Author: Greg Swann (page 10 of 209)

“Canadians are a lot like Americans, except they can save money and spell properly.”

That’s a joke I used to make with Canadian investors. This was 10+ years ago, and while it was arguably a fair-housing violation – nationality is trayf – it was demonstrably true at the time: Canadians had money to buy American houses when Americans did not.

Canadians have mattered to Phoenix since Phoenix was Pumpkinville – we are the southernmost city in Alberta – but perhaps never so much as now: Canada is losing its mind. It’s the same crap as here – underfathered wretches melting down over their desperate need for boundaries – but holiness spirals spiral best among the reliably rigorous.

So: Don’t pull out those ‘Reduced!’ riders just yet. With every burning church in the great white north, Canada may be cooking up a whole new batch of refugees.

In other news:

Hannah Cox: What Is the Great Resignation of 2021? (If You Don’t Know, You’ll Want to Read This).

Ronald Bailey: How Much Scientific Research Is Actually Fraudulent? It may be more than you think.

Christopher Rufo: The Enablers: Defending phantom freedoms, certain intellectuals usher in the concrete tyrannies of critical race theory.

Ashli Babbitt was slain in a police shooting so egregious that keeping it secret has become a “whole of government” priority. Former President Donald Trump acknowledged her murder this week – only six months late.

Last night on Fox News, Tucker Carlson finally admitted that Trump’s re-election was stolen – eight months ago.

If the audits come to something, that’s great. If enough of the stolen states become less-stealable, even better. But if you’re looking for leadership, Diogenes, your lamp needs recharging…

In other news:

Housing Wire: Homes are selling well over listing prices as buyers compete against each other.

Housing Wire: Biden renews push for housing in infrastructure plan.

The Daily Signal: San Francisco Political Leaders Out of Touch as City Descends Into Lawlessness.

City Journal: The Prosecutor Exodus: In an adverse political environment, experienced professionals are leaving the field—and crime is surging.

Matt Vespa: Twitter Thread Nails Why Trump Supporters Feel the Way They Do About the 2020 Election.

Julie Kelly: No Relief for Lego Man or Other January 6 Detainees.

I am enmired in a Batman story, and it’s making me cranky: I don’t like Batman. I don’t believe his motivation, and I would not respect it if I did. Batman is nuts, but Batman is also a schmoo.

But here’s the problem expressed generally: What will you do to defend your values when civil authority has abdicated its duty and civil order is thereby imperiled?

The question is inverted, a devolution in human social concourse: Until now, the promise of the police and the military was that they would obviate the need for defense of person and property among the rich and provide it to the poor. Now that these entities are turning their backs on you, what will you do instead?

Batman is both Irreproachable and Untouchable in one, a self-absolving berserker. Don’t be Batman. Batman is nuts. But do be prepared.

In other news:

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: New Listings of Homes For Sale Surpass 2019 Levels.

Redfin.com: Home Prices Rose Twice as Fast in Car-Dependent Neighborhoods as Transit-Accessible Areas During the Pandemic. They cannot not lie about the riots, even when it’s as plain as the nose on your face: Ants moved away from places Grasshoppers (i.e., potential rioters) can get to easily.

WolfStreet.com: Americans See the Raging Mania: “Bad Time to Buy a Home” & “Good Time to Sell a Home” Sentiments Spike to WTF Record.

City Journal: The Zoning Tax: In some American cities, regulation costs homebuyers hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Stacey Lennox: Putting Cameras in Classrooms May Be the Best Thing for Everyone—Especially Teachers.

The fear-porn media are aghast that China Joe plans to send vaccine cops door-to-door to track down the vax-resistant. Much rending of garments, but who didn’t see this coming?

More importantly: Who gives a shit?

If you don’t have a ‘No Soliciting’ sign at your door, it’s because you like awnings and security doors and satellite TV – and being closed on. In the age of SnooperCops, you may want to add ‘No Trespassing.’ Making war on my own kind – the spewers of verbiage – I might append ‘No Leafletting – Save a tree, no debris.’ And my all time favorite sign, seen long ago in a TV commercial, could wrap things up: ‘No Crybabies!’

Or: You could do what I do: Don’t answer the door.

I am a certified walking antique, but I am one with the smartphone ethic: Texting is immediate without being intrusive, so if I don’t know why you’re at my door – if you just showed up for whatever reason and rang the bell – I won’t be there to greet you.

At our place, a doorbell ring is either a delivery driver – than whom none are more forthcoming, nor quickly departing – or a solicitor who has now become a trespasser and who is no doubt a recidivist leafletter. I’ll stay where I am and sustain my concentration, thanks all the same – although I may in due course disable the bell; I’ve done that in other houses.

I do the same with my phone: If you’re not in my contacts, you’ll go to voicemail until you are. Likewise email. I am avidly attentive to my work, my clients, my agenda, but – for that reason – I shun every kind of spam.

As usual, I’m the systemic solution to the topical problem, but, even so, shunning particular busy-bodies is easy if you are already habitually shunning all busy-bodies.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Fannie Mae: Sellers still thriving as home prices stay high.

CNBC: U.S. housing shortage will be around for ‘years to come,’ says Taylor Morrison CEO.

Housing Wire: Read more

At the middle of the bell curve, appraisers are nerdy introverts who, for whatever reason, didn’t get college-tracked in high school.

Low-status nerdy introverts get picked on in school, and low-status nerdy introverts going to majority-minority (a masterpiece of modern ambiguity!) schools get persecuted. They get short-circuited out of high school before they even get the chance to get short-circuited out of college.

The appraiser licensing process is onerous, eliminating all aspirants who are not well prepared in intellectual capital and well supplied with spendable cash for what amounts to an apprenticeship to a poorly-paying tradesman’s job: Low dough, low status, high risk of conflict and litigation.

Now take the few black candidates who might have qualified for that gauntlet and destroy their prospects with high schools from hell.

I expect it makes no actual difference in housing evaluations, but that’s why there are so few black appraisers: Few black nerds make it out of high school whole – and those who do have much better prospects than grinding away pricing houses.

That argues that appraiser-licensing standards will be lowered to admit marginal candidates, which in turn argues that flesh-and-blood appraisers will be replaced by Automated Valuation Models – only as biased as the software and stone reliable – and then there will be no more appraisers.

But even then, majority-minority high schools will still be hell for everyone condemned to them.

In other news:

CNBC: Mortgage applications sink to their lowest level since before the pandemic hit.

Paul Bedard: Biden is gun salesman-in-chief, threats driving surge in purchases.

Matt Margolis: Wikipedia Co-Founder: Site Has Become ‘Thought Police’ That Shackles Conservative Viewpoints.

Jack Posobiec: America’s Ruling Class And China’s Ruling Class Are More Similar Than You Think.

Julie Kelly: 20 Questions for Nancy Pelosi About January 6.

The Epoch Times: Preschool and Kindergarten Enrollment Drops 13 Percent Nationally.

I have a listing at 12 Days On Market – literally my worst performance in years. It’s leased, so it’s being marketed to investors only. Were it vacant, it would have gone in the first weekend.

But: Still: I may have found the top of the market.

All real estate is hyper-local, by now. The recently-riotous real estate markets were caused by last summer’s riots, which in turn were caused by the Deep State’s need to purge itself of Donald Trump. This summer is more peaceful because there is no national election this year. Black Lives won’t Matter to Democrats again until 2022 and 2024.

But cities and states that actually enforce the laws will continue to fare better than those that don’t. The Ant exodus preceded the virus and the riots, and it will continue to slowly deflate those big Grasshopper bouncy-houses going forward.

As for my seller, the world is his oyster: The house should sell now; the rent prognosis is excellent. If it doesn’t, we can withdraw it, continue to operate it as a rental home and market it again later. A producing asset and zero urgency: Waiting is painless and could turn out to be enriching.

I don’t actually understand the idea of the cat-bird seat, but I figure this must be it…

In other news:

Kerry McDonald: How Cities Are Pushing Small Daycares Out of Business.

Stephen Moore: Whatever Happened to Property Rights?

Daniel Greenfield: Meet Amazon’s Radical New CEO.

Stephen Kruiser: Manhattan Institute Offers Toolkit for Parents to Fight Back Against Woke Schools.

As revisited yesterday, the fee estate is a defensible redoubt, a freehold – which may come to matter, alas, as it has many times in America’s past. But for most people, most of the time, detached and separated housing is simply the most practical way to have the most friction-free freedom while still reaping the benefits of low-overhead commerce.

Translation: How can you live free of your neighbors’ complaints about your dog’s barking or your kid’s loud music and still live close enough to civilization to have a job and snag some drive-thru?

You do it with your own dirt, that’s how.

Wall it, gate it, build an armory and an arsenal – or just play croquet in the back yard: It’s yours to do with as you choose, which is the point.

Multi-family housing lost its luster last year – it’s a disease vector, widely-known since Rome, at least – with 2021 piling its own rubble onto the pile. When I lived in Fun City, the drummers would typically stop practicing around 3 am, and the opera singers wouldn’t get started much before 5, so there was always plenty of time to sleep. 😉

Real estate is kids and dogs because they are the impetus behind the move. We have learned a lot about housing from the pandemic and from the riots: The Hoplites were right. The freehold is a better place to live.

In other news:

Andrea Widburg: America’s teachers demand Critical Race Theory in schools.

The Scholar’s Stage: Culture Wars Are Long Wars.

Voctor Davis Hanson: The Genesis of Our American Collective Meltdown.

This is me in The Arizona Republic on July 6, 2007:

By the time you read this, Independence Day will have passed, but I thought I’d give you one more reason to celebrate our freedoms: Real estate.

We call our culture Judeo-Christian, but we owe our laws and political institutions to the Greeks and the Romans. The Greek Hoplites, in particular, are the model upon which Western Civilization is based: Individual family farmers, freeholders in the land they farmed, who owned their own weapons of warfare and who banded together as a virtually unconquerable infantry when their lands were attacked.

What accounts for the independence of the Greeks? Was it their unprecedented military tactics? Was it their superior weaponry? Or was it the savage dedication of free men fighting for their own land?

The Hoplites fought against ragtag slave armies, engaging in combat only out of fear of the lash, never losing sight of the chance to desert. But the Greeks fought to retain the rights they had wrested from despots, rights ordinary people, until then, had never known.

We derive many more treasures from the Romans, among them the story of Cincinnatus, the retired general called back to battle and given dictatorial power because the situation was so dire. Instead of abusing that power, Cincinnatus won the war, set down his arms and picked his plow where he had left it.

We honor the citizen-soldier in the conduct of George Washington, who could have declared himself king of America, but who instead, like Cincinnatus, surrendered his power and went back to his farm.

Politicians will tell us that we owe our freedoms to representative government. This is twice false. The interest we share in government is the land we each own individually, like the Hoplites. Moreover, representative government without free ownership of the land is tyranny in camouflage.

Americans are free because we have the uncontested right to buy, use, enjoy, rent, let and sell the land we live on. If you have any fire-crackers left over, you might light one for Read more

Libertarians like to say that taxation is theft, but it is more accurate to say that taxation is extortion – your funds are not stolen undefended, you hand them over voluntarily in response to a threat.

Accordingly, it is still more accurate to say that taxation is lifelong extortionate slavery – you get to keep some of your production, provided you concede that the prior claimant is the state.

Less important than the stolen wealth is the coerced concession, since you can’t rule the world on insane premises unless everybody goes along. But as soon as you acknowledge the insanity, you’re free to see it for what it is: There cannot be a right to predation, nor can there be any reason to suffer predation – and to deny either claim is not just insane but literally self-enslaving.

You’ll do what you must to stay out of jail, but you can declare you independence right now from the idea of predation: The state does not have any right to prey upon you – but you have no right to prey upon anyone else, either.

There’s more to ridding humanity of the scourge of government – the terminal disease masquerading as its own cure – than robbing it of the power to tax. But government will be a whole lot less attractive to predators when it is once again starved for funds.

In other news:

Housing Wire: June jobs report is great news for the housing market.

City Journal: Our American Inheritance.

Frontpage: Celebrating Freedom in the Shadow of Tyranny.

Julie Kelly: Defund the FBI.

FEE.org: Famous Investor: The Homeschooling Boom Is Just Beginning.

It’s almost Independence Day – our wedding anniversary – and this is definitely the year to celebrate the independence of the fee simple domicile.

I’ll get to that on Sunday. For now let’s address something more-fundamental:

You should celebrate, embrace, enfold and exalt your independence – because there is no alternative to it.

All organisms persist in their defiance of entropy from the inside out. Each and every one of them – including you – is exclusively internally motivated, unmoved by any external causes beyond physics itself. Yes: It was you who didn’t do the dishes. Who knew?

If you resent your essential, inescapable autonomy, I don’t know what to do for you: There is no alternative to reality. But if you do as I advise and truly honor your independence – that is when you will discover America.

In other news:

Housing Wire: DOJ withdraws from settlement with NAR.

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: Pending Sales Slide as New Listings Reach Pre-Pandemic Levels.

CNBC: Manhattan real estate prices reach new record as buying ‘frenzy’ takes hold.

Stacey Lennox: Atlanta’s ‘Marxist Land Grab’ Is a Preview of Joe Biden’s Nefarious Plans for the Suburbs.

The New York Post: Biden’s ‘family’ plan is all about hooking the middle class on handouts.

Lee Smith: America’s New Political Prisoners.

The American Mind: Who’s Next? The Biden Administration’s Domestic Terrorism Strategy is an announcement that they’re coming for you.

Frontpage: It’s 1776 All Over Again: Corporatist elite power vs. individual liberty.

In the West, it’s truth alone that counts.

Our culture, going back to the Greeks, honors objectivity and intellectual integrity – and mocks their contraries. Not money, not popularity, not threats make lies true. Lies are to be rooted out and exposed, while truth is to be enshrined and burnished and always improved upon.

This would be the epistemological ideal in a culture explicitly built on the idealization of the good, the true and the beautiful.

But just as the Supreme Court trashed property rights on Monday, the University of North Carolina yesterday caved to a blatant fraud, granting tenure to a race-baiting propagandist in an outrageous betrayal of everything the academy – named after Plato’s playpen, please do recall – is alleged to stand for.

Kudos to professional bigot Nikole Hannah-Jones for closing hard. She expected to be the Rigoberta Menchu of the new pogrom, never thinking that anyone would check her work – or even read it. Oops. But even after she was exposed as a racist shill, still the UNC offered her tenure – thus to buy better spots for themselves in the boxcar to the crematorium. They regretted this idiotic move too late – note, for fundraising reasons, not for anything approaching principle – then caved ignominiously like Supreme Court mannequins.

Score one more victory for Marxism and for all of savagery. To demonstrate just how thoroughly Nikole Hannah-Jones understands her victory over her new subordinates – her prideful volunteer slaves – she literally bitched out UNC’s board of untrustworthies for the way they caved to her fraud.

Look out for your own. The Ruling Class is captured.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates dip back down to 2.98%.

CNBC: Home sales rebounded last month to highest level since 2005, shocking even the Realtors.

Housing Wire: Pending home sales reach highest May mark in 16 years.

The American Spectator: The Population Bomb Doomsday Scam: The narrative we’ve been force-fed for decades is being abandoned by its strictest adherents.

Brad Polumbo: Households Face Up to $14,000 in ‘Hidden’ Federal Taxes Every Read more

The Supreme Court handed down a very important decision yesterday:

Property rights in the United States emerge from popular opinion and have no basis in the United States Constitution, federal or state laws or the common law of property going back to the Roman Forum.

That’s what they bellowed – oh, so silently – in refusing to shout down this ridiculous year-long rent moratorium – not just a “taking” but lawless expropriation by a non-governmental organization, imposed nationally by an equally-lawless circuit-court judge.

How could any of this be LESS lawful?

And so the Supreme Court says what? Literally bupkis.

This is not a small thing. The CDC has zero police powers. It is not a part of government, and it had no right to impose an eviction ban. No federal district court has the power to make national law – which obvious fact the Supreme Court scrupulously overlooked during four years of Trump-kneecappings. And every bit of this was fear theater – crippling the world’s economy – all to get Trump. If there was ever a time for any remaining grownups in government to assert themselves, yesterday was it.

Are we led by liars, cowards and fools? No. We are led by no one. The entire Ruling Class is captured, compromised. “Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.” Yesterday the alleged grownups put their imprimatur on every license to chaos.

In other news:

CNBC: As housing boom begins to fizzle, weekly mortgage demand falls nearly 7%.

KPIX-TV: Poll: San Francisco Residents Consider Relocating As Crime Worsens, Quality Of Life In A Decline.

CNBC: Coldwell Banker CEO says investors snatching up homes is not a driving force in hot housing market.

American Thinker: What Was California Thinking?.

The Washington Examiner: The Minneapolis effect.

Breitbart.com: Joe Biden Attempting to ‘Destroy’ Suburbs with Infrastructure Package, Proving Trump’s Prediction Correct.

UPI: Pandemic may have created ‘baby bust’ instead of boom. No such thing as panic breeding? Who knew…?

I would dearly love it if some impresario would put me on a stage with Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman, so we could discuss his strategy of race piracy as a business plan.

As discussed, I find the bigotry repellent, not the least because, as with every other Black Lives Mattering, Redfin is deliberately misleading black people – ultimately in order to prey upon them.

Accordingly, Redfin has just produced a dubious study purporting to prove that black wannabe home buyers are beset by racism – rather than by the accumulated consequences of habituated poor choices.

Witness:

That chart is intended to prove that black homeowners’ brows bead up with more-photogenic sweat, as they toil for their houses. What it actually shows is that – among Redfin’s very small, self-anointed data set – the white homeowners made much wiser decisions: Saving rather than spending, not paying extra taxes as a diminishing return and not robbing the family of quality time.

I’d love to see the questions, but I’d rather add my own:

• Did you grow up with both of your parents?
• Are they still together?
• Are you legally-married?
• How many family transitions occurred while you were trying to buy a home?
• At what age were you taught to swim?

It is beyond doubt that, considered contrafactually as groups, black Americans tend to be poorer in intellectual and social capital than white or yellow Americans, but blaming that on anything other than parental negligence seems specious to me. It is both false to fact and contrary to good sense: The only way to fix unmade beds is to make them.

Redfin is a liar in a choir of liars: It laments what upwardly-mobile black people are getting wrong while obscuring these obvious facts and refusing to share the good news: If you manage your family, career, time and money like your white and yellow colleagues, you will achieve the same results financially.

Since Redfin is not doing anything like that, it is safe to assume that they are lying and pandering in order to prey upon black consumers – just like every other corporate Read more

Most of the people you will have read on the subject of love – for all of human history – were demonstrably terrible at it.

That’s the seen and the unseen where you never expected to find it! Even so: You could look it up. People who rhapsodize romance typically have many, many failed romances to rhapsodize – or at least to fictionalize.

An apple is nothing without the tree it grows on, but ultimately it is nothing unless it becomes a tree from which other apples grow. The romantic or ludic love we idolize in fiction is at best the juvenile seed of the grown-up storgic love we forgot to revere in real life.

We love by, in and for families. Every other so-called love ultimately comes to nothing.

In other news:

City Journal: Backlash by the Bay: San Francisco residents are fed up with city officials’ lack of action on open-air drug use.

Bari Weiss: When a Free Society Becomes a Police State.

“What’s six times seven?”

I ask that question of school-age children – up to age 15 or so – everywhere I go. And since real estate is kids and dogs, I meet a lot of children. Guess how many kids know the times table?

Excluding the Testudo families: Zero.

Yes. Zero – the unfathomable quantity. School-age children know nothing, with this situation having gotten substantially worse in my lifetime. (I have to smile at myself, writing so much into a world where fewer and fewer can read.)

Even the bright sparks – which once would have meant the nerds but now apparently means the Marxists – know nothing beyond their indoctrination. The idea of the well-rounded man possessed of a broadly liberating education is now upheld solely by cranks like me.

We’ve been here before. We have Catullus because very dumb monks mistook a Roman of the Romans for a monotheist. No joke. But we ought not be here now.

It is absurd to have to say that there should be no matters of controversy in compulsory eduction. So how much more absurd is it to insist that children actually learn something of the facts of existence in the 10,000 hours they waste at school?

In other news:

CNBC: The future of home ownership is Latino.

Real Clear Energy: Blackouts Loom in California as Electricity Prices Are ‘Absolutely Exploding’.

CNBC: The most liberal and conservative tech companies, ranked by employees’ political donations.

The Daily Mail: Read this and you won’t click ‘I agree’ ever again: We’re being spied on by phones, computers, TVs, cars – even the doorbells. Worse, argues Oxford professor CARISSA VELIZ, we’re doing it to ourselves by giving away our data.

TechnoFog: It is Time to End Compulsory Public Education.

Lee Smith: America’s Top General Read Marx, but Does Not Understand How It’s Destroying America.