1038 Lake sells at foreclosure auction for $3 million

Clown College

A lawyer friend of mine sends this:

Chris

Auction was held  at 12:00 in the rain.  There were four bidders. The winning bid was $3,000,000.00 by Patriot National Bank, which held the second and third mortgages.
Astoria Federal held the first mortgage and bid the amount of the debt of about $1,250,000.
Then another bidder bid and Patriot bid until he backed off and Patriot was declared the winner.

Access to premises was denied , not even in the driveway. The gates to the property were closed and the auction was held in the street, with two police officers monitoring things.

The property had a court appraisal of $5.1m and it will be interesting to see if the court will approve the sale.

I’ve been reporting on Steven Braverman’s woes for a long time. He owed $6.5 million on this dreadful house so it’s no wonder he couldn’t sell it before today’s foreclosure auction made that moot. I don’t usually cheer another’s misfortune so I won’t here, but if I was ever tempted to say a man got what he deserved ….

Final stage for Braverman will be the foreclosure on his last remaining property, 44 Close Road. Unlike his Lake Avenue monstrosity this was very well built (Tommy Hilfiger either had it built or bought it new, I forget which, but never lived here) and finished with taste. But that won’t be enough to achieve a sales price large enough to pay off the massive debt Braverman has saddled this place with, so look for the pending foreclosure to run its course to conclusion.

By the way, Patriot Bank now owns Lake free and clear of all the junior encumbrances, so you could probably buy this from them for even less that they paid today. Not my cup of tea but it is a lot of house. Trying buying something half its size in Riverside for $2.75 million – apples to oranges, I know but still ….

UPDATE: Hah! Duke of Deception, you missed your chance! Looking back at old comments, I see the Duke and I had this exchange in 2009:

InstaPundit posts this question and depressing answer from John Hindraker

JOHN HINDERAKER ASKS: Why Is This Election Even Close? “On paper, given Obama’s record, this election should be a cakewalk for the Republicans. Why isn’t it? I am afraid the answer may be that the country is closer to the point of no return than most of us believed. With over 100 million Americans receiving federal welfare benefits, millions more going on Social Security disability, and many millions on top of that living on entitlement programs–not to mention enormous numbers of public employees–we may have gotten to the point where the government economy is more important, in the short term, than the real economy.”

 

A message for modern Greenwich parents (and elsewhere)

 

Will it fit the whole family AND the life coaches?

Little Professor dvd’s and professional pre-nursery school coaches aren’t helping your child succeed.

At the root of this parental anxiety is an idea you might call the cognitive hypothesis. It is the belief, rarely spoken aloud but commonly held nonetheless, that success in the U.S. today depends more than anything else on cognitive skill—the kind of intelligence that gets measured on IQ tests—and that the best way to develop those skills is to practice them as much as possible, beginning as early as possible.

There is something undeniably compelling about the cognitive hypothesis. The world it describes is so reassuringly linear, such a clear case of inputs here leading to outputs there. Fewer books in the home means less reading ability; fewer words spoken by your parents means a smaller vocabulary; more math work sheets for your 3-year-old means better math scores in elementary school. But in the past decade, and especially in the past few years, a disparate group of economists, educators, psychologists and neuroscientists has begun to produce evidence that calls into question many of the assumptions behind the cognitive hypothesis.

What matters most in a child’s development, they say, is not how much information we can stuff into her brain in the first few years of life. What matters, instead, is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit and self-confidence. Economists refer to these as noncognitive skills, psychologists call them personality traits, and the rest of us often think of them as character.

Hmm – self-confidence, curiosity, grit: aren’t these characteristics being washed out of boys by massive doses of Ritalin and the continuing war on boys?  That aside, read the whole article or, better, pass out copies  in the Whole Foods parking lot. – it probably won’t deter a SUV Mommy from her destructive behavior towards her children, boy or girl, but at least she may feel bad about doing it.

People’s Republic of California keeps going, somehow

Professors seeking tenure will have to show that they’ve toiled in the fields of the Marxists.

Another wacky idea from California: forcing teachers in the state university system to provide some form of social service as a condition of achieving tenure. Assembly Bill 2132, which passed in the legislature and is now awaiting  Governor Jerry Brown’s signature, “encourages” the independent University of California to include a demonstration of “service” in its evaluations for the hiring, promotion and granting of tenure to teachers.

Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee writes that “The specifics of Assembly Bill 2132 appear to give great weight to political or at least semi-political activities favored by those on the political left. They include, in the words of a legislative bill analysis, ‘developing programs for underserved populations’ and ‘outreach programs developed to promote cultural diversity in the student body.'” Walters wonders whether researchers working on a cure for breast cancer will be pushed to spend time on service that pleases the legislature.

Add this to the long list of attempts to politicize higher education, from the recent move at UCLA to approve advocacy in classrooms to the battles in teachers’ colleges to require students to display the proper “disposition” (i.e., political principles of the left) before graduating. Anything but actual education.