Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more.
Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more
Damned if I know, but there’s certainly a discount imposed for ugly. 29 Doubling Road cut its price from $7.750 to $6.950 million today, and while that’s an impressively large slice to lop off in one stroke, 9,000 square feet of brick piled into this peculiar configuration may require still more.
Or not; tastes do differ, and after all, someone designed this, and someone bought it. Ya never know.
41 Binney Lane, Old Greenwich, has closed at $10.1350 million. Not the $14.950 it had asked for originally, but still a strong price.
And over in Riverside, brother Gideon’s land listing at 122 Cedar Cliff Road, asking $3.695, is finally reported as pending. I’ve house sat the existing home over the years for the owners, who were family friends, and fell in love with the location and the house. The house, alas, probably won’t live to see the spring, but someone will be working with a fine piece of property. Lucky them.
5 Orchard Hill Lane (Riversville Road/Mayfair neighborhood) has a contract. It was asking $1.050 and presumably is selling for less. Sold as a building lot in 2005 for $1.980.
And 70 Lower Cross Road, 10 acres of really beautiful land, cut its price today to $1.995 million. The owner, one of Riverside’s few professional football players and by all accounts a very cool, very nice guy, paid $2.725 for the land in 2015 and had an entire house designed before changing his mind. Presumably the plans come with this new price. The parcel backs up to the Babcock Property, so ten acres is really just the beginning. I’d be tempted to pick it up and just build a hunting cabin on it.
COO COO KA CHOO!
Three years on, Hillary is still pretending to be president
Spends an hour behind an Italian mock-up of the Resolute desk, reading her email. Hillary is in Italy, the real desk is in the Oval Office, but … humor her.
Several psychiatrists have gone on TV to opine on the madness of Saint Donald — what do they make of Hillary’s deranged confusion?
UPDATE: Fauxcahontas refused to be upstaged, and moved in when Hillary left.
Not because they’re losing jobs, mind you, but because waiting in the express line for the person ahead of you with 36 items to be rung up is good for “the community”.
The draft initiative claims “grocery stores provide many people with their primary place of social connection and sense of community,” but self-service checkouts add “to social isolation and related negative health consequences” for shoppers. It claims the kiosks “contribute to retail workers feeling devalued” and heighten the risk of everything from shoplifting to underage drinking. Oh, and self-checkout stations also intensify “efficiency pressures on workers.”
Yshoo “news”: 300,000 U.S. jobs lost to Trump’s trade wars.
Now, a headline like that should raise the question in any inquiring mind, how many jobs have we lost because of China’s cheating and restrictive tariffs? But when it comes to reporters suffering from TDS, that question never arises. The answer, by the way, ranges from estimates of 2.4 million to 3.4 million, and that’s just through 2015.
Between 2001 and 2015, around 3.4 million U.S. jobs, three-fourths of which were in the manufacturing sector, were lost as a result of the trade deficit with China, a report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute shows. From the time China joined the World Trade Organization to 2015, the U.S. trade deficit expanded from $83 billion to $367.2 billion.
And that doesn’t include the billions of dollars of trade secrets stolen by China from U.S. companies. It took me about 5 seconds to DuckDuck “U.S. jobs lost to China”; the fact that this reporter couldn’t be bothered to make the same effort says all that needs to be said about our mass media, the enemy of the people.
Snowflake triggered when she learns that a friend’s child was told not to eat rice with her hands
Writing in "Today's Parent," Joshana Maharaj, is outraged, I tell you, just outraged that some teacher somewhere in Canada told a little girl not to eat rice with her hands.
This prompted her to write about learning how to eat around the world where using hands is acceptable and the West is just racist by using utensils, or something.
Recently, I chatted with someone who told me a story about her young niece, who goes to a prestigious preschool and was eating rice with her hands at lunchtime. The feedback her parents received was that this child needed to work on her table manners and use proper cutlery to eat. I immediately felt a rush of anger bubble up inside me when I heard this. The message that eating food with your hands is an unmannered way to eat is a real problem for me because it is dripping with the control and shame of colonization, which is particularly dangerous in an educational context. Suggesting that a child who eats with her hands has no manners is an echo of European colonial powers looking to tame the wildness out of the people they controlled. These European table manners were imposed on conquered people in an attempt to “civilize” them. It’s a damaging message about right and wrong ways to do things. It positions the technique as superior and the people who practise it as setters of the standard, leaving those with a different approach to eating with a status of inferiority. The idea of a single standard of acceptable table manners is just one of a host of strategies used to grow and promote racism. It’s a subtle message but one that is reinforced three times a day, every day, which makes it quite powerful.
It must somehow satisfy a basic need to go through life perpetually outraged, but I don’t get it.
136 Parsonage Road
136 Parsonage Road has dropped its price today to $5.695 million, which puts it squarely in competition with the new construction at 105 Parsonage, $5.699. It seems to me that a buyer would have no difficulty choosing between the two houses, with 136 the hands-down winner, but the builder of 105 is probably going to come out ahead here.
136’s owners paid $4.2 million for the land in 2007, and originally priced their newly-constructed (2015) home at $8.295 million in March, 2017. Today’s price almost certainly represents a large loss, while 105’s land, a nasty bit of swamp, sold for just $1.330 in 2017; there’s still plenty of profit to yield before this proves a money loser. I’m sure there’s some sort of a lesson here.
105 Parsonage Rd
45 Meadow Wood Drive, located in Belle Haven n the shadow of I-95, has cut its price again and is now asking $11.9 million.
Erected by a spec builder, it was priced at $17.9 million in July, 2007, and finally sold for $6 million in 2014. That buyer, the current owner, futzed around with it a bit and returned it to the market in April, 2018, at $16.250. The results are as noted above.
Both the original builder and this owner seem to have confused a whopping-big piece of construction with an equally-sized price tag, but they should have raised up their eyes to the hill above and behind them and noticed the looming presence of the Governor John Davis Lodge Memorial Weigh Station, pride of the Connecticut Turnpike. Therein lies their problem.
The first of three homes being built at 500 Lake Avenue hit the market today, priced at $7.7 million. This is part of the ten-acre parcel, with teardown, owned by one of the hundreds of daughters of Prince Abdul-Rahman bin Abdulaziz al Saud. The princess tried for $15.9 million in 2011, but eventually sold the place to this developer for $5.650 in 2016 and he, in turn, is now building three spec houses here.
This Kali-Naagy design seems awfully unpretentious for a house priced at nearly $8 million, but the location, at the intersection of Lake and Round Hill Road, is convenient, and the presence of two new neighbors will reduce that “Little House on the Prairie” feel that makes city transplants so uneasy. So we’ll see how they fare.
UPDATE: And now 498 Lake is up. $7.995 million
The original princess house
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