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.

One of my favorite Christmastime frauds, perhaps by-now socially-distanced out of existence, is the wrapped-gift bucket-brigade: On the local TV news, hundreds of ‘volunteers’ in ugly sweaters are scrunched into a wide-angle shot in which they are shown passing wrapped gifts, one to another – as if there were any reason for such anti-productivity except the “news” coverage.

That’s charity theater, and it’s not the last thing I hate about organized charity. As always with me, trim the outliers and carry them off, if you like: The people most-adept at attracting charity are hurt rather than helped by it – and the people most-interested in bestowing charity are hurt rather than helped by it. We are self-made, all of us, each of us, since there is no contrary to internal self-motivation – this being true of all living things, not just us. The best help you can offer any stranger is to get out of his way – and you could do a lot of that.

But my contempt for charity theater has its own special home in the housing biz: Habitat For Humanity, which painstakingly builds new homes, one at a time, for poor people it carefully segregates from the ‘volunteers’ – amateurs operating straight outta the labor-theory-of-value playbook: If I worked on it, it must be valuable.

Ahem.

The labor that goes into one of those houses, split into four-hour blocks of handyman time, could help hundreds of families, all in one day, not just one family at a time. Even better, it would put the ‘volunteers’ into actual contact with their putative beneficiaries and/or presumptive victims – who might, in due course, become true friends.

A new garbage disposal for an old sink is not as showy as a brand new house, but it’s a great big deal if you’ve never had one: A couple hundred bucks plus labor for an instant hygiene-booster/odor-killer for everyone nearby. That would be improved habitability for real human beings. What it wouldn’t be is a phony virtue display all dressed up for the cameras.

In other news:

CNBC: Read more

The secret to flipping houses is suckering the seller. True fact.

If you do rehab or upgrades, you may recoup about double your outlay. That’s a profit margin, but not much of one. There are no more sucker-bait buyers, so you can’t sell high. So the big bucks come from buying low.

I expect there are very few homeowners who sold to flippers – or to iBuyers, who actually should be called eFlippers – in 2021 who do not regret their choice, having watched their neighbors do so much better by listing.

The good news is that ordinary flippers and eFlippers have to pay more and more, just to be able to buy anything. The eFlippers, in particular, have convinced themselves that they are suddenly good at real estate, because they can actually move inventory in a whirlwind of demand.

Has that whirlwind died down? We’ll see. But if it has, real flippers will find it easier to buy low – while the eFlippers will find out what it’s like to work in real estate.

In other news:

Redfin.com: iBuyer Home Purchases Inch Back Toward Pre-Pandemic Levels.

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates jump back up to 3.02%.

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: Homebuying Demand Slipped Below 2020 Levels for the First Time This Year.

City Journal: Stop Extending the Eviction Moratorium: It’s a heavy burden both for landlords and for tenants who play by the rules.

Housing Wire: Biden renews foreclosure ban.

Julie Kelly: Deprogramming of January 6 Defendants Is Underway.

Christopher Rufo: Exposed: The Washington Post’s attempt to smear me and my work on critical race theory fails spectacularly.

The surge in sales of fee-simple suburban housing and the bonanza in sales of firearms and ammunition have marched together in lockstep since George Floyd socialized his self-destruction. This is the truth the real estate press won’t tell, but both housing and guns sales over the past year were driven – hugely – by the riots the mainstream media lied about for them.

But that marriage may be over. Slow Joe Biden announced yesterday that the Ruling Class will use fighter jets and nuclear weapons, if necessary, to sustain its dominance. That’s going to sell a lot of guns and ammo, but I cannot imagine what it will do to the housing market. More of the same? That’s a safe bet, since – ‘when in danger or in doubt’ – a flight to safety is more about the flight than the ultimate safety.

But the great thing about having an addlepated wreck as “president” is that he can’t keep Marxism’s secrets: Grasshoppers hate Ants more than anything else on earth. Should the Ants come to realize that despoliation today means extermination tomorrow – and should they resist – they are to be vaporized.

Consent of the governed? Not so much…

In other news:

Housing Wire: New home sales fall to lowest pace in a year.

CNBC: You can now choose and design a newly built home and put it in your shopping cart, as big builders launch virtual homebuying.

Andrea Widburg: California’ Marin County is seeing the return of the NIMBYs.

Housing Wire: Supreme Court finds FHFA structure unconstitutional. Appropriate. Now do CFPB.

“They spray-painted all over our building – in our own incomprehensible jargon!”

The quote is a joke, but, alas, the news story is not. If that’s not a fake hate crime, bill me for one edible hat. If instead it turns out to be a fund-raiser, try to cultivate some wisdom from your wishful thinking.

I don’t care for hate crime laws, since they seek to police thought instead of action, and since, as here, they engender fake hate crimes – which should only be understood as actual hate crimes against the fictionalized villains.

Bah! The one thing we can count on, as every species of corruption proliferates, is that no one will call bullshit on any fake hate crime – since to do so would both undermine the thought police and spotlight how rare non-fake hate crimes are. Get away from big cities and universities and there are none of either.

The funny thing about these stunts is how invested people become in denying the obvious. Just that much could be cured with a betting site: If you insist the “hate crime” described in the story is not fake – bet against me. Your bet is your vote on the probity of the claimants, where mine is a vote for a statistically-demonstrable pattern of maliciously tendentious behavior. So, please: Bet against me.

I love me them ‘Faye’ names, and FayeKate.com is available. If someone smarter than me builds it, I will come. I can’t imagine the payouts will be that great, betting the odds on 19-1 propositions, but the statistical reporting over time will be edifying: People actually do learn better, if there are consequences for being in error.

Why are there so many fake hate crimes? Because, so far, it seems to be paying off. In this instance, the evil awful spray paint is held to be emblematic of ever-so-much worse hatred, the evidence for which, alas, is unavailable for inspection – but which, nevertheless, can be at least partially-palliated by PayPal. “Nothing happened, Read more

I work for investors world-wide, so I’m nobody’s “neighborhood specialist.” Even so, I’ve done 23 deals in Coldwater Springs – a golf-centric master-planned community in the near-southwest quadrant of The Valley of the Ever-Fecund Sun. Half of the properties we manage are in there.

I was a skeptic, at first. I was bearish on everything south of the I-10 in Avondale – and that kind of “redlining” is not wrong for investors: Values will lag if there are already too many rentals in the area. This is nothing but economics, so it might be kinder to call it “greenlining.” Regardless, Coldwater Springs not only enriched the community, it has pulled up its entire corner of town.

This is ongoing, first with better-heeled new subdivisions in competition nearby, then with commercial development along Van Buren Street and Avondale Boulevard, and now with a new freeway exit, a coming-soon fire station and easy access to the best charter school in the state.

Coldwater Springs is a bet that continues to pay off. If you’d like to own a piece of it, I have an investor opportunity going on the MLS on Thursday. Occupied by wonderful tenants, under lease until 1/31/2022 and eager to renew, the house is the 1524sf Lavender floorplan – very popular, consistently punches above its weight – on a premium corner lot. I hate to lose the house and the tenants, but we’ll be in the neighborhood for another twenty years, at least.

In other news:

CNBC: May existing home sales drop for a fourth straight month as affordability squeezes buyers out.

The New York Post: Most big cities have become more racially segregated: study.

Daniel Greenfield: The Small Secessions of the New Civil War: Neighborhoods secede from cities, cities from counties, and counties from states.

Brad Polumbo: We Just Got Even More Proof that Stay-At-Home Orders Lethally Backfired.

Joel Kotkin: The battle between the two Americas.