Someone still has faith in Hunting Ridge

111 Hunting Ridge has sold, sans MLS exposure, for $7.250 million. This 10,000 sq.ft. Jordan Saper behemoth sold new in 2006 for $9.050, and was listed, beginning at $11.950, from 2013-2016. A local agent resurrected it from the dead by putting this buyer together with the seller, and voila: a very nice commission, and good for her.

The town appraises it (100% market value) at $5.951 million. I think that may be high, but obviously the only person whose opinion counts — he with the money — disagrees.

Cos Cob land

12 Cottontail

12 Cottontail Road, now down to $950,000. Owner paid $1,058,800 in a bidding war in August, 2018, has second thoughts, and put it back on the market this August at $995,000. So far, no takers; it seems that the other bidders in that bidding war now share the winner’s doubts.

This is a nice, flat acre-plus, and I like Cottontail Road, but it’ possible that the difficulty 17 Cottontail is having finding a buyer may be scaring builders off. 17 sold new for $3.053 in 2002, and was relisted at $3.495 in 2016. Today, it’s priced at $2.695, and still for sale.

So what would be a safe price to pay for this land? The town says it’s worth $699,000, and that does sound safe. There’s no way, however, that the seller’s ready to take that kind of haircut, so either he’ll persuade someone to pay in the $8s for this or the property’s going to be hanging around for a while.

17 Cottontail Road, now asking $2.695 million

I call Bullsh*t

Poll: air travel will plummet as green weenies change their plans

The Swedish concept of "flygskam" or "flight shame" appears to be spreading.

One in five of the people surveyed had cut the number of flights they took over the last year because of the impact on the climate.

UBS said the expected growth in passenger numbers could be halved if these trends were borne out.

Global air travel has grown by between 4% and 5% a year, UBS said, meaning the overall numbers are doubling every 15 years.

Industry forecasts from plane makers Airbus and Boeing predict growth will continue at that rate until 2035. 

But the UBS survey suggests that high-profile campaigns - like the example set by Swedish school girl Greta Thunberg, which has helped push the climate crisis up the political agenda - could trigger a change in flying habits in wealthier parts of the world, particularly in the US and Europe.

After surveying more than 6,000 people in the US, Germany, France and the UK, UBS found that 21% had reduced the number of flights they took over the last year.

What a load. Air traffic is up, not down, and with Hollywood and Buckingham Palace setting the example, is it any wonder that the hoi poloi continues to fly? Anyone relying on this poll to predict airplane manufacturing trends, as UBS intends, is a fool; respondents tend to tell pollsters what they assume is the “correct” answer, but follow their own inclinations regardless. Just ask Rachael Maddow and her friend Hillary.

As I was just saying,

24 Upland Drive, 1991 construction, dropped today from $2.495 million to $1.995. Owners paid $2.3 for it in 2011, and originally listed it this time for $2.775. Oops.

Price cut

422 N. Maple Avenue, purchased for $4.850 million in 2013 and resisted at $4.750 this past April, has cut its price today to $4.295. That’s not a huge loss, yet, but it also hasn’t sold yet. Stay tuned.

The purchase date of 2013 is significant, to me, because that was the year that many of us thought we sensed a leveling off of the 2008-2011 price collapse, and believed that we’d hit bottom. Instead, prices have continued to drop, as this house illustrates.

Charles Hugh Smith has some observations on the decline of affluent urban centers; this paragraph seems applicable to our own market:

The Kubler-Ross dynamic is in full display, as sellers go through the stages of denial, anger, bargaining and acceptance: they grudgingly drop the price of the $1.2 million bungalow or flat to $1.15 million, then after much anger and anguish, to $1.1 million, but the market has imploded while they processed a reversal they didn't think possible: now sales have dried up, and prices are sub-$800,000 while they ponder dropping their asking price to $995,000.

Global warming, communism, and you

In response to my own musings this morning about the true goals of warmists or, at least, the consequences thereof, a reader sent along this link to a piece in yesterday’s American Thinker, “The Cynical Plot Behind Global Warming Hysteria”. Its author and I share similar thoughts.

Try telling Al Gore you heard that redistributing (giving away) America's wealth to poor nations of the world is the real agenda behind climate alarmism.  Try telling him that, and he will look you squarely in the eye and say this with a straight face: Oh, that's just another right-wing conspiracy theory.  All we're trying to do is save the planet.

What Gore and his fellow globalists are attempting is to destroy capitalism in the world's largest capitalist nation to pave the way for a new world order — i.e., global governance.  That's a serious charge, so please allow me to justify it by citing the words of two prominent U.N. officials in the thick of the plot to strip away America's sovereignty.

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted during a February 2015 press conference in Brussels that the U.N.'s real purpose in promoting climate fear is to kill off capitalism:

This is the first time in human history that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally changing [getting rid of] the economic development model that has reigned since the Industrial Revolution.

In a Nov. 14, 2010 interview with Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Otto Edenhofer, co-chair of the U.N. IPCC's Working Group III, made this shocking admission:

One must free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.  [What we're doing] has almost nothing to do with the climate.  We must state clearly that we use climate policy to redistribute de facto the world's wealth.

On the same date, Edenhofer added this:

Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with protecting the environment.  The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which [re]distribution of the world's resources will be negotiated.

Dr. Ottmar Edenhofer, one of the U.N.'s top climate officials, effectively admitted that the organization's public position on climate change is a hoax.  The same admission was made earlier this year by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's former chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, who revealed that the Green New Deal is not about "saving the planet:"

It wasn't originally a climate thing at all ... we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.

In other words, the Green New Deal is using climate hysteria as a backdoor way to turn America into a socialist nation.

This foreclosure hasn't hit our MLS yet

14 Hawkwood Lane, purchased for $5.655 million in 2011, was lost to strict foreclosure, and is now available from the lender for $3.4. There’s always a question of hw well a property under foreclosure has been maintained, but a proper building inspection and some shrewd negotiation should take care of that worry.

UPDATE: Checking out pictures from this home’s earlier, now-expired listing, I came across this picture of a child’s bedroom. Heartbreaking — I forget, sometimes, that there are human stories behind these real estate transactions.

Force of arms

To the cornfield with you!

Global warmist says that you will make deep, personal sacrifices to save the world for Greta

(This article appears behind Greenwich Time’s paywall today, but a sister publication offers it for exactly what it’s worth.) Excerpts:

[T] he uphill battle against climate change isn’t just about policy and technology. Unless we change our routines — personally, in ways that mean deep sacrifice — then the Armageddon these passionate youths are talking about is a sure thing, sooner rather than later.

That means pain, folks….

The reason lifestyle change isn’t part of the discussion is simple: No one wants to hear it. It’s easy to point a finger at the White House, at the state Capitol, at corporations, at town hall. It’s hard to restructure our lives in a way that actually moves the dial toward preventing the threshold level of 2 degrees centigrade for global temperature rise.

But don’t tell the pie-eyed fools that — not just yet.’

Sena Wazer is just 15 but the Mansfield teen, an organizer and speaker at the Sept. 20 climate change rally in Hartford, understands the need to keep an audience happy.

“The goal of an event like a strike or a rally is really to get people motivated or inspired,” Wazer told me when I asked why so little is said about lifestyle changes. “And then the goal from there is really to harness that power, that people power.. and then from there, go into the legislature of from there go to an event.”

Credit Wazer, who’s already a UConn student, for knowing not to berate her listeners. “People are not going to take it onto themselves,” she said of profound lifestyle changes.

So we’ll just have to force them.

Enlightenment isn’t enough. Technology isn’t enough. Policy change isn’t enough. Selective action isn’t enough.

True sacrifice is what’s needed. As long as we live in a world where we don’t impose our values on others, the climate change problem lives someplace else. When it finally swims up and bites us in the ass, no technology or policy fix will stop the bleeding.

There’s lots more nonsense in the article, including “Teslas that can run a million miles on just 60% of their charge”, and accosting neighbors of the writer who use too many yard machines (can you imagine having this guy as your neighbor? I’d turn the garden hose on him if he even placed a toe on my driveway], but what I take away from the piece is that he gives the game away: he, and little Greta, think that they’ll soon be in charge, dictating the lives of the rest of us. No doubt permission will have to be obtained to take a vacation beyond the limits of one’s town, the size and quality of housing dictated by our betters, etc. China and Google will gladly lend us their social credit scoring system, so we can be rewarded and punished and granted favors as our behavior warrants.

This useful idiot and his passionate peers are as deluded about who will rule their brave new world as they are about million-mile Teslas; it won’t be them. Ask the Deep State; there’s a place for Greta, but it’s on the curb, after she’s been thoroughly used to their advantage.

Still trying

291 Stanwich Road, new construction in 2015, is still available, and, its listing having expired yesterday, is back today, same agent, same asking price of $3.7 million. A nice house, and its current price is a vast improvement over the $6.695 it sought originally, but it may still be too high, if only because of the stigma attaching because of its staleness.

The house was put up by a good builder with an unfortunate tendency to get in over his head on his spec projects, then making matters worse by over-pricing in the hope of digging out of the hole, thereby continuing his descent.

Still and all, a very decent house, or it was five years ago when I first saw it, and something in the mid-low $3s or high $2s (by which I mean $2.9-$3.4ish) seems reasonable.

It's all about preserving the union, of course

Well, that was three full years ago

NYT opposes impeachment — or it did

Before the election of 2016, Hillary Clinton’s illegal mishandling of classified information was a hot topic of conversation. By hosting her email on a private, unsecure server, she was violating several laws regarding the mishandling of classified information, and by deleting her emails that were under subpoena she was obstructing justice. Less than a week before the election, the New York TimesEditorial Board wrote a scathing piece blasting Donald Trump and Republicans for the “particularly bizarre and dangerous tactic” of “warning that they may well seek to impeach Hillary Clinton if she wins, or, short of that, tie her up with endless investigations and other delaying tactics.”

“Of all the arguments advanced by the Trump forces, this has to be among the most preposterous,” they wrote, “In effect, what they’re saying is, Mrs. Clinton won’t be able to govern, because we won’t let her. So don’t waste your vote on her. Vote for us.”

“The tactic is a rejection of the nation’s need of a functioning government,” they continued. Well, isn’t that interesting? Ah, but there’s more. They called the strategy “nonsensical” and said that these threats “could cause real damage by encouraging Republicans in the next Congress to effectively take the government hostage, exacting revenge by making sure that nothing Mrs. Clinton proposes ever comes to pass.” Wow, that sounds an awful lot like what Democrats are doing to Trump right now.