Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more.
Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more
35 Copper Beech, asked $2.995 and quickly found a buyer at $2.885. Plain vanilla exterior, but good interior, nice yard, and Copper Beech is a very convenient mid country location, with plenty of nice houses on it, so this makes sense.
May contract, July close.
Of course, it did have THE ZEBRA going for it, and is that a trampled tiger underneath?
7 Loughlin Avenue, $1.3 million. It came on at $1.295, but went a tad higher. That's not too surprising, because Loughlin's a good street and, for this price, No. 7's a very decent house.
It might be worth pointing out that the sellers priced this at $1.795 back in 2013, slowly dropped it to $1.195, and couldn't attract a buyer, so they pulled it that year. My guess is that that initial overpricing hurt its chances. This time around, they hit the sweet spot.
167 Bedford Road
167 Bedford Road has cut its price a third time since it hit the market in March at $3.150 million, and now asks $2.5. The owners paid $3.350 million for it in 2013 (from sellers who'd originally priced it in 2009 at $4.950), but it's a rare property on Bedford Road that's held its value over the past decades, and I suspect this isn't one of them.
Great property, but the house requires a complete re-do, from kitchen to baths to, probably, mechanicals. In most of the country, that kind of renovation might cost $250,000 or so, but here in happy Greenwich I'd budget $1 million, and the market for $3.5 million homes on Bedford is practically nil. There have been two recent sales between $6.5 and $8.5 million, but neither one was built in 1997. Better, I think, is to scrape this and try again, but that makes the listing a land sale, and what's that worth?
53 Bedford Road, four-acres, is priced at $2.3 million, but it's been on the market for 2,285 days (2012) with, so far, no takers. Obviously, 167 Bedford is a real house, and perfectly livable, unlike 53, so if a buyer wants it as is he or she will get a perfectly good house for what passes in Greenwich for not a lot of money. But at $2.5, I wouldn't put much more into it.
53 Bedford Road
And, just to screw up comps on the street, there's 22 Bedford Road, bank-owned, that sold last December for $1.8 million. The borrowers had tried to sell it since 2011, when they priced it at $5.3 million. Big mistake.
22 Bedford Road
1 Harbor Drive, a grand old 1893 Victorian, has been on the market since 2010, and held its $20 million price for years, finally dropping to $17.5 in 2016. That price didn't work either so today it was repriced at $12.5.
David Ogilvy's held the listing all this time; I don't know of another agent who could pull that off, so good for him.
20 Alpine (off North Street). asking $3.495 million. Nice house, fairly close to town, and an excellent lot. My only quibble if there is one, is that our MLS shows this as having been on the market for only 95 days, when in fact it's been for sale since April, 2016,when it started at $4.350.
That's hardly the owners' fault, of course.
battle of tours, circa 2018
“Starting at the age of 1, “ghetto children” must be separated from their families for at least 25 hours a week, not including nap time, for mandatory instruction in “Danish values,” including the traditions of Christmas and Easter, and Danish language. Noncompliance could result in a stoppage of welfare payments. Other Danish citizens are free to choose whether to enroll children in preschool up to the age of six.
Denmark’s government is introducing a new set of laws to regulate life in 25 low-income and heavily Muslim enclaves, saying that if families there do not willingly merge into the country’s mainstream, they should be compelled.
For decades, integrating immigrants has posed a thorny challenge to the Danish model, intended to serve a small, homogeneous population. Leaders are focusing their ire on urban neighborhoods where immigrants, some of them placed there by the government, live in dense concentrations with high rates of unemployment and gang violence.
Politicians’ description of the ghettos has become increasingly sinister. In his annual New Year’s speech, Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen warned that ghettos could “reach out their tentacles onto the streets” by spreading violence, and that because of ghettos, “cracks have appeared on the map of Denmark.” Politicians who once used the word “integration” now call frankly for “assimilation.””
I think this is a terrible idea, but then I'm an American, not a socialist Dane. Combine a socialist philosophy with a tiny country being swamped by a population that hates it, and your results may be different.
“Nearly 87 percent of Denmark’s 5.7 million people are of Danish descent, with immigrants and their descendants accounting for the rest. Two-thirds of the immigrants, around half a million, are from Muslim backgrounds, a group that swelled with the waves of Afghan, Iraqi and Syrian refugees crossing Europe.
Critics would say “the state cannot force children away from their parents in the daytime, that’s disproportionate use of force,” said Rune Lykkeberg, the editor in chief of Dagbladet Information, a left-liberal daily newspaper. “But the Social Democrats say, ‘We give people money, and we want something for this money.’ This is a system of rights and obligations.”
Danes have a high level of trust in the state, including as a central shaper of children’s ideology and beliefs, he said. “The Anglo-Saxon conception is that man is free in nature, and then comes the state” constraining that freedom, he said. “Our conception of freedom is the opposite, that man is only free in society.””
13 Meadow Wood Drive, cheek by jowl to I-95 with a current asking price of $1.8 million is reported as pending. It's a short sale, meaning the mortgage is greater than the current price ($2.3-ish), so "pending" should be interpreted as a signal that the lender has agreed to some sort of loss on the money it extended.
Not a terrible house, if one can accept the highway roar, but the original broker David Ogilvy did his clients no favor by initially pricing it at $3.5 million back in 2011. At seven years on the market, this was not our oldest listing, but certainly not our freshest, either, and a better initial price and speedier price cuts might have shortened the waiting period considerably.
I am impressed, however, at the premium a location on the Belle Haven Peninsula commands — not homes inside the Belle Haven Association's boundaries, mind you, but simply within aspirational distance. This house on, say, Riverside's Lockwood Lane, also a neighbor of I-95, would probably sell for $500,000 less.
Location, and a desperate hope to hang out with the rock stars may explain it.
UPDATE, July 5th: A reader corrects me; this house is within the Belle Haven Association boundaries. I have never understood the Association's bizarre boundaries, and probably never will. It makes political gerrymandering districts look positively logical.
(The same reader says that he looked at the house some time ago but rejected it because of the noise, so at least I got that part right.)
6 Windrose Way, Mead Point, is new to the market today, asking $20.5 million. I'm not wild about the exterior; looks sort of like two ancient Japanese warrior helmets joined together, but the interior and multiple outside decks have been designed to take full advantage of the views, and it all seems open and bright.
Mead Point is my favorite of our gated communities, and, for this neighborhood, the price isn't all that nuts. Besides, buyers in this price range have been known to splurge just to find a home in Mead's, so ....
My brother Anthony is the family expert on acoustics, but I'm guessing that this instrument, as sited, isn't good for much more than a place for party guests to gather and sing along to Mitch Miller records or maybe duke university fight songs.
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