Dollar Bill’s cohort turns on NPR

Who knew? Fellow lefties now claim that National Public Radio is part of a vast, right-wing conspiracy! They sure had me fooled.

Media Matters [a wholly owned subsidiary of the Koch Brothers George Soros] is scrambling to discredit a much-discussed report on America’s disability program by journalist Chana Joffe-Walt that was featured on Chicago’s Public Radio This American Life and National Public Radio’s (NPR) All Things Considered.

Media Matters researcher Hannah Groch-Begley attacked NPR by breathlessly warning that a “misleading NPR report has become fodder for a right-wing media campaign to scapegoat federal disability benefits, despite the fact that the rise in disability claims can be attributed to the economic recession and demographic shifts.”

Joffe-Walt’s six-month investigation into America’s disability program found a record-high 14 million Americans receiving disability checks in a system rife with fraud and dependency-inducing abuse that costs taxpayers $260 billion a year—more than food stamps and welfare combined.

 

Live blogging the P&Z FEMA session

P&Z. Ogilvy on floor, Gideon refuses to give up his seat Mean.

Bad start- microphones don’t work, commission members too deaf to (a) notice or (care). These are the people who brought us FAR, of course.
Coastal areas only are affected by new FEMA rules.
Base flood Elevation changes- old Greenwich, you’re f’d
Flood zone houses any part of town- “your insurance premiums will go up significantly”. You betcha.
The 50% rule (I’ll explain later) is going down to 30% in the future. Want a new bathroom? Plan on tearing down your house.
David Ogilvy is sitting on the floor(photo later) in direct violation of the FEMA minimum height level.
Question posed(sorry Walt, no answer to amount needed to bribe for a variance) – are these new maps “final”? Answer: it’s the federal government, nothing is final. Build now, regret later.
BTW- your furnace and generator will be joining the rest of your family on those stilts.
Katie Deluca – another politician’s child who’s found employment with the town* –  is not answering a question – incapable or duplicitous? Both?

Wrap up: 466 homes in Old Greenwich are being moved into flood zone with these new maps. Once there, they will all be by definition “non-conforming”, which means that anything done to the existing structure- new windows, new roof, interior walls moved, kitchen updated, etc. cannot exceed 50% of the market value of the house – not the land and house, just the house, less the cost of all improvements made since 1986. If your house is worth $350,000 and you  added a $50,000 addition in 1986, a new $75,000 kitchen in 1996 and $75,000 again in a redone master bedroom bath in 2010, you are already over your limit and should you want to install new storm windows, say, you’ll have to tear your house down and start anew. That ought to send the value of older homes soaring.

Why does our own P&Z go back to 1986 in calculating prior improvement costs instead of using FEMA’s much more lenient policy of a one-year look back? “Because we’ve always done it that way”, explains Ms. Deluca. Pressed for a reason beyond mere tradition, a P&Z member contributes a stirring story of a mother and her infant trapped on the second floor of their house in another town during Hurricane Sandy. That must not be allowed to happen here, she insists (apparently the mother and child were safely rescued, and no reason for their ignoring evacuation orders in the first place was supplied) so Greenwich P&Z intends to force property owners into compliance and damn the cost. Presumably the P&Z will be banning assault rifles on the same “if it saves the life of one child” theory of regulation, but they didn’t bring it up at tonight’s meeting.

So there you have it: if your home was built before July, 2013 and is now or will be reassigned to one of our two newly-redefined and expanded flood zones you are officially non-compliant and must meet the P&Z’s rules for future improvements. What that means is that older homes -I’d guess anything built before 1985-1990 cannot economically be expanded or improved and must remain as they are now, until replaced with the new FEMA House model, which is one built on stilts. Stay put, and you will soon be surrounded by giant homes looming over you and blocking your views and your sunlight. Move, and expect to get the land value of your property and not a penny more. Your house is now officially obsolete. Just like its FAR and lot coverage regulations, the P&Z has just confiscated your property and your wealth and isn’t planning to compensate you for your loss. You will be entitled, however, to use the town dump to dispose of your current residence.

Long range, the goal and the vision of our P&Z and the federal government is a waterfront of homes on sticks, like the quaint native fishing villages seen in old WWII movies. That will be different from what we see today.

*Katie Deluca, I am informed, is the daughter of John Blankley, former candidate for First Selectman, future member of the Board of Estimate and Taxation, raising the question, is there anybody working for town government who isn’t related by birth or marriage to a town politician?

What could possibly go wrong?

As home values recover, home equity lending resumes.

The demise of books

Decluttering team

Where are the books? This author asks. I’ve noticed the same thing myself in my years selling real estate. I used to operate on a bibilophobe theory of real estate: the more books, the longer it would take a house to sell because most modern buyers fear and loath books (I also believed, and still believe, that readers are more interesting people and tend to live in more interesting homes, and “interesting” doesn’t sell as readily as bland – ask any builder). But today, no one seems to have books – “The Great estates of Greenwich” and “Twelve Best Golf Courses in the World” don’t count. Books seem to have gone the way of albums, cds, and – remember ? videos. I’ll have to find some other way to amuse myself on the open house tour.

 Lawrence Cunningham

Books have lined the shelves of the offices of all my colleagues at every school where I have worked.  In my early days of teaching, or when spending a term as a visitor, I’d wander into a learned neighbor’s office to get acquainted.  The titles and content of those books announced a persons’s intellectual background and interests. They were instantly and extensively a topic of earnest discussion.  If my interlocutor should be interrupted by a call or an assistant popping in, I’d amuse myself by grazing over the titles, scanning the shelves that added up to an inventory of knowledge.  On their shelves and mine, students attending office hours would likewise find easy ice breakers.

When visiting the homes of friends, especially new friends but longer-term friends as well, it has always interested me to see what books are stacked on their shelves, in the living room, the study, along hallways. At parties, these books have been great conversation starters, fountains of discourse and debate.  You could even pick them up and hand them over, citing the passage on a given page where you recalled a point being made particularly well.

My wife and I, when house hunting the last time around, inspected two dozen apartments before falling in love with the homey charm of the one where we live now.  As an anonymous broker showed us through the absent homeowners’ place, we’d scan the stacks of books that gave a sense of the people who lived there–lovers of art history, a denizen of Wall Street, devotees of history, biography, the Civil War.  Stephanie and I would joke, when viewing that rare apartment empty of books, that the absence of books was an absence of warmth and that we would not trust the people who lived there.  ”Where are the books?,” we’d ask in bewilderment as we rode down the elevator, never to return.

Today, with reading so often done and “books” acquired digitally, stored in pixels on hand-held devices, we see fewer new titles gracing the offices of colleagues and teachers, the homes of friends.  No longer on display, they can no longer be conversation pieces.  The average age of books on shelves is rising steadily and even these becoming anachronistic.  Shelves are given over to decoration, clocks, cups, bells, photographs.   My wife and I wonder, “what will our kids think, 10 or 20 years from now, when they see an apartment without a single book in it?”  Maybe nothing.  We would be horrified.

It’s a true spring market

Unlike recent spring pasts, buyers have definitely responded to the lengthening days and are out buying. In addition to 141 Cat Rock, discussed below, three more properties have reported accepted offers today.

24 Rock Ridge

24 Rock Ridge, a 1920 house that last saw a workman in 1986, couldn’t sell last year when priced at $3.998 million. It came back on two weeks ago at $3.825 and is already under contract.

78 Rockwood Lane

78 Rockwood Lane, $1.995, is proof that the market has come alive. A contemporary that, to my taste, lacked the light and open feeling that can make a contemporary so appealing, perched on, again just my opinion, marginal land. None of that deterred at least one buyer and it’s going, after fifteen days.

44 Lockwood Lane

44 Lockwood Lane in Riverside, asking $1.250, is more understandable. It’s 1960 construction on the Thruway but in Riverside, this is what passes for a starter home. And those will sell.

The encouraging thing about this resurgence, for buyers, is that rising prices should bring more houses on the market, either because their owners can now afford to sell them or simply because, after waiting, those owners see that the time is right. New inventory should cool things down a bit and after the next two months of fun simmer down, may present a few buying opportunities. Maybe.

The builders are coming alive, damn it

141 Cat Rock

Having exhausted the fertile fields of Riverside the builders, reenergized with access to credit again, are swarming like locusts into midcountry – a celebration of Passover, perhaps.

Latest to go, via bidding war no less, was 141 Cat Rock, $1.295, reported today. I had clients who liked it but they’re end users and can’t compete with someone whose only concern about the condition of a house is how much it will cost to scrape it.

141 is a difficult lot, with ledge, but with two $4 million sales literally a stone throw away this past December, extra money spent on site prep is justified.

Tough for homebuyers.

New flood zone regs detailed tonight

Town Hall, 7:00 pm 6:30, per Mike Finkbeiner. Your realtor should attend as well. What you don’t know will cost you.
Look for me there-I’ll be the one wearing the Belle Haven cap.

Hope and change as Obama drives down the unemployment rate

Shh! Let’s just keep this our little secret.

He’s pushed them out of the job market and onto the disability rolls instead, where they don’t count as “unemployed”. Result? Government now spends more on disability payments than food stamps and welfare combined.

“Since the economy began its slow, slow recovery in late 2009, we’ve been averaging about 150,000 jobs created per month,” said Joffe-Walt in an Public Radio International (PRI) “This American Life” interview. “In that same period every month, almost 250,000 people have been applying for disability.”

Editor’s note: Public Radio is not known for its conservative views or reporting.

Among Joffe-Walt’s findings are the following facts:

• The federal government spends more money each year on cash payments for disabled former workers than it does on food stamps and welfare combined; America’s two largest disability programs, including health care for disabled workers, costs taxpayers $260 billion a year
• In some parts of the country, such as Hale County, Alabama, one out of every four working-age adults collects a disability check
• As of 2011, 33.8% of newly diagnosed disabled workers cited “back pain and other musculoskeletal problems” as their reason for being unable to work.  In 1961, the top reason for being disabled was “heart disease, stroke”
• Disabled workers do not get counted in the unemployment figures. If they did, the numbers would be far higher
• Less than 1% of people who went on disability at the beginning of 2011 have returned to the workforce
• The Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program—which covers kids and adults—has exploded.  SSI is now seven times larger than it was 30 years ago.

The report suggests that the much-touted Welfare to Work policies of the 1990s that appeared to successfully move welfare recipients off the public dole may have been a mirage. States have figured out that shifting people from welfare to disability frees up substantial funds, as states have to pay the costs of welfare, but the federal government picks up the tab for disability.

“That’s a kind of ugly secret of the American labor market,” said MIT economist David Autor.  “Part of the reason our unemployment rates have been low, until recently, is that a lot of people who would have trouble finding jobs are on a different program.”

Joffe-Walt says disability has “become a de facto welfare program for people without a lot of education or job skills.” The reporter notes that the disability program “wasn’t supposed to serve this purpose; it’s not a retraining program designed to get people back onto their feet.”

According to Social Security chief actuary Steve Goss, disability insurance program reserves will run out of money in 2016.

When you’re in a hole and want to get out, quit digging

Florida Atlantic University student who refused to step on the name Jesus as demanded by his professor (and Vice Chairman of the Palm Country Democrats – hmmm) has now been suspended and brought up on charges.

I wasn’t the only one to ask why this brave “professor” used Jesus as the object of contempt instead of, say, Mohammad or a copy of the Koran. So far, FAU administrators haven’t answered that poser.

No mercy for the distraught

“A real man of compassion packs a revolver” Jim Carrey, March 25, 2013

Actor Jim Carey savages Gabby Gifford’s husband for buying an assault rifle. “Any one who would buy an assault rifle after [Newtown] has very little in his soul or his heart worth protecting” the comedian deadpanned, refusing to acknowledge the emotional distress Mark Kelly must have been under after testifying just the day before in support of a law banning er, assault rifles.

Well of course it is

Take me to the wreckers ball

Regis Philbin’s old house at 38 Meeting House Road is slated for destruction. I’ve never heard anything but kind words about Mr. Philbin from those who’ve met him, from newsstand vendors to barbers to further up the economic scale: he seems the perfect gentleman, so it’s probably ungentlemanly to suggest his house is, or was simply gawdawful, with dated everything and, really, nothing to recommend its continued existence on this earth.

Philbin tried to sell it for $5.9 million and after years of price cuts unloaded it on the current owners for $3.8. Between so-so land on this dreadful street with an abandoned, uncompleted spec house and another home under foreclosure serving as gates to the neighborhood, they grossly overpaid. A building lot on a medium quality street way north of the Merritt on the eastern side of town? $2.5 million, tops, and if you suggested $1.8, I’d probably agree.