When they meet me at festivals, they are fans. And I don’t want to come off as bragging, it is the same way when, like I met young thug once in New York, and then I get star struck, I am a fan of him, nothing weird about that. But there is like, you know, group from group, it goes back. If you look at Wu Tang, and then it goes down, it gets weirder, like Odd Future and Asap Mob. And when we started, there was probably more people that thought like, like Yung Sherman, Yung Gud, Bladee, and all in Drain Gang and Sad boys and this is what we look like, we can also do this. I think we made it even more easy to access. And even more like, you only need a computer and internet. And less of, like maybe you don’t even have to skate, maybe you don’t even have to live in New York. More of like, you have a concept, and we were strict with that concept, we had a clear aesthetic, a clear way of making music videos, a clear message. It was easy to take things from that goth aspect, or the sad aspect, or like, people had purple hair like Ecco had. People dressed exactly like Bladee or Sherman, or rapped like me. And I still think that I see that today. And I’m proud, and I’m happy. I don’t see it as something negative, like, shit these boys are stealing or all these rappers are stealing, it’s more like, in that case I have also stolen. Everyone has been influenced by something, and as long as you are not ashamed about that, it’s okay, because that is how it goes. People can be like, I’ve never listened to Yung Lean, And I can see that they obviously have, and like…
Music break (Unreleased Lean)
Lean:
We got a lot of the autotune aspect from, like Bladee and Whitearmor started using it a lot, and me and Micke (Gud) used it a lot. For us that was inspired by Future and Atlanta. And Casino and the first FBG mixtapes with young scooter and all those. Like those were using autotune. But we were from Europe, like, we are from The Knife country, Håkan Hellström, Broder Daniel (Swedish artists), it is more like Kraftwerk when we do it. It is more monotone, a bit more dead, maybe a bit more ABBA english. It is a bit more depressing I think. And that is not something you try to do, it just ends up like that. And then I think that, a mix of that, we we got big during 2013, Hip Hop went more Nihilistic, dark, it was grim. The way Chief Keef rapped, everything after Finally Rich, Bang 2, Almighty So, it was like melodies but dark mumbling about killing people. Hip Hop was going that way. You no longer had to have a hook like “Woke up in a new Ferrari”. The whole song could be the same melody.
Mats:
The bored and monotone mumbling turned into an anxiety lowering melody. And a manic flow of words. Yung Lean and sad boys, deeply uninterested in conventional song structures landed in the beginning of the start of a new era. Post Hip Hops surrealistic and psychedelic era. The new era was open for people that had not belong before. People that looked and sounded like Lean. A new sound, a new way to experience and listen to music. It was perplex and fascinating. Something Sad Boys happily utilized.
Lean:
Yeah, it’s true. As long as you, like for us it was the natural thing to do. For us it wasn’t that we were exploiting this style of music or what they were doing in the US. For us it was more like, I have rapped since I was a kid, same for making beats for Micke. Drain Gang had a punk band. All of us made music. And when the time came it was just logical for us to take part. Same with rapping in English, it just came naturally. I actually lived in Vietnam three years before that. My mom is a diplomat so I was in the English school and spoke English so rapping in English came naturally. That the beats were slowed down, that, like everything was a bit weird, it came naturally to us. And of course the timing was perfect, it wouldn’t have been able to come at a different time. I think I’ve said that before. That if that had happened in 2009 it would have felt fake. I would have had to be more of a Paul Wall character or like Petter (Swedish Rapper). I was very lucky with coming up during that time. But after all I was just being myself to 100%. I think that if I hadn’t been, it wouldn’t have worked out.
Music break
Lean:
Except for you and some others it was typically Swedish, a prime example of how it is in Sweden. A Swedish artist comes up, something they don’t recognise. They think it’s embarrassing. A Swedish sixteen year old boy from Södermalm, a middle class boy. He shouldn’t be doing this, it’s embarrassing. They wouldn’t want to touch me with a ten foot pole. He can’t be included here blah blah blah. But the second that the US started appreciating it and when he was in the New York Times or when he collaborates with Frank Ocean or other big names. Then they are ashamed of themselves. Like “Oh shit, he is Swedish, he is with us now…” It’s typical for Sweden, the law of Jante, like you shouldn’t think that you are somebody. That was basically what I witnessed since I was sixteen. It’s sad that we can’t trust each other and support everyone. I really believe that there is room for everyone to make it in Sweden.
Mats:
What did it do to you, experiencing this? The Journey from hate to understanding and in the end to love.
Lean:
I think that it might have been easier with hate. To be completely honest, if you look back at a lot of rappers, when they were hungry, when they were still hated or underground, they had so much to give. And I had that kind of idea in my head. That it was more exciting when Sweden hated me and I was only famous in the US. I really thought it was interesting. But I have matured now, time has passed, six seven years since we talked. The music I make now is different. If I had not been loved and was still hated, it would have been a bit perverse. Maybe then I had only been provoking just to provoke. I don’t like that. Right now I think I deserve to be where I am. I wouldn’t want to be in any other position.
Music break
Mats:
What happened when you got to the US for the first time, as an unlikely star?
Lean:
What happened? I can’t say I remember a lot. We were very young. Suddenly we were sitting in limousines. Lots of drugs, lots of illegal substances. We were very young, you know almost like a Metallica documentary, suddenly someone is sitting there with a knife in some group or something. No but a lot of things went downhill, but all the gigs were so much fun. It was some kind of friendship, like a family. You can’t take away all the gigs and the touring we did in the start. When we arrived in the US, it’s like, you know Femi, Emilios girlfriend, that has been with us since day one. She says it’s like we were all a part of Lost. Like the airplane crashed and when we meet each other now all of us know that we were part of that. Character wise I don’t remember anything that was any special. I remember us playing at Röda Sten in Gothenburg for 150 people. And when we got to New York we sold out Webster Hall twice, back to back. And rappers were contacting us, we were hanging out with artists. It was another level of respect. I guess I’m a bit like you there. I’m a hip hop nerd, always have been. When I started expressing myself through this music it was easier for Americans to understand what the fuck I was doing than for like a 40 year old Swedish man. So there’s nothing weird about that. But I wish I remembered more from the first tours (laughing).
Music break
Lean:
You are sixteen, you go to the US, you are living in some hotel, you get to meet some drug dealers from Florida whom are also promoters, they have a Cadillac, and someone is backstage and lots of different rappers are coming in and suddenly Travis Scott is there and blah blah blah. Things are happening all the time. You wake up in a bed there are people around and then you have to go on stage. (Lean starts talking about something else) Is that David Lynch? Sorry we are watching a movie, we are watching Dumbo. (Back to interview) I wasn’t really ready for that. That it was going to be so much work. You don’t think that but there is so much work. Now I can do many shows. Like the last tour that I did sober I was able to do like 70-80 shows and been able to do that but you are still tired. Like you have to workout and sleep. But back then, where did all the energy come from? Including all the drugs and the shitty sleep and all partying. I don’t understand it at all.
Mats:
Let’s talk some more about Florida. How was it to meet spaceghostpurrp who sort of created the foundation for what you got your inspiration from, the do it yourself attitude, punk, the south, three six mafia meets other genres in Florida. How was it to meet him?
Lean:
I-I have to be completely honest. Spaceghostpurrp is insane you know. He is crazy as a human being. I think he is bipolar and doesn’t take his meds. And the people who actually met him, I met Denzel Curry, Travis Scott and some other people from raider klan, while all the rest of Sad Boys met Spaceghostpurrp. Because I had a bad comedown. So I didn’t meet him that time but our old manager was a good friend of him and he is a misunderstood legend, he really is. But the whole thing about him is like Rocky, the pretty artist and the genius ugly duckling. We both know that Asap Rocky got more famous because he is prettier and it just fit better. The picture was prettier to give to the people than that of spaceghostpurrp who was kind of wacky. But yeah I hope that everything is good with him. I have no contact and don’t know how he is doing nowadays, I don’t. But blacklander was some of the best. I remember when that was released and I was in eight or ninth grade. First I was so into MF DOOM and madvillain and then suddenly I saw a picture of Odd Future and then spaceghostpurrp came and then that was what I wanted to listen to all the time. And via spaceghostpurrp, I remember he linked a lot of good artist that I started listening to. So then came Waka Flocka.
Mats:
It must have been like heaven, but as time would tell also hell. Landing in Florida.
Lean:
It feels good. We were there a bit too long but it’s such a special feeling. You can go to Everglade and see alligators and you really feel all that in fort lauderdale that is it like a swamp. We recorded at a place called pink house, pink mansion. They had a lot of brick that they had thrown down so that it became pink. Rick Ross had recorded there and it’s really Florida. People run around with machetes and it’s voodoo and all of that Haiti thing. Music break
Lean:
And then we were there in the pink mansion and recorded all of Warlord. It was insanely creative and it was like, I guess like when you read about Black Sabbath recording it feels like you have like a demon in you and you just make so much music and don’t realise what’s happening and yeah it ended up bad. It ended up with me at the psych ward, smashing a balcony and covering myself in the blood and the same night my manager died and then I got back to Sweden and was in convalescence, like at the psych ward. After that trip a lot of things changed in my life. I remember after a while when Hoover was released, maybe two months after. All the boys, I remember Axel and Benjamin, Bladee and Sherman was like, this might be Jonathans last video ever. And I was sure of that as well for a while. My mom helped me write a CV and I walked around with that and was thinking about working at a kindergarten.
Music break
Lean:
I was so fucking tired, of all that had to do with music, and all that shit.
Music break
Lean:
It went down like this. Barron, may his soul rest in peace, me and Benjamin and Hunter lived in an apartment that was owned by Barrons father, who’s a lawyer named Stephen Machat. Stephen was a lawyer for Ozzy Osborne, Nate Dogg and his father, Barrons grandfather, was the lawyer that cheated Leonard Cohen out of a lot of money. So it’s a lawyer family. I had started to go into psychosis, or like drug related psychosis or an overdose for some days and I wasn’t feeling any good. Barron and Hunter was out to buy some paper, paper and soda. And while that’s happening, at the same time that Barron crashes, I’m smashing this balcony without knowing what had happened. And Benjamin calls 911. I was not in the car with him and the car did not catch on fire either. He crashed into a tree. There are a lot of weird versions of that story. But I have also heard a lot of terrible things from family members and people around that were sure that I was the devil and that I had evil powers and all that. If you think about it, I was seventeen eighteen how the fuck can you put the blame on a seventeen year old. It was tough for me as well. But I have no magic powers. Unfortunately. If I had I would use them for good things.
Mats:
It was the father of the manager, Stephen, that accused you of being pure evil.
Lean:
I wonder why it was me that got that since he has worked with like Ozzy Osborne and have told stories about when Nate Dogg ran into his office with an AK-47.
Music break
Lean:
Yeah I wonder how I ended up being pure evil. But I guess there was something there, Swedish folklore with midsummer powers.
Mats:
The troll syndrome or something like that?
Lean:
Yeah haha, exactly, the big monster, Näcken (Water spirit) haha.
Mats:
But there is something provoking about it still right?
Lean:
When it is about peoples lives. I knew Barron, we were with each other every day. It is not fun to be called the Devil or pure evil when I was just seventeen and ended up at the psych ward. It’s about real peoples lifes. You can’t just call young people those things. And of course I understand that someone is scared and upset because their child died, but you can’t put the blame on people or call them things like that, it’s sick. But if it had been in a completely different scenario I would probably have been more proud of being called that. If it had to do with my music. But when it’s about real things it’s just scary.
Music break
Mats:
Yung Lean took drugs, dressed up as a nurse and wrote an unreadable book about his life. Everything got out of control around the making of the dark album Warlord. Where Sweden and Florida in songs like the Billy Bragg sampled song Miami Ultras. Yung Lean took an overdose, experienced psychosis and ended up at a mental hospital. At the same time he lost his American manager in a car accident. Barrons father, the well known show business lawyer with ambitions to reach the American senate put the blame on Yung Lean. He planned to release an unfinished version of Warlord. Back in Sweden, Sad Boys could see how a version of the album had leaked.
Lean:
Yeah shit I remember that. Yung Sherman was celebrating his birthday and we were out bowling, or maybe it was his old girlfriend who was celebrated and suddenly everyone was on their phone like shit, Stephen has released it all. Directly on band camp connected to his account. Unfinished versions of the songs, the song names were wrong. We had been working on that album since we got back home, it was all we had. Leaks can be the worst things. If you have been quiet for so long and so much has happened and you just want to release Warlord the right way, with the correct videos and artwork and then something like that happens. It’s like a fucking punch to your face. We lost a lot of hope that day.
Music break
Lean:
I think that the most crazy, for me, was a while ago, the had been at Fort Lauderdale at a large fair and I had bought a costume that was made for nurses and I wore that all the time. We were going to a hotel with an artist and he was buying weed from a stripper. And when we are at this hotel a man in there is arguing with the workers there and he has a large entourage and I recognise the voice. I’m like it’s Jim Jones, Jim Jones from dipset. I did not realise It by then but I had started living a little in my own world. I was begging to enter the psychosis. I was wearing the nurse outfit and took a picture with Jim Jones and we talk for a while. When I have looked at that picture years later I’ve been like what the fuck is this shit.
Music break
Lean:
Who was it, I think it was The Who, who met in a clothing store, and a guy was like you should make music. And then they made music. And it kinda felt that way, like yeah you guys should make this music.
Music break
Lean:
Sad rap, haha. Sad rap is quite a sickening term. It shouldn’t exist. We don’t make sad music. When you start going into the dark water you just want to go deeper and deeper. And you can only get back up when you are really hit by the waves. It was a mixture of destructivity, teenage anxiousness, and yeah, just how I felt back then.
Music break
Mats:
What for some appeared like a smart joke in the beginning, and for others like INAUDIBLE (he speaks danish accent Swedish) entertainment had in the middle of the 20th century attracted a dedicated fan base in the US. Something that no Swedish rapper had dreamt about. Yung Lean saw the opportunity to create surrealistic art and shabby rap. And history was written when Yung Lean was the first swede to enter the top 40 American R&B list. A list whose history goes back to Harlem Hit parade, 1942, where leaders like Louis Jordan and Lionel Hampton ruled. Yung Leans Unknown Memory entered at 36th place on the album list, right above Kanye West and under Migos. It was October 2014.
Lean:
It sounds like a lot of fun now that you say it but the most fun was just if the songs and the album were great for me, like it goes so far. Prices and stuff comes but it’s so temporary compared to creating it, what you have gone through to create the music.
Mats:
Yung Lean was a a part of the drug cult. The cough syrup drinking and pill popping that defined a depressed generation. Lil Peep with Swedish roots had just started building his emo vision, related (musically) to Yung Lean, and Juice WRLD stopped breathing after just a couple of albums.
Lean:
The death that affected me the most among those is a person that I didn’t know that well. But it was when I met Fredo Santana and we were in the studio. Me, Fredo, Axel and some of his boys. He was the kindest. We were listening to get rich or die trying and made a song together. He was a really good guy. And the day after I got a message that he was dead. It’s not more than that. In the US and in Sweden. I have friends that have died from benzodiazepines in Sweden as well. I think that it has a lot to do with, like lean, it goes hand in hand with the sales. Lean, Codeine. First Actavis, and then it gets so expensive and after a while completely banned. Then people start drinking red, and it costs like a thousand dollars a pint. You can’t pay that much unless you are a rapper. If you are a rapper you get special prizes. And then you want to get cheaper stuff, you want to take the same things as the rappers you look up to. I guess that once everything was very weird. Around 2013-2014, there was ILoveMakonnen there was, like mushrooms and that stuff. Before it was all opioid based with Percocets.
Music break
Lean:
It felt like, I don’t want to be that guy but, the music often gets very interesting when people are trying different stuff. I think that’s the sad reality. Maybe not with my music. I feel as I can create more when I’m sober. I have tried most of the drugs so if I feel I want to channel some type of drug I can go back in my memories to get the feeling if I want to sound a special way. If you think about like Young Thug when he made I came from nothing, you could hear he was all fucked up. You can’t do that sober. Gucci Mane is also an example. But now Gucci mane is also an example because now he’s skinny, he looks good, he has a great body, he has his wife, I wanna give him that. I don’t want him to be fat and have a codeine belly, be constipated and on the brink of dying all the time. I want him to look like he does now. I will sacrifice the music for that. His music is not good any more. But fuck that I can listen to the old songs. I’d rather have him healthy. And with Future as well. That he is afraid of going public with having quit lean because his fans wouldn’t trust him no more. That’s sad. But the music is explosive now. There is more hip hop being created now than ever before. It used to be kind of a mainstream genre with Lil Wayne and people thought it was a joke and the underground stuff was much cooler. But hip hop now, the biggest artists, it is the most experimental genre right now. It is more experimental than experimental indie pop. They use more drugs than those who do experimental jazz. It is weirder than punk. It is the weirdest there is right now. And people just have to live with that. That so many people die on the way doesn’t have to be a part of that. It could continue to be this special without people dying.
Music break
Lean:
Much of the trap you listened to in the beginning was like, more voices, almost choirs, Siberian choirs. Gucci Manes adlibs are louder than the main track. One of Chief Keefs biggest hits, Citgo, you can’t even hear the instrumental. There’s like six different layers of “smoking on the gas, gas citgo citgo”. It’s amazing. It’s weirder than anything else and I think I saw it from my own perspective. For me, all the elements of hip hop ant trap, and the clothing, has been art. And my way of expressing myself, minimalistic, if it’s with an iPhone camera or if I get to direct a whole video, it will always be done my way. It’s a mix of movies I’ve seen, experiences I’ve had, colours I think about that day. I think that this timing. Luck doesn’t exist to put it that way. If I am allowed to leave it at that. Haha.
Music break
Mats:
When you got back to Sweden from Florida. Your dad picked you up right?
Lean:
Yeah, I think both my parents were at the airport. You mean that my dad came to Florida and I walked around the mental hospital and I called my dad the king of California, because I didn’t recognise him. I just told him several times, “Are you the king of California?”. He became quite sad, but he has also been able to joke about it a lot now. There was one story that was quite scary actually. I kept saying that there was a doctor that was coming in and fucking things up for me. He was threatening me that I was gonna go to juvie and things like that, threatening me. And my dad asked me what the doctor looked like and I explained it to him. And he was like, that is not a doctor, it’s the guy who comes in to clean. He just came in to provoke me. And I was told that months later. It was quite scary. I have actually been at the psych ward in Sweden as well, much longer than in the US. 2017 I was at Danderyds (place outside of stockholm) closed section for a month. For psychosis as well, but not drug induced. But I have been sober now for two almost three years. I work out, I do boxing. I’m really happy and I’m more creative than ever. I think that everything that we’ve been talking about, me being a part of drug culture. Kids that say like, Yung Lean, I smoked my first joint for you, I took my first E for you. They would have done it to someone else’s music as well. I promise that. I’ve never pushed anyone to do drugs, I promise. I’ve just told it how it is, from my perspective. And you can do exactly the same thing and be sober as well. It is as much fun if not more fun. If I go out to club now, I can be out all night, I don’t get tired. I have much better relations now with everyone around me. I’m just a happier person. I think it’s much more fun for me to do this interview now compared to last time.
(They put in a clip from the interview they did way back)
Lean:
It sucks to be in school but that’s also a way to be down to earth and not feel so like I’m so fucking special, which I’m not. In a way it’s nice to be in school. Like, I’m no superstar. I have a normal life. It’s nice to live out my teenage life before something crazy happens.
Mats:
How old are you right now?
Lean:
I turn eighteen this summer.
(Back to the interview again)
I was at the Mount Sinai (Medical Centre) in Miami. And I found out Avicii was also there when I watched his documentary. And when at the hospital in Danderyd. It was very nice I must say. I was fucked up, completely manic, but it was a very nice place. Big up to the Swedish health care. That they put up with all the people there.
Music break.
Lean:
Those hours. All the people who are there, who try to break out, or try to commit suicide, or are screaming. You are laying there and you hear screams all night. It’s like being in a nightmare 24/7, plus that your own head is a nightmare 24/7. I had plans of escaping, I had a map of the hospital that I took a copy of and hid under my pillow. It was like One flew over the cuckoo's nest. You walk around there.
Mats:
Do you remember when you started making music after all this? The first attempts at getting back there musically.
Lean:
I was still a bit manic and when I was allowed to leave for some hours I chose to go to the studio. So I was driven to the studio from Danderyds hospital. I recorded six songs and then had to go back. When I finally left and was convalescent and quite low because of all the medication I just chose to never listen to those songs)
Music break (Lean starting singing I’d rather go blind by Etta James)
Lean:
I have no idea what I’m talking about there. I don’t really want to know. I just remember that I made a listen to your heart cover and I made a version of Etta James song because I had listened to that so much when I was at the hospital.
Music break (Lean continue to sing I’d rather go blind by Etta James)
Lean:
In the beginning you just try. You are like Bambi on the ice, trembling. But then I finished Stranger. We had made that album before I ended up at the hospital. Me and Micke finished it in the studio and then Whitearmor and I did our own tape. We went out to Mariefred where a guy named Pontus has a studio. He produced Britney Spears Toxic. And there we were making Poison Ivy. It felt very nice to just clear my head and the music turned out great. Those days were nice.
Music break
Mats: (talking about the upcoming album)
The adventure continues. The new album that follows up the anxiety filled milestone, Stranger, is punky millennium R&B, that can only be made by Yung Lean.
Lean:
It’s everywhere. Some of the songs are almost like ballads and some are more to the classical witch house, others sound like some, you know SVT Play (Swedish national TV) intro with piano haha, it’s everywhere. But I’m very inspired by The Stooges, I wanna be your dog. That song, and R&B.
Music break
Mats:
Jonathan spend the first time of his childhood in Belarus.
Lean:
You know you have some fake memories. You have a picture of an apartment. But I have one memory that I’ve been told so many times that It’s like I can see it. It’s when I was at kindergarten and my dad comes to pick me up. He asks for me and I’m not with the other kids. I had been bad so I was put in the corner with a large cone on my head. My dad walks over there and since he is Swedish he gets super mad and wanted me to quit going there. My mom was calmer and explained that that’s what they do, nothing weird about that, just some discipline. My mom is grown up in Soviet you know and went to a Russian school. Two different worlds. But I have lots of nice memories from there. I went to a school theatre and danced in snow and that stuff. I must have been a Pinocchio, somewhere around there I turned into a donkey. The cigar came. (Referring to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCBjfgXg8A4) I had a very nice childhood, middle class, Södermalm. My dad’s a writer, raised in Söder as well. My moms raised in Russia, she’s a real boss. She has had a crazy life. One time she told me that she was a cleaner at an embassy, and that one day she would be in those rooms. Now she is becoming an ambassador in Albania. She has worked her way up. I’m very proud of her. We lived in Söder. I have been to a lot of schools, Södermalmskolan, Gamla Maria, Katarina Norra, Kärrtorp…
Music break
Lean:
When I got back to Sweden from Belarus I started going to a kindergarten. It is one of my first memories. I was still speaking Russian and I so badly wanted to be understood. I walked around speaking in Russian Swedish, can I have milk and bread, can I have milk and bread. I really wanted to learn Swedish so I forbid my parents to speak Russian with me. That was very stupid, I really wish I hadn’t said that. I wish I had learnt Russian as well. Music came into my life early. It was what made my life fun. It was always my thing and what I was good at. I think I said that last time we talked. When I was young I got a little bit famous with a song called Söder Söder. I was opening for Adam Tensta (Swedish rapper) when I was in fourth grade. Then I made a mixtape with a friend during a summer, and I made a lot of music with my sister. I dressed up and put on makeup. Went to school and listened to Green Day. You know, you wanted to, I basically dressed up the way I do today. I did the same thing back then as I do now. The only difference is that I make money now.
I think that they were worried a lot. I guess the drug aspect of it. When you get so interested in things, those things comes with it. When I was I seventh grade I was caught with some weed, petty shit, and yeah they were worried about all that. But in the end they have been very proud and they will come tonight to my show. They have been to so many of my shows and they are very proud. If I make a good song I want to show it to my mom. If she likes it then it will be released. Same with my dad. I don’t know if they understood if they that there was always something extra or something special that I wanted to do. I guess you will have to ask them about that. But I know that they are proud.
Music break
Lean:
I think it’s so much fun. That I’m Swedish and that there are not that many Swedes that like me. I means that I’ve made it. I remember when I went out to eat with my mom, she had got us Indian food, I told her that I had gotten a gig in Gothenburg. And she asked like for who, for yourself or what? She was just laughing at me. I had to convince her, showing the event. And she asked like, Yung Lean, is that you? And I showed her videos and she still didn’t get it. I finally had to call Emilio on speaker and have him explain it to her. My dad didn’t get any of it either. It was quite tough because someone had written an article where it said that I was the son of Kristoffer Leandoer, the horror writer. He was so mad, I came home from school and he was furious. He was like “What’s all this? My name, and this song, greygoose?”. But afterwards when he understood it he was proud. But no one ever understood how big it was. I was at my room all the time. We remade the basement into a small studio and I was always there. I was smart with that shit. I got like Lofty 305 and people from Miami and small underground people that I kept sending my songs to. I just sat home and we had this Tumblr that Axel created and we were like dolphins, we communicated directly to the fans, even if I had like 3 fans, and suddenly I had ten thousand fans, and we still communicated directly to them. They got to know all about us. They knew exactly what we were doing.
Music break
(Again a clip from the older interview when Lean was seventeen)
Lean:
I do not claim that I do all the things I sing about in my songs. I’ve never said that. That would be completely crazy. I wouldn’t be a good seventeen year old then. It would be insane. But I guess you should believe that Yung Lean doesn’t exist. That he is just some fucking seventeen year old that’s completely crazy, and then the real me comes in and say things and have real emotions and real lyrics. I guess the mix between those things are Yung Lean, that’s what Sad boys are. The mix of what’s real and what’s not. That’s what the listeners have to think about themselves, and decide what they want to believe and now. And what they like, is it the music or the person.
Mats:
And it is when you balance that where everything becomes interesting.
Lean:
It’s exactly that. And it’s so nice because you get to do that, while really you are not allowed to do it, it’s completely wrong, but if you really want to do it, do it, and then you do it. Everything that’s written should have to be thought of several times, nothing should be just straight forward. I get it, that’s good, now I won’t listen to it again. That’s no good. If it’s an album or a song where you get everything there’s no fun in it. It’s like watching a bad film. You want to see something that leaves an impression. It’s much more fun that people talk about me. Rather than that they just say like he’s such a good rapper. It’s not like I’m trying to be a weird rapper, I guess that what I feel like doing, that’s real. I make things from myself. I don’t rap about these crazy things because I want to be like that or because I want to build up an image. I do it because it’s what I feel like doing. I do it because it’s what I want.
Music break
(Back to the new interview again)
Lean:
I remember Charlie XCX saying that her and Robyn had been in the studio and she had shown her Ginseng strip and they had been like turn it off, turn it off. They hated it. And then some days passed and both of them had listened to it by themselves. And when they came back to the studio the just kept on listening to it. It’s like you have to hate it at first. It’s so provocative. Like he looks this way, or it’s so honest, or it’s just something. It’s too close, or I don’t know. Like it’s still a meme on all my YouTube videos. Listened first time, hated it, listened tenth time, my favourite song. It’s the Yung Lean effect.
Music break
Lean:
I would love to make film when I get older. I would like to make film of greek tales. There is a tale of a man called Geryon, he is completely red and has a red dog and lives on a red island. He is killed by Hercules. I would like to make a film about that but more of a psychological thriller. Kinda like pusher, Snabba Cash (Swedish movie) meets Greek mythology.
Mats:
You have the John Ausonius (Swedish serial killer) project, you are drawn to darkness.
Lean:
Yeah, yes I do. It’s natural and not at all an image. I remember my dad joking about that when I was small. I always wanted the orchs to win in the lord of the rings, and that Voldemort was much cooler than Harry Potter. I think it’s quite simple psychology really. That it’s just more interesting. If I had a history of real darkness. Like growing up in war or torture. I think I would be very interested in happy stuff. But now I am not. You are attracted to what you are not from, where you don’t think you belong. But where I am is where I belong the best. I am privileged where I do not belong any more. I think everyone wants to find a world where they don’t naturally belong. For me that has been music. No one in my family had anything to do with music. No one has been a rapper. I have always felt at home in front on a microphone.
Mats:
When you found the darkness in Florida and managed to get out of it, was it mission completed?
Lean:
I don’t know if it was mission completed really. Barron died so I would want to take back a lot of what happened there. I think I had the darkness within me before that. It is inside of you.

So this past weekend in Florida is a Vacation I’ll never forget.. its like one of those stories you hear on the News where you dream that one day something like this could happen to you. We’ll start On Saturday. The day was lackluster at best, you know those awkward family vacations where you feel out of place especially around your family... to make everything worse, we were in a state where we knew no one and finding some good bud was near impossible. We managed to get 2 fat joints on the Plane, hidden very well of course, but after that it was CBD from then on. It wasn’t the end of the world but, FUCK when you go a week without pot it feels like an eternity. It truly does make everything better especially when your stuck with family for the entire week.
So I had the Idea to rent a Scooter. (I HIGHly Recommend Renting a Scooter while on Vacation in SoFlo.) We cruised all up and down the coast from DeerField Beach all the Way down to the beaches in Fort Lauderdale. On the way, we went down Hillsboro Mile (which is where the story gets Juicy later into the Story) where the entire Mile is Full of Homes that only the 1% can afford. I Loved it, what an experience it was. I know I won’t have that kind of money anytime soon, but hey it definitely got me MOTIVATED!!! As we were Scootin past these homes, I pulled into a Vacant Lot in between 2 Multi Million Dollar homes and drove all the way up to the beach and parked. Man, what a view, It got me thinking, “how often do these beaches get used?” I didn’t see a single person in sight, I knew as of then that I wanted to explore this area of the beach before I leave to go back to the boring Midwest... so we left and continued south until we were in Fort Lauderdale.
We stopped and had Lunch at a small Italian place called Kisses of Italy. I ordered Chicken Parm that wasn’t even on the Menu (Best Chicken Parm Sandwich EVER) and my Gf had a Hotdog Sandwhich (3 Hotdogs on a toasted bun with toppings.) After a great Lunch we went back home to relax after a great Scooter ride.
Scroll forward about 6 hours and we are headed to the Casino because we can’t seem to get her family to do anything other than sit at home.. (were on vacation, so we don’t wanna just stay home) when we arrived at the Casino, we each took out $60 (TIP. Only take out $60, if you lose it GO HOME, if you gain $60 back, pocket it and DONT TOUCH IT, continue to play with your winning, until you either lose what you had profited or are ready to be finished) and headed straight to the Roulette Table. I started with my $60 and it was gone within 10 minutes and she put in $20 and it was gone after 2 minutes. (It was on a Red Streak and I refuse to play Red) We went outside to smoke a CBD Joint and are prepared to lose the rest when we go back inside. So when we go back in (after about 30 minutes) we see that the tables have turned and my LUCKY number 33 has been hit twice as well as a slew of other black numbers. We then put in the last $40 and got up to $200 in a matter of minutes. I think we had a number get hit 5 times in a row with $2-$3 on the number plus $75 on black. Needless to say we made our money back and profited $800 for the night! We left at 12:45am and got to sleep around 2:00am.
We woke up on Sunday at 7:30 to spend our last few hours on Florida on the Beach. (I didn’t wanna get outta bed) After sleeping an entire week on a crappy blow up mattress and having little sleep the night before, my body was telling me to stay in bed. We got to the beach around 8:30 and stayed until 10:00. I made sure we had enough time to go to the Spot I mentioned the day before. So we get home and hop on the scooter and head for Hillsboro Mile. (There is only 1 public entrance to this beach and its at least a 1/2 mile walk in the sand to get to where I wanted to go, so we took the scooter to the very last Condo Building before the Row of Mansions on Hillsboro Beach. All the parking spots were numbered so I just parked in the covered area by a door to get inside. There was only 1 sign that said no Trespassing unless your a resident, and there was a Chain going across 5 posts about 3 feet high. We hopped the Chain and were to the Beach within a minute or 2.
There wasn’t a person to be seen in the area, which is something I have wanted for awhile. Technically all Florida Beaches are Public Property, so we weren’t breaking any major rules. We started walking down the beach toward all the mansions. (I Recommend this walk for anyone that comes to the area. It’s extremely peaceful, just make sure you respect the beach and make it look better than when you got there.) As I got to about the 3rd Mansion I saw an elderly man in the distance and he saw me eagerly looking for Cool Seashells at the beach. When he got close he took off his headphones and told me that he saw a package on the beach a little ways down that had appeared to be drugs of some kind. He didn’t want to have anything to do with it, but seemed like he wanted me to take care of it. So we keep walking another 500 feet or so until we see what the man was talking about. It was a vacuum sealed black bag that was wrapped in multiple layers of plastic to form that of a brick. It had the Sun of Uruguay on the front (the Cartel Logo) it appeared to have been in the Ocean for a very very long time, but also appeared to be sealed still. (Keep in mind our flight leaves at 5:00pm and it’s currently 11:30am) so my GF takes off her shirt and we wrap it in the shirt so it doesn’t look Suspicious and we start walking back to the Scooter. At this point we had already made a video of finding it on the beach and we took a few pictures of it. (At this point No one knew about this except us, the old man was long gone by this point too) we put the brick under the seat of the Scooter and start heading towards her dads house. (Yes we’re just cruising around with a 30k brick in a cheap $500 scooter.)
When we get to the house we pull into the Garage and show them what we found, and they literary Flipped! They kept trying to tell us we were going to get a possession charge or something even worse. They wanted us to go find a trash can and go throw it away. I didn’t agree with how rash they were thinking. (Technically we didn’t do anything wrong, we took the package from the beach so someone else didn’t get their hands on it, and at this point we were pretty set on going to turn it in) So we unwrap it from the shirt and put it on a Walmart bag and bag into the Scooter seat and we start heading to the Police Station.
The Scooter has to be turned in at 12:00, and I didn’t wanna potentially get held for questioning and get a late fee, so we pulled over and call 911, I told them the short version of the story and they send a BCS out to meet up with me and we opened the Seat and he opened the bag and said that’s quite the find!! We told him where we found it and what our intentions were and he was SUPER COOL, we had a few questions about the brick and he answered all of them and talked to us about it. He took our info and asked us about our local college football Teams. All in all it was the Craziest way to end a Vacation.
I’ve been back now for 3 days and can say we are moving to Florida at the end of April. I’m an adventurer at heart and after finding the find of a lifetime it has motivated me to move to Florida to start our Fun Filled Life. I do want to say that I have never done this Product and know nothing about it. I know this could have been the Best/Worst thing that could have happened to me. I have also imagined so many other ways I could have handled it. Either way I’m happy it won’t end up on the Street even though I potentially gave up 30-100k worth of Pure Untouched Product. If you read this entire thing, I want to Thank you and welcome you to the Crazy Life I’m Living in. Follow to stay up to date with when I move and start searching the Beach again. Until then... Peace and Love

I recently finished renovating a condo so that my mom can retire, rent it, and live off of it. She’s worked very hard all her life and not had much (I mean she’s had the essentials which is a lot more than others), I was hoping she enjoy the last half of her life without having to work hard just to get by.
The issue is the pandemic happened just as I finished and we paused from putting the apartment for rent until we were sure everything that was happening. Unfortunately, we can’t just let the apartment sit there not producing income while still paying maintenance and property taxes. She and I are new to renting other than my mom renting out our previous house when in dire need and having the tenants live there for months’ rent-free while not being able to evict them right away. I was hoping I could get some help/some questions answer.
Property Information
Location: Miami Gardens, FL
2nd floor (top floor) Condo in Senior Neighborhood (Age requirements 55+, no children under 16)
Square feet: 910
2 Bedrooms, 2 Baths, Kitchen, Dining Room, Living Room, Balcony, 2 front entrances, Personal Parking Space, Dishwasher, Hardwood Floors, View to the surrounding canal.
Community clubhouse and pool, building washers and dryers.
A few minutes from Turnpike, I-95, Palmetto (826), US1, US7, US9, I-75
15-20 minutes from both Miami and Fort Lauderdale airport
15-20 minutes from Sunny Isles, Golden Beach, Haulover Park/Beach. (30 from Miami Beach)
10-25 minutes from malls and casinos including: Aventura Mall, Sawgrass Mall, Bal Harbour Shops, Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, Gulfstream Park Racing and Casino, and Hard Rock Stadium.
Now the questions I have:

1. Should I use Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com, Craigslist, Cozy, Zumper, Hotpads, Facebook’s Marketplace, Oodle, Rentals.com, Apartments.com, Rent.com, TurboTenant? Why? Why not?
   
2. Should I get a realtor or should we just try our luck on these websites?
   
3. What information above should I out in the listing? What should I remove?
   
4. What laws should we be aware of as landlords? Or someone putting something up for rent? (I don’t mind reading so a simple link or name, I can do the research)
   
5. What inspections should we have done before renting?
   
6. What forms should the applicants fill out?
   
7. What forms should the renters fill out? (once rented)
   
8. Should we wait longer to rent while the pandemic is still in an unpredictable state?
   
9. Are there any protections as landlords while the pandemic is active?
   

My mom just doesn’t want to go through the situation she did before and was hoping for a smoother process/outcome.
Any other information is appreciated.
Thank you in advance for all the help.
TL/DR
Need any advice on renting a Condo in Miami Gardens, FL

So this past weekend in Florida is a Vacation I’ll never forget.. its like one of those stories you hear on the News where you dream that one day something like this could happen to you. We’ll start On Saturday. The day was lackluster at best, you know those awkward family vacations where you feel out of place especially around your family... to make everything worse, we were in a state where we knew no one and finding some good bud was near impossible. We managed to get 2 fat joints on the Plane, hidden very well of course, but after that it was CBD from then on. It wasn’t the end of the world but, FUCK when you go a week without pot it feels like an eternity. It truly does make everything better especially when your stuck with family for the entire week.
So I had the Idea to rent a Scooter. (I HIGHly Recommend Renting a Scooter while on Vacation in SoFlo.) We cruised all up and down the coast from DeerField Beach all the Way down to the beaches in Fort Lauderdale. On the way, we went down Hillsboro Mile (which is where the story gets Juicy later into the Story) where the entire Mile is Full of Homes that only the 1% can afford. I Loved it, what an experience it was. I know I won’t have that kind of money anytime soon, but hey it definitely got me MOTIVATED!!! As we were Scootin past these homes, I pulled into a Vacant Lot in between 2 Multi Million Dollar homes and drove all the way up to the beach and parked. Man, what a view, It got me thinking, “how often do these beaches get used?” I didn’t see a single person in sight, I knew as of then that I wanted to explore this area of the beach before I leave to go back to the boring Midwest... so we left and continued south until we were in Fort Lauderdale.
We stopped and had Lunch at a small Italian place called Kisses of Italy. I ordered Chicken Parm that wasn’t even on the Menu (Best Chicken Parm Sandwich EVER) and my Gf had a Hotdog Sandwhich (3 Hotdogs on a toasted bun with toppings.) After a great Lunch we went back home to relax after a great Scooter ride.
Scroll forward about 6 hours and we are headed to the Casino because we can’t seem to get her family to do anything other than sit at home.. (were on vacation, so we don’t wanna just stay home) when we arrived at the Casino, we each took out $60 (TIP. Only take out $60, if you lose it GO HOME, if you gain $60 back, pocket it and DONT TOUCH IT, continue to play with your winning, until you either lose what you had profited or are ready to be finished) and headed straight to the Roulette Table. I started with my $60 and it was gone within 10 minutes and she put in $20 and it was gone after 2 minutes. (It was on a Red Streak and I refuse to play Red) We went outside to smoke a CBD Joint and are prepared to lose the rest when we go back inside. So when we go back in (after about 30 minutes) we see that the tables have turned and my LUCKY number 33 has been hit twice as well as a slew of other black numbers. We then put in the last $40 and got up to $200 in a matter of minutes. I think we had a number get hit 5 times in a row with $2-$3 on the number plus $75 on black. Needless to say we made our money back and profited $800 for the night! We left at 12:45am and got to sleep around 2:00am.
We woke up on Sunday at 7:30 to spend our last few hours on Florida on the Beach. (I didn’t wanna get outta bed) After sleeping an entire week on a crappy blow up mattress and having little sleep the night before, my body was telling me to stay in bed. We got to the beach around 8:30 and stayed until 10:00. I made sure we had enough time to go to the Spot I mentioned the day before. So we get home and hop on the scooter and head for Hillsboro Mile. (There is only 1 public entrance to this beach and its at least a 1/2 mile walk in the sand to get to where I wanted to go, so we took the scooter to the very last Condo Building before the Row of Mansions on Hillsboro Beach. All the parking spots were numbered so I just parked in the covered area by a door to get inside. There was only 1 sign that said no Trespassing unless your a resident, and there was a Chain going across 5 posts about 3 feet high. We hopped the Chain and were to the Beach within a minute or 2.
There wasn’t a person to be seen in the area, which is something I have wanted for awhile. Technically all Florida Beaches are Public Property, so we weren’t breaking any major rules. We started walking down the beach toward all the mansions. (I Recommend this walk for anyone that comes to the area. It’s extremely peaceful, just make sure you respect the beach and make it look better than when you got there.) As I got to about the 3rd Mansion I saw an elderly man in the distance and he saw me eagerly looking for Cool Seashells at the beach. When he got close he took off his headphones and told me that he saw a package on the beach a little ways down that had appeared to be drugs of some kind. He didn’t want to have anything to do with it, but seemed like he wanted me to take care of it. So we keep walking another 500 feet or so until we see what the man was talking about. It was a vacuum sealed black bag that was wrapped in multiple layers of plastic to form that of a brick. It had the Sun of Uruguay on the front (the Cartel Logo) it appeared to have been in the Ocean for a very very long time, but also appeared to be sealed still. (Keep in mind our flight leaves at 5:00pm and it’s currently 11:30am) so my GF takes off her shirt and we wrap it in the shirt so it doesn’t look Suspicious and we start walking back to the Scooter. At this point we had already made a video of finding it on the beach and we took a few pictures of it. (At this point No one knew about this except us, the old man was long gone by this point too) we put the brick under the seat of the Scooter and start heading towards her dads house. (Yes we’re just cruising around with a 30k brick in a cheap $500 scooter.)
When we get to the house we pull into the Garage and show them what we found, and they literary Flipped! They kept trying to tell us we were going to get a possession charge or something even worse. They wanted us to go find a trash can and go throw it away. I didn’t agree with how rash they were thinking. (Technically we didn’t do anything wrong, we took the package from the beach so someone else didn’t get their hands on it, and at this point we were pretty set on going to turn it in) So we unwrap it from the shirt and put it on a Walmart bag and bag into the Scooter seat and we start heading to the Police Station.
The Scooter has to be turned in at 12:00, and I didn’t wanna potentially get held for questioning and get a late fee, so we pulled over and call 911, I told them the short version of the story and they send a BCS out to meet up with me and we opened the Seat and he opened the bag and said that’s quite the find!! We told him where we found it and what our intentions were and he was SUPER COOL, we had a few questions about the brick and he answered all of them and talked to us about it. He took our info and asked us about our local college football Teams. All in all it was the Craziest way to end a Vacation.
I’ve been back now for 3 days and can say we are moving to Florida at the end of April. I’m an adventurer at heart and after finding the find of a lifetime it has motivated me to move to Florida to start our Fun Filled Life. I do want to say that I have never done this Product and know nothing about it. I know this could have been the Best/Worst thing that could have happened to me. I have also imagined so many other ways I could have handled it. Either way I’m happy it won’t end up on the Street even though I potentially gave up 30-100k worth of Pure Untouched Product. If you read this entire thing, I want to Thank you and welcome you to the Crazy Life I’m Living in. Follow to stay up to date with when I move and start searching the Beach again. Until then... Peace and Love
Link to imgur in comments

I recently finished renovating a condo so that my mom can retire, rent it, and live off of it. She’s worked very hard all her life and not had much (I mean she’s had the essentials which is a lot more than others), I was hoping she enjoy the last half of her life without having to work hard just to get by.
The issue is the pandemic happened just as I finished and we paused from putting the apartment for rent until we were sure everything that was happening. Unfortunately, we can’t just let the apartment sit there not producing income while still paying maintenance and property taxes. She and I are new to renting other than my mom renting out our previous house when in dire need and having the tenants live there for months’ rent-free while not being able to evict them right away. I was hoping I could get some help/some questions answer.
Property Information
Location: Miami Gardens, FL
2nd floor (top floor) Condo in Senior Neighborhood (Age requirements 55+, no children under 16)
Square feet: 910
2 Bedrooms, 2 Baths, Kitchen, Dining Room, Living Room, Balcony, 2 front entrances, Personal Parking Space, Dishwasher, Hardwood Floors, View to the surrounding canal.
Community clubhouse and pool, building washers and dryers.
A few minutes from Turnpike, I-95, Palmetto (826), US1, US7, US9, I-75
15-20 minutes from both Miami and Fort Lauderdale airport
15-20 minutes from Sunny Isles, Golden Beach, Haulover Park/Beach. (30 from Miami Beach)
10-25 minutes from malls and casinos including: Aventura Mall, Sawgrass Mall, Bal Harbour Shops, Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, Gulfstream Park Racing and Casino, and Hard Rock Stadium.
Now the questions I have:

1. Should I use Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com, Craigslist, Cozy, Zumper, Hotpads, Facebook’s Marketplace, Oodle, Rentals.com, Apartments.com, Rent.com, TurboTenant? Why? Why not?
   
2. Should I get a realtor or should we just try our luck on these websites?
   
3. What information above should I out in the listing? What should I remove?
   
4. What laws should we be aware of as landlords? Or someone putting something up for rent? (I don’t mind reading so a simple link or name, I can do the research)
   
5. What inspections should we have done before renting?
   
6. What forms should the applicants fill out?
   
7. What forms should the renters fill out? (once rented)
   
8. Should we wait longer to rent while the pandemic is still in an unpredictable state?
   
9. Are there any protections as landlords while the pandemic is active?
   

My mom just doesn’t want to go through the situation she did before and was hoping for a smoother process/outcome.
Any other information is appreciated.
Thank you in advance for all the help.
TL/DR
Need any advice on renting a Condo in Miami Gardens, FL

So this past weekend in Florida is a Vacation I’ll never forget.. its like one of those stories you hear on the News where you dream that one day something like this could happen to you. We’ll start On Saturday. The day was lackluster at best, you know those awkward family vacations where you feel out of place especially around your family... to make everything worse, we were in a state where we knew no one and finding some good bud was near impossible. We managed to get 2 fat joints on the Plane, hidden very well of course, but after that it was CBD from then on. It wasn’t the end of the world but, FUCK when you go a week without pot it feels like an eternity. It truly does make everything better especially when your stuck with family for the entire week.
So I had the Idea to rent a Scooter. (I HIGHly Recommend Renting a Scooter while on Vacation in SoFlo.) We cruised all up and down the coast from DeerField Beach all the Way down to the beaches in Fort Lauderdale. On the way, we went down Hillsboro Mile (which is where the story gets Juicy later into the Story) where the entire Mile is Full of Homes that only the 1% can afford. I Loved it, what an experience it was. I know I won’t have that kind of money anytime soon, but hey it definitely got me MOTIVATED!!! As we were Scootin past these homes, I pulled into a Vacant Lot in between 2 Multi Million Dollar homes and drove all the way up to the beach and parked. Man, what a view, It got me thinking, “how often do these beaches get used?” I didn’t see a single person in sight, I knew as of then that I wanted to explore this area of the beach before I leave to go back to the boring Midwest... so we left and continued south until we were in Fort Lauderdale.
We stopped and had Lunch at a small Italian place called Kisses of Italy. I ordered Chicken Parm that wasn’t even on the Menu (Best Chicken Parm Sandwich EVER) and my Gf had a Hotdog Sandwhich (3 Hotdogs on a toasted bun with toppings.) After a great Lunch we went back home to relax after a great Scooter ride.
Scroll forward about 6 hours and we are headed to the Casino because we can’t seem to get her family to do anything other than sit at home.. (were on vacation, so we don’t wanna just stay home) when we arrived at the Casino, we each took out $60 (TIP. Only take out $60, if you lose it GO HOME, if you gain $60 back, pocket it and DONT TOUCH IT, continue to play with your winning, until you either lose what you had profited or are ready to be finished) and headed straight to the Roulette Table. I started with my $60 and it was gone within 10 minutes and she put in $20 and it was gone after 2 minutes. (It was on a Red Streak and I refuse to play Red) We went outside to smoke a CBD Joint and are prepared to lose the rest when we go back inside. So when we go back in (after about 30 minutes) we see that the tables have turned and my LUCKY number 33 has been hit twice as well as a slew of other black numbers. We then put in the last $40 and got up to $200 in a matter of minutes. I think we had a number get hit 5 times in a row with $2-$3 on the number plus $75 on black. Needless to say we made our money back and profited $800 for the night! We left at 12:45am and got to sleep around 2:00am.
We woke up on Sunday at 7:30 to spend our last few hours on Florida on the Beach. (I didn’t wanna get outta bed) After sleeping an entire week on a crappy blow up mattress and having little sleep the night before, my body was telling me to stay in bed. We got to the beach around 8:30 and stayed until 10:00. I made sure we had enough time to go to the Spot I mentioned the day before. So we get home and hop on the scooter and head for Hillsboro Mile. (There is only 1 public entrance to this beach and its at least a 1/2 mile walk in the sand to get to where I wanted to go, so we took the scooter to the very last Condo Building before the Row of Mansions on Hillsboro Beach. All the parking spots were numbered so I just parked in the covered area by a door to get inside. There was only 1 sign that said no Trespassing unless your a resident, and there was a Chain going across 5 posts about 3 feet high. We hopped the Chain and were to the Beach within a minute or 2.
There wasn’t a person to be seen in the area, which is something I have wanted for awhile. Technically all Florida Beaches are Public Property, so we weren’t breaking any major rules. We started walking down the beach toward all the mansions. (I Recommend this walk for anyone that comes to the area. It’s extremely peaceful, just make sure you respect the beach and make it look better than when you got there.) As I got to about the 3rd Mansion I saw an elderly man in the distance and he saw me eagerly looking for Cool Seashells at the beach. When he got close he took off his headphones and told me that he saw a package on the beach a little ways down that had appeared to be drugs of some kind. He didn’t want to have anything to do with it, but seemed like he wanted me to take care of it. So we keep walking another 500 feet or so until we see what the man was talking about. It was a vacuum sealed black bag that was wrapped in multiple layers of plastic to form that of a brick. It had the Sun of Uruguay on the front (the Cartel Logo) it appeared to have been in the Ocean for a very very long time, but also appeared to be sealed still. (Keep in mind our flight leaves at 5:00pm and it’s currently 11:30am) so my GF takes off her shirt and we wrap it in the shirt so it doesn’t look Suspicious and we start walking back to the Scooter. At this point we had already made a video of finding it on the beach and we took a few pictures of it. (At this point No one knew about this except us, the old man was long gone by this point too) we put the brick under the seat of the Scooter and start heading towards her dads house. (Yes we’re just cruising around with a 30k brick in a cheap $500 scooter.)
When we get to the house we pull into the Garage and show them what we found, and they literary Flipped! They kept trying to tell us we were going to get a possession charge or something even worse. They wanted us to go find a trash can and go throw it away. I didn’t agree with how rash they were thinking. (Technically we didn’t do anything wrong, we took the package from the beach so someone else didn’t get their hands on it, and at this point we were pretty set on going to turn it in) So we unwrap it from the shirt and put it on a Walmart bag and bag into the Scooter seat and we start heading to the Police Station.
The Scooter has to be turned in at 12:00, and I didn’t wanna potentially get held for questioning and get a late fee, so we pulled over and call 911, I told them the short version of the story and they send a BCS out to meet up with me and we opened the Seat and he opened the bag and said that’s quite the find!! We told him where we found it and what our intentions were and he was SUPER COOL, we had a few questions about the brick and he answered all of them and talked to us about it. He took our info and asked us about our local college football Teams. All in all it was the Craziest way to end a Vacation.
I’ve been back now for 3 days and can say we are moving to Florida at the end of April. I’m an adventurer at heart and after finding the find of a lifetime it has motivated me to move to Florida to start our Fun Filled Life. I do want to say that I have never done this Product and know nothing about it. I know this could have been the Best/Worst thing that could have happened to me. I have also imagined so many other ways I could have handled it. Either way I’m happy it won’t end up on the Street even though I potentially gave up 30-100k worth of Pure Untouched Product. If you read this entire thing, I want to Thank you and welcome you to the Crazy Life I’m Living in. Follow to stay up to date with when I move and start searching the Beach again. Until then... Peace and Love

So this past weekend in Florida is a Vacation I’ll never forget.. its like one of those stories you hear on the News where you dream that one day something like this could happen to you. We’ll start On Saturday. The day was lackluster at best, you know those awkward family vacations where you feel out of place especially around your family... to make everything worse, we were in a state where we knew no one and finding some good bud was near impossible. We managed to get 2 fat joints on the Plane, hidden very well of course, but after that it was CBD from then on. It wasn’t the end of the world but, FUCK when you go a week without pot it feels like an eternity. It truly does make everything better especially when your stuck with family for the entire week.
So I had the Idea to rent a Scooter. (I HIGHly Recommend Renting a Scooter while on Vacation in SoFlo.) We cruised all up and down the coast from DeerField Beach all the Way down to the beaches in Fort Lauderdale. On the way, we went down Hillsboro Mile (which is where the story gets Juicy later into the Story) where the entire Mile is Full of Homes that only the 1% can afford. I Loved it, what an experience it was. I know I won’t have that kind of money anytime soon, but hey it definitely got me MOTIVATED!!! As we were Scootin past these homes, I pulled into a Vacant Lot in between 2 Multi Million Dollar homes and drove all the way up to the beach and parked. Man, what a view, It got me thinking, “how often do these beaches get used?” I didn’t see a single person in sight, I knew as of then that I wanted to explore this area of the beach before I leave to go back to the boring Midwest... so we left and continued south until we were in Fort Lauderdale.
We stopped and had Lunch at a small Italian place called Kisses of Italy. I ordered Chicken Parm that wasn’t even on the Menu (Best Chicken Parm Sandwich EVER) and my Gf had a Hotdog Sandwhich (3 Hotdogs on a toasted bun with toppings.) After a great Lunch we went back home to relax after a great Scooter ride.
Scroll forward about 6 hours and we are headed to the Casino because we can’t seem to get her family to do anything other than sit at home.. (were on vacation, so we don’t wanna just stay home) when we arrived at the Casino, we each took out $60 (TIP. Only take out $60, if you lose it GO HOME, if you gain $60 back, pocket it and DONT TOUCH IT, continue to play with your winning, until you either lose what you had profited or are ready to be finished) and headed straight to the Roulette Table. I started with my $60 and it was gone within 10 minutes and she put in $20 and it was gone after 2 minutes. (It was on a Red Streak and I refuse to play Red) We went outside to smoke a CBD Joint and are prepared to lose the rest when we go back inside. So when we go back in (after about 30 minutes) we see that the tables have turned and my LUCKY number 33 has been hit twice as well as a slew of other black numbers. We then put in the last $40 and got up to $200 in a matter of minutes. I think we had a number get hit 5 times in a row with $2-$3 on the number plus $75 on black. Needless to say we made our money back and profited $800 for the night! We left at 12:45am and got to sleep around 2:00am.
We woke up on Sunday at 7:30 to spend our last few hours on Florida on the Beach. (I didn’t wanna get outta bed) After sleeping an entire week on a crappy blow up mattress and having little sleep the night before, my body was telling me to stay in bed. We got to the beach around 8:30 and stayed until 10:00. I made sure we had enough time to go to the Spot I mentioned the day before. So we get home and hop on the scooter and head for Hillsboro Mile. (There is only 1 public entrance to this beach and its at least a 1/2 mile walk in the sand to get to where I wanted to go, so we took the scooter to the very last Condo Building before the Row of Mansions on Hillsboro Beach. All the parking spots were numbered so I just parked in the covered area by a door to get inside. There was only 1 sign that said no Trespassing unless your a resident, and there was a Chain going across 5 posts about 3 feet high. We hopped the Chain and were to the Beach within a minute or 2.
There wasn’t a person to be seen in the area, which is something I have wanted for awhile. Technically all Florida Beaches are Public Property, so we weren’t breaking any major rules. We started walking down the beach toward all the mansions. (I Recommend this walk for anyone that comes to the area. It’s extremely peaceful, just make sure you respect the beach and make it look better than when you got there.) As I got to about the 3rd Mansion I saw an elderly man in the distance and he saw me eagerly looking for Cool Seashells at the beach. When he got close he took off his headphones and told me that he saw a package on the beach a little ways down that had appeared to be drugs of some kind. He didn’t want to have anything to do with it, but seemed like he wanted me to take care of it. So we keep walking another 500 feet or so until we see what the man was talking about. It was a vacuum sealed black bag that was wrapped in multiple layers of plastic to form that of a brick. It had the Sun of Uruguay on the front (the Cartel Logo) it appeared to have been in the Ocean for a very very long time, but also appeared to be sealed still. (Keep in mind our flight leaves at 5:00pm and it’s currently 11:30am) so my GF takes off her shirt and we wrap it in the shirt so it doesn’t look Suspicious and we start walking back to the Scooter. At this point we had already made a video of finding it on the beach and we took a few pictures of it. (At this point No one knew about this except us, the old man was long gone by this point too) we put the brick under the seat of the Scooter and start heading towards her dads house. (Yes we’re just cruising around with a 30k brick in a cheap $500 scooter.)
When we get to the house we pull into the Garage and show them what we found, and they literary Flipped! They kept trying to tell us we were going to get a possession charge or something even worse. They wanted us to go find a trash can and go throw it away. I didn’t agree with how rash they were thinking. (Technically we didn’t do anything wrong, we took the package from the beach so someone else didn’t get their hands on it, and at this point we were pretty set on going to turn it in) So we unwrap it from the shirt and put it on a Walmart bag and bag into the Scooter seat and we start heading to the Police Station.
The Scooter has to be turned in at 12:00, and I didn’t wanna potentially get held for questioning and get a late fee, so we pulled over and call 911, I told them the short version of the story and they send a BCS out to meet up with me and we opened the Seat and he opened the bag and said that’s quite the find!! We told him where we found it and what our intentions were and he was SUPER COOL, we had a few questions about the brick and he answered all of them and talked to us about it. He took our info and asked us about our local college football Teams. All in all it was the Craziest way to end a Vacation.
I’ve been back now for 3 days and can say we are moving to Florida at the end of April. I’m an adventurer at heart and after finding the find of a lifetime it has motivated me to move to Florida to start our Fun Filled Life. I do want to say that I have never done this Product and know nothing about it. I know this could have been the Best/Worst thing that could have happened to me. I have also imagined so many other ways I could have handled it. Either way I’m happy it won’t end up on the Street even though I potentially gave up 30-100k worth of Pure Untouched Product. If you read this entire thing, I want to Thank you and welcome you to the Crazy Life I’m Living in. Follow to stay up to date with when I move and start searching the Beach again. Until then... Peace and Love
I’ll post the imgur link to the comments

Just looking for some ideas as to where to go?
I am from Ireland originally but moved to Indian River County in the last year or so - so am a Florida resident but do not know too much outside of my local area.
I have a friend coming over in a couple of months and we want to go somewhere for a weekend of drinking, essentially.
We were thinking Miami as there is 24 hours drinking, but it looks crazy expensive.
Does everywhere else close at 2AM or is there loop holes, like casinos etc? that we could carry on drinking?
We aren't massive into clubbing, maybe a dive bar or just a normal bar with cheapish drinks and some music in the background with a good crowd, 21-35, say! We want to be able to drink from the evening until the morning time, 5am onwards
As I say, not hugely into clubs but wouldn't be against going to some if they were cheapish and it meant we could carry on drinking.
By cheapish I mean, less than 10 dollars a drink. We'd preferably love a bar with 5 dollar or less beers and then as the night went on would be open to paying more.
As I say we are in Indian river county, so we could go to Miami, Orlando, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach.
Does anyone have any experience or can they recommend a place for us to enjoy?
Many Thanks
TIm

America’s 11 Most Interesting Mayors
by POLITICO MAGAZINE via POLITICO - TOP Stories
URL: http://ift.tt/2sa0c1J
At a time when one yellow-haired, Twitter-happy personality dominates American discourse, it’s easy to forget how much political energy—and important new thinking—emanates not from the nation’s capital but from city hall. We surveyed dozens of national and local political junkies, and came up with 11 leaders who are compelling for the fights they are waging, their personal backstories and how they are transforming their cities, often without Washington. Plus: Seven more to watch.
Eric Garcetti | Los Angeles, California
The mayor who would be president
By Edward-Isaac Dovere
Back in 1984, when he was mayor of San Antonio and a rising star in the Democratic Party, Henry Cisneros got a final-round interview to be Walter Mondale’s presidential running mate. Mondale decided against it: It was a little too much for a local official to make the leap right onto the national stage.
It’s early still, but many top Democrats have started assuming Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti will skip that step entirely and run for president himself in 2020. Garcetti has helped fan that speculation, already talking to strategists and big donors about the prospect. And it helps that, as cities step up their resistance to President Donald Trump, Garcetti has been able to jump into the national debate on issues like immigration, health care and infrastructure.
“My main job, and my overwhelming job, starts with my family, my street, my neighborhood and my city,” Garcetti told Politico’s Off Message podcast in May. “But I’m playing too much defense in my backyard to not get involved in the national discussion.”
If Garcetti runs for president, he wouldn’t just make history as a rare sitting mayor to do so. He also has the potential to be the first Hispanic and the first Jewish president. Garcetti is the 46-year-old grandson of an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, and the son of a former L.A. district attorney—Gil Garcetti, of O.J. Simpson trial fame—and a mother whose parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia. The mayor can order his bagel and lox, which he loves, in fluent Spanish. He was also a Rhodes Scholar and a Navy Reserve intelligence officer, and likes to tell stories about the time in high school when he traveled to Ethiopia to deliver medical supplies.
As mayor, Garcetti has successfully pushed for tax increases to fund a mass transit plan and more housing for the homeless, and he won a second term this year with 81 percent of the vote. His big project over the next few months is landing the Olympic Games in 2024 or 2028. The choice is expected in September, and Garcetti is putting off any decision about his political future until after that. There’s an open governor’s race in California next year, but people close to Garcetti don’t think that’s where his heart is, especially if he can go straight to a White House run. There’s also the chance of an open Senate seat if Dianne Feinstein retires, but that job doesn’t seem to fit Garcetti’s personality or his experience being the man in charge.
In the meantime, the mayor is firing back hard at Trump, at appearances all over the country, telling people to channel their rage into action—even if he’s also taking a cue from Trump’s “outsider” playbook. Gone are “the old rules of who can run and who should be president or vice president—and that reflects the American people’s desires,” Garcetti says. “They’re not looking for résumé-builders. They’re not looking for a set pathway or a set demographic or a set caricature. They want to go with their gut about somebody who they think has the guts to shake it up.”
Edward-Isaac Dovere is chief Washington correspondent atPolitico.
Hillary Schieve | Reno, Nevada
The re-inventor
By Megan Messerly
Tucked in the desert just east of the Sierra Nevada mountains, Reno is best known for its casinos, lax divorce laws and “Reno 911!” But these days it’s also becoming a hub for tech entrepreneurs and companies, pulling coders and data analysts from far more expensive Silicon Valley four hours to the west.
The woman now at the center of this transformation is Hillary Schieve, a 46-year-old political outsider who has her own remarkable transformation story. As a teenager, she was a figure skater elite enough to train with an Olympic-level coach. But she struggled for years before discovering that the fatigue she experienced was brought on by a serious kidney disease. Two years after a transplant—her sister was the donor—Schieve, then 27, was working in the Bay Area when her mother suffered a massive brain aneurysm and fell into a coma. Schieve put her life on hold again, moving home to Reno to care for her mother and become the family’s breadwinner. She had briefly attended Arizona State University, but never returned to college.
After working a few different jobs, the former figure skater without a college degree reinvented herself in 2007 as a small-business owner, opening a secondhand clothing store serving teenagers in a rundown part of the city. That’s where Schieve’s transformation story meets Reno’s. She shot a low-budget commercial to promote the area and lobbied the city to recognize it as a distinct district, now known as Midtown. Today, Midtown is a bustling center with wine bars, breweries, gastropubs and shops.
Schieve never pictured herself in politics. But her personal setbacks gave her a powerful sense of gratitude—“It makes you connect better with others, and I think it’s important really to honestly have a lot of compassion in your life,” she says now—and her work in Midtown convinced her that small-business interests needed a voice on the City Council. In 2014, after two years as a council member, she entered, and won, Reno’s first competitive mayoral race in more than a decade.
As mayor, Schieve hasn’t been immune to challenges. Even as Reno’s economy has boomed and the city’s population has grown by some 20,000 since 2010, it has struggled to promote affordable housing and mental health services, or to fight homelessness—issues Schieve says she is trying to address. In an age of intense partisanship, however, she stands out not just for her up-by-the-bootstraps MO, but because she’s a registered nonpartisan in a purple state, fiscally conservative and socially liberal. A wall in her office is covered in chalkboard material with a to-do list that ranges from cleaning up the blighted downtown to bringing back a gay rodeo that started in Reno in the 1970s. “Everyone likes the taste of beer, right?” Schieve says. “So don’t tell me we can’t find something in common.”
Megan Messerly is a political reporter at the Nevada Independent.
Kevin Faulconer | San Diego, California
The modern GOP executive
By Ethan Epstein
Of America’s 10 largest cities, only one has a Republican chief executive: San Diego, where Mayor Kevin Faulconer is straddling ideological and partisan lines to surprisingly popular effect.
Faulconer became mayor in this border city of 1.4 million during troubled times, after a sexual harassment scandal ousted Democrat Bob Filner. A pension scheme for city employees was also bleeding the budget dry, leading to cutbacks in basic services like library hours and funding for beaches and parks. A city council member at the time, Faulconer campaigned in English and Spanish, pledging to right the city’s financial ship, and easily won a special election.
He has made good on that pledge as mayor, pushing a high-profile legal case that let the city switch new municipal hires from its costly pension system to a 401(k)-style retirement plan. Library hours have been restored, too.
Faulconer has struggled at times with the Democratic city council, which overrode his veto of a bill to raise the minimum wage and provide private-sector workers with guaranteed paid sick days. But given San Diego’s Democratic majority, it’s not surprising that Faulconer, 50, has bucked his own party on several major issues. He speaks often of the city’s integration with its neighbor to the south, saying he views San Diego-Tijuana as “one megaregion,” and pledging that local police officers will not be used to enforce federal immigration laws. He also backed a 2015 plan to curtail San Diego’s emissions, and he has flown a gay pride flag at City Hall. “He approaches things from a pragmatic point of view and doesn’t publicly project his ideology,” says James R. Riffel, a longtime San Diego journalist.
For the most part, Faulconer’s policies have proved popular—he was reelected easily last year—perhaps because, unlike many national Republicans, he tries to eschew ideological labels. He’s quick to say he’s not a liberal. “Fiscal responsibility is a core Republican value,” he points out. But he has no qualms admitting that his conservatism differs from that of the national GOP—not to mention a certain denizen of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
“San Diego is not Washington, D.C., and I’ve done what I can to keep it that way,” Faulconer says. “My approach has always been to keep partisan politics out of governing and focus on what matters most: protecting taxpayers and getting things done for our residents.”
Ethan Epstein is associate editor at the Weekly Standard.
Greg Fischer | Louisville, Kentucky
The data geek
By Katelyn Fossett
At a 2013 conference in San Francisco, Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer announced a new policy in which all his city’s records would be publicly available by default, and delivered a line that married the folksy simplicity of a political slogan with the message of a numbers geek: “It’s data, man.”
Fast-forward nearly four years, and Fischer has carved out just that reputation, defining his tenure in Louisville with high-tech and open-data initiatives that have cut costs and improved public health, as the city has added tens of thousands of jobs. In 2011, shortly after taking office, he named a city “innovation czar.” One result: a partnership with a company that vacuums up data from individual asthma inhalers so health agencies know what really triggers attacks. Fischer also launched LouieStat, a metrics system that in 2012 helped identify problems across municipal agencies—like the cause of 300 monthly inaccuracies in the fingerprinting process at city jails. It was improper staff training, not anything as tricky as software, and after the training was revamped, the number of inaccuracies came down to just 10 in following years.
Fischer, 59, is a Democrat, but in a deep-red state his track record fulfills the most fashionable of Republican beliefs: that a businessman, even with virtually no political experience, can deliver common-sense reforms. A Louisville native, he invented a beverage and ice dispenser and ran the company that made it; later, he started a private investment firm and Louisville’s first business accelerator. His previous life in politics was a single Senate primary, which he lost.
Fischer, who peppers his speech with corporate-sounding phrases like “de-optimizing potential,” entered politics with the same goal he had in business—to “serve as a platform for human potential to flourish.” Although he recognizes that business skills don’t always translate to politics, at a time of sky-high institutional distrust of government, he believes that cities are the best ticket toward earning back public trust, particularly with the help of data and crowd-sourcing. “It emphasizes to people we’re all interconnected,” Fischer says.
Katelyn Fossett is associate editor atPolitico Magazine.
Marty Walsh | Boston, Massachusetts
The union hall progressive
By Lauren Dezenski
Even his fans would concede that Boston Mayor Marty Walsh isn’t usually the most dynamic speaker. But his anger was on full display at a news conference in January. Flanked by dozens of city officials and aides, Walsh railed against Donald Trump’s new travel ban and anti-immigrant rhetoric as “a direct attack on Boston’s people.” Then, he went a step further, offering to house inside City Hall any undocumented immigrants who felt vulnerable.
The picture was striking: A white, blue-collar former union leader from Dorchester, the image of the Irish old guard in a city with troubled race relations, taking one of the most progressive stances on immigration—and making one of the fiercest critiques of the president—of any mayor in the country.
“It was personal,” Walsh, the child of Irish immigrants, said in a recent interview. “I have the opportunity to speak up, to speak against someone. I’m not afraid, and I don’t like bullies.”
A recovering alcoholic and survivor of childhood cancer, Walsh, 50, has always bridged two worlds: the hard-bitten and socially conservative landscape of Boston’s longtime white residents, and contemporary progressive Massachusetts politics. He got his start as the head of a local labor union—one his uncle had run, and for which Walsh had hauled building materials for two years. As a state representative, he was an early advocate for marriage equality. As mayor, an office he has held since 2014, Walsh recently hoisted the transgender flag over Boston’s City Hall Plaza as an anti-transgender “free speech bus” rolled into town.
Walsh admits that “to see a mayor from a blue-collar neighborhood [supporting] transgender rights, progressive policies—it’s a bit of a disconnect.” When he has spoken to union members about social issues, he says, “Sometimes people would look at me [like] I’m crazy.” And for those who object, he says: “What frustrates me about working-class people is: Why focus on social issues, why not just focus on work-rights issues? Be more concerned about your benefits and your health care and pension.”
Conventional wisdom says Walsh will coast to a second term in November—no incumbent mayor in Boston has lost reelection since 1949. But while he remains tight-lipped about higher aspirations, he rejects the “mayor-for-life” approach of his five-term predecessor, raising questions about his future. Last year, Walsh traveled the country supporting Hillary Clinton, and rumors swirled that he could be tapped for a labor role in Washington. But Walsh now says that he wouldn’t have accepted the job before finishing out his first term as mayor.
As for the current president, Walsh says that day to day, “I really don’t make big decisions based on Trump.” But he takes seriously the chance to stand up for Boston: “I’ll continue to do that as long as I’m mayor of the city, or whatever position I have. I did it as a state rep, I did it as a labor leader, I did it as a Little League coach, before I was into any of this stuff.”
Lauren Dezenski is aPoliticoreporter in Boston and author of Massachusetts Playbook.
Michael Hancock | Denver, Colorado
The cool-headed change agent
By Caleb Hannan
The day after Donald Trump was elected president, Denver Mayor Michael Hancock did something he almost never does: He left work early. He had stumped for Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama before her, and was so shocked by Trump’s win that he left shortly after lunch, only the second time he had done so in more than five years in office.
“I had to breathe a little bit and collect my thoughts,” he recalled recently.
Hancock hasn’t skipped a day since. Coming to grips with the shock of a Trump presidency didn’t take him long, a calm response befitting a low-key leader who has moved beyond his turbulent past and faces daily the growing pains associated with a boom city.
Being mayor has been Hancock’s dream ever since he decided, at age 15, that he wanted to be the first African American to lead Denver, whose population is only about 10 percent black. (Wellington Webb would beat him to that goal in the 1990s.) And Hancock’s path was far from clear. He had the kind of childhood that can be an asset only after it has been overcome: an alcoholic father; a brother who died of AIDS; a sister who was murdered by a domestic abuser. Before getting to the mayor’s office, Hancock spent a season as the Broncos’ then-mascot, “Huddles,” two terms as a City Council member, and then defeated the son of a former governor in his first mayor’s race in 2011. When he ran again four years later, he was virtually unopposed.
Perhaps because Hancock, 47, already has his dream job—he’s begun raising money for a second reelection campaign—he wields his powerful personal story with some subtlety. This spring, he created a new office designed to improve affordable housing options for low-income residents without dwelling on the fact that he and his nine siblings were often homeless.
That deft touch has come in handy as Denver has navigated hot-button issues like marijuana legalization. Hancock opposed the amendment that made weed legal in Colorado but worked hard to smooth the transition once voters overruled him.
Because of its progressive stances on a number of issues, Denver also holds, perhaps even more so than other cities, the potential for conflict with the Trump administration. But Hancock has navigated the new national politics with his signature understatement. A week after the election, he posted a two-minute video on his YouTube page meant to reassure Denver residents, but never mentioned Trump’s name.
Then, when the president issued an executive order threatening to withhold federal funds for so-called sanctuary cities, Hancock once again reacted without being reactionary. His response was to spend months lobbying to change local laws, rather than making confrontational speeches. And this spring, in a move that earned applause from the Denver Post, Hancock signed a series of sentencing reforms that reduce penalties for low-level violations in the city—minor crimes that in the past would have set off alarms at Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and possibly resulted in deportation.
“It’s easy to be emotional ... and to do things because it looks good politically,” Hancock says. “But if you’re not doing things that are going to protect and help your residents, then what’s the point?”
Caleb Hannan is a writer in Denver.
Jennifer Roberts | Charlotte, North Carolina
The embattled activist
By Greg Lacour
If there’s an embodiment of a mayor whose political challenges have taken on national import, it’s Jennifer Roberts.
The Charlotte mayor, a Democrat, flashed onto the national radar by facing down the Republican state legislature over House Bill 2, the 2016 state law that overturned a city ordinance protecting gay and transgender people. On September 19, having rejected a proposed deal to repeal the ordinance in exchange for possible repeal of HB2, Roberts walked into a City Council meeting to a powerful round of applause from members of the local LGBTQ community.
One week later, she returned to the chamber for another council meeting and faced a crowd with a very different message.
“Shut your goddamn mouth.”
“You should not be in office at all.”
“Fuck all y’all.”
The speakers were members of Charlotte’s black community, infuriated and terrified after the fatal police shooting of Keith Scott, a black man, on September 20. Roberts seemed at a loss. The night after the Scott shooting, she waited until a riot at the center of the city had left a man dead before signing a state of emergency proclamation that allowed the governor to send in the National Guard. She urged patience with the investigation, then wrote an op-ed criticizing the police department for not immediately releasing footage of the incident.
A former diplomat, Roberts, 57, was elected in 2015 with broad backing among disparate constituencies. But her ironclad support for the nondiscrimination ordinance and missteps after the Scott shooting have turned her, improbably, into a polarizing figure as she seeks reelection this year. She is struggling to manage HB2’s economic damage and a hostile legislature that blames her for it, and a perception among some in the black community that she will work for their votes but not their well-being. Roberts has two challengers in this year’s Democratic mayoral primary, both of whom are African-American, and in May, the local Black Political Caucus endorsed placed her in a distant third in an internal caucus vote—although a poll in late June showed her leading both of her primary challengers.
“Mayor Roberts does not have a consistent application of attentiveness with the African-American community and the Black Political Caucus like she does with the LGBTQ community,” says caucus Chair Colette Forrest. “We as African Americans have not seen that consistency on our issues, such as housing, crime and safety, economic development and transportation.”
Roberts says, with justification, that she has urged city action on all of those issues. But many Charlotteans, she says, fail to grasp how little formal power she has as mayor, since the city council sets policy in Charlotte and the city manager handles day-to-day operations. “I can’t really legislate or govern,” Roberts says—which puts all the more pressure on what she says and how she acts in the face of both local and state-level opposition.
“I don’t really think of myself as a politician. I’m an advocate,” Roberts says. “The civil rights movement needed white people. The LGBT community needs straight people. I want to be there when people are fighting for equality.”
Greg Lacour is a writer in Charlotte and contributing editor at Charlotte Magazine.
Tomás Regalado | Miami, Florida
The Republican resister
By Marc Caputo
The Argentinian real estate investor had a question that Miami Mayor Tomás Regalado hated hearing. “I’m investing in Miami. But I want to ask you if I should be concerned that I would never be able to go. … All these Trump laws could impede me and my family.”
This was one of the mayor’s fears during the 2016 election—that Donald Trump’s rhetoric could spook the foreign investors who are essential to Miami’s booming economy. Miami is both a big U.S. city and Latin America’s northernmost metropolis, and keeping its status as the latter requires Regalado to calm the nerves of jittery investors up and down the hemisphere.
Few major U.S. cities have as many reasons to fret about a Trump presidency. It’s not just that Miami has one of the country’s highest proportions of foreign-born residents and relies heavily on foreign investment. It is also among the cities most threatened by rising sea levels, at a time when Trump has labeled climate change a hoax and is withdrawing from the Paris climate accord.
That means that, at age 70, Regalado has fashioned himself as one of the most caustic voices of the so-called anti-Trump “resistance,” and from within the president’s own party—both men are Republicans.
For Regalado, opposition to Trump is almost personal. He was born overseas, in Cuba, one of the last of the old-school anti-Castro exiles who helped turn Miami into a Spanish-language mecca more culturally attuned to Havana than Fort Lauderdale. And he empathizes with the flood of immigrants and refugees, particularly from Latin America and the Caribbean, who populate Miami’s metropolitan area. At 14, Regalado was one of 14,000 Cuban children spirited off the island and settled in the United States without their parents. His father, a lawyer and journalist, was jailed by Fidel Castro for two decades.
Regalado went into journalism too, starting out in radio and local TV, before covering the White House. He traveled the world and says he was among the last foreign reporters to interview Egyptian strongman Anwar Sadat. In 1996, he parlayed his name ID into his first political bid, on the city commission, and won the first of his two mayoral terms in 2009. (His daughter is now a congressional candidate in Florida; one of his sons is running for city commission.)
Despite his calm demeanor, Regalado grows animated when discussing Trump. The administration, for instance, recently extended temporary protective status to more than 58,000 Haitians who fled the country’s 2010 earthquake—but only for six more months. “These are good people, hard-working people,” Regalado says. “Now we have this guy saying, ‘Get your things in order. You might go back.’ What the hell? What ‘things’?”
In the end, he says, it’s hard not to see racial overtones in Trump’s immigration rhetoric and policies. “It reminded me of when I was a kid, and the others would tell me, ‘Spic, go home,’” he said during the campaign. “I never responded to that. But I was like, ‘Fuck this. This is my country.’”
Marc Caputo is aPoliticosenior reporter in Miami and author of Florida Playbook.
Jackie Biskupski | Salt Lake City, Utah
The pioneer in Mormon country
By Erick Trickey
Her parents in Minnesota named her after Jacqueline Kennedy. But Salt Lake City Mayor Jackie Biskupski didn’t turn to politics until she witnessed Utah’s 1990s anti-gay backlash.
“When I first moved here, I was a ski bum and a bartender,” Biskupski recalled in an interview earlier this year. Then the Utah legislature tried to stamp out a local high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance. That convinced Biskupski to run for office as an out lesbian. “By hiding, you were legitimizing the discrimination,” she says. In 1998, Biskupski was elected as Utah’s first openly gay state legislator.
If it shocks people outside Utah that Salt Lake City would have a lesbian mayor, given the state’s streak of Mormon-influenced social conservatism, it’s a source of pride to residents of the capital city, who favored Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump 4-to-1 and haven’t elected a Republican mayor since the 1970s. Today, Biskupski, 51, governs from Salt Lake City’s towering Romanesque City Hall, built in the 1890s as a secular counterpoint to the Mormon Church’s Salt Lake Temple.
During her statehouse years, Biskupski waged a near-constant battle against anti-gay legislation. She was sworn in as mayor in 2016 with her fiancée, now wife, by her side. But while her identity helped her get elected as a progressive, it hasn’t been much help with governing: Biskupski is struggling to deliver on difficult goals such as better homeless services and affordable housing.
Salt Lake City’s growing homeless problem, fueled by the opioid epidemic and a housing shortage, has roiled local politics. A thriving drug trade has grown around The Road Home, the city’s main downtown homeless shelter, near a revitalizing neighborhood and the Rio Grande train station. In her first year as mayor, Biskupski joined with the county sheriff to launch a crackdown on drug crime near the shelter that offered the addicted a choice: jail or treatment. About half of the defendants who chose treatment have stayed with it, early results show.
But a controversy over where to move the city’s homeless services has hurt Biskupski. She came to office as the community agreed to replace The Road Home with smaller homeless centers. Under Utah law, the job of finding the sites fell to the mayor. After a year of study, Biskupski chose four sites, and not-in-my-backyard opposition broke out, especially in the middle-class Sugar House neighborhood. Forced to back down in February, Biskupski, the City Council and the county government cut the number of centers from four to three, moved one of the remaining ones outside the city and set 2019 as the deadline to close The Road Home. Critics say the mayor’s decisions weren’t transparent and were sprung on the public. Biskupski says she tried to avoid a divisive debate and find a fair way to distribute the homeless centers around the city. “We did not want to pit neighborhoods against neighborhoods,” is how she often puts it.
In February, Biskupski delivered her long-awaited affordable housing plan, “Growing SLC.” She proposed requiring developments to include affordable units, changing city zoning to allow denser development in neighborhoods full of single-family homes, and buying hotels and apartment buildings to remake them as affordable housing complexes. Her ideas got a positive reception from the City Council and local advocates, though some are pushing for quicker progress. Biskupski calls her plan “bold but equitable.” That’s a good summary of how she would like to be seen herself.
Erick Trickey is a writer in Boston.
Bill Peduto | Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
The Rust Belt rebrander
By Blake Hounshell
When a Nashville Predators fan was arrested for throwing a dead catfish on the ice during Game 1 of the Stanley Cup finals in May, a home game for the Penguins, Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto responded with a barrage of fish puns. “This has turned into a whale of a story,” he wrote in a news release. “We shouldn’t be baited into interfering with this fish tale, but if the charges eventually make their way to a judge I hope the predatory catfish hurler who got the hook last night is simply sentenced to community service, perhaps cleaning fish at Wholey’s.”
It was vintage Peduto, and not just because of the goofy humor: The affable Democratic mayor has a knack for inserting himself into every story about Pittsburgh, a prideful city that has aggressively rebranded itself as a metropolis of the future during his three-year tenure. A self-described “student of cities” who rose to local prominence by championing a bohemian mix of indie art galleries and urban tech centers, Peduto, 52, represents the global aspirations of a city shaking off its smoky past.
There’s no better example of his media savvy than when Peduto seized on President Donald Trump’s speech announcing his decision to withdraw from a 2015 global climate agreement. No sooner had the president said the words, “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” than the mayor was pointing out on his lively Twitter feed that in fact, 80 percent of Pittsburghers had voted for Hillary Clinton. He followed it up with a media blitz positioning Pittsburgh as a leader in green technology, and co-bylined a New York Timesop-ed with the mayor of Paris calling on cities to fight climate change.
The flurry of positive press was good for Pittsburgh—and also good for Peduto, who has told friends he has wider ambitions. But he has kept them mostly to himself, just as he did in high school, when for months he hid from his strict, academic-minded parents that he had been elected student council president. “They loved the fact,” he later explained, “but didn’t understand why I wanted to do things like that.”
Blake Hounshell is editor-in-chief ofPolitico Magazine.
Dan Gilbert* | Detroit, Michigan
The shadow mayor
By Nancy Kaffer
Walk the streets of downtown Detroit, and Dan Gilbert is everywhere. The headquarters of his online mortgage firm, Quicken Loans, looms over the park at downtown Detroit’s center—thronged with Gilbert’s employees, eating at restaurants in Gilbert-owned buildings, traveling to Midtown on the QLine, a light rail line championed and partially funded by Gilbert, all under the watchful eye of a network of security guards and cameras installed and paid for by Gilbert.
Gilbert, 55, is not actually the mayor of Detroit, and in most of the city’s sprawling 140-odd square miles, his influence is negligible. But in the city’s now-thriving downtown—Gilbertville, some call it—this billionaire businessman wields the kind of power and boasts a résumé of civic accomplishment that most politicians could only dream of.
At a time of dire need for Detroit, what he has done is remarkable. But for some Detroiters, that doesn’t sit well: Because Gilbert isn’t an elected official, he has no public accountability.
In many ways, Detroit was ripe for Gilbert’s intervention. It had lost nearly two-thirds of its population since 1950; during the recession, it watched the implosion of the administration of Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, now serving time on federal corruption charges. The city declared bankruptcy in 2013.
Gilbert grew up just outside Detroit and originally built his mortgage empire in the suburbs. He announced the move downtown in 2007, hoping it would be “transformational,” and city and state officials applauded him. Quicken moved downtown in 2010. Today Gilbert owns more than 95 buildings there, and 4,000 of his workers have flooded the area. Many have also bought homes in Detroit with down-payment assistance offered by Quicken and other businesses. (Separately, the Justice Department is suing Quicken for improper underwriting of hundreds of Federal Housing Authority-insured mortgages during and after the recession. Gilbert vigorously denies those claims; he was not available for an interview for this article.) Dozens of businesses have opened to serve the influx of workers.
But not everyone is convinced what’s best for Gilbert is what’s best for the city. His security force, for example, isn’t required to release the same data as public police departments. And while Gilbert has brought thousands of workers downtown, they’re mostly suburban white transplants. The majority-black neighborhoods where most Detroiters live still languish. “It’s the feeling of, ‘Is it still our city? Are we still included?’” says Keith Owens of the Michigan Chronicle, a newspaper that serves Detroit’s African-American community.
Detroit has a real mayor, of course—Mike Duggan, elected in 2013 as the city’s first white executive since 1974—who has partnered with Gilbert on some projects. Duggan is perhaps more attuned to the contours of the city. The mayor—who has demolished thousands of blighted houses, among other initiatives—has ensured that razed land gets community input as it is redeveloped. (His press secretary did not respond to a request for comment about Gilbert’s work downtown.) Unlike Duggan’s, Gilbert’s job isn’t intrinsically tied to the city of Detroit, since Quicken is an online business. And that has prompted questions about what would happen if the billionaire—who owns the Cleveland Cavaliers and has other investments in the Ohio city—ever left Detroit.
“That’s been my biggest worry about Detroit’s momentum,” says Tom Walsh, a retired Detroit Free Press business columnist who covered Gilbert for more than a decade, “that it has relied on a small group of people.”
Nancy Kaffer is a political columnist and member of the editorial board at the Detroit Free Press.

If you are local or know the florida poker landscape well, I'm open to suggestions.
I will be there in august and am looking for any room recommendations.
So far I have near Pompano:

• Seminole Coconut Creek
  
• Isle Casino Pompano Park
  

There are a bunch from Fort Lauderdale. Hoping some people can recommend the better ones :)
Is there a need to stay away from any particular rooms?

I recently purchased a condo in Fort Lauderdale, Florida that I will be living in part-time. I'll be down there next week both to play the Florida State Poker Championship at Isle Casino and to break in the new place. I'm also looking to buy a car in Florida, as it's necessary for getting around there and I'll just be spending money on rentals whenever I'm down there until I buy. After researching a bit, I've become really enthralled by the Nissan GT-R: http://www.nissanusa.com/gt-
I've bought one higher end car (Audi S4) in the past before, but this was my freshman year of college (2007) and I don't think I went about the process as well as I could have, although I do love the car.
So far I've been looking at GT-Rs available in the area http://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-s...d=614110&Log=0 and contacting dealerships about scheduling meetings and test drives. My questions at this point:
-Better to buy used or new? I bought new last time and afterwards wondered if I was wasting money. My arguments for buying new this time around: can customize as I'd like, no uncertainty as to why car is being sold (lemon problem, probably not applicable for a GT-R though), no wear and tear. Arguments for buying used: better value, still plenty of usage left (used I'm looking at have between 6k and 35k miles on them), GT-R less customizable than other models. Curious to hear opinions on this and how it differs with the GT-R vs other models of automobiles.
-How much can I haggle on price? I certainly didn't do enough negotiating when I bought my last car. Conventional wisdom is that car buyers can bargain the price down a fair amount with some effort, but I'm wondering how much I can do this for a higher end car (in comparison with other cars and overall) and if anyone has any tips for doing this.
-Am I being shortsighted fixating on one model? I've heard nothing but rave reviews of the GT-R (MotorTrend car of the year at least once, I think twice in the past 3 years, Ferrari-quality performance for less) but perhaps being more open-minded would allow me to get better deals or perhaps I could test drive something I'd like more?
Also any other comments are greatly appreciated.
Also, if there's a better subforum to post this in, let me know.