orange sitecel buys 76 properties in pine bluff, arkansas because they were cheap: shocked at crime, life degrades

meet pontifier (hackernews, twitter)

My method sure hasn't worked very well... or has it? I was looking for cheap warehouse space to start a business in, and did a nation-wide search for the largest, cheapest building in the entire continental US.

I found one that seemed too good to be true. a 220,000 sqft metal warehouse and office complex on 17 acres. I thought the price was a typo at $375k.The agent assured me that the price was correct, and I flew out to see the place.

It was in a little town called Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

I offered about 3/4 what they were asking, and they accepted the offer.

Fast forward 2 1/2 years, and I've had nothing but problems. Break in after break in. Can't work through the red tape with the city so my warehouse sits empty. It feels like they are actively working against myself and other entrepreneurs I talk to. At least 2 others who bought buildings and tried to open businesses left after getting nowhere.

Maybe I'm daft, but I ended up buying about 75 more properties here... all surprisingly cheap.

The town is killing me though. I haven't seen my kids very much lately - I don't think it's safe enough for them. I'm probably going to be moving back to Utah in the next couple of months because it's just too much out here.

holds robber at gunpoint, twitter account is full of videos of getting robbed

starts an actual vigilante justice bounty website

devotes most of the rest of his time to pooping on pine bluff

tldr: @911roofer origin story

160
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Fast forward 2 1/2 years, and I've had nothing but problems. Break in after break in. Can't work through the red tape with the city so my warehouse sits empty. It feels like they are actively working against myself and other entrepreneurs I talk to. At least 2 others who bought buildings and tried to open businesses left after getting nowhere.

Maybe I'm daft, but I ended up buying about 75 more properties here... all surprisingly cheap.

:marseygigaretard:

I'm having a hard time understanding his thought process here.

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He's going to fix them up and add hipster coffee shops

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For a second, I honestly thought his intention was to try and gentrify the place single-handedly

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That would be too hard but you could probably manage the crime by only buying contiguous properties and hiring homeless veterans to live in them for free and shoot any robbers. Just build a big butt wire razor fence with a moat and cameras and shit around your outermost buildings, and give some vets ARs and free weed to camp out.

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:marseynotes:

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CHUDZ/CHOZ

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At that point you may as well kill the robbers and bury them under the warehouses.

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Nothing is stopping you from doing both but its better to have a homeless fall guy in case things go south

Also you want at least a few of them to survive to get the warning out to other crackheads that the guys in the lots on the noetheast corner dont frick around and should be avoided

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This would take about a day to propagate. There's some secret sauce to using poors against poors, they share an unspoken creed.

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Surely there is some local crime syndicate that could help for a percentage.

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Let the homeless vets cook the dead robbers and eat them.

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A lot of homeless veterans seem like they could freak out and be just as likely to shoot themselves or each other as they are criminals :marseyschizoshaking: "the tunnels the tunnels the tunnels the tunnels"

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Thats a bonus, you could post the footage here!

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That's fine, you officially want them gone anyway, they're squatting on your land with assault weapons

:taywink:

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He could. :#gun:

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There's another comment where people found he had plans to setup nuclear fusion. Top tier schizo

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He’s going to turn them into gulags for the homeless

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Read his other posts. This guy is mentally ill.

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Which is why this is incredible drama

>Stupid business

>Absolute shithole town

>Vigilantism

>Everyone is armed

Truly an incredible blend

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The only way this makes sense is if he's planning to establish a cult or a commune.

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![](/images/16605935921976328.webp)

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all the robbers r white?

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Shoulda listened to the rdrama brand of internet racism

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>just suck their peepees bro

Seems like it would be hard to convince him of that when he likes to draw down on them.

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around whites never be nice?

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Only the ones he shows you, the city is 76% black so yeah...

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cope racist

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:#marseyblackface:

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They're culturally black.

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>EntrepreneurChad wants to open manufacturer ING facility/meth distribution front

>r-slurmaxxes on warehouse space in literal 3rd world shithole

>Keeps buying up the rest of the town despite constant break-ins

>Starts vigilante movement to eliminate the criminal class

>Probably will single-handedly save the city or die in a firefight with local crackheads

Unintelligent and megabased

:#gigachad2:

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buys 100 vacant lots, keeps them vacant

“This town seems to have nothing going on?”

:marseyshrug:

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This shit is hilarious, but what exactly is the purpose of his business?

Best I can tell you send them your own CDs and then they store and rip them and you can download or stream the FLAC of your own CD, but why? Who’s paying for this shit? Is this some kind of audiophile nonsense?

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His business is supplying copper and lead to criminals (depending on how lucky they are)

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Old people who don’t know they can do this themselves.

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He probably gets all his customers from putting up flyers in nursing homes tbh.

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It apparently had users, but I think it must be some insanely outdated service because he founded a competitor back in 2004. For some reason he was excited to swoop in and claim it when the main service went kaput 16 years later.

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Are you trying to suggest that this is an NSA front? Typically they go for bigger things like capital management companies so that they have more influence. The only way this makes sense would be if they're going for maximum isolation.

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It isn't. It's just a real r-slur. If it were NSA, they would have given out insane kickbacks to the local police and mayor departments and declared their compound weapons free instead of reeeeing about it on social media

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I thought glowie fronts try to avoid attention, not sperg out on Twitter and HN

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Wtf is even this. Who has enough CDs in 2020 to need someone to store then for you. Even my old parents know how to download their CDs to a computer that has a disk drive. That was doable since like late 90s, before I even knew how to

work a computer.

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Omg that video...

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@A is this sufficient effort

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too short, sry

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Faces of Autism

:marseydramautist:

![](/images/1660593614503368.webp)

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I'm ok with this guy getting robbed

![](/images/16605970360728607.webp)

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When this guy holds you at gunpoint, you know what's next.

![](/images/16605968530734084.webp)

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![](/images/1660594508295956.webp)

![](/images/1660594601079783.webp)

![](/images/16605946094452627.webp)

:marseywrongthonk:

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Its actually called "upscale sports bar."

![](https://media.giphy.com/media/10JhviFuU2gWD6/giphy.webp)

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:#marseyemojirofl: good find!

It's like a where's waldo of grinding poverty.

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>bingo

REE GENTRIFICATION

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Why do all american towns look exactly the same?

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If he won this would be based

He lost so he is a clown, the circus and an r-slur all in one.

![](/images/16605923010240657.webp)

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Imagine this

![](https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/378800000602088291/4c1e11c92e8f3563c750897353380dc3_400x400.png)

Being the reason you went to prison.


Transform your Marseys! :marseywave:
/e/marseybooba.webp
www.pastebin.com/Jj9URfVi

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Better:

![](/images/16605998212827775.webp)

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POV: Your going to die over $6 of scrap copper

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Is this crypto nerd shit? God I hate nerds so fricking much

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Inshallah Cletus steals a warehouse full of GPUs and singlehandedly halves the market price

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![](/images/16605930604513912.webp)

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My god this is guy is an untapped dramamine.

I guess he's had a competitor to Murfie since 2004, I still don't even understand the service but although it apparently had users and several hundred million CDs it's obviously very outdated. In a double whammy of genius business decisions apparently he bought this failed business and relocated it to this impoverished hellhole.

https://captimes.com/news/local/neighborhoods/john-fenley-shipped-murfie-customers-800-000-cds-to-arkansas-where-are-they-now/article_ef835ab8-b43c-5ec7-b390-c0bdca40e8e5.html

Fenley had founded a Murfie-like startup called Crossies more than a decade ago — though it never got off the ground — and he’d just months before purchased a 200,000-square foot warehouse in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where he planned to build a makerspace, business incubator and science museum. If he could write software to reduce the server costs, and move the CDs to his own warehouse, foregoing rent, he could cut down on the two costs he believed had driven Murfie to its end.

http://www.crossies.com/murfie/murfie_letter.html

Crossies LLC has purchased substantially all of the assets of Murfie, and over the next few weeks will be integrating their systems with our technology to re-enable access to your collections and once again enjoy lossless access to your music. All of the disks Murfie stored will be transferred to our own warehouse, where they will be safe for many, many years. :marseytroll:

Claims he hasn't seen his children for Christmas in two years. While fighting methheads and corrupt officials decided to buy an MRI to do "fusion research" with? Also a total :marseysoylentgrin: with a Neil deGrasse shirt

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It's not the worst plan in the world: you can do a lot with a good makerspace. The trouble is just convincing enough nerds to move out in the middle of nowhere. Once you have the nerds, you can easily elect a new mayor and then take over the town and create more business-friendly ordinances.

So as far as I can tell, his plan is:

  1. Build makerspace

  2. Attract lots of nerds

  3. Replace town legislature

  4. Clean up corruption and crime

  5. Profit

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Ambitious goal, but if you research Pine Bluff just a little it's very clearly not the kind of "downtrodden area with opportunity and potential" where you could lure nerds based on the beautiful outdoors or make it sound like it just has a bit of edge and some cool bars and culture. By all accounts it's a smelly industrial graveyard where the only businesses are gangs and fast food restaurants. It would be a noble goal too but based on how much he antagonizes the locals I don't think he had any idea what he was getting into and just wanted to be the hero who saved some shitty community with his genius investments.

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Yeah, that's harder to clean up. I mean technically it's still possible because once you control the sheriff's department you can just have them look the other way while the gangs are wiped out by murderous vigilantes (the Duterte technique), but the problem with modern day nerds is that they usually like to keep their hands clean rather than hunting criminals for sport... and given the legal incentives, I can totally understand that.

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Sovereign Drama city out in Alabama? Would if not for the humidity.

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I was looking for places to escape the oppressive heat of where I live, and you can buy like 400 acres in the upper peninsula of Michigan for around $500k. And the average high temperature in the dead of summer there is like 65 degrees.

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Once you have the nerds, you can easily elect a new mayor and then take over the town

This was legitimately a plan with a few friends of mine. Problem is that if you want a halfway useful area, you're going to need to have a few connections, preferably through family. Then, like you said, getting people to actually come through business incentives.

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This is best effort post I’ve seen in awhile.

Pine bluff is legit one of the worst places to live in the south. South Arkansas fricking blows.

North Arkansas is as underrated as they come

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Am I right that south AK, north Louisiana and all of Mississippi is pretty much the worst of the worst rural America? The rest of the south and Oklahoma seem to have plenty of redeeming qualities, any time I've passed through that little slice of the country it's just seemed like heck on earth.

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In my experience, yes. The Mississippi delta regions of northeast Louisiana, nw Mississippi and south Arkansas absolutely blow.

Just farmers and lots of poor blacks.

Some of the oxbow lakes, like lake Bruin are a good Time but the actual towns themselves are depressing

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I wish I was this badass,

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Man thought he found some sort of unpatched exploit in reality and didn't question why the property was dirt cheap.

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Crackheads stole his security system

:#marseyxd:

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Bluff,_Arkansas

read the wiki page, downwind from a papermill, lost a large chunk of it's population, 3/4 black population, This is like an even worse version of Detroit. It seems like they talk about rebirth almost as much as detroit anyway. What a fricking shithole, of course there's tons of empty warehouse space, the entire fricking downtown is basically empty warehouse space.

https://www.google.com/maps/@34.2294291,-92.0046054,3a,75y,214.76h,90.34t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1suPCvcHPkYleVBV0p-Fh8YQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192

https://www.google.com/maps/@34.2262329,-92.0034013,3a,75y,331.39h,96.35t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sPx7soGcPVcuIXjvYRIxJww!2e0!7i16384!8i8192

https://www.google.com/maps/@34.2262329,-92.0034013,3a,53y,233.87h,94.54t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sPx7soGcPVcuIXjvYRIxJww!2e0!7i16384!8i8192

yeah in the last one the only buildings are a hotel on the left and a motel on the right, both permanently closed and vacant.

Ah i see, most of the white people moved to Whitehall and it's like a half hour drive from there to little rock, so they really don't need pine bluff. hmm fascinating.

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That bounty system is terrible. If they even get convicted it'll be forever until they get sentenced. Nobody's doing the hard work of catching a criminal for maybe 100 dollars in a few years. It needs to be something more like $1000 up front for catching them plus 100 for each month they spend in jail.

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The guy doesn't understand poverty. Putting aside any delusions that these people will be properly prosecuted, brokecels fail the marshmallow experiment and will always take a little payout now over a potential larger payout later. But he's probably just so assblasted at being victimized by crime for the first time in his life that he wants to make sure the book gets thrown at them.

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Darn I wanted to post this. Sat on that golden egg too long.

Nice work King :marseykingcrown:

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Who could’ve seen this coming?

![](/images/16606143663060126.webp)

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Needs more Bootstraps.

Also "This shithole city is a real shithole!"

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you get payed

Ngmi

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