Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more.
Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more
31 Dublin Hill Drive, a 1941 home on 4 acres, is new to the market today and priced at $6.850 million. I don’t know if that’s the right price, but these owners paid $6,439,000 for it in 1999, and listing agent John McAtee isn’t known for delusional pricing, so we’ll see.
Too formal for my personal taste, but with updating it should be a pretty impressive place to wow and impress one’s lessers.
112 Indian Head Road, $13.950 million, is reported pending. The two acres this house was built on old for $5.3 million in 2012 and the construction costs for these 12,300 sq. ft. must have been, er … “substantial”. Nice to see that big money’s still around.
Brother Gideon’s listing at 11 Bryon Road in Old Greenwich, $4.295 million, is pending after 127 days. I haven’t spoken to the chap about this property yet, but i’m assuming it’s a land sale. Or put another way, a waterfront sale.
(Update) I see that the neighbor to this parcel, no.7 Bryon Road, is also reported pending today. It’s asking price is $6.075 million, so it seems that someone with an awful lot of money is moving to the neighborhood.
17 Cottontail
17 Cottontail Road, Cos Cob, has a contract after 1,479 days on market. This is a very decent house and at its current price of $2.595 million, a pretty good deal. Its difficulties can be attributed to its first rice of $3.495 back in February 2016 and the combination of too high a price and a slowish market hurt its chances. I had clients who were bidding on this property but we were dealing unknowingly with an agent whose authority had lapsed; he failed to share that information with us, and he failed to notify his former principal that he was negotiating on their behalf, so it was a total waste of time. The new agent got the job done but, unfortunately, with another buyer. This industry is not without its charlatans.
38 Aiken Rd
An another long in the tooth dowager, 38 Aiken Road, has sold for $3.2 million after 1,778 days on the market. It started at $6.995 million in December 2013, a price that at the time I thought a tad exuberant. So it proved.
It’s nice to see, by the way, that the boys in the transgender club have horned in the BLM movement; boys are so pushy, so aggressive, bless their hearts, they just have to get into everything!
The MTA’s multimillion-dollar effort to shrink the homeless population in the city’s subways has been an expensive bust, the agency’s watchdog says in a damning new report. ….
The “very expensive” and “minimally effective” program cost at least $2.6 million in overtime on top of the contact — but 10-person teams of MTA cops and social workers from contractor Bowery Residents’ Committee lured just three transients out of the system per station per night, the report said.
“On the nights OIG staff observed the program, dozens of apparently homeless individuals stayed on the trains for every 1 that accepted services,” IG staff wrote.
Despite the MTA’s “good faith” program, delays related to homeless individuals continued their upward trajectory from the first half of 2019, the IG reported. Incidents involving the homeless caused 100 delays per month in January and February.
The teams began trying to coax homeless people out of the system at end-of-line stations last summer after Gov. Cuomo declared their presence on transit “egregious” and “the worst it’s ever been.”
But the effort was primarily hamstrung by the MTA’s limited ability to force homeless people off trains and a vast web of societal failures that have increased homelessness, the IG’s office concluded. [Emphasis added]
Essay: Horror and humiliation in Minneapolis
Excerpts;
…. If police are restrained, or even de-funded, as Rep. Alexanda Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) demands, the crime rate will rise sharply, and blacks are far more likely to be crime victims than whites….
Why black Americans should want to undermine the police forces that protect them is a sensitive question that has a simple answer: The price of such police protection is humiliation. The sort of policing that keeps criminals off the streets requires stopping and frisking large numbers of people, stopping cars with a broken tail light, and so forth. But this also subjects large numbers of innocent people to humiliating examination and occasional mistreatment.
Most people would rather be dead than humiliated, and black Americans are no exception.
It is easy to point out how unreasonable are the complaints of Black Lives Matter. Reasonable, sadly, has nothing to do with the issue: When people engage in extreme behavior, it is due to extreme distress. Nonetheless the numbers tell a clear story: Black Americans are a thousand times more likely to be killed by another black American than by a police officer, as the estimable Heather Mac Donald explained in The Wall Street Journal. To be precise, American police (white or black) killed exactly nine unarmed black Americans in 2019. Whether these shootings were justified is a different issue. That is about one one-thousandth of the 7,407 blacks murdered in 2018 (last year for which data are available), about 90% of whom were killed by other black Americans. …
Why, then, do black communities view police with such hostility? The increased safety of black communities depends upon measures imposed from the outside by a largely white state power, which is humiliating. It comes on top of other humiliations, of which the most onerous is the fake promise of upward mobility through university education.
Forty-two percent of white 18-year-olds will attend a college vs. 37% for blacks and 36% for Hispanics. The percentage of young blacks of college age who will attend university in the United States is not much different from that of whites. But fewer than 34% of black males at U.S. universities will graduate after six years (the standard program is four years). These are shocking numbers. Of this 37%, only a third, or 12.5% of college-age black men, will obtain a university degree. Almost one-quarter of all black men of college age will try and fail. Those were the black youth who stayed out of trouble, graduated from high school, and sought advancement in the university system—but ended up at the bottom of the greasy pole. That is a humiliation on a gigantic scale.
Blacks are accepted at colleges with a Scholastic Aptitude Test score 250 points lower than white candidates, and Hispanics with 185 points less; Asians must score 50 points higher than whites. A standard deviation is 210 points on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, so the handicapping is enormous. That fiddle has equalized black and white college admissions, but not graduation rates. The only systematic racial discrimination practiced in the United States victimizes Asian-Americans.
Worst of all, the six-year graduate rate for black men stood at just 33.8% in 2016 (for university entrants in 2010), while the graduate rate for men of all other races and ethnicities rose over the past twenty-five years. Most impressive is the increase in the graduation rate of Hispanic men, which rose from just above 40% for university entrants in 1996 to over 50% for 2010 university entrants.
The drastic improvement in Hispanic graduation rates refutes the assertion that America has a problem with minorities as such. Hispanics are America’s largest minority group at 16.7% of the population, and their university graduation rate has improved steadily. This is a not a minority problem but a black problem, and specifically a problem for black men. The six-year graduation rate for black women is 43%.
For liberals who think that the problem is racism, and that black women are doubly oppressed by misogyny as well as racism, these facts pose a conundrum: If racism somehow deters black men from succeeding in higher education, why doesn’t the combination of racism and misogyny deter black women even more?
A vicious hoax has been perpetrated on America’s young black men by the liberal establishment. ….. The revolving door of minority admissions creates jobs and perquisites for college bureaucrats. U.S. universities now spend almost as much on “administrative support” as they do on instruction, wrote Caroline Simons in Forbes ….
The leftists who run the university system are happy to cover up their deception and incompetence by blaming racism for the low graduation rate of black men. A 2006 study in The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education commented, “High dropout rates appear to be primarily caused by inferior K-12 preparation and an absence of a family college tradition, conditions that apply to a very large percentage of today’s college-bound African Americans.” As I reported in a March 30 review-essay in this space, mention of this 2006 analysis in a journal edited and written by blacks would be grounds for instant dismissal on grounds of racism at any major American university.
….. The long humiliation of black men has incubated a terrible rage. The phony promise of upward mobility leaves them feeling cheated, with good reason. This rage has metastasized into a dominant trope in black popular culture.
… Among all the identities that modern liberalism has constructed, black identity is the first and most practiced: In place of the Christian culture that made black churches the bearers of the civil rights movement, black identity politics has constructed a culture of rage and rejection. In 1993 the Rev. Calvin Butts, pastor of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church and the most distinguished black pastor in New York, drove a bulldozer up to the headquarters of Sony Music and crushed a pile of rap CD’s to protest their effect on black youth. More recently the first black president hosted an obscenity-spewing rapper at the White House.
That, I believe, explains the dire position of young black men in America. The humiliation of black men and their enraged, self-destructive response horrifies white liberals, for whom the sorrows of black America are not merely a social problem but an identity crisis. ….
Colorful home can’t find a buyer
When Mary Rose Young attempted to sell her house in 2014, she could only get one person to view it — despite it being worth more than a quarter of a million dollars.
The reason? It’s covered in 30 years worth of rainbow-colored paint and decor.
The 61-year-old pink-haired artist purchased the dilapidated Lydney, England cottage in 1987 for just £30,000 (about $37,500). At first, it was painted white, but over the three decades of living in the quaint abode, she painted every wall, floor, and ceiling in shades of yellow, blue, pink, orange and every hue in between .…
“I did one wall orange with red dots, and it really stood out and took people’s minds off the fact there’s hardly any natural light,” Young tells LadBible. “It became a really fun project for me on the side of my pottery business, and I was so galvanized by it I ended up neglecting my pottery at times.”
But her vibrant vision was one not shared by many. When Young and her musician husband, Phil Butcher, wanted to sell the home, agents said they should be able to get at least £250,000 (about $315,000). Unfortunately, those agents could only find one potentially interested homebuyer. And even that sale didn’t pan out.…
Young has refused to paint the house in more neutral tones, and the family has been stuck in the unsellable house ever since.
“I made this house around my own life, and I wasn’t thinking about it being sellable,” says Young. “We’re living like two children in a doll’s house, and in retrospect, why would anybody else want to buy it? It’s like a playhouse for adults.” ….
“I love my house, and the house really works for me,” she says. “I’m a colorful person . . . I like it more and more as I get older.”
I’ll point out that despite the reporters’s assertion that the house is “worth more than a quarter of a million dollars”, a house is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it and in this case, that’s nothing. But my sympathies are with the homeowner/artist; if she prefers her house the way it is she should keep it that way. tt’s fortunate, however, that she “likes it more and more as she gets older”, because this is a fine example of the concept of “aging in place”..
Time for a little morning eye-closer
William Penn, tear down this wall!
Lots of similar stories from other woke campuses around the country as well as high schools demanded the removal of cops from the premises because mass shootings were so yesterday; even older than global warming walk-outs — remember those?
Have we got a story for you!
What happened to shelter in place? It’s back.just in time for Trump rallies. Earlier this week the (very) Liberal Glen Greenwald wrote about the shift:
REMEMBER THE CORONAVIRUS? That was the pandemic which we were told by public health experts since February was so grave — the worst public health threat since the 1918 Spanish Flu — that we could not go outside for any reason, even if it meant a collapse in the global economy, tens or hundreds of millions of people suffering from unemployment, the permanent shuttering of small businesses, sustained mental health damage, and the separation of people from their loved onesand communities, including barring them from visiting dying spouses and parents and children in the hospital or even attending an outdoor burial.
So dogmatic was the dictate that we all stay at home that any attempt to question or even balance it — by, for instance, arguing that the harms of the virus had to be weighed against the suffering from an economic shutdown and a global depression — was deemed immoral. Those who questioned state-mandated lockdown and stay-at-home orders, let alone left their homes to actually protest against them, were condemned as sociopaths who were willing to sacrifice the lives of old people for economic prosperity or the trivial, troglodyte desire to go to Applebees. Oftentimes those protesting lockdowns were vilified as white nationalists or at least driven by white racialist sentiments (sometimes they were that, but often they were not).
People who left their homes for any reason other than officially approved “essential” functions were — no matter how careful they were — publicly shamed if not fined and arrested. A lawyer became famous and celebrated for dressing up as the Grim Reaper to shame people for being at even deserted beaches in the sun with ample social distancing. One particularly creepy video from a police department in the United Kingdom used drone footage to castigate and denounce people who did things like walk on nature trails or go for family drives:
….What has changed — dramatically, radically and abruptly — is the messaging from public health experts and even public officials about the virus. Beginning roughly two weeks ago, we all watched as mass stay-at-home orders and self-isolation gave way to massive street protests, where tens or hundreds of thousands of people gathered together in the U.S. and around the world, often one on top of the other, chanting, yelling and singing: a virtual laboratory for what we had spent four months hearing was exactly what one must not do in the middle of this pandemic.
Read the entire essay; Greenwald is one pissed-off, betrayed liberal.
For an example of how the liberal camp reverted to its original line at the end of this week compare Nicholas Kristof’s exultant tribute to his 88-year-old mother, one of the most vulnerable to Covid, breaking quarantine to join the infected on June 4th, and Stephen Miller and Jeremy Wallace renewed scolding of the masses on June 10th.
And with that shift, the lying and hysteria-inducing posts have resumed. Wallace, for instance, shrieks about a record number of new hospitalizations for the past three days in Texas, but doesn’t say what those numbers are. in Texas’s case, 106, 72 and 98 on June 9, 10, and 11, respectively. The population of Texas in 2020 is 28,966,000. A two-second search produced those numbers, and Wallace could have easily, but didn’t, include those numbers to give perspective. That’s not in the game plan.
If anything good has come out of this virus it’s the stripping away of the last shreds of credibility once accorded the press and public health authorities. Time and again they’ve been exposed as know-nothings posing as knowledgeable experts, partisan hacks vs objective observers. Many conservatives have known this truth for decades, which may account for the blue/red divide in how the population has reacted to this panic, but now the rest of the country is beginning to discern it. I don’t see how that faith will ever be restored. Or at least I hope it won’t be.
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