Author: Greg Swann (page 17 of 209)

I had a plan for this year, but the world got in the way.

I was sure Trump would win and the all-go-no-quit Trump economy would rage on. At the same time, I did not anticipate the NAR opting to take up the race war against its own membership. So in both of those ways, my plans are jammed: I don’t want to grow just to feed cannibals, and I desperately want to get shed of the NAR.

Even so, the first quarter has been good to me, and the whole year is shaping up nice. I’m told there are more Realtors than listings right now, but it is a very pleasant world for a broker with a client base – and listing houses for sale has never been easier than it is right now.

The supply side is my long-term future, and the Southwest exodus will continue as before, after the riot-borne exodus has abated. “Affordable, move-in-ready luxury” – that’s every relo’s dream, easy to sell from afar.

For the short-run, I’m not so sure. For now, I’m content to hide and watch – and play with dogs.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Average home sale price hits all-time record.

American Greatness: Two Major California Newspapers Lost Over $50 Million in Revenue in 2020.

Rabobank: Food Price Surge Is Unlikely to Revert.

American Thinker: Why we might soon see big-time deflation.

Julie Kelly: Where is GOP Outrage Over Justice Department’s Capitol Probe?

American Thinker: The Democrats’ War on Black Americans.

City Journal: Taxation with Representation: A fair and reasonable alternative to D.C. statehood.

I’ve been expecting this news for a while, but I didn’t know how it would play out. Given the incipient housing crisis ballooning on the border, I thought China Joe might make mention of it yesterday.

Vide: There is a huge surplus of effectively-abandoned housing building up in the rioted cities. No one is talking about this, but it is simple math: Massive exodus from urban to suburban leaves empty urbanity behind. Moreover, big cities are now bursting with emptiness in their inner cores, as every Ant who could scurried home and stayed there.

Is the problem that poor people need better housing? Nah. Is it that all of China Joe’s newly-imported voters need places to live? Nah. Do we finally plan to actually “do something” about the homeless? C’mon! Get your head out of your ass.

No, the problem is that the very wealthiest of Americans own a ton of urban dirt – and the value of those investments is – so far secretly – in freefall.

Sometime very soon, expect to hear about a housing initiative that will convert underperforming office towers into grim government-owned tenements, instead.

Two points, I think: First, if big cities become vertical homeless encampments, they will never come back. Second, if you own C- or D-quality rental housing in rioted cities, your best day to sell – forever – is probably today: The government’s handouts will be going to richer landlords in other neighborhoods.

In other news:

The San Francisco Chronicle: S.F. has nearly 16 million square feet of vacant office space. Why can’t it become housing?

Redfin: Housing Market Update: A Record 39% of Homes Sold Above List Price.

Real Clear Education: The War on Merit.

Joanne Jacobs: ‘They sit and stare’.

City Journal: A Big Gamble: The Biden administration downplays the risks of its historically massive spending bills.

Angelo Codevilla: American Exodus: Don’t wait for the oligarchy to let you in. Just walk away.

As with municipal water supplies, government schooling is a terrible idea. Even if it were good – and I’m old enough to remember when it was better, at least – intellectual diversity actually is our strength, especially when the government schools are serving up poison.

So while the past year has been great for dogs and awful for kids, there is a silver lining for about 20% of kids – those lucky enough to be homeschooled or privately educated. This will end up creating an aristocracy of literacy – precisely what the public schools were intended to prevent – but at least your doctor and your pharmacist will both know how to read.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates jump to 3.17% last week.

Brad Polumbo: 250 Top Business Leaders Just Warned Cuomo: NY’s Tax Hike Proposals Will Have One Huge Consequence.

American Thinker: The Government Is Considering a Financial Weapon of Mass Destruction.

Joanne Jacobs: 11.1% of families are homeschooling.

The Federalist: Once Held Hostage By Teachers’ Unions, West Virginia Just Passed The Nation’s Broadest School Choice Law.

Swiss Policy Research: Why the flu has ‘disappeared’.

American Thinker: COVID-19 could lead to telemedicine expansion.

City Journal: Don’t Let Financial Regulators Dream Up Climate Solutions.

If you sniff at a glass of tap-water, chances are you’ll nose out the scent of chlorine. Your local municipality chlorinates your water supply because they know it’s not safe. They’re hoping that introducing toxins into the water supply will kill all the stuff still there that might otherwise kill you.

That would be a kludge if it were merely absurd, but your public water system poisoning your drinking water because they know it’s already poisonous is a blaring confession of ineptitude.

If you’re looking for something government does well, the list stops at killing: Its only useful function is killing bad guys, but it much prefers killing businesses, hopes, dreams and innocents. If it can casually kill you with your drinking water, so much the better.

The obvious course of action would be to get government out of every activity where the objective is not killing people. There’s no guarantee they can even manage national defense, by now, but their ability to screw everything else up is as clear as that milky, smelly glass of water in front of you.

In other news:

CNBC: Homebuyer mortgage demand inches higher, but rates hit highest level since summer.

Housing Wire: New home sales plunge 18.2%, but demand stays strong.

CNBC: The national eviction ban is set to expire at the end of March. The CDC likely will extend it.

Mike DelPrete: CAC-attack: The Cost of iBuyer Customer Acquisition.

Housing Wire: Spencer Rascoff outfit Pacaso raises $75 million. I would love to interview whomever thought this was a good idea. I cannot imagine a business model less connected to the reality of living organisms.

The Seattle Times: Washington state’s rise in homelessness outpaced the nation’s, according to report.

Joel Kotkin: The death of the American city: Rising crime and a pandemic-inspired exodus are powering urban decay.

Daniel Greenfield: A Muslim Terrorist From the Capital of ISIS Shot Up a Supermarket. Biden Blames Guns.

Gordon Chang: The Coming Demographic Collapse of China.

City Journal: Open Schools Now: A new CDC report confirms that K-12 schools are not associated with Covid-19 transmission.

Donald Trump was a president of great consequence, most of which was buried under daily fusillades of hysterical hatred.

His greatest accomplishment, best obscured, was peace in the Middle East – which China Joe is doing his best to undo, of course. China first – always – but The War Party can’t resupply weapons that haven’t been used, so war first, too.

The good news – perhaps irrepressibly good? Lion and lamb are already at the bargaining table – no more Trump administration required. Good business makes good sense, so the peace may yet endure even despite its Marxist and militarist enemies.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Existing home sales dip 6.6% amid supply struggles.

Reason: The Dream of the ’90s Died in Portland.

Frontpage: Terrified for NYC’s Future.

Daniel Greenfield: Asian-Americans Worry About Democrat Bill ‘Legalizing’ Mugging.

Ron Paul: Want a Job? Get a Shot!

The ideal of rational political philosophy is to achieve a stable equilibrium maximizing individual liberty and minimizing mob tyranny. But the way that is done is with stable, father-led, monogamous families. That is how trust is engendered – by literally imprinting moral goodness into us before we are capable of informed discretion – and it comes into existence in no other way.

Libertarianism-writ-large idealizes the well-fathered past without knowing it, seeking to replicate the consequences without the cause – just like any other Ci cargo-cult. It exclusively seeks Ci solutions to the on-going Ds problem – the emasculation of fatherhood.

Doesn’t matter in the long run – Ds wins – but all of libertarianism-writ-large looks like a psyop to me by now: Mountains of unreadable books, effectively zero reproduction. Ci is at war with human identity, and to the extent it is Ci, so is libertarianism.

In this context, crypto-currencies are an ineffectual and strategically-inverted stop-gap, much like freezing eggs: Better money will not buy you better fathers – the source of tomorrow’s wealth.

In other (not much) news:

CNBC: Existing home sales fell sharply in February, as supply dropped by the largest amount on record.

Axios: Inside a crowded border patrol tent in Donna, Texas.

City Journal: Death and Lockdowns: There’s no proof that lockdowns save lives but plenty of evidence that they end them.

I do so love being ahead of the news. It’s not hard, if you’re willing to see with your eyes and not your ears.

This is me a month-and-a-half ago, foreseeing this weekend’s very temporary “news” reports:

Follow elderly Asian women in poor neighborhoods in big cities on either coast. When they go out unaccompanied, they will be visited with endless, unrelenting racist verbal and physical attacks, coming almost entirely from young black males. That would be reality, rather than ‘news.’

For purposes of racial despoliation, Asians are white. So, too, most Hispanics. How can that be so? Because ‘white’ means Ant, and Ants are to have been devoured by Grasshoppers. The people who denounce ‘white supremacists’ insist that you are one if you respond appropriately to values and incentives – no matter what your skin color.

Bad news for everyone, worse news for Asian kids who bust their asses believing that America is a meritocracy.

In big cities, poor Asian people are routinely persecuted by poor black people. It was ever thus: The police have never done a good job of protecting Asian people, not until they move into the tonier neighborhoods. That would be actual racism built into the system, and poor black and brown people have every right to complain about it, too.

But: Since George Floyd found sobriety, the police are standing down, especially in big cities. Every pre-existing crime problem will have gotten worse, including abuses by black people against Asian people. That would be the news, if the purpose of news reporting was telling the truth, instead of sliming Donald Trump, his supporters and white people in general.

For my money, Asian people are fools to get sucked into this racist game, since they are already its designated losers, but perhaps it’s strategy: You can’t join the Grasshoppers without demonstrating a complete hostility to facts, after all.

In other news:

The New York Post: Top finance, tech firms mulling NY exodus over proposed tax hike.

Bonchie: California Couple Buys Their Dream Home, What Happens Next Will Absolutely Infuriate You.

The Libertarian Republic: Dear Read more

Bill Gates says he’ll fly a lot less and eat more synthetic meat to fight climate change. And that, most assuredly, is totally not bullshit.

However: If the point of living is to save the planet from himself, he could do so much better. For example, he could check into a Seattle SRO, sit down in a wooden chair and shut-the-frolic-up, thus reducing his ‘carbon footprint’ even more drastically.

Or, of course, he could do as all misanthropes should do and deliver himself to oblivion – thus curing his imaginary obsession and relieving the rest of us, at least a little, of the pestilence of ‘merciful’ genocidal maniacs.

The bad news? Comic-book super-villains are not Ci by accident. The good news, ever and always: Where it is possible to choose not to reproduce, Ci is self-extinguishing. Assuming Fauci and Gates are not sterilizing all of us with either the virus or its vaccines, only Ds matters, going forward.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Could the great refi boom finally be over?

City Journal: Hanging in There: On a landlord’s pandemic plight.

Brad Polumbo: Federal Government Lost 5x More to COVID Stimulus Fraud Than It Spent on Vaccine Development, New Report Reveals.

Naiomi Wolf: The End of America?

I had a text from “Steve at Common Cause” entreating me to lobby for some piece of legislation. I responded thus:

“Does your plan entail taking private property by force? Since we both know it does, accept that you are an exponent of crime and ultimately genocide. Please do better with your life. And take me off your list.”

“Steve” is a bot, no doubt, but you never know who sees what. Meanwhile, I got a meme of my own that I have wanted for a while – an opportunity to set a lasting example of how to confront political hypocrisy.

The claim that Marxism is “merciful” or “compassionate” is absurd. Marxism is genocide, everywhere, eventually. But in its meekest forms, Marxism is devoted to pain: It seeks to hurt people for responding appropriately to the facts of reality.

Accordingly, you should always hold Marxists accountable for their crimes. They should have been purged along with the Nazis – for millions more murders. No one should treat them as anything but evil.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Buyers are overpaying, but are there signs of a bubble?

CNBC: Mortgage rates just moved sharply higher, but homebuyer competition is fiercer than ever.

Housing Wire: A 3% mortgage rate may be the new norm.

Housing Wire: Spencer Rascoff SPAC to take iBuyer Offerpad public. Dead-money stalking.

CNBC: Petco CEO says shift to suburbs is fueling company growth.

Josh Hammer: Recover the Moral Imperative of Law and Order: Conservatives should lead the way in moving the pendulum back toward the rule of law.

The Fedralist: A Prescription For Fixing American Family Life.

I realized yesterday that my ultimate objection to crypto-currencies is familial, not financial: Like all of the rest of libertarianism, crypto is a Ci solution to a Ds problem.

How do you engineer trust? You don’t. You cultivate it – in toddlers – and if you don’t cultivate it, you can’t have it. Bitcoin is underfathered money.

Jokes are easy. Comity is hard. How do you cultivate Ds trust in a Ci technocracy?

Fatherhood, of course, but that implies two things: Couples have to cooperate rather than competing in marriage. And moms have to put their child-bearing years ahead of their career-triumph years.

Sending your daughter away to college at 18 is the best possible way to avoid grandchildren. Had she married at 18, she might have brought home five apples of their daddy’s eye. Instead, she’ll be lucky to spawn two crabapples – or one – or none – daddy or not.

But if we schedule things the other way, kids first, then school and career, families can have the ‘having it all’ that takes 50 and 100 years to have.

He marries when he’s established – five years older, not ten – she marries when she is most-propitiously fecund. She studies from home as she can, as the kids are growing, and she’s only 30 or 35 when she is able to make a full-time commitment to her career – if that still seems wise.

But it is certainly wise to get the sequence of these priorities in order. The way to put families first is to put your own family – however it might be composed – ahead of any value outside the home. And, as above, if you want trust, this is the only way it comes into existence.

In other news:

Housing Wire: What happens to Realtors if the PRO Act passes?

CNBC: Here’s how the Fed decision impacts your wallet.

Housing Wire: Homebuilders are slowing production despite wild demand.

Fox News: Americans move to freedom – people fleeing these 5 states. Here’s why.

Joel Kotkin: How Declining Fertility Rates May Deliver Us Into Read more

We call them ‘the dots’ – the subdivided channels that emerged, mushroom like, from the HDTV rules. It’s classic TV with long commercial breaks, much like ‘the independent stations’ when you were a kid.

They’re ‘the dots’ because of the way they are denominated. We mostly watch channels 45.1 – a classic ‘independent’ – and 15.3, which is LAFF – antique reruns and pay-per-performance advertising.

The latter is a marketing channel, if you’re looking for a way around everyone else. A phone number and a web site can make a 30-second spot pull like a 30-minute infomercial:

“Everybody wants to buy your home, but nobody wants to pay for it. Wholesalers and iBuyers scheme to low-ball you, while fast-talking Realtors just want to stick their sign in your yard. I can show you how to maximize your return on your investment in your home – whatever its condition. I am the champion of your hard-earned equity – and I don’t get paid until you get paid. Don’t sign anything until you talk to me first.”

I may do something like that, but that’s not why we watch the dots. It’s the entertainment quality. If we watch a ‘free’ movie on a streaming service, we may like it, or we may want our time back. But if we watch reruns of “How I Met Your Mother” on LAFF – we’re going to laugh. Note bene: We second-screen or pee during the commercial breaks, so caveat emptor on the ad buys.

But: Whatever: The dots may in fact your best entertainment value: Time-tested reliable content at just the right price.

In other news:

Mike Del Prete: The Economics of iBuying, 2020 Edition.

CNBC: Mortgage refinance demand tanks 39% as rates continue to climb.

Housing Wire: Insane lumber prices mean new homes cost $24K more.

The Washington Examiner: Omar pitches national cancellation of rent and mortgage payments until April 2022.

The Daily Wire: Teachers Compile List Of Parents Who Question Racial Curriculum, Plot War On Them.

The National Interest: The U.S. Economy Is Now A Giant Bubble. A ‘Pop’ Read more

“Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” So said Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. It’s a metaphor about transparency, but those sorts of metaphors work – and stick around in memory – because they are radically true.

And never so much as now is sunlight infection’s best enemy: I live near the I-10 – the very sunniest side of the street, that region of America where bugs of all sorts come to fry – but everywhere in the U.S. on or south of the I-40 or generally west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rockies will turn out to have done better with the virus than cloudier realms.

Sunlight is UVC – kills all viruses in seconds – and vitamin D, the miracle drug Fauci, Birx and the DNCCP kept secret all last year. Sunlight is why the homeless were not wiped out by the Coronavirus, and it’s why they are not wiped out every year by “the common cold” or “the seasonal flu” – both of which would now seem to be rent-seeking marketing ploys.

Be fit. Stay away from sick people. Wash your hands. Catch some rays. And, by all means, keep your own counsel. The “experts” are apparently working for the virus.

In other news:

The New York Times: ‘I’d Much Rather Be in Florida’.

CNBC: 31% of young adults relocated during Covid. But they aren’t giving up on cities altogether.

American Greatness: What South Dakota Can Teach America.

Housing Wire: Redfin: Former redlined neighborhoods at massive flood risk. I skipped this yesterday, because Redfin is making me sick. Rich people live in the heights. Poor people live in the flats. Not news. Were the flats redlined by race or poverty? Which reason applies now – since Redfin Offers almost certainly is also redlining these exact same neighborhoods. I’d say “motes and beams” – but they know they’re liars spinning a bigoted narrative. What’s going on in and near CHAZ/CHOP, Redfin? And what are you doing to help the poor people Read more

We are mad, and we are intolerant only of those who call us mad. The actual news of the day consists of briefly vanishing truths instantly smothered under the Hissy-Fit Veto – the hysterical version of the Heckler’s Veto.

Don’t believe me? Tucker Carslon made the factual observation that the military’s effeminization and war-fighting are incompatible objectives. This is obviously so, so of course the armed forces declared war – “Mean Girls” style – on Carlson. Now he’ll never be Prom King.

Here is an obvious truth, one so easy to understand you need six-figures’ worth of student debt to miss it: Fertile women ought not be put in peril.

We say “women and children first” but the purpose of civilization is children. We can tell we are at war with ourselves – with our undeniable natural identity as organisms – by how much we are at war with that simple fact.

A woman in combat is not as stupid as a man in a birthing chair, but both are obvious misapplications of limited resources. But while a man dying in combat loses one life, when a fertile woman is a casualty of war, she takes legions with her: Her eggs, of course, but also the family she won’t have, the investment that family would have made in the future, and all the children and grandchildren never to come…

All lost because we are mad – and in our madness desperate to cease to exist.

In other news:

Michael Totten: Leaving Portland.

FEE.org: Target Announces It’s Abandoning Its Minneapolis Headquarters. Here’s Why It’s No Surprise.

Kay Hymowitz: There Goes the Neighborhood School.

Daniel Payne: One year later: A look back at inaccurate projections that helped drive COVID lockdowns.

Joy Pullman: 5 Ways To Use ‘Stimulus’ Hush Money To Fight Democrats’ Plans For Your Serfdom.

Salena Zito: The culture curators want to think for you.

Conrad Black: A Kingdom of the Anti-American Elite: Joe Biden, a man who 34 percent of Americans think is not sufficiently mentally alert for his office, is presiding amiably over a regime infested with anti-American forces.

The economic theory behind crypto-currencies is not that far from Marx’ Labor Theory of Value: Pointless activity pursued rigorously creates new value.

That’s absurd, of course, but long cons always are. But the inverse of that stupid ‘theory’ is surely true: Pointless activity destroys wealth.

There’s nothing wrong with doing the crossword puzzle. Just don’t call it work.

In other news:

National Review: New Yorkers Must Be Punished: A Modest Proposal.

American Thinker: Why is Biden releasing thousands of Covid-positive migrants into the country?

Matt Taibbi: The Sovietization of the American Press: The transformation from phony “objectivity” to open one-party orthodoxy hasn’t been an improvement.

The Pipeline: No More Cakes and Ale.

American Greatness: Are We Still Free?

Until 1974, production homes in Metropolitan Phoenix were block-constructed ranch houses: The side-walls, frequently windowless, bore the load of a rafter-and-shingle roof. Single-story, necessarily, and wide-and-shallow on the lot, like all ranch homes. Galvanized-steel ducting, so low hallways – and low ceilings generally. The trade-off, of course, is that a block-home will stand for centuries. The roof needs maintenance, but the walls are not going anywhere.

They built zillions of these homes in the decades after World War II – America’s suburbanizing miracle. But then in 1974 the brick-masons went on strike and the new-home builders switched to stick-and-stucco construction – Orange County vaulted. Because the homes are built on a truss, the ceilings can soar – with aluminized-mylar hose to hide the ugly ducting. When AC-compressors were pulled off roofs, the roofs got tiled, and we’ve been building stick-stucco-and-tile ever since.

But unlike block-homes, stick-stucco-and-tile houses are wedding cakes: They melt in very short order without constant maintenance.

Because block-homes last – and because they can withstand repeated remodelings – they seem to represent a better long-term value for home-buyers. By contrast, the steady maintenance required by stick-built homes can lead to whole communities seeming to crash all at once, with too-obvious deferred maintenance leading in lockstep by bad example.

My point would be what? I’m delighted to see concrete returning to the new-home subdivision sales office. Not here quite yet, but the price of lumber makes thoroughly-modern masonry more competitive every day.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Real Estate Exchange files antitrust suit against Zillow, NAR.

CNBC: 3D-printed housing developments suddenly take off – here’s what they look like.

Victory Girls: Ilhan Omar Wants to Take Your Rental Properties.

City Journal: Crossing the Line: The CDC stretched its authority to halt evictions, but it has taken a hands-off approach to preventing the spread of Covid-19 across the southern border.

Julie Kelly: One Year Later, Vindication for Lockdown Skeptics: The overwhelming majority of Americans last March acted in good faith to do what we were told was in the best interest of Read more