Shocker: two below-ask sales

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44-40 Mayo Avenue, Belle Haven, has sold for just $21.250 million on a guide price of $24.9. It’s comforting to know that there are still bargains to be had out there.

And a ranch house at 47 Husted Lane only fetched $6.650 million instead of its asked-for $7.450. That’s probably because it was described as “sun-filled” instead of “sun-drenched”. It’s not often that you see one of our finest professionals, Sally Maloney, make such a rookie error, but perhaps she was just being daring and stepping outside convention.

Pending in Old Greenwich

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24 Rocky Point Road, listed at $5.150 million but gone in 8 days, so we can assume it;’s fetching more. Owners paid $4.3 in October ‘24 and painted it white, and put it back on the market, so not bad, depending on how much Sherwin Williams charges for Arctic White these days.

Described as “sun-drenched” and located on “one of the most coveted streets in Greenwich”, because of course is: in the wacky world of real estate clichease, every house is both of those.

Rocky Point Road may in fact be the most coveted street in an AE flood zone — I haven’t checked the numbers — but this house was built in 1932, and it didn’t float away in the hurricane of 38, or Donna in 1960, or Sandy in 2012 — or if it did, it was placed back on its foundation — so water wings and a Zodiac inflatable should see you through.

A tad pricey, but I'd buy it in a heartbeat (so don’t forget to hit my donation button to the right)

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I went with Gideon on a lightning tour of Caroline McNally’s new listing at 380 North Street, yesterday, priced at $28.5 million — I don’t think I’ve seen a finer house in all my years in this racket. Designed by Mark Finlay and custom built by Hobbs for these owners in 2008, every room is just about perfect; Finlay has the ability that I haven’t seen except in Alex Kaali-Nagy designs, to build rooms that feel right-sized for humans: no matter how large a particular room is, and there are several of them here, they all still manage to feel comfortable and inviting. Too many of the Greenwich mega-mansions I’ve been in over the years are really just Costco warehouses with expensive wallpaper. Not this one.

Hobbs always builds a fine house, but they’ve outdone themselves here: beautiful moldings and finishes, antique oak flooring, solid doors, and quality windows that those of us on Anderson budgets would never recognize.

Gideon tells me that Hobbs, like a number of top builders will, for a fee, come back to a house they’ve built and bring it back to its original perfection; I don’t know whether it was Hobbs who did that work here, but someone did; I initially mistook this for new construction, not an 18-year-old house, because it looks and feels as fresh as the day it was built, which, at this price, I suppose it had better.

And then there’s the view: the house is on the top of the hill, high enough to offer a sweeping view of Long Island Sound, the Stamford skyline, and maybe the Manhattan skyline as well (if not, a stealthy nighttime visit to the neighbor’s yard by your gardner armed with some tree poison would do the trick).

12,00 square feet, 5+ acres, fabulous property. The pictures at the link don’t capture how magnificent this place is; if you look at them, you’ll probably react as I did: yeah, yeah, very nice, but I’ve seen essentially the same pictures of every other house priced from $10 million up. But this one is better than those, and that’s not the fault of the photographer, it’s just that the house has to be walked through and felt to really appreciate what’s here, and I don’t believe any photograph can capture that.

I’ve ever gushed about a house before, and almost certainly won’t do so again – it would ruin my image as a curmudgeon — but this one is truly very, very special.

Benjamin Street sale

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67 Benjamin Street, 1942 construction, punkah cooling system, was listed at $2.995 million, Gideon’s buyers paid $3.2, just because they were feeling generous. Plans are to fix it up, rent it for a few years, and then build new. Which I suspect was the original intention of the builder who paid $1.375 for the property in 2020, and then realized he could just collect his winnings at the counter without ever lifting a hammer.

punkah fan

So, back from a flying trip to Greenwich and back to blogging.

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Pal Nancy was passing through Riverside after spending time with friends on the Cape, so I took advantage of her proximity — it’s quite a bit farther to Colorado — and we caught up. Nancy was effortlessly picked up at and returned to LaGuardia by Lou Van Leeuwen’s Luxury Car Service by the way, and reports “what a wonderful man Lou is”. That’s true, he is; book accordingly.

I also deliberately stayed away from all new on the internet for the past 2 1/2 days, and wasn’t that refreshing. I went back on this morning and nothing’s changed, same old outrages, same old, same old. Oh well, let’s try to get back into things by discussing real estate first, as a warm-up.

And therein lies the problem: who would commit to any fossil fuel project when the next administration is going to stop it?

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now-shuttered phillips 66 los angeles refinery, february 27, 2026

Refineries, pipelines, power plants, hydro-dams, mines, development of new internal combustion engines

THE OIL IS NO GOOD AT THE PUMP IF YOU CAN’T REFINE IT INTO GAS OR DIESEL:

continued… It's not feedstocks. The US can get all the crude oil it needs in this hemisphere; supply chain disruption at Hormuz mainly affects the Europeans and China. (The Iran War isn't about oil, it's about preventing insane religious fanatics from getting nukes.)

No, the main reason gas prices keep going up is a squeeze in U.S. refinery capacity. Who in their right mind would commit the huge lump of capital it takes to build a new refinery just to have it shut down by anti-CO2 nutballs the next time the Democrats are running the federal government?

This is a justified fear. The state of California shut down two major oil refineries and now has to import gas, very expensively. Which they blame on greedy Big Oil, because of course they do.

For gas prices to come down, potential refinery builders have to believe they'll get their capital investment back. That means we need a major change towards a more permissive regulatory environment.

The Republicans have had two years in power to enact into law the reforms Trump made via executive orders, and failed to act. At the very least, solidifying those orders into statutes would have made them more difficult to reverse the instant the next Democrat president is sworn in. The refusal to do so says all we need to know about both parties’ devotion to keeping government exactly the way it is and they way they like it.

Delay, delay, delay — the Democrats' (and a critical core of Republicans’) judicial game plan wins again

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Enjoin the Trump administration in every way until we regain power and can make certain this assault on our deep state never occurs again. This decision makes that day grow closer.

The Supreme Court Just Ruled Against Election Security

On Monday evening, the U.S. Supreme Court denied the Trump administration's emergency request to allow the U.S. Postal Service's (USPS) new ballot-mail rule to take effect for the 2026 elections.

The ruling leaves U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani's preliminary injunction in place and effectively means the rule will not govern the November midterms.

The decision has allowed a lower court ruling to stay in place that blocked the federal government from only delivering ballots to individuals who were verified registered voters in their respective states.

Justice Kavanaugh concurred with the ruling provided by the majority, saying that the new rule imposed by the United States Postal Service may be legal, but the move was made too close to the midterm election.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito were the lone dissenters in the case. Alito took aim at Kavanaugh’s decision in his dissent, claiming that the courts were to blame for the case coming before the Supreme Court so close to Election Day.

The ruling deals a significant blow to Republicans who hoped to rein in mail-in ballots after Republican leadership in the Senate failed to advance election security measures before the election.

Sponges gotta sponge

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Trump Admin Invokes Law to Boot Welfare-Reliant Foreigners. Mamdani Is Furious.

As soon as the Trump administration invoked a law allowing the denial of taxpayer-funded benefits to foreigners who are living off our money and not contributing to our nation, New York socialists freaked out and sued. In fact, the Trump administration confirmed that 22 states have already joined the lawsuit.

Responding to a Polymarket report that 22 states were bringing suit against the Trump administration for enforcing the 19th-century law, the Department of Homeland Security posted, “Let’s get this straight, sanctuary states are terrified they will lose federal funds because hundreds of thousands of illegals and noncitizens might remove themselves from American welfare programs. This is the ideological contortion required by left-wing leaders to justify their defrauding of the American taxpayer at the hands of illegal criminals. DHS has heard for months that illegal aliens weren’t using these very same welfare programs. So, which is it?”

🚨BREAKING: The Trump Administration has invoked the long-unenforced Immigration Act of 1882 to prohibit entry into the United States of “any convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” Ultimately, this will allow the Trump Administration to deny green cards to immigrants who are likely to use federal welfare, food stamps, or Medicaid, and to revoke the green cards of immigrants who are currently using these programs. The new rule is set to take effect Friday, September 18. As a result, 5.6 million immigrants are expected to lose access to those benefits, and American taxpayers are expected to save $13 billion per year. Follow: @MorseReport

— Morse Report (@MorseReport) September 14, 2026

And:

‘ANTI-DEMOCRATIC’: Nonprofits That Received Tax Dollars Unite to Oppose Rules Cracking Down on Waste, Fraud, and Abuse

And:

Stephen Green:

DEMOCRATS HAD JUST TWO YEARS UNDER BIDEN TO JACK UP SPENDING, AND AFTER FOUR YEARS, THE GOP STILL LACKS THE GUTS TO FIGHT THE RATCHET EFFECT: Congress mum on federal deficit hitting $2 trillion milestone, again.

The federal government has collected $4.8 trillion and spent $6.8 trillion, generating a deficit already higher than last year’s with still a month of borrowing to go.

“Such extraordinarily high deficits are just one piece of our fiscal situation that is falling apart,” Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said.

“The gross national debt recently hit the sobering milestone of $40 trillion; we’re now spending more on yearly interest costs than on our national defense; debt held by the public exceeds the size of our entire economy; and trust funds for programs that tens of millions of Americans rely on face insolvency in less than a decade.”

As of Thursday afternoon, however, even the so-called Republican “deficit hawks” in Congress haven’t responded to the news, following a pattern of lawmakers largely disregarding soaring deficit spending.

“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop,” the wise man once said.

In fact, it's a great ad for every group that opposes the new world order, Europe, Britain or the United States

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