Price cut on Finney Knoll

3 Finney Knoll, “new” construction, from $3.999 million to $3.795. This was a 1840 house in deplorable condition when a local builder purchased it for $800,000 in 2006. He proceeded, verrry slowly, to add on a modern house attached to the original, but by 2023 that project was still unfinished — I believe the builder was living and bathing in the kitchen, for example, and there were numerous code violations in the work that had been done. A years-long effort to complete a short sale failed and the title was eventually turned over to the lender.

That bank put it on the market in January 2023 at $750,000, a low price designed to attract higher bids, and it did. Two of my clients looked at it separately and passed; they were each of the opinion, as was I, that the property was fairly priced at $750,000, especial;y given the unknown of how much of the original builder’s work would need to be replaced and redone (almost al of it) and neither wanted to play a part in a greater fool adventure.

But many did, and this owner was the lucky winner. He might get this price — it’s a frenzied market, and the ability to hop over the fence and shop at Balducci’s may prove a strong draw — but I’m guessing somewhere closer to $3.2’s going to take it, eventually.

January, 2023: “Needs some TLC”

Fado Friggin' Lane?

1 Fado Lane has sold for $3.275 million. I get it, sort of, because its builder paid $850,000 for the land in 2023, and if you apply the once-standard 1/3-1/3-: Land; cost of construction; overhead and profit formula, this is about where you end up, but I once wrote an article for Greenwich Magazine listing my favorite streets, and Fado was one of them. Inexpensive homes, a real sense of neighborhood, an annual block party; just a nice little enclave for those tired of the frippery of Mead Point and Belle Haven.

Time marches on.

Buy in haste, repent at leisure

The owner of 25 Upper Cross Road, an 11-acre building lot in Conyers Farm paid $5.475 million for it in June 2021, immediately regretted doing so, and put it back up for sale in September that year for $5.875. He’s had to drop his price over the ensuing years, down to $4.995, and a buyer has now finally showed up and signed on.

Final price to be revealed at sale, but it’s unlikely to be higher than the ask.

He doesn't grasp American college students's attention span

Poor guy; he doesn’t understand that America’s privileged juveniles’ violent support for Hamas today will have long since faded by the time Iran gets its act together and attacks the US; not that the children won’t cheer when it happens, but they’ll have gone on to the next passion, just as we’ve witnessed the passing of 2020’s BLM parades, the Occupy Wall Street frolics of 2011, and the goldfish swallowing contests of the 30s (which got its start at Harvard, naturally, when one Lothrop Withington Jr. took on the piscatorial challenge on a dare).

Look, Foad, the children you’re counting on for support have the attention span of any other 3-year-olds, and their commitment to any particular cause is as profound and ephemeral as that displayed by these Oberlin students back in 2015:

Oberlin College Students Protest The Cafeteria Food Not Being "Culturally Accurate" Enough, Demand To Be Paid An Hourly Wage For Their Protesting

National ReviewThe Oberlin College Black Student Union has released a list of 50 “Institutional Demands” for the school, including one that orders it to pay black students who organize protests $8.20 per hour for doing so.

The 14-page document opens with this nice buzzword salad:

Oberlin College and Conservatory is an unethical institution From capitalizing on massive labor exploitation across campus, to the Conservatory of Music treating Black and other students of color as less than through its everyday running, Oberlin College unapologetically acts as [sic] unethical institution, antithetical to its historical vision.

“This institution functions on the premises of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy,” it continues.

Other demands on the list include one for the “establishment of special, segregated black-only ‘safe spaces’ across campus” and a “40 percent increase in the number of black students in the school’s jazz department by 2022.”

NY PostStudents at an ultra-liberal Ohio college are in an uproar over the fried chicken, sushi and Vietnamese sandwiches served in the school cafeterias, complaining the dishes are “insensitive” and “culturally inappropriate.”

I only hope that kids rioting today can keep their enthusiasm through August, so they’ll be willing to abandon the beach and travel to Chicago to create colorful convention scenes for consideration by this fall’s voters.

If Columbia still had a reputation to salvage, this should finish it

Dispatches from the revolutionaries Lost & Fund chat. I’m not sure which is funnier, the “solidarity pig’s” missing suicide vest, or the person wondering where the homeless, non-gendered bum she gave her credit card to has gone*, but they all shine a light on the quality of students that Columbia’s been admitting these days.

UPDATE: I’ve realized that I’m guilty of missing the satire going on in those two particular posts. Columbia does have some bright wits (Brother Anthony being an older example of the type), and “Business Majors Against Capitalism” and a martyr’s vest festooned with toy hand grenades should have triggered my satire alert warning. Likewise, the poor dear missing her daddy’s Amex Centurion Card — winning through ridicule, and I missed it. On the other hand, how often are the Bee’s best efforts trumped by reality? The world is getting too absurd to distinguish fact from fiction.

And this is just heart-breaking, although I suspect it was posted by some jokester — funny either way, though

RELATED?

Liberal White Women 'Are Just Really Into Hamas'

Especially, it seems, liberal Jewish girls, but if gay transvestites can cheer for their own destruction, why shouldn’t they and their Long Island shiksa friends be allowed their moment in the sun?

The Cloward-Piven Strategy* is alive and well

useful idiot

Illegals Cause $560M+ Loss to Fla. Hospitals This Year

And that’s just this year, and just one state. This has been building since Biden opened the borders on his first day in office, and the damage is accelerating.

Catharine Salgado, PJ Media:

Manatee Memorial Hospital CEO Tom McDougal noted at a recent county meeting that the hospital received $2.7 million in funding from the county in 2023. However, the hospital spent $21.2 million in 2023 on uninsured care costs, predominantly to illegals, compared to $14.4 million in 2021, the Herald-Tribune reported on April 18…Florida is hardly the only state throwing millions in state funding at health care for illegals. In March 2023, Fox News reported that between December 2021 and November 2022, Yuma Regional Medical Center in Yuma, Arizona, had spent $26 million on migrants who did not pay for the services.

Salgado: That has likely increased astronomically, as Arizona has been a hotspot of the border crisis in 2024. But every state is a border state now. Arizona, Florida, Texas, Virginia, California, Montana, New York — everywhere in the country illegals are coming and draining resources.

Breitbart added a couple more state statistics and a federal statistic on illegal alien costs:

In January 2021, Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton estimated that the Lone Star State spent between $62-90 million per year to cover illegal aliens. Illinois reported an expenditure of $1.1 billion in 2022…Even as far back as 2018, the federal government was spending $18.5 billion to pay for hospitals and health care for illegal aliens…Early in 2023, the Federation for American Immigration Reform reported that illegal immigration was costing the nation’s hospital systems at least $23 billion annually — $8.2 billion of which is uncompensated medical care for illegal aliens.

* The term and its purpose explained here:

The four steps of the Cloward-Piven Strategy:
1. Overload and Break the Welfare System
2. Have Chaos Ensue
3. Take Control in the Chaos
4. Implement Socialism and Communism through Government Force

Overburden the bureaucracy to break the system, create controlled chaos, usurp power as civil unrest peaks, and offer government aid as the only solution. This was the basis behind the Cloward-Piven strategy created by sociologists Frances Fox Piven and her husband, Richard Cloward. The couple published their theory in The Nation Magazine on May 2, 1966, entitled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty.”

“[T]he strategy we propose, is a massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls,” the sociologists wrote in their theory. This theory aimed to overburden social programs at the state level to give the federal government the power to control the people.

“Widespread campaigns to register the eligible poor for welfare aid, and to help existing recipients obtain their full benefits, would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments. These disruptions would generate severe political strains, and deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the white working-class ethnic groups and the growing minority poor.”

Cloward and Piven noted that civil unrest was necessary to create change and encouraged the government to antagonize the masses. “The poor are most visible and proximate in the local community; antagonism toward them (and toward the agencies which are implicated with them) has always, therefore, been more intense locally than at the federal level.” As the anger brews and protests erupt, the government will lasso in the masses, acted as both the hero and the villain.

“In order to generate a crisis, the poor must obtain benefits, which they have forfeited. Until now, they have been inhibited from asserting claims by self-protective devices within the welfare system: its capacity to limit information, to intimidate applicants, to demoralize recipients, and arbitrarily to deny lawful claims.”

Tell the people that they are victims and instill a sense of entitlement for their neighbor’s assets. Remind the people consistently that they are oppressed and only an equal distribution of wealth can save them from the confines of poverty. Cloward and Piven insisted that hard work could not “elevate the poor en-mass from poverty.”

“The ultimate objective of this strategy–to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income,” the theory clearly stated. The theory stated that the creation of unions was a good start to bargain collectively, but still not enough to solve poverty. “Union leaders have understood that their strength derives almost entirely from their capacity to provide economic rewards to members,” the theory noted. “A federal program of income redistribution has become necessary to elevate the poor en masse from poverty,” meaning a shift away from capitalism entirely.

Cloward and Piven stated that a minimum standard of living must be provided to the people through federal welfare. That right must be guaranteed to end oppression, thereby ensuring Guaranteed Basic Income. Furthermore, there could be no conditions for benefits as it “results in violations of civil liberties.” Therefore, expecting able-bodied people to work would be an attack on the welfare system. The sociologists insisted that most people were in fact eligible for welfare and encouraged the government to advertise in brochures, schools, stores, churches, civic centers, and public housing projects. They even advised the government to send people door-to-door to explain to people that they are oppressed and deserving of GBI as a “civil education drive will lend it legitimacy.”

“As the crisis develops, it will be important to use the mass media to inform the broader liberal community about the inefficiencies and injustices of welfare.” To succeed, the shift away from capitalism required “mass influence” and “publicly visible disruption.” “Crisis can occur spontaneously (e.g., riots) or as the intended result of tactics of demonstration and protest, which either generate institutional disruption or bring unrecognizable eruption to public attention.”

The bigger the crisis, the more power the government could usurp. They noted that politicians paid attention to massive uprisings, and they had been used to “reinforce the allegiance of growing ghetto constituencies to the national Democratic Administration.” The sociologists noted that the Conservative Republicans would decry a public welfare system and that the Democrats needed to appeal to the emotions of the people over logic. They also urged for “a coalition between poor whites and poor Negroes” to turn the race war into class warfare.

“Once eligibility for basic food and rent grants is established, the drain on local resources persists indefinitely.” Cloward and Piven wanted to overburden the welfare system at the state level to eliminate state rights. Therefore, under this theory, government is encouraged to market a crisis, antagonize the people, and offer a solution. The only solution being to replace capitalism with socialism or communism by which the people would be entirely dependent on government. You will own nothing and be happy.

Back for more on Byram Shore

200 Byram Shore Road, originally listed for $7.6 million in 2019 and passing through several brokers and price suggestions ever since, is back again with another agent and a new, improved price of $5.495. It’s not a bad house at all, designed in a style sure to meet the approval of many Byram residents, and even perhaps, buyers who missed out on 86 Lockwood Road.

There are rver views, but no access, although that’s not much of an issue because the Port Chester sewer plant across the river has long made recreational use of the Byram problematical:

Port Chester Harbor: The Port Chester Harbor is one of ten maritime centers on the Long Island Sound. The popularity of recreational boating is reflected in maritime-related uses along the Byram River shoreline. NYSDEC tested the Harbor for pollutants and listed floatable and pathogens as high priority issues. As such, the harbor is unfit for swimming most days.

That might sound a bit discouraging, but you can still boat on the river, and the “floatables” referred to are easily spotted and avoided; they really don’t smell that much, either. On most days. In the winter.