Sale Prices reported

looking for mr. goodbar

40 Howard Road, $4.450 million on an asking price of $4.495. As I mentioned in a previous post, the owner, Mr. Paul Steed is temporarily unavailable for comment but should be back around in five years — a little less, perhaps, depending on good behavior.

29 Hunting Ridge Road, guide price $3.495 million, final price $4.020

The Gullibles and the Profiteers “California really is the land of the golden OUGHT, which exists in opposition to the old cold IS.”

Start with this AI summary, because it does a pretty good job of summarizing how this fraud started (spoiler alert: government money)

AI Overview

The landmark Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act passed in 2008 required insurers to cover drug and alcohol treatment on par with medical care. While intended to help vulnerable populations, a lack of oversight and massive insurance payouts inadvertently sparked an explosion of rampant fraud, particularly in "sober home" and treatment networks. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Unscrupulous actors and "body brokers" capitalized on the new law through several highly lucrative, illegal schemes: [1, 2, 3]

  • Patient Brokering & Kickbacks: Centers and sober homes paid illegal bribes and kickbacks (e.g., free rent, cash, or travel) to recruiters or the patients themselves. Patients were then cycled through multiple rehabs simply to bill their insurance. [1, 2]

  • Billing for Ghost Services: Facilities billed private insurance and state programs for expensive treatments and therapies that were never provided, or for care from clinics that were already closed. [1, 2]

  • Fraudulent Urine Drug Testing: Many centers charged insurers exorbitant amounts for highly frequent, unnecessary drug testing, sometimes billing for as many tests as possible without possessing licensed professionals on staff. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

  • Intentional Relapse: In the most extreme cases, corrupt operators actively encouraged patients to relapse and bought multiple health insurance policies in the patients' names to maximize fraudulent billing potential. [1, 2, 3]

The combination of the parity law and the subsequent Affordable Care Act provisions opened a floodgate of easy insurance dollars. This turned localized, scrappy addiction recovery networks into multi-billion dollar industries, resulting in a wave of federal indictments, FBI investigations, and state crackdowns. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

The fraud extends nationwide — Florida’s a hotbed of for-profit rehab centers as is Portland, Maine, and pretty much everywhere between. Here’s the Substack essay, focused on California, that triggered this post this morning:

Constituencies

…..

….. So: Arresting drug addicts who use in city parks or intervening in their drug abuse and self-destructive behavior in any negative way is cruel. Helping and supporting them, bringing food to their tents in the park where they do drugs all day, is being warm and kind.

This is the premise we’re operating on in Los Angeles: enabling behavior is decency. You give things to the homeless, and support their choice, and protect them from consequences that might follow their own behavior. Mean vs. nice.

There are a few wrinkles, though.

First, the practice called “harm reduction” pays, and harm reduction needs addicts. It’s a lucrative industry. “The Skid Row Care Campus, located at 442 S. Crocker Street in Los Angeles, costs approximately $26 million a year to operate, according to the LA County Department of Health Services. It is run by three nonprofits: Homeless Health Care Los Angeles, Social Model Recovery Systems, and Wesley Health Centers. The facility distributes needles, pipes, aluminum foil, and condoms as part of its harm reduction services.”

Second, the giant RV encampments are a business. “Vanlords” buy old RVs and rent them, on the street and without services like sewage hook-ups or water, to the homeless. They’re often towed into place, because they don’t work. The thing being rented is the shell, the walls and the roof. When you see people living in poverty and desperation in ratty old dark RVs, dumping human waste in the street, that’s somebody’s rent farm.

Third, “body brokers” recruit drug addicts all over the country and ship them to Los Angeles so rehab facilities can bill health insurance for them. This is how so many drug addicts end up in California. I hadn’t realized until tonight, but this practice has become so obvious that even Hollywood noticed.

Fourth, drug addiction is married to sex trafficking. Five minutes around Skid Row or MacArthur Park make this obvious, unless you’re a very important journalist and you work for the New York Times, in which case it’s a dark MAGA conspiracy theory.

The city put a bunch of portable toilets on the streets in Skid Row, a decade ago, but removed them because they had doors that latched. Guess how that ended. From the Los Angeles Times, back when they still allowed themselves to notice the city:

A few hours after a homeless guy named Virgil died of an overdose in the portable toilet, the blue plastic outhouse at 6th and San Julian streets was back in business. Not as a toilet, but as a house of prostitution.

Five portable toilets stand at that corner in the darkened heart of skid row. T.J. says she sometimes has a customer in each of them -- a john in every john -- and scurries from one to the next, taking care of business.

….

Pimps, drug dealers, vanlords, body brokers, harm reduction NGOs with budgets for free needles: There’s money to be made. Unless somebody takes it all away.

Homelessness is the foundation of a predatory culture. It’s a locus of profound and sustained predation. And California is full of warm and kind people who are…helping. You know, “helping.” They’re very angry at Spencer Pratt for being so mean.

We’ll see.

(Just one) Example:

$26M Skid Row campus: Violence, drug use surge at 'Meth Mansion' as officials stay silent

Published May 29, 2026 6:07 PM PDT

LOS ANGELES - A taxpayer-funded homeless services campus in the heart of Skid Row is at the center of a growing controversy, as dramatic video shows open drug use and drug deals just steps from its entrance. The Los Angeles Police Department reported a surge in violent crime, including four homicides in four months, and community leaders say they warned city and county officials years ago that this was coming.

….

The Skid Row Care Campus, located at 442 S. Crocker Street in Los Angeles, costs approximately $26 million a year to operate, according to the LA County Department of Health Services. It is run by three nonprofits: Homeless Health Care Los Angeles, Social Model Recovery Systems, and Wesley Health Centers. The facility distributes needles, pipes, aluminum foil, and condoms as part of its harm reduction services.

…..

According to federal tax records reviewed by FOX 11, Homeless Health Care Los Angeles has seen its revenue grow from $3.2 million in 2011 to more than $20.6 million in fiscal year 2024, with nearly 96% coming from government sources.

And it's back again

7 Loch Lane is coming on the market with a guide price of $13.495 million. Long time readers will remember this house as it struggled through the years; listed in 2003 for $13.995 while still under construction, its builders ran out of money while it was still half-finished and it sat empty for years, a crumbling monument to underfunding and a deteriorating market.

The lender WaMu, had its own difficulties — it failed in 2007 — the loan was transferred to some other bank, and eventually the builders signed it over to their creditor. That institution completed the project in 2019 and sold it to the current owners in 2020 for $6.9 million. No mention is made of any improvements performed on the place since the bank’s contractors left, so we’ll assume that the $13.495 price represents what the owners feel is an appropriate appreciation and inflation rate, and perhaps it is.

I’m pretty sure that the garden the listing agent has included in her illustrations is the product of wishful thinking and the liberal use of artificial intelligence, so I’ve felt free to improve on her efforts.

Old Greenwich contract

13 Mortimer Drive, currently priced at $2.395; surprisingly, it had to take price cut some weeks ago from it’s opening guide price of $2.495. 1921 construction, although upgrades have been performed since that time, no garage, 0.12 acre. Easy water access; in fact judging from its location in the VE Flood Zone and the home’s Elevation Certificate, it’s likely that the water will come to you.

Don't count on it — the force is strong in this Blue State

Matt Margolis:

Graham Platner's Senate Campaign Is Finished

Oh, really? Here’s a more realistic view, in my opinion:

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING:

Graham Platner Is Not an Outlier in the Democratic Party. “What the few remaining normie Democrats don’t understand is that the coastal Dems are OK with Platner because he’s not that different than any of them. We’ve seen the hard turn to antisemitism that the Democrats have taken in recent years. They’ve been big defenders of the ‘Free Palestine’ campus Brownshirts. The only real difference between Platner and a lot of the Dems in D.C. is that he got the tattoo.”

Reader “Behind the Library” commented on yesterday post about this commie fraud:

Behind the Library17 hours ago

I don't know why anyone thinks Platner can't win the primary. His one viable opponent, Gov. Janet Mills, had no notable support from her party or its elders, ran no visible campaign at all, and dropped out weeks ago, though her name remains on the ballot. In a 25 mile loop through the towns of York, Kittery, and Eliot, I can count at least 100 Platner signs, zero Mills signs, and now, at last, two whole Susan Collins signs. Portland isn't the biggest media market in the country, but Platner is the largest single advertiser in that market, out-advertising all other candidates combined and most of the private sector business advertisers as well. His Nazi tattoo, his professed communism, his penchant for wanking in porta-loos, his infidelity (married three years and they've already been to marriage counseling), his contempt for and smears of veterans, his fake oysterman personality (his only customer is his mother's restaurant, his dad bought him his house, and he went to prep school), matter not one whit.

He will win the primary on the votes of the young ignorant wokesters (but I repeat myself) of Portland and the old white red diaper/yellow dog Democrats of York County. He hates Trump, and that's all these people need to know. (It's also the entire platform of every Dem running in the primary for Governor, but that's for another day.) York and Cumberland counties between them are home to 38% of the population of the state, and they list heavily to port. So in a state-wide election, it doesn't much matter what the other 14 counties do: they can't overwhelm the Dem dominance in these two counties. I want to be wrong. I hope I am. But I doubt it.

As for the recently raised argument that after he wins the primary the elders will strongarm him into backing out and substitute somebody (any warm body would do, they say), Platner's self-regard is bigger than the state he claims he knows so much about. I doubt he'd withdraw. Could Collins beat him? Maybe. But we haven't yet factored in the probability of cheating in Portland come November.

Behind the Library’s experience is similar to mine: all Platner yard signs, even — especially – in the wealthier neighborhoods behind the Tofu Line, and those are usually planted in fron the most expensive homes.

As the primary draws near — June 9th (early voting began May 11th so the recent revelations of Platner’s sex posts — will have no effect on voters who have already sent in their ballots, not that they’s care about them anyway) — political discussions with liberal friends have spontaneously popped up; not on my volition, but I engage in them because I’m curious about why today’s liberal feels the way he/she/it does. And the operative word here is “feel” - there’s no real thinking going on, just a knee-jerk, reflexive reaction that’s firmly entrenched them in the most radical end of the political spectrum.

Most of those I talk with are, knowingly or unknowingly, socialists at best, and communists at worse. They reject capitalism, America, and the outdated Constitution that was designed and enacted by racist old white men specifically to protect and foster slavery. Yesterday, an acquaintance assured me that serfs of old had it better than today’s American poor because “they only worked 150 days a year, and the rest of the time they were at celebrating at church festivals and hrveat firs”.

Told that, in fact, the 100-150 number he’d been taught in school was the number of days the peasants were required to work on the land of their masters, and the rest of their time was spent trying to grow enough food for their own families, repairing their primitive hand tools, living single-room, dirt-floor shacks, and essentially starving. Infant mortality was 50%, 20% of women died in childbirth, and a serf who somehow survived to adulthood could expect to die between his 40th and 50th year. His only response to all of that? “Well, the US has one of the highest infant mortality rate among western countries” [0.05%, but don’t tell him that].

This person was, in my experience, no less educated than the average product our educational system has been spitting out over recent decades; in fact, I’d say he’s typical, 40-year-old college graduate. He intends to vote next Tuesday and so do his friends: they will not be voting for Platner’s opponent, Susan Mills.