Charter schools deliver what public schools can’t: Actual taxpayer-funded education. On-line charter schools deliver what no in-person school can do: Education without bullying.

It’s fun to watch them selling it: Short kids, pudgy kids – even a literal red-headed step-child. As noted below, charter schools are answering the “what for?” and “what’s next?” questions better. One on-line charter we know is offering free summer-school – which is simply bald-faced loss-leader recruitment.

I’ve never been crazy about the charter school idea, because you can’t take government money without the government eventually taking over. That hasn’t happened so far, and the teacher’s unions have been remarkably obtuse about the charter movement – so it still works for now. And the simple fact of competition and innovation in education is wonderful, whatever the downstream risks.

Grasshoppers make war on merit because it shames them: The spotlight of excellence silhouettes their sloth and envy. If you would proudly proclaim that you never feed your children poison, make sure no one is poisoning their minds all day while you’re working.

Homeschooling by Aristotle is the ideal, with everything else falling short. Charter schools – on-line or in-person – deliver what public schools won’t, and they mitigate the dogma and bullying. Ultimately, the hard work is all on the kids, but charter schools provide more opportunities and present fewer obstacles to their thriving.

In other news:

Slate: Logjam! A journey to the heart of the lumber shortage.

AP: California leaving: State population declines for first time.

The College Fix: Texas Virtual Academy trains students to enter workforce right after high school.

The American Mind: Schoolhouse Scapegoat: Joe Biden wants to instill racial hatred and resentment as the new American values.

Why should you subscribe to and religiously ingest BloodhoundBlog every day? The price inflation that’s suddenly such big news? We warned you it was coming on February 15th:

“One third of all American dollars are less than a year old. That inflation will be paid for. Plan accordingly.”

That was obvious, frankly, and I had been ruminating about it for months – last year’s mad spending was one of my key objections to Trump. What’s worse is that the yearling dollars by now number five out of every six: In due course, and assuming ZERO additional inflation, it will turn out that an American dollar is worth one-fifth or less what it was on January 1, 2020.

Buy deep, borrow cheap, plan ahead. Dollar-denominated assets will evaporate but tangible goods will require active defenses.

Welcome to the new age. There is at least some measure of self-defense to be found here among the dawgs: We can help you see what’s coming.

In other news:

CNBC: Homebuyers are the most pessimistic they’ve been in a decade thanks to tight supply, high prices.

Housing Wire: Regulatory costs add nearly $94K to new home prices.

City Journal: Always Be Founding: Projects to “renew” civic education and “reinvent” U.S. democracy smuggle in a rejection of the American Founding.

Christopher Rufo: The Wokest Place on Earth: Disney mounts an internal campaign against “white privilege” and organizes racially segregated “affinity groups.”

American Thinker: One way you can start saving American liberty, personally.

Joe Concha: Social media’s ban on Trump: Our ‘silence of the lambs’ moment.

Zillow’s first-quarter results are out, and the message is plainly obvious: Milk the idiots, but don’t be the idiot.

They won’t learn. The only successful “disruption” in proptech, so far at least, belongs to Zillow: They replaced supermarket real estate magazines with the Zestimate™. The difference is, the sleazoids who published those cheesy shoppers knew where the bread was buttered – bilking an endlessly-renewing stream of gullible morons. This is Zillow’s actual business, but, like Redfin, Coke and so many other publicly-traded companies, they’re not happy making money.

Zillow wants to be a real boy, so it admits to pissing away $30K per iBuyer “investment” in the most amazingly easy seller’s market in the history of time.

People like to smooth numbers, but Zillow is smooth about nothing: They will have made a little money on a few houses, lost money on most – and lost $100K or more on a few. They don’t have a plan, but they do have buckets of money to finance their ineptitude.

When the market turns, Zillow will be able to lose six-figures on every iBuyer “investment.” I’m assuming that will make them even prouder of themselves.

In other news:

Mike DelPrete: What Zillow’s Results Reveal About Its Momentum Towards Zillow 2.0.

Housing Wire: More renters and homeowners are making payments.

Christopher Rufo: The Shaky Foundations of L.A.’s Housing ‘Entitlement’ for the Homeless.

The Federalist: The Census Rewarded Red States, But Democrats Are Scheming To Reverse That.

Heather Mac Donald: Diversity Over Discovery: Biden’s war on merit puts America’s scientific edge at risk.

I will give you a very simple lens for understanding political issues: “Does what you want require the use of force?”

Are your neighbors your property, to be ordered around at your whim? No? Congratulations. You are now an anarchist.

The Marxists have muddied up that word, so you can choose another – agorist, voluntaryist, anarchocapitalist – if you like. The good news is, you have foresworn your criminal past, so you’re one of the good guys now.

Once you look at things this way – government is the criminal imposition of violence upon innocents – you’ll find plenty of government you want to get rid of. And what has the last year taught us but that even well-meant tyranny is still tyranny?

The government that governs best governs least – and that’s why the best government is no government. That requires better fathers, which suggests the first branches of the state to prune. But government infantilizes and enfeebles us in everything it does, so – as the Trump presidency just illustrated – getting rid of it anywhere makes us stronger everywhere.

We cannot be feral, so we must be civil – but we cannot be civil by predation. Yet as logic dictates and Hayek insists, simply by not pushing each other around, we make wonders where the tyrants make nothing but mountainous mass graves.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates remain under 3% for third week in a row.

CNBC: Federal judge overturns national eviction ban.

City Journal: Anatomy of a Crime Wave: Baltimore’s experiment with de-policing has been disastrous—and deadly.

UPI: U.S. birth rate in 2020 saw largest decline in almost 50 years, CDC says.

The Federalist: Critical Race Theory Illuminates Democrats’ Master Plan To End Honest Elections In America.

City Journal: The Federalism Fix: How to bring peace to Washington’s partisan wars.

Lucky us, we have had zero real estate problems during the pandemic of panic. We manage a portfolio of rental properties, but we had zero missed or late payments – and we even sold two of them occupied, a third-rail red flag when eviction may be forbidden by law.

If you read me elsewhere, you’ll hear me talking about The Affectionate Display: The default proffering and presumption of good will, and the assumption that any difficulties arise from miscommunication or mistake, not malice. That’s a social strategy – assuming the best about other people – but it’s how we run our business, too. We don’t want conflict, so we don’t have conflict.

I can’t swear that’s why the past year has been easy for us – the entire trick to property management is resident selection, and we have wonderful people living in our rentals – but it’s how we know our properties are secure from negligence or damage.

In other news:

CNBC: Weekly mortgage demand stalls as rates rise and fierce competition hurts home sales.

Fox 5 Vegas: Renter trashes Las Vegas house on way out, property managers say it’s a pandemic trend.

Katie Pavlich: Americans Set Another Gun Purchase Record in April.

City Journal: Urban Growth Will Continue.

Mises Institute: How Trillions in Newly Printed Money Created a Labor Shortage.

Angelo Codevilla: Oligarchy, and Remedies.

City Journal: Less Than Meets the Eye: How admissions officers could be setting up minority students for failure.

Robby Soave: In the Name of Equity, California Will Discourage Students Who Are Gifted at Math.

Dana Loesch: A Model for Fighting Critical Race Theory in America’s Schools.

Redfin is coming to Boston – if you consider the remote outer-suburbs Boston. From the link:

Redfin is making offers on single-family homes and townhomes built after 1900 in parts of Middlesex, Norfolk and Plymouth counties. The company expects to expand to additional neighborhoods and property types in the region over time.

Going back to 1900 is ballsy. Everything built before 1935 or so was one-off – not production homes – and subsequent remodels would throw comparability out the window, anyway. But most of the houses on the I-495 outer loop – where RedfinNow is actually going – are post-WWII tract homes, many of them post-1980.

Where is RedfinNow not going? To Roxbury and Dorchester – or anywhere in Suffolk County – where the black people are. RedfinNow is redlining the very whitest part of a very racist, very redlined, very white state to stake its claim in Massachusetts.

Making these big-city boasts is absurd. No big-budget iBuyer works in inner-cities – which is why all of them are redlining, de facto. But redlining Redfin is so far from Boston and its bothersome diversity that it might as well claim Providence, too.

What a tangled web! Be like a real real estate brokerage, Redfin. Stop lying about racism and lie about your results, instead, like everybody else.

Yesterday on BloodhoundBlog:

Greg Swann: If Zillow is buying its marketing from Fiverr, it should spring for the upsell.

In other news:

Rob Hahn: Clear Cooperation Is a Disaster in the Making. Static market fallacy, along with normality bias. I read this theory two years ago and thought the same thing. When the market turns, the MLS will rise again.

The Hill: Is the US headed toward a new housing bubble?

The New York Post: Expelling Asian Americans from top schools proves NYC education is off the rails.

The Wall Street Journal: In L.A. and San Francisco, Schools Are Open but Classrooms Are Near-Empty.

Is Glenn Kelman the Orren Boyle of real estate?

While Basecamp is graciously showing the world how to be based in business, Kelman is the social savior who has a solution for every problem except Redfin.com’s currently-completely-useless marketing strategy.

The flavor of the micro-second? Pocket listings. I don’t like them, either, but they are no less stupid than selling to an iBuyer – like Redfin – in this market.

So Kelman makes an earnest appeal with a hidden motive: Redfin’s buyer’s agents can’t show and collect on exclusive listings. Their dissatisfied buyers have good reasons to gravitate to big local brokerages instead of Redfin’s national database of Pending sales. The MLS has always been a fallback to direct marketing. Other brokers are where you go when the listing isn’t selling – compensating them appropriately for marketing what you could not. As with compulsory commission-gouging, Kelman’s grand statesmanship amounts to outlawing alternatives to dipshit discounters like Redfin.

Redfin can’t get listings because it sells like employees sell – unimpressively – while shafting buyer’s agents from other brokerages. It can’t sell other broker’s exclusive listings, because they and their sellers don’t need Redfin’s remaining buyers just now. And, apparently, it can’t stop bitching about the brutal unfairness of it all.

Here’s the trick: Get better at real estate, Glenn. That would be what they’re paying you for.

In other news:

PJ Media: Change: Austin Voters Strongly Reject Unfettered Homeless Camping.

Fox 5 New York: De Blasio calls city workers back to offices; some aren’t happy.

Andrea Widburg: A software company comes up with a brilliant corporate speech policy.

Brad Polumbo: Biden’s Labor Secretary Just Threatened Independent Contractors.

The New York Post: Educational malpractice in the name of ‘equity’.

Here’s a fun real estate analysis exercise, one you’re unlikely to see anywhere else:

If a neighborhood has a very high ChaosScore™, will it have better or worse tree coverage than one with a low score?

We don’t have to measure chaos. HUD keeps track of rental housing. Will a community that is 75% renters have better foliage than one that is 25% renters?

Wicked easy, ain’t it? The renter analysis is actually better for understanding tree coverage – which is also racist, lesser minds argue. Trees are expensive, high-maintenance amenities, so all the reasons that make homeowners better about upkeep generally make them better about landscaping, too.

So again, not racism but location, location, location. If you prize wildlife, you pay with a longer commute. If you crave tree-lined streets with rolling lawns, you settle for less house for more money. If you want a lot of house for the least money – either as a homeowner or an investor – you buy where the renters are many and the trees are few.

Everything in economics is a trade-off. You could argue that the tenants in a treeless neighborhood have no better choices. The owners all do. Each one chose the home he bought according to his own hierarchy of values, weighing each material consideration by his own scale. If the home he bought does not yet correspond to his dreams, by fix-up or move-up, someday it can.

In other news:

The New York Post: Long Island man dodges eviction for 20 years, living in house he doesn’t own.

American Thinker: The shifting human tide.

The American Spectator: Florida: The Emerging Super State.

Townhall: Biden’s New Death Tax.

Politico: Some kids never logged on to remote school. Now what?

There really is a Crazy Linda, and she really does call herself that, and she really does go to the puppy store at the Arrowhead Mall every day. I can’t imagine what the past year has done to her – not locked in, but locked out of much of her meandering.

I don’t know what happened to the puppy store, either, but there sure are a lot of new puppies out there. And here’s something else I didn’t know – the big-duh secret sauce of the puppy business: Puppies are financed. Just like used cars – and I mean just like used cars.

How stupid is that? For forty bucks at the pound you can get a better dog, and they’ll throw in a nylon lead. Fussy about purebreds – because you like ’em hot and crazy? Over the years, we scored two Bloodhounds, an English Coonhound and a Redbone Coonhound – all purebred, all rescues.

It happens that I am socializing a four-figure dog just now – paid for in cash, I should note – a French Bulldog named Cleo, and I love her to distraction. But the dog who loved me best in the world was Shyly, a Chow/Labrador mutt, an Arizona disaster with four inches of black fur in all directions, passed on twice by other families. Smart, fun, loyal, always by my side.

A few weeks ago, Cleo and I met a nerdy couple at the park – with their puppy and their dog trainer. The dog was a Belgian Malinois – TV-famous for running down Islamofascist terrorists. Why were they buying dog training? Because they were overmatched by their oh-so-fashionable, hyper-dominant puppy. The dog was literally taking over, blocking their access in their own home – itself probably also too much for them!

Funny to me, anyway – this Scottish Terrier couple with a GI Joe dog. It’s funnier still to think that the dog might be financed – at credit-card interest.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Housing starts are rising, Read more

Redfin has more home-price ballyhoo this morning, but it answers none of my standing questions:

• Where is all this new demand coming from, and what so-far undocumented vacancy is it leaving behind?
• What is happening to real estate values in the core – not the ring suburbs – of the rioted cities?
• And while we’re about it, what is a “home” to Redfin in articles like these: Any ownable domicile or just single-family detached residences on bucolic, fee-simple suburban lots?

Lots of new puppies last year, but almost no new babies. If the balloon is bulging for puppy-perfect housing, it is being squeezed somewhere. Redfin knows the answers to my questions – and they can’t just be my concerns. It would be nice if someone were to tell the whole truth.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Pending home sales rebound in March.

Redfin: Newly Built Homes Make Up 26% of All Single-Family Homes for Sale—A Record High.

Michael Tracey: One Year After George Floyd, Minneapolis Is “Murderapolis” Again.

Architectural Digest: This Artist Faked Being a Billionaire to Photograph New York City’s Best Views.

I’m doing CE just now – a month early, because I’m about to get hit with houses and I can’t be late.

So: Dual agency is bad, m’kay? Steady source of lawsuits, including class-action suits. But it’s lawful, as regulated, so that’s what’s taught: Written consent of both parties when limited agency is imminent.

Agency with an interest, anyone? I’ve pointed out that the iBuyers are also going to have this problem: They are badly-veiled self-dealers – pawnbrokers – except that pawnbrokers are not fiduciary to their self-designated clients.

And it occurred to me this morning that much inventory, MLS’d or not, must be moving by dual agency. Yes, I’m that dumb: We don’t double-dip, so I never think about it. Buyers will waive anything, right now, so why not representation itself?

Surely that won’t bite anyone in the ass…

In other news:

CNBC: Pending home sales rose less than expected in March as prices soared.

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates rise, but remain under 3%.

CNBC: The Fed keeps rates near zero — here’s how you can benefit.

Housing Wire: Skyrocketing lumber prices add $36K to new homes.

Fox News: More than 200 Seattle police officers quit over the last year, many citing anti-police climate. If only there were giant real estate brokerages in Seattle to report on actual facts instead of racist chimera.

The Washington Times: Biden’s racial equity agenda targets ‘exclusionary’ single-family neighborhoods.

The American Mind: The Struggle for Owned Space.

Frontpage: Black Supremacy: The hate that dare not speak its name.

American Greatness: America’s Real White Supremacy Problem.

CNN: Meet the 12-year-old graduating high school and college in the same week.

Masks are obviously stupid. If you can smell perfume – or a dog’s fart – your mask is protecting you from nothing. Except anoxia, of course, the silent killer of brain cells.

Even so, the worst advice “the experts” gave us, over the past year, was not about encasing your face in toxic plastics. No, the worst advice was to stay indoors.

The UVC in natural, unfiltered sunlight kills all viruses, practically instantaneously. And when sunlight hits your skin, it is converted to vitamin D, boosting your immune system.

Ignoring for governmental ineptitude, people will have done better against this virus where the sunlight is strong all year – or where they had dogs-to-walk or work-responsibilities that brought them outdoors anyway.

Why weren’t the homeless wiped out by the virus? Sunlight. Why are Texas and Florida doing so much better than Michigan or New York? Sunlight. Why will the virus abate up north with the onset of Summer? Sunlight.

If you tell me “the experts” have been lying about everything all along, I’m an easy sell. But it is beyond doubt that they have been lying about the benefits – undisputed lifelong holistic benefits – of getting outside.

In other news:

MarketWatch: The No. 1 emerging property market in America isn’t in Texas or Florida — you may never even have heard of it.

Housing Wire: Applications drop, despite falling mortgage rates.

The New York Post: Albany’s ‘Good Cause Eviction’ spells bad news for NY’s housing market.

American Thinker: Woke Democrats Broke American Cities.

City Journal: The Big Empty.

American Thinker: Righteous Recycling.

Betsy McCaughey: The CDC’s reign of error has done incalculable harm to America. Yeah, but how are things working out for China?

My nephew is a locksmith, so I know his children’s futures are secure: Home security is a growth industry.

If you live in a city where the police are afraid to enforce civil order, you need security. If you moved away, but not far enough, you need security. And even if you are no less safe than before, if you are more fearful, you need security.

Young and bored to death with schoolwork? Your neighbors need security doors and iron bars for their windows. Their neighborhoods need security gates and perimeter defenses. Talk all day about the internet-of-things, but there is nothing more brick-’n’-mortar than a wall.

We socialized home security to the police, and that worked pretty well where almost no one was a criminal, anyway. The police are defaulting just when they are needed most, and, hence, self-defense had devolved to from whence it first emerged: You – your self, your spouse, your family, hour homestead, your work, your values. Home security is a growth industry because you know that, ultimately, there is no one to defend the things you love but you.

That’s why Americans are buying guns, too, but passive defenses avoid bloodshed by sending bad impulses elsewhere. That would be ‘privilege’, I should think – and give me excess of it! Civilization is people fighting – and dying, if necessary – to sustain their values.

That’s a heavy burden! If you’re in Metropolitan Phoenix, my nephew – Tim Brannum – can help: Lockology, 623-800-5900.

In other news:

Redfin: Urban Single-Family Homes Are Seeing the Fastest Price Growth as Buyers Return to City But Still Crave Space. More little-riot-lies from Redfin: They are documenting the demi-flight from urban cores to ring suburbs – which I have argued will prove to have been a mistake. Their charts are always fun, since the text yammers on about the pandemic, but the results document the riots. What’s going on with apartments, Redfin? What’s going on in CHAZ/CHOP? If you’re walking on tiptoes over there, afraid to speak the truth out Read more

As we talked about last year, the likelihood of rioting in any particular urban environment is broadly predictable by what I jokingly called a RiotScore™. The best tell is the Chief of Police, but by now we all know many ways of predicting where and why riots will occur.

A more granular way of looking at the same issue – where is the safety the residential real estate market is fleeing to? – is something I am calling the ChaosScore™: How much urban chaos is proximate to this home? That is to say: Is this an area where I am more likely to roll down my windows – or lock my doors?

Plausibly, there are Fair Housing issues here, since real estate agents are instructed to send safety questions to third-party resources – but the ChaosScore™ can be precisely that.

So: Like this: Within a three-mile radius, quantity of:

• Supermarkets/pharmacies
• Abortion clinics/gun stores
• Check-cashing/payday-loan stores
• Convenience stores/gas stations
• Traffic lights/limited-access roadways

The lower the score, the better – unless you are plotting the location of your next McDonalds. I could think of other things to measure, but they’re all about non-residential uses of the land. This again is a color-blind way of looking at the impact of location on residential real estate appreciation: Anyone buying a home where the ChaosScore™ is high should expect worse results, going forward, compared with low-ChaosScore™ neighborhoods. Higher risk of both greater-commercialization and condemnation, as well.

And while I do not ever expect to see a ChaosScore™ on a realty.bot listing, this is the way to do real estate analysis when you are not trying to uphold a demonstrably false, palpably racist agenda.

Yesterday on BloodhoundBlog:

Brian Brady: How To Fix Florida Homeowner’s Insurance Costs.

In other news:

American Thinker: Portland’s mayor should resign first.

Joel Kotkin: The Green New Deal Will Impoverish America.

City Journal: Capitalist Havens of Free Speech: Market-driven innovation is providing new outlets for free expression in an increasingly intolerant media environment.

Townhall.com: The Oscar Speech That Went Viral…For a Good Reason.