Interesting period piece, but does it have value?

the fifties are calling: they want their cardboard model back

7 Memory Lane (off Riversville Road, and so named because it ends at a cemetery), has reduced its price to $1,695 million. It’s kind of cool, as an example of untouched, mid-1950s modern architecture, but I wonder what the market is for a house with no central air, two first-floor bedrooms with a shared, tiny bathroom, and a third guest bedroom on the floor below, plus a one-car garage and a carport? All on the west side of town.

Maybe a weekend retreat for an avant garde West Village couple with a pair of shih tzus but otherwise, tough sell, I predict.

Calling all you financial wizards

The year my father graduated columbia with an mba

In 2015 I entrusted a significant (to me — to many readers of this blog, chump change) amount of money to a money management team, and then ignored it: either they knew better than I how to run things, or I shouldn’t have made the investment in the first place, Three-plus years on, with a portfolio roughly distributed between 75% stocks, 25% bonds, I’m at about exactly zero growth. Question for you geniuses is, given my dark, foreboding fears of coming developments in the global economy, am I better throwing the whole thing into a savings account and collecting 2.5%, insured, or trying a mix of index funds? I’m done with the paid managers, regardless.

(Just thought this might be an interesting topic for the blog’s readership, which seems heavily skewed towards a financial management background).

So, so much fun

The new Democratic Party is furious that Bernie Sanders is daring to respond to The Donald’s SOTU speech. As a white male, he has no right!

Sanders giving his own response, after Abrams gives hers, should be completely inoffensive. And yet some in the liberal coalition think Sanders has got some nerve: He's a white man, choosing to speak, even though party leadership has chosen a black woman to speak. (Doesn't he know it's Black History Month? For shame.)

#Resistance conspiracy theorist Louise Mensch was apoplectic on Twitter. "We already have to listen to one old white male traitor advance the Kremlin's interests, we don't need two," she wrote.

Mensch, of course, does not speak for sane Democrats. But a more respected voice, MSNBC's Chris Hayes, predictedSanders' commitment to doing the rebuttal—again, something he does every year—"will grate/alienate." It appears he was right: Many on social media dragged Sanders for daring to speak out of turn.

"Why is he talking over the black woman our party chose to speak for us?" asked the feminist author Amy Siskind. (Again, Sanders is not talking over anyone.) "This is disrespecting black women, the most important and reliable part of our base. He can speak another night. This is Stacey Abrams' night. She was the one the party chose. Nope. This is not his night!"

I’m so old, I remember when thinking that Russia was an enemy of our country was considered a delusional hangover from the 80s, but that’s an aside, The new Democratic Party’s insistence that white males and even white heterosexual females step aside from politics is, at least through the 2020 election, going to fare poorly, I predict.

On the other hand, the vast majority of the traditional Republican power structure is determined to see Trump fail, and, knowing full well that he will fall if there’s no wall under construction next year, will join with the Democrats to prevent it. They think they’ll rid themselves of Trump; I think they’ll see the destruction of their party.

Interesting times; buy popcorn futures.

I'm not ignoring real estate news, there IS no real estate news

Or at least, nothing huge to write about. Lots of rentals, though.

The mirror cracked from side to side

State hospital tax was supposed to be an accounting trick played on federal taxpayers in favor of ourselves has, duh, proved to be just another tax on constituents.

Having inherited an unprecedented $3.7 billion deficit, Malloy proposed the hospital provider tax one month after taking office in January 2011.

It was to be a tax in name only.

The industry would pay $350 million per year to the state, which would redistribute and return every penny back to hospitals — plus $50 million more.

This back-and-forth arrangement — which is common in most states — would enable Connecticut to qualify for huge federal reimbursements through the Medicaid program.

But things began eroding almost right away. As state government struggled frequently with budget deficits over the next six years, the tax grew while the payments back to the industry shrank — despite an increase in the federal reimbursement rate.

Hospitals also could not even rely on the shrinking payments they would see in the adopted state budget. Legislatures routinely ordered Malloy to achieve massive savings once the fiscal year was underway — often with little guidance as to how those targets were to be met. And, at times, the administration would order emergency reductions to the hospital payments.

And so on. Details, found in the article itself, are sordid, but basically the Hartford Looters came up with a new tax , sold it as a non-tax, and then just couldn’t resist looting the federal funds that came in to “balance’ Hartford’s tax. So we have another $900 million in spending, with no way to pay for it.

Our lower end of the market continues to flourish

10 Ponderosa Drive, which is across from Central Middle School and not in Montana, priced at $1.350 million, reports a contract after just 28 days on the market. It’s 1979 construction, with just about exactly what you’d expect from that time period and this price range, but a perfectly nice house and location.

Congratulations, by the way, to listing agent Daphne Lamsvelt-Pol, who did a fine job staging and photographing this house. She also nailed the price, as is obvious.

Price cut way up on Round Hill Road

640 Round Hill Road, dropped $400,000 to $2.850 million. The seller, bless his heart saved this wonderful 1725 antique from the wrecking ball and paid $3 million for it in 2006. I have no idea how much he put into its total renovation but it must have been a substantial sum, so today’s price represents a very nice subsidy for the next owner; I’m also pretty sure that the owner considered this restoration as a labor of love, rather than a money-maker.

It’s a great house, but it’s been pared down to just four acres, so farming is out, and I can’t see this a kid-friendly home; not for rearing a family, at least. Maybe a weekend retreat for NYC types? I think that would be fabulous.

As an aside, the previous owner of this house was a Mr. Frank Snyder, whose 2006 obituary can be found here. I never had the privilege of meeting Mr. Synder, but he was quite a man: submarine officer in the Pacific during WW II, UVA Law, one of the founders of Stratton Ski Mountain and, how I came to know of him, a great sailor. Greenwich has its drawbacks, but we do attract some very interesting, accomplished people.

A sale on Pecksland Road

79 Pecksland, sold for $3.2 million. A nice, 1941 house on four acres, when it was renovated in 2002 it sold in less than a month for $5.4 million. That was then.

Reader "Dichotomy" nails it: magical thinking

Commenting on De Blasio’s claim that, by placing Amazon’s new headquarters adjacent to a sprawling public housing slum, tens of thousands of residents are going to win $150,000 tech jobs, Dichotomy observes,

According to this logic, DeBalsio can relocate a top hospital to the projects and suddenly the denizens will become neurosurgeons and nurses. The left does dream big dreams.

De Blasio’s understanding of the world is exactly the same as that of the most naive Pacific Island cargo cult native, someone who believes that engaging in a ritualistic building ceremony of, say, an airfield, will bring material wealth in the form of airplanes suddenly appearing and dropping mana from heaven. In the Mayor’s defense, this same thinking was why Washington spurred the creation of no-cost home loans to the poor during the past decades: our experts observed that people who owned their own homes tended to be middle-class, steadily employed and living in stable families; caused, the savants concluded, by home ownership. Put an unemployed, high school drop-out single-mother of five into her own house and she’d prosper, just like her fellow home owners. It didn’t occur to our tax dispensers that the material object: the house, was the reflection and result of the living habits of the owner, rather than the other way around.

Go, Sully!

One tough eight-year-old, as I recall

There’s a game tonight, LA Rams v. Patriots. My heart’s been claimed by the Patriots, just because they were so kind to my son John when he was terminally ill, treating him and his sister Sarah to a two-day visit back in 2014, including a visit with cancer-survivor Marcus Cannon, who spent an hour cracking chemo-jokes with John and, the next day, putting John and Sarah in front-row seats on the 40-yard line while they dispatched the Detroit Lions. And then went on to win the Super Bowl.

But we also have Riverside’s own, John Sullivan, playing center for the Rams, and who wouldn’t want to cheer for him? He played on a little league team I coached way back when, and daughter Kate was friends with him at GHS. A great family, sadly diminished by the loss of father Rick Sullivan, who would come out to help me on Saturdays when I was doing my worst trying to corral and “teach” eight-year-olds how to play baseball.

I’m torn, but the Patriots have won plenty of these things, and I think John Sullivan’s family would be absolutely thrilled if their baby boy, at 35, won one of those horribly gaudy rings. And so would I. So let’s go Rams!