New agent, new price, but ...

An agent's gotta do what she's gotta do — or punt

The owner of 10 Rapids Lane (off Winding Lane, near its terminus at Zaccheus Mead), has disengaged from Tamar Lurie and hired Ellen Mosher to unload it, but is Ellen's new price of $8.950 enough of a reduction from Tamara's 2015-2017 price of $12.5 to move this place?

I'm a bit skeptical about the market appeal of early 2000s architecture and especially 10,500 square feet of it, buried in the woods, but I guess we'll see.

Back country blues

144 Aiken Road, way, way up off Rogues Hill, chopped another million from its price today, and can now be yours for just $3.8 million, instead of its 2013 $6.995 launching price back 1,513 days ago.

Perfectly acceptable house, but I was baffled by its 2002 selling price of $6.9 million, and was no more impressed when it resurfaced this time at about the same number. 

Recently, the owner's been taking million-dollar price cuts once a year, each year: I might wait for 2019, even 2020, before moving on this one.

And in Cos Cob, another winner

510 Valley Road, $3.195 million, also reports a contract. I wasn't wild about its architecture back in 2014, when it tried for $3.750, but I liked how it worked inside, and it's perched above the Mianus River, so quite a pretty site.

Its interior pictures seem to prove that the right price and right location can triumph over horrible, tacky staging, which should encourage sellers everywhere.

Oh, dear

Contract on Zaccheus Mead Lane

144 Zaccheus Mead, asking $1.950, and on the market for just 13 days, so that's probably close to what it's selling for.

Charming pre-war (1936) home, slate roof, good yard and (relatively) close to town. Back it 2012 it took a year before it finally sold for $1.825 million, but it was very nicely redone between then and now.

Only 3 bedrooms, and its undersized lot — 1.5 acres in the R-2 zone — which will restrict expansion, but not everyone wants a 10,000 sq. ft. mansion, and certainly no one needs one.

Nice home.

Here's a town that got its sign ordinance exactly backwards

(Representative — I just happen to like this one)

Up in New Hampshire, a small town has ordered certain residents to remove yard signs because the town allows only commercial, not political ones. Not surprisingly, the ACLU has stepped in.

If I remember my constitutional law classes, political speech is pretty much completely unrestricted under the First Amendment, while commercial speech can be regulated, within reason. That's why our town right-of-ways are so cluttered with campaign signs during election season (and have you ever wondered at the mental sagacity of a voter who would make up his mind on how to vote based on seeing a sign saying, say "Tesei?"), while realtor's for sale signs are banned. 

Even small towns should retain a lawyer to review ordinances: if a governmental agency loses a civil rights suit, as this one surely will, should it go to court, it's on the hook for damages and the aggrieved citizen's legal fees, and that can be expensive.

Do you really want to be a landlord?

Palmer, who first enrolled in Hunter in 2010 after a stint at St. John’s University in Queens, said dorm life is “really lonely” for someone in her 30s.  “I feel very isolated."

But free rent's free rent, so ...

(Photo credit: David Mcglynn, nypost)

Hunter College drop-out refuses to leave her dorm room

Although she's "attended" the college for 8 years (with a stint at another college before that), and hasn't attended any classes at all since 2016, this 32-year-old lady is still fighting her eviction and so far, is winning.

It's a NYC story, but Connecticut's own landlord/tenant laws are similarly protective of tenants who don't pay rent.

Hunter College is waging a court battle to evict a stubborn student who refuses to leave her dorm room some two years after dropping out.

Delaware native Lisa S. Palmer — who has not paid rent since 2016 — refuses to leave Room E579 at the school’s 425 E. 25th St. co-ed dormitory, according to an eviction lawsuit filed in Manhattan Supreme Court.

The 32-year-old “racked up a staggering $94,000 in unpaid residence hall charges on account of her continued occupancy, all the while ignoring Hunter College’s service of additional vacate notices,” said the suit.

But the former geography major, who now works for an architecture firm, refused to budge.

“I plan on fighting the lawsuit and while I fight it, I’m going to stay,” Palmer told The Post from outside her messy, 100-square-foot single, which is adorned with a lava lamp, a dream catcher and piles of dirty dishes

Parking tickets, parking permits, and the Royal Indulgence of Peter Tesei

Have you hugged your First Selectman today? I'm guessing not.

A reader sent along this article from Greenwich Time's Bob Horton, detailing the best way to void parking tickets and jump the line on parking permits at our train stations: be a friend of First Selectman Peter Tesei.

First Selectman Peter Tesei said this week that he and his staff routinely void parking pickets, citing what he calls “past practices” that preceded his tenure at Town Hall, even though the town operates under state statutes that prohibit such meddling in the parking ticket appeals process.

Tesei also denied that a thank you note he received in January 2017 from the now deceased Ambassador Joseph Verner Reed had any connection to a commuter parking permit issued one month earlier to his daughter, Electra. She was issued the coveted permit in December 2016, despite having spent little or no time on the five-to-eight-year waiting list.

When shown the ambassador’s email to him during a conversation in his office Tuesday afternoon, Tesei said he did not remember why Reed sent him the note. “I would occasionally get notes from the ambassador,” he said.

In my reply to the reader, I noted that the general unwritten rule on parking tickets in town has been that, if you showed up at the traffic violation cubbyhole in the bottom of Town Hall and complained, they'd cut the ticket price in half. I tried it once, when I'd received a completely bogus ticket from a cop (not even meter maid) and brought a picture along showing that the "violation" couldn't possibly have happened. I accepted the proffered offer of $20, instead of the $40, because how much time do any of us really have to spend on enduring a formal appeals process?.

There is, to my mind, nothing wrong with a simple way to mediate these things, by-passing the elaborate process of state-ordained appeal rules, but should there be an extra-special route for extra-special people? I think not, especially if they can get the ticket entirely voided, instead of the half-off discount offered to us plebians.

As for the children of Peter's friends and donors jumping to the head of the line for parking permits at our municipal lots, ... no.

Next media craze: Ban lawn mowers! AR 15-type rifles have killed 173 persons since 2007, lawnmowers, 700

I blame Trump

And constipation? Forget it: 2,300 deaths

PROPOSITION: : If God speaks to you, you're nuts

There goes that endorsement, presumably

February 13, 2018: "The View''s Joy Behr, on Mike Pence: "If Jesus speaks to you, you're nuts". 

Joy Behar then said: “It’s one thing to talk to Jesus. It’s another thing when Jesus talks to you.”

Behar said hearing voices is a “mental illness”.

This week: Oprah Winfrey: "If God tells me to, I'll run for president".

She might pass Behar's litmus test if God just drops her a note, maybe.

Best intentions gone awry

Breakfast Special

Winter's ending, and the chipmunks have emerged from their burrows to join the juncos, nuthatches and chickadees (and the greedy squirrels) I've been feeding all winter, so I added an extra helping of sunflower seeds to make up for the extra mouths. At dawn, I saw this fella (representative photo — didn't have time to capture the real thing) come swooping in to participate in the meal, but birdseed was definitely not on his mind.

So it goes; pretty cool to watch, though I'll miss my chippie.