Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more.
Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more
19 Deer Park Meadow Road, asking $4.750 million. It's taken two years to find a buyer, and one fairly modest price cut last year from $5.250, but someone has finally stepped up.
Will this 1928 home escape the wrecker's ball? Maybe not. It's on an oversized lot: 1.73 acres in the RA-1 zone, and the house itself is pretty dated. Deer Park is a wonderful neighborhood, and I'd be nice if it can continue to be graced with old houses from this era. We'll see, I guess.
63 Maple Avenue, asking $5.199 million. This is that foreclosed spec house that sold for $3.7 million in 2012. I thought that price represented a good value; in fact, I had clients who gave the house a serious look, but ultimately decided on a quieter location.
Depending on how much work these owners have put in, even $5 might still be a decent price.
5 Lindsay Drive has closed at $5.660 million. Lindsay's a good location, but I wasn't wild about this house the when it was last on the market. Still, these owners paid $3.550 for it back in February, 2015, did a remarkable job renovating and updating it, and have now received their reward.
De gustibus non est disputandum,
Last week I wrote about 82 Cat Rock going to contract, and opined that No. 80, the companion house behind it and priced at $3.999 million, would sell for less than No. 82 because of both its location and incredibly ugly design.
It's reported as under contract this morning.
Never can tell.
The royal cushion is delivered to the prince
Until now, that was my favorite quote, from a Columbia University "radical" back in 1968 — it started me on my journey to conservatism when I was just 14, but it's now been supplanted. It turns out, the world's leading eco-warrior, Prince Charles, has been harboring the same seething sentiments all this time: "Nobody knows what utter hell it is to be Prince of Wales".
Lots of great stuff in the linked article, and well worth reading in full, what with revelations of his traveling with his personal bedroom, replete with personal toilet seat and proper toilet paper, but I especially enjoyed this bit:
He was also unusually particular about his gardens at Highgrove. Because he refused to use pesticides, he employed four gardeners who would lie, nose-down, on a trailer pulled by a slow-moving Land Rover to pluck out weeds.
In addition, retired Indian servicemen were deployed to prowl through the undergrowth at night with torches and handpick slugs from the leaves of plants.
As a general rule, from the perspective of one whose ancestors were French nobility, only a few of whom escaped the mob, I'm against the regular use of the guillotine, but in this case, perhaps an exception could be made.
Apparently global warming hasn't quite arrived in Oregon — here's Kat, dressed up for Salmon fishing
I do so love my girls
Sturbridge Village South
Three Tree Top Terrace, reports a contract. It's recently been asking $1.360 million, which is down a bit from its 2010 ask of $1.695 (had you been there with me then when I toured the place, you'd have caught me coughing up my sleeve).
But never mind — houses here, built in the 1990s (1992, in this case) have been fetching around $1.3 the past decade, so these buyers will be pretty much where they should be.
I do enjoy, however, the listing agent's description of the building as "a stately colonial". Samuel Adams must be spinning in his grave.
19 Thunder Mountain Road, asking $2.995 million, has a buyer. It's a nice house; in fact, I placed a client there, as a renter, back in 2012, and he stayed happily ensconced until business took him elsewhere. Owned by a famous baseball player who, after signing a wonderfully generous contract with a local team, got injured and, so far as I know, never played an inning for his new team. He's been down in his hometown of Mayagueze for a long time now, doing good works.
Not that he can't afford the hit, but he paid $3.8 for this in 2006.
And then there's this, from PowerLine:
Beyond the contemptible enlisting of uninformed children in a political cause, today’s demonstrations were disgusting because they represented a massive passing of the buck. The demonstrations were, ostensibly, on behalf of school safety. But who is responsible for the security of our schools? The administrators who run the schools. If they believe that crazed “shooters” represent a serious threat, it is up to them to do something about it.
Sending kids out on the playground or the street with signs about gun control does absolutely nothing to make schools safer. There are, however, practical measures that administrators can take. They can secure schools the same way many thousands of office buildings are secured, with locked doors and controlled entry. There are few office buildings one can enter with a rifle under one’s arm. They can dispose of the idiotic “gun free zone” concept, which acts only as an invitation to any potential murderer. They can hire one or more armed guards. They can encourage teachers to be trained in firearms use and to obtain carry permits. These measures, unlike pointless demonstrations in favor of banning random categories of semi-automatic rifles, would actually make schools safer.
But, for whatever reason, most public schools apparently are not taking such steps. Instead, they are using silly demonstrations by ignorant children to deflect attention from their own dereliction of duty.
goodbye to all that
The black government of South Africa has voted to confiscate the land of whites remaining in the country, without compensation, so Australia is working to speed up its visa program for white South African farmers.
If Zimbabwe's own program of confiscation of white farmers' land proves the model, and it will, the large, industrial farms will go to the corrupt politicians, who will then break them up into tiny plots and dole them out to loyal supporters. What is now a working agricultural system that produces enough of a surplus to actually export grain, beef and the like will quickly revert to subsistence farming; men, women and children grubbing the soil with wooden hoes and, if they're fortunate enough to have one, an ox to pull a plow.
We had friends in South Africa, a family whose ancestors had arrived almost 200 years before; liberal, anti-apartheid, they sold off their property and left their country for Australia in the late 70s, explaining, "there's no future for whites in Africa". They, and tens of thousands of their peers, were prescient — those who attempted to hang on are only now discovering their folly.
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