Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more.
Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more
67 Pecksland Road, a 1930 home completely restored in 2004, has sold for $5.425 million. That’s not the $7.150 the seller paid for it in 2006, nor is it the $8.750 he looked for in 2016, but Pecksland doesn’t seem to be commanding the prices it once did; I don’t know why.
218 Valley Road, currently asking $1.545 million. I wrote about this house a couple of weeks ago after it had cut its price to this current one. It’s a good property, completely rebuilt/renovated/expanded back in 2013. This owner paid $1.525 for it then, added his improvements, and put it back up for sale in June 2019 at $1.750. That was apparently more than the market was willing to pay, but $1.545 (or, presumably, somewhat less) was the right price.
I think these buyers are doing well here.
28 Pheasant Lane, $2.950 million, under contract after 17 days. Good street, charming, 1942 house on 1.5 acres (in the 2-acre zone, but still FAR left), will it survive? We’ll have to wait and see.
It’s my friend Sally Maloney’s listing, so maybe I’ll do something daring, like call her and ask.
UPDATE: I did hear from Sally last evening, and she tells me that the purchasers are a young couple who love the house; hooray! Sally also reports that she had 22 showings in 5 days, so apparently the market remains hot, and demand for older homes is, if anything, stronger than it’s been in some time. For a while, now, the demand has been for houses built or extensively renovated in the past ten years. And in the $2.5 range, though those are scarce.
OMG, I’m gonna die! LOLLOLLOLLOL!
They’re not buying into it. The AP offers a fair report, though with a strong whiff of disapproval: “Surging virus cases get a shrug in many midwestern towns”
ELMWOOD, Neb. (AP) — Danny Rice has a good sense of how dangerous the coronavirus can be.
What puzzles him are the people who have curtailed so much of their lives to avoid being infected by the virus.
“I’m not going out and looking to catch it,” he said, sitting at a cluttered desk in his auto repair shop in the tiny eastern Nebraska community of Elmwood. “I don’t want to catch it. But if I get it, I get it. That’s just how I feel.”
Plenty of people agree with Rice, and health experts acknowledge those views are powering soaring COVID-19 infection rates, especially in parts of the rural Midwest where the disease is spreading unabated and threatening to overwhelm hospitals.
It’s not that people in Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa and elsewhere don’t realize their states are leading the nation in new cases per capita. It’s that many of them aren’t especially concerned.
Wayne County, home to 6,400 people in southern Iowa, has the state’s second-highest case rate, yet its public health administrator, Shelley Bickel, says mask-wearing is rare. She finds it particularly appalling when she sees older people, who are at high risk, shopping at a grocery store without one.
“I just want to get on the speaker and say, ‘Why don’t you have your mask on?’ It’s just amazing,” Bickel said.
Jenna Lovaas, public health director of Jones County, Iowa, said even now that her rural county has the state’s highest virus rate, people have opted not to make any changes, such as protecting themselves and others by wearing masks.
“They don’t think it’s real,” she said. “They don’t think it’s going to be that bad or they just don’t want to wear a mask because we’ve made it a whole political thing at this point.”
In part, though, some of those views are hard to fight because of the reality that many people have no symptoms, and most of those who do get sick recover quickly. And treatment advances mean that those who become seriously ill are less likely to die from the virus than when it first emerged in the spring. Even though cases and the death toll are rising, infectious disease experts note that death rates appear to be falling.
Like most people, Jay Stibbe, 52, of Fargo, North Dakota, said he and his family are respectful of COVID-19 protocols and wear masks where required. However, Stibbe said he doesn’t see enough “concrete information” about the virus to stop him from going about his normal life, even though North Dakota leads the nation in the number of virus cases per capita.
In Plattsmouth, Nebraska, Karen Prohaska, 76, said she generally doesn’t wear a mask in her downtown purse and jewelry shop but will put one on at the request of a customer. When customers come into the store with a face covering, she asks if they’d like her to don one as well. Most say no and ask if it’s OK for them to remove theirs.
“I hope that I don’t get the virus, but I’ve never really been a germophobe,” Prohaska said.
The pandemic hasn’t stopped Mary Gerteisen, of Eagle, Nebraska, from visiting her 96-year-old father on weekends to watch football. Gerteisen said she understands the risks, given her father’s age and vulnerability, but she also weighed the fact that he’s in the early stages of dementia and often believes family members have abandoned him.
“There are times when I think that I do need to take the pandemic more seriously,” she said. “But I want to see my dad, and I don’t know much longer I have with him. I would love for him to live to 100-some years old, but if he comes down with (the virus), he’s lived a good, long life.”
I wish the reporter had also asked her interviewees about their political and religious leanings because I suspect she was speaking with Republicans and, perhaps, people with a strong faith. Democrats lean heavily towards demanding that the government protect them from all risks, and in those states with Democrat governors, the government is happy to oblige: shelter-in-place mandates are surging faster than new positive-test rest results for Whu Hu Flu.
As this pandemic has gone on, it’s become evident that Progressives, even young cubbies who have essentially zero chance of getting seriously ill, fear COVID far more than their less-enlightened fellows. I can’t account for their irrational fear, other than to point out that these people have irrational feelings about lots of things, but I’m struck by the question, what are these people so desperate to cling on to? Progressives seem to me to live a drab, humorless, joyless existance, one governed by guilt, anger, and fear of social disapproval of their peers — what’s fun about that?
There might well be a life after this one, but even if there isn’t, do you want to spend this one locked alone in your Prius and muttering from behind your Dr. Faucci-approved mask, “that’s not funny!”?
Better, I think, to go visit your 96-year-old father and reassure him that his family hasn’t deserted him. You’ll both be happier, and maybe even live longer.
I’m as disappointed with the presidential election result as any thinking person is, but it looks like the Democrats’ mail-in voting, same-day registration and ballot harvesting plans achieved their aims, and, as Nixon said when he declined to challenge Illinois’ and Texas’ corrupt vote count, “they stole it fair and square”.
If there were provable fraud (emphasis on provable), the time to produce the evidence showing that has passed. Rudy’s claim that he’s got irrefutable proof” but isn’t ready to show his hand is too late. And too little (no little, in fact).
Rudy, it’s been two weeks; the country’s mostly come to accept that we’re going to have a Kampallawalla Wing Doodle caretaker presidency for the next few years, and no judge is going to risk tearing this country further apart by reversing the election now. Yet Rudy persists with allegations of fraud, but no proof:
President Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani on Sunday insisted that the presidential election would be “overturned,” claiming he had “evidence” that “corrupt machines” had deleted millions of votes for Trump — but couldn’t share it.
Now Sidney Powell, an attorney I deeply respect, has joined the Trump/Giuliani and she, too, has “irrefutable proof” of fraud, but isn’t ready to reveal what it is.
On to Georgia, on to 2022.
I’d need a note from my teachers, and they won’t give me one
He admits that schools “are not the force driving infection”, but close they must.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) on Friday acknowledged that school districts in New York City will close on Monday because of high community spread even though they aren't the driving force behind the Big Apple's Wuhan coronavirus infection rate.
"Are schools going to close Monday if we top three percent?" MSNBC host Katy Tur asked.
"Yup," he replied flatly.
According to Cuomo, his office set parameters for schools being open or closed and then local governments set their own guidelines with individual school districts.
"New York City set three percent as the agreement. If the number goes over three percent – and, by the way, [three percent] is very low, almost 80 percent of the states are above three percent, three percent is a low number – but, if it goes over three percent, schools will close," he explained. "The question then will be how quickly can we reopen them?
"We've learned a lot over the past few months. We do a tremendous amount of testing in the schools and what we've learned, Katy, is we're not seeing spread in the schools. You see a very low percentage of positivity in the schools so even though you have a jurisdiction that may be at three percent that doesn't mean the schools are what's spreading it," the governor explained. "We have to take that into consideration and that will facilitate a reopening.
The puzzled MSNBC host asked what we're all wondering: if schools aren't the force behind community spread, why close them? Cuomo said it's because the three percent community spread is the threshold school districts, local governments, teachers' unions and parents came to when the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic first hit earlier this year.
So an agreement reached with the teachers’ unions last spring when little was known about COVID or how it was spreading (Cuomo was still urging New Yorkers to ride the subway down to China Town, for example), can’t be changed 9 months later? Any guess who’s behind this inflexibility? Is there a politically-powerful group out there that enjoys being paid for doing nothing and staying home? I’ll go look.
Biden endorser Dr. Fauci says “Now is the time for Americans to do as they’re told”.
Who would listen to this man, let alone follow his dictates? Or for that matter, Ezekiel “Dr. Death” Emanuel, Biden’s chief health advisor, who is calling for a 12-18-month lockdown? Democrats, mostly. The latest Gallop poll shows 87% of Democrats would obey a shelter in place shutdown order, vs 40% of Republicans.
Why the difference? I suspect there are a couple of reasons. First, Democrats can afford to stay home. Once a party with at least a claimed affinity with blue-collar workers, Democrats are now elite, pule-nibbling surrender monkeys, who can stay home, work remotely, and order in deliveries of food and meals from those “black-lady shelf-stockers” their man Biden mentions. so staying home will pose no particular hardship. And they have the savings to smooth over any rough spots; no living paycheck-to-paycheck for the New Democrats.
More importantly, I think, is that Democrats are now socialists, especially the younger members. They expect, and demand, cradle-to-grave security, and are willing to trade personal freedom for promises of guaranteed food, shelter, medical care, and income (that they expect those things to be delivered at a high level of quality is laughable, but what are dreams for, if not to lead sheep to the slaughter?)
Add to the mix the enforced group-think and virtue signaling these Democrats have been subjected to during their entire educational experience (Virginia is now mandating social justice [sic] and slavery lessons in kindergarten: "Sugarcoating or ignoring slavery until later grades makes students more upset by or even resistant to true stories about American history”), and it’s a wonder that 13% of Democrats still want to think for themselves.
9 West End Avenue, asking $1.990 million. A surprising renovation of a 1908 home, it works for me, especially when you consider its convenient location, walkable to anything worth walking to in the Village.
480 Cognewaugh Road, purchased for $2.875 in 2005, has sold for $2.186 million. And that’s after the owners put in a pool and added on.
Windy, narrow Cognewaugh is not for every buyer, and this home’s design is a bit, er, eccentric, but there’s a lot of it, for this price.
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