Home and Ownership

Today is tax day and across America we will be writing checks, filling in forms for both State and Federal taxes in which to ensure our role in the defining marker of equality and parity in American Democracy. Yeah that is working out great, right?

One of the ideas that is instilled in Americans is the dream of Home Ownership. And that has been peddled along with the idea that a College Degree is the key to success. And that is working out great, right?

Owning a home is perhaps the most daunting project one can take on. It is considered wealth building, provides economic security and builds a concept of community as one lives, builds a family, works and lives in a home for at least the term of the Mortgage (that usually 30 years) and in turn sends their Children to local schools, which are paid for through the taxes on said home. This like Meritocracy is a massive myth.

Home ownership MAY have been that at some point in the economic ladder but like Union jobs, decent wages, pension plans and other financial incentives such as supporting infrastructure that includes schools, public transportation, roads and all that align said roads, from crosswalks to street lighting, I suggest you take a trip to a Southern City and see how that fails in every stretch of the imagination. Even some larger cities that are appreciated for density fail in providing that equally across the board to all citizens as you can see in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco.

One book that deals with some of the failures of policy when it comes to issues regarding housing, especially affordable housing is a book called San Francisko. But there are other books that have covered the economic failures such as Evicted, Nickel and Dimed to name a few. The reality is that housing has always been a NIMBY issue by many regardless of their political and economic leanings. They may be for different reasons but the issue is the same when it comes to costs. And by that we mean Property Tax. This is the least transparent of tax systems and this article about how New York City demonstrates that the poorer homeowner often subsidizes the richer home owner when it comes to the way taxes are assessed.

And this is not just in New York, Colorado is facing a similar situation. And the move to remote work led many to find themselves relocating to cheaper environs in which to work and live and surprise they are not the Nirvana one imagines. As I can attest living in Nashville I experienced first hand the United States equivalent of third world country trying to navigate a city with lackluster public transportation, poor sidewalks, no crosswalks, high traffic fatalities, shitty infrastructure when it comes to weather issues and then the largest issue – the failures of the public school system. This article discusses the way these areas nickel and dime you to death when it comes to subsidizing the city when property and/or income taxes are low.

One of the major beliefs in home ownership which still mystifies me is a “starter home” that one buys and maintains to eventually leave and build up or move up. I had never heard of this until the arrival of HGTV and with that flipping also became a new moniker in which to convey they idea of buying properties that a dilapidated and in turn fixing them and turning them over to make a buck. I recall that may have been a factor in the crash of 2008 but again those were different times, right? True lower than lower mortgage rates, less down, shorter term loans and of course Realtors and Mortgage Brokers willing to find suckers, whoops I mean, clients willing to sign the contract. That worked out well, didn’t it?

I could get into a discussion about Real Estate and their MONOPOLY (the reality not the game on which irony that it is based) on selling and buying homes. The recent Missouri Case regarding the National Association of Realtors and that subject is best explained in this article from some of the actual Homeowners behind the case. It is shocking to realize how exploited and dependent we are on agents who have little to no business background, accounting or legal knowledge yet we hand over thousands of dollars to them to exchange property. A Lawyer could do it for a flat fee and so could any Agent, but that is not how it has been done. Okay then.

I have written often about how Real Estate Agents are one step above a Used Car Salesman and again Television has glorified it with varying reality shows that have them raking in the bucks and living the life. That is not the life of the “average” Real Estate Agent. This is one perspective I found that explains wages and incomes in varying markets. But like many other industries, this is industry that is not exempt from those that define corporate hierarchy, or is that Patriarchy? As the the story behind the such as this reason the NAR (irony that the acronym is so close to the NRA) head stepped down. Or this story about another Real Estate Agency, eXp, and their “issues” regarding harm. But just a review of a search in the NY Times brings article after article about the real estate industry and its many “issues.”

Aside from that industry that has contributed to housing costs, housing shortages and denting one’s savings via commissions and costs (come on do you really need to stage a home?) that ultimately come out of the seller’s pocket, there is little to no reason to believe that the equity you have built in your home for many will entitle them to a million dollar retirement. Again that is the reality of real estate, the rich stay richer, the poor stay well less poor in some cases if they have a hot house in a hot market.

But the real problems with home ownership other than maintenance which includes insurance, upkeep as those two factors with Climate problems of late are placing burdens on many, is the biggest check one will write – Property Taxes.

I have reprinted this editorial from the Times regarding this issue and it is something that we have to ask why? As I live in Jersey City the city mentioned in the article I can see firsthand what happened to this city and the aftermath of what it means for its residents, past.

It’s Time to End the Quiet Cruelty of Property Taxes

April 11, 2024 The New York Times Guest Essay

By Andrew W. Kahrl

Dr. Kahrl is a professor of history and African American studies at the University of Virginia and the author of “The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America.”

Property taxes, the lifeblood of local governments and school districts, are among the most powerful and stealthy engines of racism and wealth inequality our nation has ever produced. And while the Biden administration has offered many solutions for making the tax code fairer, it has yet to effectively tackle a problem that has resulted not only in the extraordinary overtaxation of Black and Latino homeowners but also in the worsening of disparities between wealthy and poorer communities. Fixing these problems requires nothing short of a fundamental re-examination of how taxes are distributed.

In theory, the property tax would seem to be an eminently fair one: The higher the value of your property, the more you pay. The problem with this system is that the tax is administered by local officials who enjoy a remarkable degree of autonomy and that tax rates are typically based on the collective wealth of a given community. This results in wealthy communities enjoying lower effective tax rates while generating more tax revenues; at the same time, poorer ones are forced to tax property at higher effective rates while generating less in return. As such, property assessments have been manipulated throughout our nation’s history to ensure that valuable property is taxed the least relative to its worth and that the wealthiest places will always have more resources than poorer ones.

Black people have paid the heaviest cost. Since they began acquiring property after emancipation, African Americans have been overtaxed by local governments. By the early 1900s, an acre of Black-owned land was valued, for tax purposes, higher than an acre of white-owned land in most of Virginia’s counties, according to my calculations, despite being worth about half as much. And for all the taxes Black people paid, they got little to nothing in return. Where Black neighborhoods began, paved streets, sidewalks and water and sewer lines often ended. Black taxpayers helped to pay for the better-resourced schools white children attended. Even as white supremacists treated “colored” schools as another of the white man’s burdens, the truth was that throughout the Jim Crow era, Black taxpayers subsidized white education.

Freedom from these kleptocratic regimes drove millions of African Americans to move to Northern and Midwestern states in the Great Migration from 1915 to 1970, but they were unable to escape racist assessments, which encompassed both the undervaluation of their property for sales purposes and the overvaluation of their property for taxation purposes. During those years, the nation’s real estate industry made white-owned property in white neighborhoods worth more because it was white. Since local tax revenue was tied to local real estate markets, newly formed suburbs had a fiscal incentive to exclude Black people, and cities had even more reason to keep Black people confined to urban ghettos.

As the postwar metropolis became a patchwork of local governments, each with its own tax base, the fiscal rationale for segregation intensified. Cities were fiscally incentivized to cater to the interests of white homeowners and provide better services for white neighborhoods, especially as middle-class white people began streaming into the suburbs, taking their tax dollars with them.

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One way to cater to wealthy and white homeowners’ interests is to intentionally conduct property assessments less often. The city of Boston did not conduct a citywide property reassessment between 1946 and 1977. Over that time, the values of properties in Black neighborhoods increased slowly when compared with the values in white neighborhoods or even fell, which led to property owners’ paying relatively more in taxes than their homes were worth. At the same time, owners of properties in white neighborhoods got an increasingly good tax deal as their neighborhoods increased in value.

As was the case in other American cities, Boston’s decision most likely derived from the fear that any updates would hasten the exodus of white homeowners and businesses to the suburbs. By the 1960s, assessments on residential properties in Boston’s poor neighborhoods were up to one and a half times as great as their actual values, while assessments in the city’s more affluent neighborhoods were, on average, 40 percent of market value.

Jersey City, N.J., did not conduct a citywide real estate reassessment between 1988 and 2018 as part of a larger strategy for promoting high-end real estate development. During that time, real estate prices along the city’s waterfront soared but their owners’ tax bills remained relatively steady. By 2015, a home in one of the city’s Black and Latino neighborhoods worth $175,000 received the same tax bill as a home in the city’s downtown worth $530,000.

These are hardly exceptions. Numerous studies conducted during those years found that assessments in predominantly Black neighborhoods of U.S. cities were grossly higher relative to value than those in white areas.

These problems persist. A recent report by the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy found that property assessments were regressive (meaning lower-valued properties were assessed higher relative to value than higher-valued ones) in 97.7 percent of U.S. counties. Black-owned homes and properties in Black neighborhoods continue to be devalued on the open market, making this regressive tax, in effect, a racist tax.

The overtaxation of Black homes and neighborhoods is also a symptom of a much larger problem in America’s federated fiscal structure. By design, this system produces winners and losers: localities with ample resources to provide the goods and services that we as a nation have entrusted to local governments and others that struggle to keep the lights on, the streets paved, the schools open and drinking water safe. Worse yet, it compels any fiscally disadvantaged locality seeking to improve its fortunes to do so by showering businesses and corporations with tax breaks and subsidies while cutting services and shifting tax burdens onto the poor and disadvantaged. A local tax on local real estate places Black people and cities with large Black populations at a permanent disadvantage. More than that, it gives middle-class white people strong incentives to preserve their relative advantages, fueling the zero-sum politics that keep Americans divided, accelerates the upward redistribution of wealth and impoverishes us all.

There are technical solutions. One, which requires local governments to adopt more accurate assessment models and regularly update assessment rolls, can help make property taxes fairer. But none of the proposed reforms being discussed can be applied nationally because local tax policies are the prerogative of the states and, often, local governments themselves. Given the variety and complexity of state and local property tax laws and procedures and how much local governments continue to rely on tax reductions and tax shifting to attract and retain certain people and businesses, we cannot expect them to fix these problems on their own.

The best way to make local property taxes fairer and more equitable is to make them less important. The federal government can do this by reinvesting in our cities, counties and school districts through a federal fiscal equity program, like those found in other advanced federated nations. Canada, Germany and Australia, among others, direct federal funds to lower units of government with lower capacities to raise revenue.

And what better way to pay for the program than to tap our wealthiest, who have benefited from our unjust taxation scheme for so long? President Biden is calling for a 25 percent tax on the incomes and annual increases in the values of the holdings of people claiming more than $100 million in assets, but we could accomplish far more by enacting a wealth tax on the 1 percent. Even a modest 4 percent wealth tax on people whose total assets exceed $50 million could generate upward of $400 billion in additional annual revenue, which should be more than enough to ensure that the needs of every city, county and public school system in America are met. By ensuring that localities have the resources they need, we can counteract the unequal outcomes and rank injustices that our current system generates.

The Grift

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We have spent the better part of the last decade debating about Trump and his coterie of Grifters that define both his business, Trump Enterprises (whatever those were) that included Real Estate, Casinos, Clothing Lines, Wine, Classes/Seminars, Steak, and other labeled brands that extended to other members of the Family that shared the name of Trump. From the seat in the White House he managed to further extend that brand to the point it drew attention from the State of New York which prosecuted members of his corporation, his personal Attorney and finally Trump himself for acts of duplicity and fraud regarding his real estate “empire.” That led to a massive penalty which he will not or will pay and this will go on perhaps for years more. There are other debts, trials and tribulations that seem to never have an end game in sight and that is what falls into that classification of the “Long Con.” A long con is one that takes place over a much longer time frame, I feel the story on John Oliver’s show regarding Pig Butchering is a great example of one of the current crops of long con. Bitcoin is a fabulous example of how that also plays into this story. A great long con if ever there was one, with the nefarious invisible “Banksy” who created all this but no one really knows who he is, where he is and what is this about? But even Kara Swisher in her new Memoir writes of another in Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg, who may be perhaps the best at this new type of Grift. Social Media is one long con.

This article in the New York Times discusses the growth of the Grift. And where I found this definition which I have paraphrased and added my own comments.

The difference between a Grifter and “Grafter” are often tied together. “Grift” evokes not so much specific criminal acts as a broad, opportunistic racket, executed with a bit of cunning and panache; Grafters are stolid and conventional, lining their pockets and then quietly retreating to one of their several homes. A Grifters has both flair and ambition, who seem to delight in the con itself — the cleverness of the scheme, the smooth ease with which the marks were gulled. So while Trump is a classic grifter take a look at many who attach themselves to his varying schemes and plans. Many worked for him during his Administration quickly extricating themselves post January 6th but would happily Vote and/or work for him again if the opportunity arose. A Grifter loves a Grafter as they give them legitimacy. I prefer the term “Enablers” which is another way of allowing or permitting if not encouraging the behavior, a person usually associated with Addiction and there is no greater addiction than money. All of Venture Capitalists are some type of Enabler. Without them or the banks would Sam Bankerman Fried or Bernie Madoff made as far and in his case as long without them?

Now we are all being grifted or are grafters at some point. We take an opportunity and we work it to our advantage. I like to think of Real Estate Agents as the lowest on the professional totem pole who play the role of Counselor, Financial Advisor and Best Friend as you try to buy or sell a home. They dip their wick in both pots often coming out well ahead of the game when you are working with one and this adds to the price of housing and why many cannot afford to as they work in tangent with another Grafter, the Mortgage Broker/Agent. Banks are not the only one who writes these loans and they too have a massive interest in making money, yours. The process of this led to a massive financial crisis in 2008 and yet not one saw a trial or a penalty in the process for this and many banks were bailed out and rescued from their misdeeds. But without the Agents and these secondary lenders, few would have made it to sign the papers and make the sales of a product they could not afford. Used Car Salesman get a bad rap, add Real Estate Agents to the list. There are many many more stories about Real Estate Agents and their acts of fraud and duplicity, and by far more costly. Just Google “Real Estate Fraud” to see the list of crimes they have committed.

This week a neighbor and her husband moved out of my building. He is a Surgeon and she is a “Model”/ Real Estate Agent. I did not like nor dislike them I simply lived down the hall from them and kept it at that. Upon their final move out our Refuse room was full of their rejects, disgusting broken furniture, filthy smelling couch cushions, and largely junky items that seemed to be from a college dorm than an adult professionals home. Their move out was done in a small order Uhaul truck with two hired hands who packed what they took with them to relocate to Pittsburgh. To say crap in both quality and design is to be polite. I had to remind myself that this Man was a fucking Surgeon and this filthy shit is his? His wife the model did not adorn herself with the quality of designer goods but they did have three vehicles, two Porches and Volvo. Well priorities. And while living in a building that is largely filled with Asian families and Students who live very cheaply I did laugh as it explains why the fascination with my decorated digs is a source of discussion. And for the record many many folks who rent now are taking it upon themselves to decorate and design living spaces that reflect their taste. And yes folks what comes up can come down and if you are responsible you restore, replace all what you did back to the shit the building gave you. Or you can be like the Doctor and his wife, leave it there and pay for that via forfeit of the damage deposit. Clearly he has the cash. But man would I want that Man operating on me? NO! Again, this is a choice and it takes a weekly wander outside any apartment building at end of month to see the treasures and trash left behind.

And that too is another kind of Grift, the tip. There is now an industry tied to the Tipping Economy. The complaints about the added “service fee” and the mandatory tip on screens when at the Bakery or Butcher even have made one wonder what is appropriate and how much also has become an insidious way of doing business. Living in already overpriced multi family housing means Tips at the Holiday time are mandated if not expected. For many the strain of tipping a building with often dozens of staff, many invisible can be an expensive proposition. To give you an idea, we have in our Building we have Six Front Desk Staff, some whom work Graveyard and often have limited Tenant contact but no less an important job in which to provide security and maintain package inventory and distribution for those who do collect them at odd times. The cleaning and maintenance staff are (often at times) 10 in number and do most of the heavy lifting; Add to that the Superintendent who oversees that crew and lastly the Manager and when we have one, an Assistant. (And for the record the Manager has massive problems holding staff so the turnover is high and often overtly dramatic adding to buildings toxic demeanor) So, at one point we have over 18 people we have to pay at some point, and how much and do all of them get it? I mean the fat fuck who is the Gossip troll deserves the most as that way you won’t be gossiped about right? He should get the most too as he is fat, old, barely walks and is a troll right? Over the young girl who works her ass off. But how about the former Lead who used her position as “helping people” by enabling those with Dogs and Kids to be largely ignored when the kids were running wild in the gym unsupervised or the Dogs shit everywhere or the ones that killed a dog and another attacking a woman, but they were “good” Tenants as they tipped more and more often. So that is hierarchy in Apartment living, who tips, how often and how much matters. And there are a lot of holidays and dates of import. Valentines Day, Lunar New Year, Holi, their birthdays, your birthday all are on the calendar and have cards ready in which to shove in that obligatory payment.

We think of Grift as something associated with Politicians and there is no greater profession guilty of it, but it is everywhere. It is the way we assert our control and and influence even in the most benign of situations. And with that we are not exempt from the fraud, the duplicity and the guilt associated with our role as Grifter or Grafter. The recent story about the New York Times Reporter who handed over 50K in cash to a recent scam, but the Bank who willingly handed over 50K in cash is the same banker who is supposed to notify the IRS if you have deposited more than 10K in your account to notify them as earnings. Or the payment apps if you have transfers exceeding 300 dollars. The Police who will take any amount a cash during a traffic stop legally as a it too is suspect under the guise of Civil Forfeiture. So that Estate Sale, Car Sale, or some transaction is all watched or monitored or taken as it is all seen as gotten gains. But taking it out and in cash to pay an extortion not a problem in the least.

Grift or Graft, the Con, the Long Con and we are all players or victims in the game. This article from Psychology Today explain who is more likely to be a victim, but in reality we all are at some point players in this game. It is just how much you lose what matters. We are all pigs waiting to be butchered.

The Art of the Con and Why People Fall for It

How the con is pulled off, why fraudsters are successful, and how to spot them.

Posted September 26, 2019 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

By definition, a con artist is a manipulator who cheats, or tricks, others through persuading them to believe something that is not true. Through deception, they fool people into believing they can make easy money when, in fact, it is the con artist who ends up taking the victim’s money. The criminal and legal consequences of such indiscretions can be insignificant or great, depending on the circumstances and the laws of the land. In the course of co-authoring The Crime Book, which covered more than 100 crimes, I researched and wrote a chapter about con artists. Their crimes are varied, as are their behaviors. But the one thing they each have in common is the power of persuasion to take advantage of unsuspecting people.

Name of the Game

The confidence game, as scam artistry is called, is one of the oldest tricks in the trade. It exploits people’s trust. Human nature is on the side of these masters of fraud when it comes to defrauding their marks, or victims, and contributes to the con’s enduring success. Perpetrators have been referred to everything from flimflam operators, hustlers, grifters, and tricksters. The victims have been called marks, suckers, and gulls. And while media publicity has further romanticized cons and put their crimes in the public eye, their actions are anything but glamorous.

Even further, the cost of the capers to victims may run anywhere from a couple hundred to a few million dollars, with some victims learning the hard way, using their own free will, that when an offer seems too good to be true, it probably is. In fact, the Federal Trade Commission reported that people lost $1.48 billion to fraud in 2018, an increase of 38 percent in 2017.

It Can Happen to You

How do unsuspecting people get duped to begin with? After all, even the most rational people have proven susceptible to crimes of trickery. That’s because con artists often prey on people’s trust and their propensity for believing what they wish was true—especially with get-rich-quick schemes and individual’s desire for a quick buck. They let their guard down and buy into what con artists feed them—all in the belief of the scammer and a high rate of return in exchange for a small investment, albeit a shady deal. But the convincing scammer skews the victim into thinking the payoff will come true and the scheme is legitimate.

Some famous con artists were at the top of their game—until they ultimately got caught. With impersonator Frank Abagnale and international career jewel thief Doris Payne, they are the epitome of the swindling game. By their own rights, they became experts at the art of the con and successfully evaded law enforcement for years. Two centuries earlier, Jeanne de la Motte, a cunning Frenchwoman, orchestrated a diamond necklace affair, which was one of several scandals that led to the French Revolution and helped destroy a monarchy.

Other significant confidence criminals, from forged artwork to fake manuscripts—Elmyr de Hory, a Hungarian-born forger of Picassos and Matisses, who sold more than a thousand pieces to art galleries worldwide, and novelist Clifford Irving, who wrote a fabricated autobiography of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. These stories break down how grifters pass off their own works as those of masters and literary greats—but eventually they too were caught.

A con artist can execute remarkable expertise in their trickery, as with Czechoslovakian Victor Lustig, who in an underhanded plot sold the Eiffel Tower for scrap metal—not once, but twice.

Psychology of the Con

Each of these con artists have one thing in common: the power of persuasion to swindle their victims. The successful ones exhibit three similar characteristics—psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism—which have been referred to by psychologists as “dark” personality traits.

Those characteristics allow con artists to swindle people out of their money without feeling any remorse or guilt. Another thing most chiselers have in common are their egos. These extortion sales people boost the psyche of the perpetrators and make them feel even more confident, thus the description of the con has been termed as a confidence game.

Because cons often change their identities as part of their game, it can be pesky for law enforcement to catch them. Also, police may not even go after them when the crime has to do with bilking property and even money from their marks. That’s because the law can consider the loss a civil issue and not a legal one, unless it’s a corporate white-collar crime, such as those committed by Bernie Madoff, a former stockbroker, financier, and operator of a massive pyramid scheme that perpetrated the largest financial fraud in recent US history. Going after grifters is often of low status, more difficult to prove, and less likely to be prosecuted, with violent crimes and terrorist acts of higher priority.

That happenstance leads to a message for everyday people: Buyer beware.

Rent: Too Damned High

Yesterday in the Washington Post was an article about a company called Starwood that has been buying up Multi family dwellings in Florida and raising rents that has led the company to earn profits out of literally forcing people to pay rents that have increased up to 50% (and higher) over their current rent. With that it forces more into poverty, debt and/or having to relocate with few options given Florida’s own issue with regards to affordable housing. And we are seeing this play throughout America, especially in Cities that are designated “it” and have intense in-migration from nearby States/Cities of individuals looking for work or in turn looking for better taxes and less regulation. Or just because an article declared it as such as the New York Times has done with regards to Nashville, Jersey City and Weehawken. Or when the New Yorker declares your city the Most Livable that pretty much kills the place. But Americans are always in search of somewhere better aka a place that will make them “richer” Places like Florida and Texas and Tennessee promise to with low wages and low costs and even less regulation. In real estate they are referred to as “migration boomtowns.” And in exchange, they generate revenue through a “regressive tax system” that harms the working class and frankly does not fill the coffers sufficiently. Which leads to endless ways to garner revenue you will certainly vote on new ways to tax property or supplement the budget, in order to improve schools, fund arts or create parks. Jersey City has done that of late and it shows how expensive it is to fund it all from the few who have little as a high rise that pays little to no taxes rises above them.

This from Investopedia explains how this tax structure works. This is also how much development across many cities build. Nashville has their Tax-Increment Financing, or TIF which is another boondoggle to taxpayers. How? By rising property values it means you have to pay more what? Property Taxes. And that used to be great when you are rich as you could deduct those, that is no longer so. Thanks to the GOP and the Trump Administration (which ironically contributed to some of his own tax issues), a Federal tax reform enacted in 2018, it limited deductions for state and local taxes and in turn supercharging the movement of more affluent Americans from the Northeast, Illinois and California toward zero-income tax states such as Florida, Texas and Nevada. Nashville was quite proud of its kills in that but TN does not quite have that “ennui” of the other States, but hey they are trying real hard. But the steady movement toward warmer, more affordable areas was well underway before the tax incentive and will persist even if it’s repealed. But also what contributed to this was the declaration of Opportunity Zones or Investment Areas. Funny I live in one or what used to be. These are the biggest bullshit of all the ways Developers use failures by Cities to build affordable housing. So you will see a brand new luxury building next to a shiny new Storage building; Convenient as you will need it as you cannot fit all you belongings into your overpriced but small unit or be homeless and keep your belongings in them as many do. And my recent trip to Detroit confirmed how that works for rich developers by buying off properties, keeping them dilapidated and then using fed funds to finally update and improve them. ProPublica did such a story on that same issue, leading the family to immediately write press releases dismissing the story as what? Fake News. Yeah right, welcome to City Living!

I live now in New Jersey with immense taxes, in 2021 I paid more in State Taxes than I did in Federal, go figure. And it taxes that push the migration, not politics. So when you go about red vs blue I suggest you realize that money is more a factor than whom you vote for. And our voting records show that. I lived in a Blue State went to a Red on and now back to Blue. Which only a few years ago was not. And with that I live in an “It” city that is undergoing immense gentrification with little to actually show for it but numerous luxury apartment buildings and some overpriced Condos (although few of those as Jersey City has the least available single family dwellings in the State and Condos are not money makers today at all but they have a few). With that we have also been listed as one of the most expensive rents in the country and are consistently in the top 10 with regards to rents and housing costs. And we have again little to show for it. The few green spaces are few and far between, the infrastructure is collapsing and they are in the middle of trying to replace all water and sewer lines. The flood that hit Jersey after Sandy has not been fully addressed and parts of Jersey City and Hoboken still flood when there are weather issues. I look out at a Development by a company called Bozzutto which built two units, one completed during the pandemic that sit directly on a FEMA floodplain. Yes folks this is city living.

A conversation with a neighbor about Jersey and the City led to some similar complaints, the lack of interesting places to socialize, inadequate library system, amenities in the building and of course rent. We also discussed the “character” or “type” of Jersey resident, either English as a Second Language group who rarely mix outside their own and she is Asian and the lack of sophistication and education. I agree that after my incident with the Cunt Family of 946 that there are problems, but I had not witnessed what she had in the building gym when a Young Man verbally berated and abused another over weights not returned, leading him to leave the gym and the Man followed this other man out, still screaming and ranting over the weights. She said she was terrified as she recognized both men, commented on the one young man’s good looks as well as the other and he often worked out with his girlfriend, so she knew them on sight. Yet, no complaints were filed with the building as this is another issue that defines White Privilege. White people here are abusive and unkind to other white people and believe that that is an implicit contract between you that you will keep it in house, handle it and accept it. I realized that when I filed my complaint over the Karen in 946, and her husband’s subsequent threat to me about “airing out our dirty laundry”. I kept on believing he had a type of Hoover file on me about some bullshit that he had “found out” from a former employee but I actually believe that is the again the invisible agreement, contract or script that we as White people have and tacitly agree to. These include such things that many Karen’s have been busted for when accosting POC about their behaviors. That is the first rule, don’t go public. Okay. So when I did mention this to the Front Desk one asked me “What Race where they?” He is White and often is a combative type, the stereotype Jersey person. Again, the implicit contract is in that response. I wonder if I had said Asian or Indian as we have few Black residents and to my knowledge no Latin ones or if there are they are really in hiding, what his response would have been.

The Racial divide is one of both Class and Money. Poverty is the level-izer that crosses all three. I saw that in Tennessee and in my travels in the South. There is little in migration in states like Alabama, Louisiana, and Missouri. The reason being that while they are not highly taxed they are highly populated by people of color and incomes and work are largely confined to small businesses. Larger industries and business have not established outposts the same way they have in Georgia, Texas, Florida and Tennessee. The courting and fawning over industry can only spread so far like the butter that melts on the table during the relentless hot muggy summers. And so while many do relocate there and have established homes, moving is not something you can do as frequently as I. You have children, you have family and you build roots. And with that you do not move unless a Job is in the offering and guaranteed. Despite all the hybrid work, I find it interesting the few chose to move to less populated states and areas, hell many moved to NYC or Boston or LA as this was their chance to take advantage of that cheap rent and availability thanks to those leaving in the same amount for safer pastures. My favorite of all of this are all the City Slickers who bought homes in the Country and found themselves now saddled with lemons and the costs to restore them now beyond the reach, so as Mortgages climb, the ability to dump it back on the market also declines. Watch for Foreclosures and more Venture Capitalists to buy those homes to rent back to the former occupants at a much higher cost. Regrets, I have a few.

That is the circle of ownership today. We have more businesses buying residences, both single and multi family units and moving them like checker pieces on a board. Add to that the growth of AirBnB. But cities are starting to realize how that affects home availability but that again does not exempt that home from being purchased by an investor and using it as a short term rental with minimal lease requirements, or a pied a terre which allows the unit to be vacant. There are those too that are an issue with regards to housing. But the reality is that most developers are seeing money in rentals. With now home purchases on decline, and more smaller landlords worried about rising interests and other costs they are looking to sell so, the building run by one slumlord today will be purchased and run by another tomorrow. I want to point out that again both Kushner and Trump were sons of fathers who began their career as slumlords.

But they have like all rich folks divested themselves of those properties and again the checkerboard keeps moving those pieces. Today in JC, there are the Cast Iron Lofts, once run by the most infamous of Slumlord Billionaires, Sam Zell, and Equity Residential now taken over by Bozzutto that has raised rents, amenity fees and reduced maintenance and oversight. They are notorious throughout the area as the numerous complaints from Yelp, Google and Apartments.com note. Equity, along with other property management firms are part of a class action lawsuit for price fixing thanks to the algorithms they use to inflate rent and discriminate. Yes folks the rent you pay may not be the same rent your neighbor pays. And they can blame the computer for that. You know like they do in law enforcement for facial recognition and other junk science.

And here again is Pro Publica, which did a recent investigation into this practice and the software used RealPage that supposedly enables leasing agents to get more bang for the buck. In other words gauge the tenant. It also allows for greater vacancy rate as they in turn can balance the books on the backs of the current residents to raise their rents to offset the loss. If you realize that most of these buildings are also required to have leased businesses be they local or educational as in day care, Boys and Girls Clubs etc to offset the tax incentives that the city provides. So when those big spaces are empty someone has to pay. Well that are those that live above. Write off? No. Many co-ops in Manhattan are struggling with that issue and have been working to find ways to fill spaces once held by Physicians, Bodegas, Cleaners and other commercial enterprises that supplemented the buildings bottom line. And with that, there will be many a unit with new costs to their annual assessments coming soon! But they too are equally discriminatory and have even more restrictions and requirements in in which to live. This is city living folks.

Home ownership is not just taxes, it is upkeep and the same with Condos only you have neighbors that are literally on top and below you. Think an Apartment with more costs and even less security. Just ask the Board of the Condo in Toronto that had a mass shooting over “noise” the standard complaint in almost all community living. Same problems different solutions. And what applies to those applies to the multi family “luxury” builds. Same problems, no solutions. And yes as the Year ended, regrets there are a few. And they are not alone as many did find themselves out of work as we are starting to see the effects of the recession and the white collar layoffs, and with that owning a home they cannot sell but cannot afford; hey folks the reality is that the grass is not always greener. And it is these same communities under the NIMBY rules that often again cause more problems than create solutions.

So we have a problem that ties into the construction of affordable housing across the county, homes that are too big to both maintain and in turn sell, homes bought by venture capitalists and put back on the market as rentals that are again overpriced, the “flipper” mentality also contributing to this; Multi family dwellings being built but as “luxury” with few to none affordable units and exempt from rent controls, if in fact there are such laws or restrictions in place (Seattle is not allowed to have them thanks to the State Constitution). Then there Opportunity Zones and Investment tax laws that enable developers (often with former Governors fronting them as one had always washes the other) to skirt further taxes: As people who invest their capital gains in qualifying real-estate projects (usually REIT) within these tracts can defer their tax bill. And if they hold the investment for at least 10 years, they won’t have to pay capital-gains taxes on any profit from an eventual sale of the property. The states make the pick and one area can always outdo the other in the bid. As Camden in NJ found out the hard way.

And what these do is decimate revenue from communities in the ways of schools, roads, public transportation and other infrastructure needs that when population increases demand does as well. The Investopedia link above shows how that affects the overall community and their liveablity factor. I can personally point to the schools in both Nashville and Jersey City as being absolute dumpsters in ways that Seattle only comes close but have active citizens who seem intent at at least staving some of that, but that too from what I can tell is coming perilously close thanks to the pandemic and a loss of enrollment. And without decent schools cities do suffer folks and that migration to the suburbs the place you left is the place you end up returning to, if you can afford to. But can you afford not? But then again the roads and public transportation options leave few and that gas tax again in many of these same places that you once left never to return is necessary to fund the State. It either/or neither/nor folks. You cannot have it all ways. Take for example the lack of buses and public transportation, let alone sidewalks that contribute to numerous pedestrian deaths in Nashville every year. The rise in bicycle deaths another. You have to live in a city and work in a city or you commute, so how does that work when you have a car but you cannot afford to fill the tank, or the drive is literally a competitive one?

So why is the rent too damn high? Yes corporate greed and the need to feed Wall Street. Then we have personal wealth and familial wealth that dictates another level of reasoning. We have varying State, City and Federal incentives and programs that enable tax dodging and in turn find new ways to redline via gentrification and rental increases all under the guise of providing growth. The pandemic enabled many to stop rent and evictions but those moratoriums are over and in turn inflation has brought even the most tolerant of Landlords to the brink and are now selling properties as refinancing has become a challenge due to rising interest rates. And lastly we have simply not built enough homes period. The issues of regulations, of financing and of construction has made it seemingly impossible and yet some is done and others have failed. Major corporations are now looking into loaning or offsetting those costs, Microsoft and Amazon have established such funds. But the idea of Workforce Housing is also fraught with issues and again the private versus public sector seems to have always been a dance with the issue of who leads a problem. Answers, I have none, ideas I have a plenty but there are few who listen and ever fewer willing to try. We are ruled by money, and in turn by race and gender. That is the reality of our America. We refuse to listen. I read the comments on the pages and there are valid ones and some just equally so; however, just in the way they advocate their position puts them further on the side of the “others” and we rarely see or listen to the “other” so in “other” words, compromise is near to impossible. Coming to a City near you.

Closing shop

The tech world is getting bitch slapped with several CEO’s taking leave and a nice chunk of change as they head to the exit doors. But in reality what service are the providing? But this is the reality that we gloss these shiny bits into billion dollar businesses that have no long range plan or actual product. The case of Peloton was the singular exception but then again the price and cost were out of range of most consumers. But then again who cares!!! This is the article discussing the great resignation among said unicorns and like Adam Neumann they will be back. WeWork for renters, sounds scary.

I have long wondered the point of Pintrest and the Peloton craze is like all crazed things that happened during the pandemic, but now even I am sick of working out in my office. That said, I doubt I will ever set foot in a Yoga studio again as I love my virtual classes from Steadfast and True Yoga in Nashville, few real studios compare and my home practice has improved dramatically as you should in Yoga do so. Now I literally double down. But again there is something oddly sanctimonious and pretentious about Yoga studios and the entire way it is done that frankly given Covid and air transmission is a reason there to go no. But I do go to the gym in my building, open windows and manage to work at times when I have less crowds and in turn less breathing out. Well for men that seems to be some type of shitting/orgasm breath that they feel compelled to do when working out. It was explained to me that they have to given the weight they are pushing. Um, no if you are feeling that kind of discomfort you need to drop the weight up the reps and change your workout there, Jack LaLane.

And with that the remote work continues and how offices are created and for what purpose will also change the skylines and the cities that they are located. I for the first time was in Manhattan where I witnessed people actually leaving an office for end of day rituals and discussing work, commutes and it was a pleasant surprise if not a relief. Sadly that is still small in number but good to see regardless. I do think that is a double edged sword for many. It is a great deal for those who work at home and can be flexible with work times and family obligations. I get that now the work day can be 24 hours broken up into times that fit into schedules for other obligations like physical exercise and meals, this editorial discusses that very issue. But again really is this what we really want and need? For many workers it is yes and particularly disabled or POC and especially Women who are shut out of workplaces they can do the job and get paid without the extra bullshit that comes with it. I tried to imagine myself in an office workplace after 30 years and realized I could not do it unless I microdosed all day and kept myself away from well anyone. Man I really hate people. But I am not alone and with that this from the NY Times shares what the results were for some who did take advantage of the bullshit myth, the Great Resignation. But then again if you think working at home gives you some form of privacy and dignity, think again. This article is about the way employers are using data analytics to monitor performance and they do so using the very computer you work on, through flash photos, key movement and types of work produced. It is fun times folks, get used to it. You will never be free. Never.

So what is the future of work? I have no clue. I truly can say it is good to be old as this has little to no affect on me what.so.ever. But change is always good just for the better, I am not sure. And with that what will the “it” cities of NY and SF be like? Well they will be just fine, that I am sure.

What Twitter’s Move to Shutter Offices Signals for Big Tech

Companies are cutting costs by embracing remote setups, but what happens to the hubs they leave behind? This article in the NY Times discusses the sudden exodus of the cowboys behind the Unicorns they created.

Twitter executives can currently travel the world by globe-trotting among the company’s 38 offices, from San Francisco, Sydney, and Seoul to New Delhi, London, and Dublin.

But not for much longer. On July 27, the company sent a memo to employees saying that one office in San Francisco would be shuttered; plans for a new office in Oakland, California, would be abandoned; and the future of seven locations was being carefully considered as part of a cost-cutting measure. Five other offices globally would definitely be downsized. It’s all part of an attempt to prepare the company for purchase by Elon Musk and tighten expenditure as much as possible.

Twitter isn’t the first to cut down its office space. In early June, Yahoo was rumored to be getting rid of its 650,000 square foot San Jose campus, which was only completed at the end of 2021. Later that month, Yelp announced it was edging closer to being fully remote, and closing 450,000 square feet of office space across the United States. It was followed a week later by Netflix, who said it plans to sublease around 180,000 square feet of property in California as part of a broader company downsizing. That echoed Salesforce, which put up half of its eponymous San Francisco tower block for sublease in mid-July.

Twitter is likely to be one of many companies making the same decision, says Daniel Ismail, senior analyst at real estate research company Green Street. “Even for technology companies, which are some of the most profitable and valuable companies in the world, the office is still an expense—and one that may not be critical in the future.”

Big Tech companies have been at the forefront of some of the bigger issues that are throwing the future of the world of work in flux. From the ability to work remotely from anywhere, which Meta has embraced, to simply spending less time in the office and more time at home, Big Tech companies—by dint of the fact that they’re often developing the infrastructure and products that enable remote work—have been more willing to trial the concept ahead of traditional businesses. US Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that 27 percent of American workers in “computer and mathematical occupations” worked remotely at some point in the last four weeks. “The pandemic showed that remote working was not only quite viable for many companies, but also something many employees really like, and could be productive doing,” says Ismail. It’s having an impact not just on rank-and-file workers, but stretching all the way up to the upper echelons of management. On August 2, the Financial Times reported that Instagram boss Adam Mosseri would be moving to London, away from Meta’s headquarters in California. Mosseri follows colleagues like Javier Olivan, who is spending more time in Spain since replacing Sheryl Sandberg as chief operating officer, and Guy Rosen, vice president of integrity, who had planned to move to Israel.

Phil Ryan, director of city futures and global insight at real estate advisors JLL, says that although many Big Tech companies are drawing down their workspace portfolio, others are continuing to buy, making it a mixed market. Those purchases are often coming outside the traditional homes for Big Tech on the coasts, moving inland to places like the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona. However, Ryan does acknowledge that there has been what he terms a “rationalization” of office space among some larger companies. “There are a lot of companies, particularly in the Bay Area, with multiple locations in a specific metro area that will consolidate that space,” he says.

Consolidation has been particularly prevalent in San Francisco, where Mayor London Breed estimates one in three workers who used to be in the city have now gone remote. According to JLL, the office vacancy rate in San Francisco stood at 22 percent at the end of the first quarter of 2022. In Dallas, where other tech companies have created outposts, more than one in four office spaces are vacant.

That has huge ramifications for the broader real estate market in the US and abroad. Tech companies account for between one fifth and one quarter of all activity in the office sector space, according to both Ismail and Ryan. Their departure leaves huge amounts of office space unoccupied, with knock-on effects on the broader city and services set up to support those workspaces. “If you think about the jobs themselves, it has a big impact on the local economy,” says Ismail. “Tech jobs tend to create more office jobs around them—so it’s quite important for many office markets to have a robust tech sector.” As businesses disappear, so does the vibrancy of a city, with knock-on impacts on everything from tourism to food, drink, and entertainment.

The tech industry contributes $516 billion to California’s economy alone, according to one analysis by the Computing Technology Industry Association, with 3.4 million people employed in the tech sector across the US to support the tech professionals who work on developing software and architecting networks.

And while Twitter says that its office shifts have “no impact” on jobs, that’s only true to a point. All those who support office workers, from cleaners to security staff to caterers, lose out. “It worries me that smart people can’t come up with a way to make hybrid working work, because other places seem to be doing it,” says one Twitter employee, who asked not to be named because they are not authorized to speak to the press. “It’s people who staff the perks that bring people to the office who are going to be hurt the most.”

Big Tech’s impact looms large over the rest of the world. “Over the span of at least a decade, tech has been the leading single driver of leasing activity throughout the US,” says Ryan. But that’s changing. While he’s still analyzing the data, Ryan suggests the second quarter data indicates that may be changing. “Tech and finance were basically tied,” he says, “which is a little unusual, and speaks to the fragility of the market that we’re still in right now.”

Ryan believes that Big Tech will continue to lease office space at significant levels, and will remain one of the major contributors to real estate activity for years to come. But it’ll be in markets that perhaps aren’t traditionally equated with the industry. “We’re going to continue to see this focus on places like River North in Denver, East Austin, Wynwood in Miami—not really traditionally corporate or even active areas at all that are becoming the biggest bright spots in the office market, and that’s almost entirely a result of tech-led investment,” he says.

That comes at the expense of the more traditional areas in and around Silicon Valley, which have historically relied on the tech sector. But rather than a one-and-done overhaul, Ismail equates the change in how we work to a “slow bleed.” “It won’t happen all at once,” he says. “It’ll happen over time—and that’s what we’re seeing as time goes on.”

Morning Train

My baby takes the morning train; He works from nine to five and then; He takes another home again; To find me waitin’ for him

Well that is a romantic notion of commuting and apparently one spouse is at home working. Sounds familiar yes/no? The reality is that while we are still spouting the myth of the Great Resignation it was more like the great layoffs, followed by the ones who returned to jobs that they needed as soon as possible and many who did not. These are all the help wanted signs you see in windows of restaurants, small shops, some banks, hotels and retail outlets. You do not see a desperate sign flashing above the major corporations for white collar gigs with great pay and benefits. Why? Well few quit and some just shuffled deck chairs on the Titanic. Many white collar workers had some leverage and used it to move up the ladder of meritocracy and negotiated a deal that worked for them. A rare state in our attitude toward labor. If we valued labor and workers so much then why such a hard push for Unionzing many of the service/labor jobs across the country, from Starbucks to Amazon, leading Howard Shultz to emerge from retirement to take back the CEO gig and stop the movement to unionize the stores. I am shocked Jeff Bezos has not done so but he is busy with his rocket ship to space. Elon Musk is another who has had many suits with regards to discrimination and harassment filed against his business yet not a big lover of unions which might reign that in. Ask yourself: If unions are such a problem why are CEO’s against them? Why not let the workers they value make that decision for themselves. If they don’t want one or do and then change their mind it is either keep it or dump it. Amazon has created it own subset of the concept why not Starbucks? Again if you are pro worker why are you not negotiating with them honestly and openly?

I work a gig job, Substitute Teacher and I have never heard one word from the State or City union agents, from the National Teachers Unions or anyone. NO ONE. I hate my job. HATE IT. You think it is easy for a 63 year old woman to change careers and find a job? Sure at a retail store or hotel, which does what for me an educated professional who is able to transition but has no “experience” other than apparently the ability to process a credit card. And for the record, many of those same businesses are over hiring to cover the outs via sick leave or walk outs so many are not getting full time hours at all. Again more bullshit over hiring practices continues. And with that they are back to multi gigging. Okay thanks, I will just sit in a room all day and watch kids shuffle in and out. At least I can walk in and out without some moron documenting my time in the toilet.

Anyone who has been working from day one of the pandemic was considered an “essential” worker and that included all of the staff at the Kushner Buildings who did not receive hazard or extra pay for working, accepting packages in the tons, showing units as people were moving in and out at a rapid clip, cleaning said units, decontaminating the public areas on a regular basis or just regular maintenance. And many did not either despite all the hysteria over Covid and that it would kill you as soon as look at you. How is Dr. Fauci doing? Well I know from varying reports that during any of the Covid meetings he was maskless and yet is Covid “fear” that led him cancel attending the Journalism dinner where Biden arrived late, and so far he and Jill are still Covid free. I have never trusted, respected or liked that man and while I wish him well, RETIRE sir. Again some jobs need not to be replaced or filled, his being one.

Covid has continued to be the supposed reason behind why Companies have decided to push back on return to office dates. Really? Have the asked or surveyed how many of their associates have already had Covid? Or how often the attend public events? I bet a lot. So now it is about cost of gas and crime and whatever other issue that employees without a union can find to NOT go back to the office. I have noticed when I am near Train, PATH, Subway or Ferry terminals during rush hour there are people and they are in work wear. Some of it has changed but go to the popular watering holes near major businesses around 5 and they are packed, every day. So either they are wandering from home or are back in the office. I think it is a mix of both and that is where said networking occurs.

So where are we economically? I suspect that white collar will take a greater hit now with the current downturn as they are all that is left. Those who refuse to return to the office and those who took new gigs as many of the companies feeling the need to load the payroll will also be cutting. Look to the current crop of layoffs in the Bitcoin world and given this assholes attitude it doesn’t seem quite a loss. And with that the housing market now that interest rates have risen will be going the way of the wind, many many who switched to Real Estate will be finding themselves out of a home. Can’t say I feel bad about that one. And folks who moved to remotesville to a dump they were going to flop/flip/update and over paid will also be hurting when the Bell rings and they either have to move back into the city they just left and find renting to be a stranglehold on their wallets as urban cores have raised rents into double digit percentage points, as people are back baby!! Or are they? How they are paying these astronomical prices must be through Only Fans. Seriously there are 7K penthouses in Jersey City, why. Live in Manhattan if you are paying that price. Well again four to a shack up is more like it as we are seeing almost all two bedrooms here with at least three moving in, subletting and other means to pay for the rents. So it is not Nirvana and paradise in the least.

So if you are one of the coddled class you enjoy it, I suspect your time is coming to an end. Maybe it is time to join a Union.

Why the return to the office isn’t working

“I don’t gain anything besides a commute.”

By Rani Molla Jun 10, 2022, Vox for Recode

Andres is back to the office three days a week, and like many knowledge workers, he’s not happy about it. He says that while he and the other executive assistants at his Boston law firm have been forced back, the attorneys haven’t been following the rules. That’s partly because the rules don’t quite make sense, and people in all types of jobs are only coming in because they have to, not because there’s a good reason to go in.

“People have adapted to remote work, and truthfully, the firm has done a tremendous job at adapting in the pandemic,” said Andres, who would prefer going in two days, as long as others were actually there. “But I think it’s more the returning to work that they’re struggling on.” He, like a number of other office workers, spoke with Recode anonymously to avoid getting in trouble with his employer.

Andres enjoys working from home and thinks he does a good job of it — and it allows him to escape a long commute that has only gotten 45 minutes longer thanks to construction projects on his route.

The majority of Americans don’t work from home, but among those who do, there’s a battle going on about where they’ll work in the future. And it’s not just people who enjoy remote work who are upset about the return to the office.

Those who want to be remote are upset because they enjoyed working from home and don’t understand why, after two years of doing good work there, they have to return to the office. People who couldn’t wait to go back are not finding the same situation they enjoyed before the pandemic, with empty offices and fewer amenities. Those who said they prefer hybrid — 60 percent of office workers — are not always getting the interactions with colleagues they’d hoped for.

The reasons the return to the office isn’t working out are numerous. Bosses and employees have different understandings of what the office is for, and after more than two years of working remotely, everyone has developed their own varied expectations about how best to spend their time. As more and more knowledge workers return to the office, their experience at work — their ability to focus, their stress levels, their level of satisfaction at work — has deteriorated. That’s a liability for their employers, as the rates of job openings and quits are near record highs for professional and business services, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

There are, however, ways to make the return to the office better, but those will require some deep soul-searching about why employers want employees in the office and when they should let it go.

The current situation

For now, many employees are just noticing the hassle of the office, even if they’re going in way less than they did pre-pandemic. This is what’s known as the hybrid model, and even though people like the remote work aspect of it, for many it’s still unclear what the office part of it is for.

“If I go into the office and there are people but none of them are on my team, I don’t gain anything besides a commute,” Mathew, who works at a large payroll company in New Jersey, said. “Instead of sitting at my own desk, I’m sitting at a desk in Roseland.”

Mathew’s company is asking people to come in three days a week, but he says people are mostly showing up two.

Further complicating things is that, while the main reason hybrid workers cite for wanting to go into the office is to see colleagues, they also don’t want to be told when to go in, according to Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford professor who, along with other academics, has been conducting a large, ongoing study of remote workers called WFH Research.

Employees say that management has yet to really penalize people for failing to follow office guidance, likely out of fear of alienating a workforce in a climate where it’s so hard to hire and retain employees. Many others moved farther from the office during the pandemic, making the commute harder. The result is circular: People go into the office to see other people but then don’t actually see those people so they stop going into the office as much.

With 70 percent of office workers globally now back in the office at least one day a week, the excitement many people felt a few months ago is wearing off. For many, that novelty is turning into an existential question: Why are we ever here?

“It was sort of like the first day of school when you’re back from summer vacation and it’s nice to see people and catch up with them,” Brian Lomax, who works at the Department of Transportation in Washington, DC and who is expected to come in two days a week, said. “But now it’s, ‘Oh, hey, good to see you,’ and then you go on about your day,” an experience he says is the same as working from home and reaching out to people via Microsoft Teams.There’s actually been an uptick in virtual meetings, despite the return to office

Most of the people we spoke to use software like Teams, Slack, and Zoom to communicate even while they’re in the office, making the experience similar to home. If one person in a meeting is on a video call from home — say, because they’re immunocompromised, or they have child care duties, or it just happens to be the day they work from home that week — everyone is. There’s actually been an uptick in virtual meetings, despite the return to the office, according to Calendly. In April, 64 percent of meetings set up through the appointment scheduling software included videoconferencing or phone details, compared with 48 percent a year earlier.

One issue is that hybrid means different things from company to company and even team to team. Typically, it seems employers are asking workers to come in a set number of days per week, usually two or three. Some employers are specifying which days; some are doing it by teams; some are leaving it up to individual workers. Almost half of office visits are just once a week — and over a third of these visits are for less than six hours, according to data from workplace occupancy analytics company Basking.io as reported by Bloomberg. The middle of the week tends to be much busier than Mondays and Fridays, when there are empty cubicles as far as the eye can see.

There’s also a disconnect between why employees think they’re being called in. Employees cite their company’s sunk real estate investments, their bosses’ need for control, and their middle managers’ raison d’etre. Employers, meanwhile, think going into the office is good for creativity, innovation, and culture building. Nearly 80 percent of employees think they’ve been just as or more productive than they were before the pandemic, while less than half of leaders think so, according to Microsoft’s Work Trends Index.

Employers and employees generally tend to agree that a good reason to go into the office is to see colleagues face to face and onboard new employees. Data from Time Is Ltd. found that employees that started during the pandemic are collaborating with less than 70 percent of colleagues and clients as their tenured peers would have been at this point. Slack’s Future Forum survey found that while executives were more likely to say people should come into the office full time, they are less likely to do so themselves.

The nature of individuals’ jobs also determines how much, if at all, they think they should be in the office. Melissa, a government policy analyst in DC, is supposed to go in twice a week but has only been going in once because she says her work involves collaborating with others but not usually at the same time. She might write a draft, send it to others to read, and then they’ll make comments and perhaps, at some point, they all get together to talk about it.

“I see a lot of these ads for these teamwork apps — they always show these pictures of people sitting at a conference table and they have paper and all sorts of things on the wall and they’re really collaborating on product development or something,” Melissa said. “And I’m like, that’s not what we’re doing.” Still, she thinks that from managers’ perspectives, in-person is the gold standard, regardless of the actualities of the job.

“It feels like they just want people in the office,” she said.

It also depends on the pace of work. A financing services employee at Wells Fargo in Iowa said he works more efficiently at the office but that since his job consists of working on deals that come in sporadically throughout the day, that efficiency means he ends up wasting a lot of time playing on his phone or pacing around the office in between.

“What makes this so frustrating is that my wife will send me a photo of her and my 10-month-old son going out for a walk,” he said. “If I had a break at home, I’d go on a walk with them.”

Employers are certainly feeling the frustration from their employees and have been walking back how much they’re asking employees to be in the office. Last summer, office workers reported that their employers would allow them to work from home 1.6 days a week; now that’s gone up to 2.3 days, according to WFH Research.

Companies are rolling back return-to-office, or RTO, plans at law firms, insurance agencies, and everywhere in between. Even finance companies like JPMorgan Chase, whose CEO has been especially vocal about asking people to return to their offices, have loosened up.

Tech companies have long been at the forefront when it comes to allowing hybrid or remote work, and now even more tech companies, including Airbnb, Cisco, and Twitter, are joining the club. Even Apple, which has been much stricter than its peers in coaxing employees back to the office, has paused its plan to increase days in the office to three a week, after employee pushback and the resignation of a prominent machine learning engineer.

It seems like, for now, office workers have the upper hand. Many don’t expect to be penalized by management for not working from the office when they’re supposed to, partly because they don’t think management believes in the rules themselves.

“Our retention is better than expected and our employee engagement is better than expected, so I don’t think [our executives are] seeing any downside,” said Rob Carr, who works at an insurance company in Columbus, Ohio, where people are expected to be in three days a week but, as far as he’s seen, rarely go. “Honestly, if they were, I think they’d be cracking down, and they’re not.”

Carr himself goes into the office every day, but only because he and his wife downsized houses and moved a short bike ride from his office. Otherwise Carr, who is on the autism spectrum and says he doesn’t do well with in-person interactions, would be completely happy working from home as he is from his empty office.

“Hats off to Apple for innovation,” Carr said, “but they are, certainly from a Silicon Valley perspective, an old company.”

What to do about the broken return to the office

Solving the office conundrum is not easy, and in all likelihood it will be impossible to make everyone happy. But it’s important to remember that going to the office never really worked for everyone, it was just what everyone did. Now, two years after the pandemic sent office workers to their living rooms, their employers may have a chance to make more people happy than before.

“The problem right now is you’ve set something that’s unrealistic and doesn’t work, and when employees try it out and it doesn’t work, they give up,” Bloom, the Stanford professor, said. “If employees refuse to come in, it means the system isn’t working.” “If employees refuse to come in, it means the system isn’t working”

To fix that, employers should explore not only why they want people in the office, but whether bringing people into the office is achieving those goals. If the main reason to bring people back is to collaborate with colleagues, for example, they need to set terms that ensure that happens. That could mean making people who should be working together come in on the same days — a problem around which a whole cottage industry of remote scheduling software has cropped up.

That said, Bloom believes there’s no golden rule on how often it’s necessary to go in to get the benefits of the office. Importantly, when workers do come in, they shouldn’t be bogged down with anything they could be doing at home.

“First, figure out how many days a week or a month constructively would it be good to have people face to face, and that depends on how much time you spend on activities that are best in person,” he said, referring to things like onboarding, training, and socializing.

Employers need to be realistic about how much in-person work really needs to happen. Rather than making people come in a few times a week at random, where colleagues pass like ships in the night, they could all come in on the same day of the week or even once a month or quarter. And on those days, the perks of coming in have to be more than tacos and T-shirts, too. While fun, free food and swag aren’t actually good reasons to go to the office.

How much someone needs to come into the office might also vary by team or job type.

“For me, coming in to do teaching and to go to research seminars, that might be twice a week,” Bloom said. “But for other people, like coders, it may just be a big coding meeting and a few trainings once a month. For people in marketing and advertising, mad men, that’s very much around meetings, discussions, problem-solving — that may be two or three days.”

Another thing to consider, especially for those who truly like the office, is how they can get that experience with fewer of the downsides.

Currently, even employees who still like their offices a lot aren’t necessarily using them. Real estate services company JLL found that a third of office workers are using so-called “third places” like cafes and coworking spaces to work, even when they have offices they can go to.

Matt Burkhard, who leads a team of 30 at Flatiron Health, is one of those workers. He says he works better at an office than at home, where he has two young children. And while Burkhard enjoys going into his office and goes there once or twice per week, though he won’t be required to do so until later this summer, the trip to Manhattan isn’t always feasible, especially if he has to do child care for part of the day. So he’s been going to Daybase, a coworking space near his home in Hoboken, NJ, three or four times per week.

“I’m just a lot more focused when everyone is in the same place working,” Burkhard said, noting that he hasn’t asked his company to pay for the $50 a month membership fee.

For many office workers, the current state of affairs just isn’t working out. So they’re doing what they can to make their experience of work better, whether that means renting coworking space or not showing up for arbitrary in-office days. They don’t necessarily hate the office. What they hate is not having a good reason to be there.

Home Sweet Home?

Buying a home becomes more challenging with each passing day for many. There is the rising interest rates that along with the additional requirements/costs to buy simply puts a home purchase further out of reach for those who don’t have the requisite down payment so with that means added costs via mortgage insurance. Then there are homeowner fees or dues to an association which can contribute to financial obligations and penalty’s; and with this ProPublica discovered they can also force homeowners into Foreclosure.

With that there are unforseen or unpredictable costs that can lead to further debt or again forcing foreclosure or selling the property via a short sale. These can be issues regarding Property Taxes (they can rise without notice and do so often), unforeseen maintenance issues due to natural disasters (and with FEMA discontinuing subsidizing flood insurance this may be the biggest issue) or simply due to the lack of inspections and full disclosure of the age of property infrastructure and building materials. And lastly job losses or changes in the economy, Pandemic anyone? The NYT has been doing a series of articles on home ownership and the rising tides of both costs and now rates that has cooled a once hot market. But all home ownership is believed to be tied to personal wealth and building a legacy that accompanies said home ownership. And with this we have a new housing crisis that is not just about shortage but about wealth. And like all things now it also fuels economic inequality.

Add to the matter, the amount of housing stock being purchased by investment corporations and businesses that has lent to rising rents, a form of redlining with most of the purchases in Black and lower income areas and raising rents or flipping properties to be out of reach of the average income of the residents who once lived there. I do feel that again we can blame much of this on television shows on HGTV tha encourage house flipping Again watch these shows where they remodel and the endless discussion of resale value. Really? Is it always that which matters? The other is Million Dollar Listing and Selling Sunset with Real Estate Agents pushing up prices in which to make a higher commission not actually lending to real market values and worth to the area. The industry is awash in corruption and the the Devil is that they are always working in concert with the other assholes of this small equation, Mortgage Brokers, Appraisers, and Contractors, who often encourage both Buyers and Sellers to take on more debt for a purpose of increasing debt not wealth. And let us not forget how real estate is a money launders paradise.

Below is an article discussing the role of housing and the economic factors that lend to the anxiety of buying a home in today’s marketplace and the efforts to retain said home for lasting value and sense of legacy and building wealth.

I am done with the idea of owing a property and with that it was about cash in hand and what my long term plans and goals are. And that is not to fund a bank but I also have no children and no legacy. So it is your decision and a tough one in which to make. But all houses comes with a deed but do you really own it?

High inflation often translates to high anxiety, which is why many Americans are striving to lock in the cost of one of their most basic, most human needs: a home.

But with housing prices already at lofty levels and mortgage rates spiraling, many buyers may be tempted to jump in before they’re ready — or because they fear the situation will only get worse.

“There is this psychological pressure of everything being uncertain,” said Simon Blanchard, an associate professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business who studies consumers’ financial decision-making. That can make a necessity like housing feel concrete, he said.

“It might sound comforting to focus on the present and lock in this part of the budget,” he said. “The danger is you might be creating vulnerability by leaving insufficient flexibility for later.”

The national median price of existing homes was $375,300 in March, up 15 percent from $326,300 a year earlier, according to the National Association of Realtors. Rates on 30-year fixed mortgages were 5.10 percent for the week that ended Thursday, up from 2.98 percent a year ago, according to Freddie Mac.

That has seriously eroded how much would-be buyers can afford: With a down payment of 10 percent on the median home, the typical monthly mortgage payment is now $1,834, up 49 percent from $1,235 a year ago, taking both higher prices and rates into account. And that doesn’t include other nonnegotiables, like property taxes, homeowner’s insurance and mortgage insurance, which is often required on down payments of less than 20 percent.

With inflation at a 40-year high and the cost of just about everything rising, it’s easy to get caught up in the irrationality that has some buyers aggressively bidding up prices and skipping basic precautions, like a home inspection.

“There is a scarcity mind-set right now,” said Jake Northrup, a financial planner for young families in Bristol, R.I. He said he and his wife had decided to wait a year and save more before buying a home of their own.

Some prospective buyers are doing the same — mortgage applications have slowed lately — but the market remains deeply competitive because of the country’s chronically low supply of homes. That can lead to erroneous assumptions and bad judgment.

So before you hit the open-house circuit, it’s time to assess not just what you can spend but what you should spend — and the potential costs down the road.

Do a budget review.

Before you start scanning listings, it helps to have a solid understanding of what you can afford — and how different price points would affect your ability to save and spend elsewhere.

Some financial experts suggest working backward: Assume a minimum savings rate — say 15 or 20 percent for retirement, college savings and other goals — and account for all other recurring debts and expenses on a spreadsheet. Then play around with different home prices to see how they would influence everything else.

“The right mortgage amount isn’t what you get preapproved for but what you can afford,” said Mr. Northrup, the financial planner. “The No. 1 mistake I see when people buy a home is not fully understanding how other areas of their financial life will be impacted.”

What is affordable? The answer will obviously vary by household, income, family size and other factors.

Government housing authorities have long considered spending more than 30 percent of gross income on housing as burdensome — a figure that arose from “a week’s wages for a month’s rent,” which became a rule of thumb in the 1920s. That standard was later etched into national housing policy as a limit — low-income households would pay no more than a quarter of their income for public housing, a ceiling that was lifted to 30 percent in 1981.

Some financial planners may use a similar rough starting point: Spend no more than 28 percent of your gross income on all of your housing expenses — mortgage payments, property taxes, insurance — and an additional 1 to 2 percent allocated for repairs and maintenance.

That won’t work for everyone, though, especially in high-cost metropolitan areas where it’s often hard to find rentals within those strictures.

“Take all of your monthly expenses into account and truly decide how much you want to put toward housing,” said Tom Blower, a senior financial adviser with Fiduciary Financial Advisors. “I would never encourage a client to strictly follow a percentage of income to determine how much to spend each month. Rules of thumb are guidelines and something to consider, but not the end-all, be-all.”

Adjust your expectations.

The rise in interest rates means many people have had to rein in their price ranges — by a lot. A family earning $125,000 that wanted to put down 20 percent and dedicate no more than 28 percent of its gross income to housing — roughly $35,000 — could comfortably afford a $465,000 home when the interest rate was 3 percent. At 5 percent, that figure shrinks to $405,000, according to Eric Roberge, a financial planner and founder of Beyond Your Hammock in Boston. His calculation factored in property taxes, maintenance and insurance.

He generally suggests allocating a conservative share of household income — no more than about 23 percent — to housing, but acknowledged that’s difficult in many places. “Our calculation for affordability doesn’t change,” Mr. Roberge said. “However, the big jump in rates changes what is actually affordable.”

There are other considerations. With many Americans moving from cities to larger spaces in the suburbs, you’ll also need to consider how much more it will cost to run and furnish that home, for example, or how much extra you’ll need to spend on transportation.

Beware the fixer-upper and other hidden costs.

Properties in less-than-ideal shape are enticing to those hoping to save some money, but supply chain problems and other issues are making that much harder, experts said.

“I have clients who have recently tried to partially circumvent the affordability issue by purchasing homes that need significant improvements,” said Melissa Walsh, a financial planner and founder of Clarity Financial Design in Sarasota, Fla. “Because contractors are hard to come by and material prices have been increasing at a rapid rate, these clients are finding that purchasing a fixer-upper may not be the bargain that it was a few years ago.”

She suggests setting aside plenty of cash — she has had two clients spend more than twice their initial estimate for renovations this year.

Approach an adjustable-rate mortgage with caution.

Adjustable-rate mortgages generally carry lower rates than fixed-rate mortgages for a set period, often three or five years. After that, they reset to the prevailing rate, then change on a schedule, usually every year.

The average interest rate for a 5/1 adjustable-rate mortgage — fixed for the first five years and changing every year after — was 3.78 percent for the week that ended Thursday, according to Freddie Mac. It was 2.64 percent last year.

More buyers are considering adjustable-rate mortgages: They accounted for more than 9 percent of all mortgage applications for the week that ended April 22, double the share three months ago and the highest level since 2019, the Mortgage Bankers Association said.

But they’re definitely not for everyone. “The typical borrower is someone who does not anticipate being in the property for a long time,” said Kevin Iverson, president of Reed Mortgage in Denver.

If you know you’re going to sell before your mortgage rate adjusts, it may be a suitable loan. But there’s no telling what rates will look like in five years, and the sudden hit of higher rates pushed many borrowers to the brink during the financial crisis of 2008 (though today’s A.R.M.s are generally safer than products peddled back then).

Be even more wary of so-called alternative financing — contract-for-deed arrangements and “chattel” loans regularly used to buy manufactured homes — which often lack typical consumer protections.

Don’t forget everything else.

The cost of simply getting into a home may feel the most painful in the near term, but other expenses later can be just as thorny.

A recent paper by Fannie Mae economists analyzed costs typically incurred over a seven-year homeownership life cycle and found that the biggest contributors include just about everything but the mortgage. Other continuing expenditures — utilities, property taxes and home improvements — together account for roughly half a borrower’s costs, while transaction expenses were 20 percent, the economists found.

They used 2020 loan data in which the average first-time home buyer was 36 years old with monthly income of $7,453 and bought a home for $291,139 with an 11 percent down payment. The actual mortgage — excluding repayment of the principal loan amount — contributes about 30 percent to the total costs over that seven-year period.

Their takeaway: “Borrowing is a big piece of the cost of owning a home, but that cost often is overshadowed by utilities, property taxes, home repairs and one-time fees paid to various parties to buy and sell a home.”

The Rip Off of Real Estate Fees

Real Estate Brokers are the biggest con artists next to possibly used car salesmen. As I have actually never bought a used car I may be doing them a disservice so I will put them up with Attorney’s who are in fact the biggest rip off agents of all fields and professions. I can explain all that in this post but frankly if you have never worked with an Attorney, consider yourself lucky but their fingerprints are all over everything you have ever touched, worked with or for and are busy right now doing something slimy in a town or city near you, crafting bills or legislation that lines their pockets and makes their clients happier and richer as I write this.

But this is about the Real Estate Agent who both markets residential housing and is often the agent for rental properties here in New Jersey and New York area where I live. So to move into a residential unit, be it a large multi family dwelling or a smaller property they are often listed by Agents who collect a fee equivalent of month’s rent. If the owner pays the fee this is of course offset by a rental increase but spread out over the course of a year. The Agent does NOTHING but open the door and show the property. They submit the application to the Landlord and supposedly screen the applicant through a series of questions, usually asked prior to even showing the property, as one assumes to save them time. Them time. You give them the info, gross income, any applicants other than yourself, pets and then they may consent to open the door. What they do with that info is not much more. I suspect run a credit and criminal background check which is an additional fee. I don’t think they actually verify income or any rental history but they are paid well dependent upon the rent. And here in this part of the country, the rent has risen quite significantly. An average rent of 3,200 can net an Agent a significant income if they push enough applicants through doors and with supposedly all these people renting that means they are very busy. But I see often properties with their own leasing agents and offices often duplicate listings by a second agent who is working with another firm and of course if the building advertises themselves as a “no fee” building it doesn’t mean you will be charged a fee if you rent from them; however, if an agent accompanies you they will pay the agent for walking you into a building you could walk into yourself. Now as any property issues or upkeep that has nothing to do with the Agent as they are done the minute the lease is signed. This is one hell of a gig. I have seen several properties listed by numerous agents and then they move on and another gloms on and it goes from there. I have had so many bizarre conversations, exchanges and encounters with these human leeches that I cannot believe a word they have to say about the weather we are standing in.

The second one is the residential sales agent, the million dollar listing type that are listing properties for much less but do their best to turn most properties into that classification in which to generate higher fees. The dudes on that show actually seem to do some type of work but on average few do. They simply enter the property take an assessor with them or wait for the bank to assign one, by that time they have already listed the property with a price that can often vary in worth than what the assessor has determined. This may explain the valuations on properties that over the mark and fail to account the issues and problems that have not been inspected or in turn noted for a way in which to barter the price. The Agent has no interest in your negotiating a price down and hence discourages inspections, assessments and evaluations by Contractors, Civil Engineers and others whose business is to determine worth and costs to maintain, keep or repair said property. In a “hot” market the buyer is to throw that shit right out the window, write a dumb letter and overbid with cash in which to buy said property. And once the contract is signed that is a delivery with the Agent taking their commission and their shit right out the door with them.

In others words: Real Estate Agents are scum

Google the phrase: Why are real estate agents a rip off? And from there you will find multiple articles, essays, personal blogs and numerous stories about the field of real estate and the succubus that work in it.

Read this story from the NY Times and ask yeah, why is that?

Are Broker Commissions Too High

Online home buyers do much of the work involved in acquiring a house. So why are brokers’ fees still calculated under the old system?

By Debra Kamin The New York Times Feb 18 2021

Forty-four percent of new home buyers now begin their home search online as opposed to through referrals, according to the National Association of Realtors. The same organization found that 35 percent of brokers say they are relying on virtual tours to sell homes. And yet, despite technology shifting the power dynamic from brokers to buyers in the real estate industry, real estate commissions — notoriously higher in the United States than in other developed countries — haven’t budged.

A series of lawsuits might change that.

Even as median home prices have climbed in every major market across the United States, and buyers, especially millennials, are doing more of the legwork involved in home searches, commission rates for real estate brokers have held steady. Paid by the home seller, these rates are often as high as 6 percent — 3 percent paid to the seller’s agent and 3 percent to the buyer’s agent.

Across much of Europe and Asia, commission rates are significantly lower — in Singapore and the United Kingdom, for example, agents generally earn 1 to 2 percent on sales.

But over the past two years, seven different lawsuits, brought by private home sellers, an online brokerage and groups of California brokers, and even the U.S. Justice Department, contend that brokers’ practices in charging and collecting commissions violate U.S. antitrust laws and amount to a conspiracy to keep their fees artificially inflated.

One of the most vocal critics on the current state of broker commissions in the United States is Jack Ryan, founder and chief executive of REX, an online brokerage whose fees start at 2 percent. (There are dozens of brokerages that advertise lower than standard commissions; UpNest, Redefy and ListingSpark are a few.)

For example, in a $500,000 home purchase, a seller would typically have to pay $30,000 in brokers’ fees, which would be collected by the seller’s broker, who would then give half or 3 percent to the buyer’s broker. When REX represents a seller, it charges only 2 to 2.5 percent. The seller is on the hook for only $10,000 to $12,500, but may need to separately negotiate a fee for the buyer’s broker. (If the buyer is working without a broker, the seller would have saved the 3 percent fee.)

When REX represents a buyer in a traditional deal and is given a 3 percent fee from the seller’s agent, it will often give the buyer 50 percent of its broker’s commission back as a rebate. So a home buyer purchasing a $500,000 home with REX could receive a rebate of $7,500.

REX filed a lawsuit in December 2020 in the U.S. District Court of Oregon, challenging Oregon’s policy of banning REX and other brokers from refunding commissions back to the buyers — a rebate practice that REX employs and that Oregon says is illegal.

“Rebate bans that cause home buyers to spend thousands more, sometimes $10,000 more, really ought to be challenged,” Mr. Ryan said. “First-time home buyers, home buyers who are trying to move to a new state for better economic opportunity, for better schools for their kids, whatever circumstance a home buyer is in, we support them.”

REX is also exploring potential legal action in Louisiana, Missouri and Tennessee, where similar anti-rebate laws remain on the books, Mr. Ryan said.

But some brokers say that the current commission fee structure exists to protect both buyers and sellers, because each party’s agent comes to a home sale representing the client’s best interests, whether on the buyer’s or seller’s side.

Dawn Pfaff, president of State Listings, Inc., a nationwide multiple listing service and real estate platform, said changes to the status quo would hurt homeowners and home buyers.

“These lawsuits are frivolous,” she said. “It’s the biggest transaction of their life, and homeowners don’t necessarily know how to do it. Our system in America affords them the opportunity to be protected.”

While REX’s case is directed at the state of Oregon, most of the lawsuits have been filed against the National Association of Realtors, the umbrella trade organization of real estate licensees. The association and its local subsidiaries exercise control over the majority of the 600-plus multiple listing services in the U.S., the databases used to connect home buyers to sellers.

In April 2019, the Justice Department began investigating whether or not brokers were steering their buyers to homes that offered them larger commissions, thus cutting out brokers who might be willing to collect less out of the process.

The National Association of Realtors declined multiple requests for comment.

“You’re starting to see a kind of drum beat,” said Mike Toth, REX’s general counsel. “Buyers are doing so much of the work themselves. So why are commissions so high?”

Part of the broader issue, said Ben Keys, a real estate professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is that agents can currently sort listings by how much commission each offers, and steer their clients accordingly.

“You have agents who are incentivized to look for their largest commission, rather than to help their clients find the best house for them,” he said. “Having that information allows the steering to occur.”

In November 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice filed and settled an antitrust case alleging the National Association of Realtors had “established and enforced illegal restraints on competition.” The Justice Department’s antitrust division asked the association to provide more transparency around commissions to buyers and sellers.

The move has created tailwinds: Earlier this month, Redfin announced it will now publish agent commissions on thousands of its public listings.

Brokers cause housing to simply be more expensive from owning or renting they fuck the marketplace. And for the record there are a surplus of them flooding their cities in search of victims in which to scam money from. This is the great resignation that never really happened, people just switched gigs. Like these assholes. Yeah I want a former Bartender who took a course and now drives around hustling for house sellers instead of pushing drinks. He, I am sure is real knowledgeable.

And with that it may explain why many overpaid for their homes during the hysteria of the pandemic and regret their decision but are stuck with a lemon and cannot make lemonade or are back in the rental game in search of a home while trying to do something with the other. Fun times.

Here are some stories of home owners now in the thick of it.

They Rushed to Buy in the Pandemic. Here’s What They Would Change.

A frenzied sellers’ market led some people to make harried decisions when buying their homes that they now regret.

For nearly two years, home buyers have been shopping in conditions ripe for regret. Prices have soared, inventory has plunged and competition has been brutal in markets across the country. With fixer-uppers fetching multiple offers, buyers must make snap decisions about what is often the biggest financial investment of their lives.

Invariably, someone makes a choice they wish they hadn’t.

“There are all kinds of craziness happening,” said Marilyn Wilson, a founding partner of the WAV Group, a consumer research company, who described open houses so crowded they felt like nightclubs, with buyers getting 15 minutes to tour a home. “Sometimes people don’t remember, did it have three bedrooms or four? You might get the house, but it might not be the house you want because you’re just in this desperate state.”

The pandemic has turned out to be a historically miserable time to buy a home. Many buyers entered the market looking for a home to solve some of the problems the pandemic created. They wanted more space for Zoom rooms and home gyms. They wanted bigger and better backyards to entertain outdoors.

These expectations ran headlong into the reality of shopping in a frenzied sellers’ market where the pickings were slim and the prices astronomical. Surveys by the WAV Group and Zillow found about three quarters of recent buyers expressed some regret. In the Zillow survey, released on Feb. 4, the findings paint a picture of homeowners second-guessing the choices they made and wishing they’d had more time, more patience or considered living somewhere else. About a third of respondents regret buying a house that needed more work than they anticipated, 31 percent wish the home they bought was bigger and 21 percent thought they overpaid.

“Pandemic era buyers faced unprecedented conditions, they had far fewer homes to choose from, they had far more competition for the homes that were for sale,” said Amanda Pendleton, Zillow’s home trends expert. “A lot of buyers ended up in this home that was maybe not what they expected.”

Buyers stepping into the 2022 market have much to learn from those who shopped before them. Market forecasts predict that conditions won’t change significantly this spring. If anything, they might get tougher. At the end of December, inventory fell to a record low, according to the National Association of Realtors. Zillow projects that home prices will rise another 16 percent in 2022, on top of the 20 percent rise in 2021. Rising interest rates will likely push some buyers out of the market, but they could be replaced with others looking to escape rising rents or shoppers who sat on the sidelines last year, waiting for some stability.

Many successful buyers ended up with homes that they liked, and are happy to own a place. For some of them, that meant making an offer that managed to stand out in a bidding war. For others, it meant recalibrating their expectations during their search to avoid disappointment.

Recent buyers — those who are remorseful and others who are content with their homes — have some sage advice about how they would do it differently if they had to do it all over again.

The Risk of the Impulse Buy

Celeste Mohan and Zach Flynn did not set out to buy a farmhouse with a barn and two cows. But after they lost a bidding war for a rundown house in Boca Raton, Fla., the couple jumped on the 2,660-square-foot house in Lake Wales, a town of 16,000 about an hour from Orlando. They bought it last July for $349,000.

Ms. Mohan, 25, and Mr. Flynn, 29, a teacher, felt pressured to buy because the rent on their one-bedroom in Boca Raton was about to jump 22 percent, to $1,900 a month. With their $400,000 budget, their options were restricted to fixer-uppers, with fierce competition. After their bidding war defeat, the couple headed for the country. The farmhouse, set on five acres on a lake, seemed like an ideal alternative: quiet, pastoral, and charming.

“There really wasn’t much hesitation at that point. We’re defeated, we’re exhausted, we’re anxious,” said Ms. Mohan, a curriculum developer for an educational company. “We really just wanted to own a house.”

Almost immediately, the couple regretted their decision. The property felt eerily quiet and isolated, and maintaining five acres and two cows was more work than they anticipated. “You see these people on Instagram with their farm life,” Ms. Mohan said. “Nobody tells you what actual hard work that is and how time consuming it is.”

Before the summer ended, the couple had given the cows to the neighbor, had moved back to Boca Raton and rented a new apartment. Rather than try to sell the farmhouse, they hope to turn it into an Airbnb. “Right now we’re paying rent and a mortgage, which is really uncomfortable,” Ms. Mohan said. They married in December and are expecting a baby in March, adding to their financial stress.

What they wanted: A three-bedroom house in Boca Raton for under $400,000

What they bought: A three-bedroom farmhouse in Lake Wales for $349,000

What they learned: In hindsight, Ms. Mohan wishes she and Mr. Flynn had spent more time evaluating their goals before giving up on Boca Raton. If they had been more clear on what they wanted, they would have known that their wish list included staying in a younger, livelier community. “I also would’ve told myself and Zach to honestly try harder for a house in Boca and to not get so worried about the competition,” she said.

The Cost of Being House Poor

Three months into the pandemic, Stephanie DiSantis felt claustrophobic working from home in her 800-square-foot townhouse in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle.

So, like millions of other Americans, she started looking for a bigger space. She set her maximum budget at $900,000, but soon realized that if she wanted to stay in the central neighborhood, she would have to pay more. She pushed her budget up to $1.3 million, reassessing her priorities.

“I decided, I’ve done a lot of traveling, I’ve had a lot of fun. I’ve done the thing where I’m like, ‘I’m hungry for pasta, I’m going to go to Rome for three days,’” said Ms. DiSantis, 47, who works for Amazon. “I can stop doing that. I can afford to be a little house poor.”

In October 2020, while she was in Massachusetts visiting family for a month, a 2,570-square-foot house dropped the list price to $1.45 million, over her maximum budget, but within reach. After her friends, her broker and an inspector vetted it in her absence, her offer at full asking price was accepted.

She returned to Seattle in November, seeing the house she’d only seen on video in person for the first time. “When I first saw it, I cried,” she said of the house with views of the Puget Sound. “I fell in love.”

The house gave her more space, but at a significant financial cost. In 2021, her priorities shifted, and she suddenly felt the burden of a huge mortgage. “I got super burned out at work,” she said. “I remember thinking, ‘Man, if I was still in that townhouse, I could just quit my job for a year and be fine.’ The mortgage was so low, I could take a year off, I could relax, I could refuel and now I really can’t. ”

What she wanted: A three-bedroom house in Seattle for $900,000.

What she bought: A three-bedroom house in Seattle for $1.45 million.

What she learned: When Ms. DiSantis calculated her budget, she did not anticipate how a large mortgage would limit her future options. “I wish that I would have been able to foresee a couple of years down the road and waited it out,” she said. “I could have taken a big break or been that person who’s like, ‘OK, I’ll move to Montana and get a house that is everything I want for half the price.’”

More Work Than Expected

When Travis Parman got a new job in Lexington, Ky., he figured the housing market there would be more forgiving than the one in Nashville, where he had been living. “I thought it would be cheap and easy,” said Mr. Parman, 49, who started his job at AppHarvest, a tech start-up, in November 2020. “What I actually found out was that Lexington tends to be low on inventory.”

Mr. Parman started his search in November 2020. His husband, Andrew Kung, 43, a surgeon with the Navy, lives on a military base in Jacksonville, N.C., visiting on weekends. With a budget of $1 million, Mr. Parman imagined that he could find a picturesque historic property to be his forever home. Instead, he found extremely limited options. And the properties that were available were a far cry from the stately homes he envisioned.

“I walked into a lot of situations that were disasters,” he said.

Frustrated, he reset his expectations. Rather than look for the perfect home, he would find one that could work for the next five years. In a few years, when the market cooled, he could reassess. “The compromise that I made was really saying: ‘This is going to require a renovation, but it’s cosmetic,’” he said.

With a more measured goal in mind, he found a 3,600-square-foot four square style house in a historic neighborhood close enough to the office that he could bike to work. With canary yellow walls, dated track lighting and decorative kitchen tiles adorned with herbs, it seemed like a house that only needed modest upgrades, the types of improvements that let a homeowner put their own stamp on a space. He closed in January 2021, figuring the renovations would take three months.

But not all repairs are immediately visible, or caught during an inspection. By summer, the central air conditioning, which was 20 years old, failed. Replacing it cost $5,000. The spring revealed a dead 100-year-old pin oak on the property, another $5,000 bill, although the city shared in the cost of removal.

His list of simple upgrades to the décor collided with pandemic delays and cost increases. He struggled to find dining tables, light fixtures and wall coverings. “We wound up having to, in many cases, choose second, third or fourth options because materials or pieces just weren’t available,” he said. The three-month job has stretched to nearly a year.

What he wanted: A historic home in excellent condition in Lexington for under $1 million

What he bought: A four-bedroom home in need of repairs in Lexington for $653,000

What he learned: Mr. Parman learned that even minor improvements can take longer than expected, and not all larger problems are immediately apparent. In hindsight, he said he wished he’d researched the life span of the mechanicals, like the air conditioning, to avoid unexpected bills.

However, he found that by lowering his expectations for the kind of home he needed, he was able to find something that he could live with for the next few years.

“This does not have to be your forever home,” he said. “This does not have to be perfect.”

It just has to work for now.

Learning Your Limits

After spending almost a year traveling through Mexico and Costa Rica, Steph Vaye returned to New York in September 2021 eager to buy an apartment. She had two requirements: the apartment had to be in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and it could not be a studio.

Three days after Ms. Vaye, 29, started her search, an apartment came on the market that checked all her boxes. Listed for $599,000, it had an open kitchen and a large balcony. “This was a dream apartment,” she said.

She offered the full asking price, but with multiple offers already on the table, she bumped hers up to $655,000, over her $650,000 budget. Her offer was rejected anyway.

“I’m a single woman. I was competing against couples who might have double my income,” said Ms. Vaye, who works for nate, a shopping app.

The first rejection motivated her. “Once you start looking, it becomes an addiction and you just want to move,” she said.

Her broker, Molly Franklin, a saleswoman at Corcoran, showed her six more apartments in Williamsburg, and she bid on three. Two needed work. The third, at 484 square feet, was tiny, far smaller than any of the other options. But it had a balcony and was in a luxury building with an elevator, roof deck and a swimming pool.

“I had this expectation of the size of my apartment,” she said. “I thought it was going to be larger.”

Listed for $569,000, the apartment was well within her budget. Unlike the other options, it did not need work. She initially thought she’d be willing to renovate, but once the options were in front of her, she realized she wasn’t up for the work. “I was not prepared to remodel,” she said. “I needed something that was turnkey.”

She decided she could live with the tiny size because the apartment had an open floor plan, storage space and the amenities gave her options to entertain elsewhere. She closed on the apartment in November 2021.

What she wanted: A one-bedroom apartment in Williamsburg for under $650,000.

What she bought: A one-bedroom apartment in Williamsburg for $569,000.

What she learned: Ultimately, Ms. Vaye realized that staying well within her budget was a top priority, even if it meant she would have to pare down her belongings to live in a much smaller space. By choosing a home that didn’t need any repairs, she had the money to decorate immediately, adding new wallpaper and painting the space. “That was the really fun part,” she said. “I was really able to make it a home.”

All of this falls under “let the buyer beware” but I am sure a Real Estate Agent did nothing to prevent that likelihood. And there are many more stories of remorse that permeate the landscape. A Zillow survey found that 75% of Americans who bought a home since the pandemic have buyer’s remorse. The new Zillow survey noted that the top regret cited by recent buyers is that they purchased a home that needs more work or maintenance than expected, with 32% of respondents feeling that way.Feb 11, 2022.

This from Fortune Magazine: New homeowners are getting rushed into buying a home, and 75% of them feel they got a raw deal; or this from USA Today. Or this story from Business Insider. Even Realtor.com has a story about many who got fucked. Even the bastion of the wealthy, the Wall Street Journal, has a story on the regrets, they have a few.

Real Estate Agents and their evil twin, the Mortgage Broker, have only one vested interest, theirs. They have no concept of what it means to spend money you don’t have to buy some instrument of wealth that may or may not be something you know how to play, the long term consequences of making a decision that can for decades affect your overall financial well being. 2008 is long in their distant memory and once their checks clear they are moving onto the next mark. To them I say, Go fuck yourself, you are con artists and rip off agents. And to that I also say, “Have a Day!” The nice or good part is not my problem or wish

Big Rent Due

While I have written about the issues facing residential renters that is a double edged problem as some owners are small scale landlords with one or two investment properties that rent is the primary financial investment to pay the mortgages, taxes and incidental costs required to maintain and own investment properties. In 2008 many single investors bought numerous properties with the intent of owning as a method of long term investment and when that market collapsed it led many tenants in the lurch as banks foreclosed or the property was sold to larger REIT venture capitalists in which to again refurbish and resell or use as rental markets demanded including short term/Airbnb use. That too is another fallout post Covid for the small investor who are now listing furnished properties for rent with shorter leases in anticipation for the long term while others are simply moving to the more traditional means or trying to sell them. And once again the venture capitalists are quickly buying up such properties as well for their own long term gain.

That said the multiple family units be they condos or apartments are a market I have yet to see what will result as again I suspect many residents will want out of such hot boxes of confinement due to costs, lack of space and simply fewer demands to distance upon entering or exiting the property. The building behind me is one such example as an albatross that they stupidly accelerated and now will have multiple expensive units in which will go vacant for I suspect quite some time.

This from Forbes:  According to RealPage, about 370,000 new high-end units are to reach competition this year (although construction delays and disruptions could deflate this number), marking a 50% increase from the national supply that came online in 2019. 

“We have too much product that was either just completed or under construction and you’re not going to have people moving around as much as [it would be otherwise] typical in the near term,” says Willett. “It’s going be really hard to get that new product filled up.”

For the summer months, which usually see a peak in rental demand, it’s still hard to tell what the effects will be, despite the impacts already rippling throughout the industry.

“Everybody’s wondering what this all means for the summer leasing season,” says Robert Pinnegar, CEO of the National Apartment Association. “Traditionally, the summer period is when you see the most movement of people from property to property, from state to state, from city to the city.

“With the uncertainty that’s going on now, especially with the economy essentially being at a standstill, nobody really knows what that’s going to do. And the unknown factor here is what government policy is going to be with regards to how we interact when the businesses reopen.”

And if working from home becomes the norm it may mean larger plans other than just redesign and scheduling staffing needs for many companies as it too will have a ripple affect and nowhere will feel it more than Manhattan.

Which brings me to the issue of commercial properties which have been on the upswing in most markets, while housing lagged, this is one area of build that has not. Crane watch became the mantra of most business journals under some misguided (intentionally or not) to sell and market their cities to businesses in which to relocate their operations. Along with massive tax incentives that enables business to not pay income nor other revenue generating taxes for decades it become an inticing invite to enable business to hopscotch across America while small business are given no such breaks and they continue to generate the most jobs and in turn revenue to the state coffers. Then came Covid and that game changed.

Small business owners closed are already struggling with rent and now the added lootings we may see more closures and in turn that will affect overall taxes and mortgage burdens.   But it is not only the small businesses.

This from the Washington Post:   Nearly half of commercial retail rents were not paid in May. Companies as big as Starbucks say the financial devastation from the shutdown has left them unable to pay their full property bills on time. Some companies warn they will not be able to pay rent for months. And this from the New York Times:  If building owners cannot come up with enough money to pay their next property tax bill in five weeks, a deadline the city has refused to postpone, the city will be starved of an enormous revenue stream that helps pay for all aspects of everyday life, from the Fire Department to trash pickup to the public hospitals. It could lead to a bleak landscape of vacant storefronts and streets sapped of their energy.

But again like residential rents, commercial ones are not doing much to re-examine their balance sheets and rental agreements. This is from one such store owner in New York:  In 2018, even the national chains began closing more spaces than they opened. Rents have come down somewhat in a few heavy shopping arteries, but on the streets where I was looking to open stores, rents didn’t seem to budge. In 2019, rent for my NoLIta store jumped from $360,000 a year to $650,000.

And I laugh at the once adored WeWork that had everyone salivating at their “worth” that fell hard and fast before Covid and now it too has been infected with LayOff mentality and demands to reduce rents.

This is one new road we are going down and it sure as hell is like the rest of our infrastructure, rocky, bumpy and full of holes.

Office Towers Are Still Going Up, but Who Will Fill Them?

Developers around the country are grappling with the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic as tenants cancel plans and workers fear returning to the office.

The New York Times
By Kevin Williams
Published June 2, 2020

Before the pandemic shut down businesses, a robust economy had powered a building boom, sending office towers skyward in urban areas across the United States. The coronavirus outbreak, though, has scrambled plans and sent jitters through the real estate industry.

Skyscrapers scheduled to open this year will remake skylines in cities like Milwaukee, Nashville and Salt Lake City. Office vacancy rates, following a decade-long trend, had shrunk to 9.7 percent at the end of the third quarter of 2019, compared with 13 percent in the third quarter of 2010, according to Deloitte.

Developers were confident that the demand would remain strong. But the pandemic darkened the picture.

“There is a pause occurring as companies more broadly consider their real estate needs,” said Jim Berry, Deloitte’s U.S. real estate sector leader.

The timing is unfortunate for Mark F. Irgens, whose 25-story BMO Tower in Milwaukee opened in mid-April at the peak of the statewide lockdown in Wisconsin. A month later, a small fraction of typical daytime foot traffic was passing by as most businesses adhered to the governor’s stay-at-home directive, which expired last week. A restaurant that was slated for the ground level was canceled, and three potential tenants have delayed their plans.

Instead of showing off the building’s sparkling Italian marble floors and panoramic vistas of Lake Michigan, Mr. Irgens is worrying about who is going to pull out next and what type of corporate landscape he might face when the pandemic finally ends.

But he is not putting on the brakes. The BMO had been planned for five years, and he has leases to negotiate, investors to please, tenants to woo and loans to pay off.

“Development projects are different than making widgets,” he said. “You can’t stop; you can’t turn it off. You have to continue.”

Slowly, workers are filling their BMO offices. Managers, who were scheduled to report on Monday, constitute about 15 percent of the building’s occupancy. Mr. Irgens thinks it will be the end of the summer before it gets up to 50 percent. Without a coronavirus vaccine, it may be year’s end before the building approaches a “normal” occupancy, he said.

Other developers around the country are also dealing with the fallout, especially for towers with Class A space, regarded as the highest-quality real estate on the market. In most cases, new buildings are not fully occupied, and developers were counting on a strong economy to do the work for them. For instance, the BMO Tower was 55 percent leased before the pandemic.

The question facing the owners of office towers is: Will anyone still want the space when coronavirus crisis fades?

If the economic pain drags on, there could be long-lasting changes to the way people work and how tenants want offices to be reimagined, said Joseph L. Pagliari Jr., clinical professor of real estate at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Some of the changes — like more spacious elevators — could be costly to put into place, he said.

The pandemic could be a “pivot point,” Mr. Pagliari said, and that would be bad news for building owners. The office towers were designed to be “best in class,” he said, but the pandemic has suddenly made their most salable amenities — common areas, fitness centers and food courts — into potential liabilities.

The economic crisis could also spur high interest rates on debt, which would cause building values to fall, Mr. Pagliari said. That may happen even if the crisis diminishes in the weeks ahead.

“The current pandemic has raised perceptions about the likelihood and consequences of future pandemics,” Mr. Pagliari said. Developers who can factor in such events will gain an advantage, but any skyscrapers that are built with pandemic fears in mind are years away.

The prospect that workers may want to continue working from home does not worry John O’Donnell, the chief executive of Riverside Investment and Development, which is developing a 55-story tower at 110 North Wacker Drive in Chicago. The tallest office building erected in the city since 1990, it is scheduled to open in August and will be anchored by Bank of America. Other tenants include law firms, many of which are doing business from home.

“There is a need for collaboration, team building, common business cultures and a continuous desire to have social contact within a business,” Mr. O’Donnell said.

The building is 80 percent leased ahead of its August opening. One tenant signed for 40,000 square feet of office space at the height of the lockdown, which Mr. O’Donnell took as an encouraging sign.

The building is already being adjusted to meet post-pandemic needs, something Mr. O’Donnell said newer structures were better able to do. Amenities are being updated to be touch free. And owners are talking with tenants about walk-through thermal imaging to monitor workers and visitors for fevers.

The pandemic will result in a demand for more office space, not less, said Paul H. Layne, the chief executive of the Howard Hughes Corporation, a national commercial real estate developer based in Houston. Developers will move away from the industry-standard 125 square feet per person toward roomier workplaces.

But others say it is too early to tell when demand for office space will return. Jamil Alam, managing principal of Endeavor Real Estate Group, said the situation would vary by city.

“There will be winners and losers,” Mr. Alam said, explaining that he thinks denser metro areas like New York and Boston, which have been ravaged by the coronavirus, could find their luster lost in favor of smaller markets.

Endeavor, which is based in Austin, Texas, has a portfolio that includes 15.6 million square feet of commercial real estate in cities like Dallas, Denver and Nashville. One of its projects, the 20-story Gulch Union, will be the largest office tower in Nashville when it opens in August with 324,254 square feet of office space.

Smaller markets like Nashville are well positioned for companies wishing to pull up stakes from major metropolitan areas with higher density and costs, Mr. Alam said. Gulch Union has leased 27,000 square feet, and four more deals totaling 40,000 square feet are near completion.

“Deals are still being done,” he said.

There will be an appetite for urban, walkable, mixed-use office environments, Mr. Alam said, and changes will need to be made in buildings over time, like fewer touch points on handles and elevator buttons.

But projects that have not been started yet will be paused, said Chris Kirk, managing principal of the Salt Lake City office of Colliers, the commercial real estate brokerage firm.

“If you are a developer or landlord or C.F.O., you are concerned,” he said. “Everyone is feeling the impact.”

And the city is experiencing a building spurt downtown. A 24-story Class A tower developed by City Creek Reserve, the development arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is scheduled for completion next year. The building, which will have 589,945 square feet of office space, is already 80 percent leased.

Salt Lake City has been averaging a new Class A office high-rise every decade, and the pace is increasing. Still, the pandemic might put the brakes on that.

“Anyone who would be coming out of ground speculatively now without the commitment has got to be thinking about their timing,” Mr. Kirk said.

Mr. Irgens hopes to ride out the pandemic and continue with other projects. In February, his company broke ground on a six-story building in Tempe, Ariz., and it is moving forward with a 235,000-square-foot Milwaukee office project that is 42 percent leased.

“My partners in my business are working really hard to figure out how to have business continuity, and it is really hard to do that,” he said. “Things are changing daily.”

The Hack

That is one of the symptoms of Covid, the hacking cough. It is also a sign that you have been using Zoom the platform with more hacks than a butcher block or our Government websites be they federal or state.   The dated technology and antiquated equipment that has led to massive crashes and shutdowns as millions of Americans try to access information, sign up for unemployment or just get questions answered.

This of course is very evident in the new academies of online learning where most American students don’t even own a computer let alone access to the internet or that rural students have no broadband of any kind. Of course the miracle 3×5 phone has limitations and it too can only do so much and is compatible with well nothing that our Government.

God good times remembering the Email scandal.  Ah yes this in a time where our Government is not even running due to the distancing orders currently in place.  Those virtual meetings are working out great right?  And of course the nightly Trumpaganda show is now adding the super duper screens that are Cuomos’ shtick so we can read highlights of what they are saying just like Colbert used to do on his former show!    God it’s full circle.

First up we have this essay by Catherine Rampall of the Post discussing the tech issues and how bad they really are.  And yes they are really bad.  Note Jersey has done nothing to upgrade their system in nearly 50 years.  Man I love this place it is fucked and yet it works for me! They don’t actually try to pretend it is otherwise. Part of the attraction.

As for the educational divide it got wider.  Again another article about how that home schooling is working out. Not well.

The next is the massive economic hit from this shutdown that will make any improvements to the school system, to the operations of Government (well less bureaucracy as they are laying off many employees so that will be great…oh wait) and to hosptials that are laying off and closing sites daily. And forbid anyone to say anything critical  and that is massive issue at many hospitals across the country as this Doctor in Washington State was let go for this issue (good time to be firing staff I say) and of course leads them to join the growing unemployment line.  Ah Amazon is hiring, just say nothing.

But the global economy is reeling and hacking its lungs as it too tries to survive the pandemic.So far it has managed to do this:

  What Europe and the US have succeeded in doing is to flatten the curve of financial panic. They have maintained the all-important flow of credit. Without that, large parts of their economies would not be on life support – they would be stone dead. And our governments would be struggling with a financial crunch to boot. Maintaining the flow of credit has been the precondition for sustaining the lockdown. It is the precondition for a concerted public health response to the pandemic.

And it is that which dominates the new discussion among the coordinated State efforts announced yesterday and again the two coasts are the ones leading that progression. While CDG just gets hysterical, does he have a slide for that?   And Igor has to stand there apologize and couch his language as well that is all he does is go: Well maybe, unclear and we have to wait and see. Why I am so dismayed with Fauci/Igor is that is all he says and it is to keep Gramps afraid so that the other people in charge, whoever they are, can somewhat fix this.  I get the whole moral panic thing I heard it from my Dentist who never once had a good word to say after awhile you realize this is over her head and so by making you afraid you won’t challenge her authority. Got it.

And the divide of the working class and the stay at home working class is a farce as well. Again the rich travel and bring their shit with them including Covid. The overall affects on the real estate market are yet to be seen but this too will remind everyone that the suburbs are not that bad after all. 

And this is the renter’s dilemma as the cost of housing and the lack of jobs has placed people into roommate situations, subletting and the rest all to make it in New York City and to find out that no if you can’t make it work here just leave  And while they are stopping evictions and allowing mortgages to be delayed, few protections are in place for renters such as enabling them to break leases without penalty might be a good start. So expect again a mass exodus of Millennials living beyond their means and their interesting “gig” jobs evaporate as the economy tries to restore itself to a working level.   2008 is nothing compared to this.  Say Hi to Mom and Dad and hope the basement is a Pinterest project.

So the medical care workers you applaud are truly overworked and under respected and in turn put those patients being admitted further at risk. Do you think Joe Blow with Covid will get the Boris Johnson treatment? No. Hence that adds to the death count.

As hospitals across the country brace for an onslaught of coronavirus patients, doctors, nurses and other health care workers — even in emerging hot spots — are being furloughed, reassigned or told they must take pay cuts. 

The job cuts, which stretch from Massachusetts to Nevada, are a new and possibly urgent problem for a business-oriented health care system whose hospitals must earn revenue even in a national crisis. Hospitals large and small have canceled many elective services — often under state government orders — as they prepare for the virus, sending revenues plummeting. 

That has left trained health care workers sidelined, even in areas around Detroit and Washington, where infection rates are climbing, and even as hard-hit hospitals are pleading for help. 

“I’m 46. I’ve never been on unemployment in my life,” said Casey Cox, who three weeks ago worked two jobs, one conducting sleep research at the University of Michigan and another as a technician at the St. Joseph Mercy Chelsea Hospital near Ann Arbor, Mich.  

But even as some hospitals are straining to handle the influx of coronavirus patients, empty hospital beds elsewhere carry their own burden. 

“We’re in trouble,” said Gene Morreale, the chief executive of Oneida Health Hospital in upstate New York, which has not yet seen a surge in coronavirus patients. 

Appalachian Regional Healthcare, a 13-hospital system in eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia, has seen a 30 percent decrease in its overall business because of a decline in patient volume and services related to the pandemic. Last week, the hospital system announced it would furlough about 8 percent of its work force — around 500 employees. 

In Boston, a spokesman for Partners HealthCare, with 12 hospitals, including Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women’s, said staff members whose work has decreased are being deployed to other areas or will be paid for up to eight weeks if no work is available. 

But redeployment is not always an option. Janet Conway, a spokeswoman for Cape Fear Valley Health System in Fayetteville, N.C., said many of the company’s operating room nurses trained in specialized procedures have been furloughed because their training did not translate to other roles. 

Many health systems are making direct cuts to their payrolls, eliminating or shrinking performance bonuses and prorating paychecks to mirror reduced workload until operations stabilize. 

Scott Weavil, a lawyer in California who counsels physicians and other health care workers on employment contracts, said he was hearing from doctors across the country who were being asked to take pay cuts of 20 to 70 percent. 

 It’s just not sitting well,” Mr. Weavil said, noting that he tells doctors they unfortunately have few options if they want to work for their institution long term. 

“If you fight this pay cut, administration could write your name down and remember that forever,” he said he tells them. 

In other cases, physicians are continuing to find opportunities to practice in a more limited capacity, like telemedicine appointments. But that has not eliminated steep pay cuts. 

“Physicians are only paid in our clinic based on their productivity in the work they do,” said Dr. Pam Cutler, the president of Western Montana Clinic in Missoula. “So they’re automatically taking a very significant — usually greater than 50 or 75 percent — pay cut just because they don’t have any work.”According to a statistical model produced by HealthLandscape and the American Academy of Family Physicians, by the end of April, nearly 20,000 family physicians could be fully out of work, underemployed or reassigned elsewhere, particularly as cities like New York consider large-scale, emergency reassignments of physicians.

Now that is a highlight reel of the problem. This is from Tennessee where the amount of closed facilities could accommodate many patients not just COVID related but how about all those other needed treatments and surgeries out of way of infected sick people who need care but not round the clock. Gosh no lets set up surgical tents, convention centers, defunct malls  and have Naval ships instead.  And yes that is the same in the tri-state area but they don’t mention that.. shhh.   Same in New Jersey And across the United States.

Or how about these hospitals in Connecticut that were filthy before Covid, bet they are doing great treating patients now.

Now let’s talk about the AMA the lobbying group for Physicians.  They were (are)  adamant about not having nationalized health care as that would affect their income.  Surprise! Something else is and it aint Bernie Sanders! Somethings need to change and this is one of them.

AMA maintains its opposition to single-payer systems
Steven Ross Johnson
Modern Healthcare
June 2019

CHICAGO—The American Medical Association will remain opposed to proposals for the U.S. to create a single-payer healthcare system. The group voted narrowly to maintain its stance on Tuesday at its annual House of Delegates meeting.

Delegates of the largest physicians’ organization voted 53% to 47% against adopting an amendment to remove the AMA’s formal opposition to a single-payer healthcare system, ending days of contentious debate that pitted the organization’s leadership against a contingent represented largely by medical students.

“As long as we maintain our blanket opposition our AMA cannot ensure we are a part of every conversation,” said Dan Pfeifle, a fourth-year medical student at the University of South Dakota Sanford School of Medicine and an alternate delegate of the AMA’s Medical Student Section.

Delegates ended up voting overwhelming in favor of adopting a report from the AMA’s Council on Medical Service that reaffirmed efforts to improve upon the Affordable Care Act instead of “nationalized” healthcare coverage.

Some of the report’s recommendations included expanding eligibility for tax credits on insurance premiums beyond 400% of the federal poverty level, as well as to expand eligibility for and increase the size of cost-sharing reductions.

“The AMA proposal for reform, based on AMA policy, is still the right direction … to cover the uninsured, and is cognizant that, in this environment, the ACA is the vehicle through … which the AMA proposal for reform can be realized,” the report stated.

The debate over whether the country should adopt a Medicare for All type of system has gotten increased attention in recent months as it has become a key policy issue among several of the Democratic presidential candidates.

The AMA has long opposed single-payer efforts out of concerns that it would lower provider reimbursement rates and limit patient choice on healthcare coverage and services they can access.

“I think we ought to put a stake in the heart of single payer,” said Dr. Donald Palmisano, of Metaire, La., who served as AMA president in 2003-04. “We’ve done it before; we ought to do it again.”

But support for a single-payer system has grown among physicians. At the AMA annual delegates meeting last year, supporters got the body to at least study the impact of changing its policy.

This year, the issue sparked a protest outside of the AMA’s meeting on its first day when medical students joined nurses and advocates to call on the organization to drop its fight against Medicare for All.

More broadly, public opinion for single payer has grown over the years so that a majority of Americans now support such a system. According to a survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation in April, 56% of Americans favor a national health plan in which all individuals got their insurance from a single government plan.

Now they have rallied for single payer but with this election let’s just see how they feel. Either Grandpa will have to realize that they are going to need care sooner than the rest of us so go figure.

I am going to step out of my apartment today as I tried 24 lockdown for the first and what will be the last time as it was me sleeping most of it with about 45 minutes of working out (if that was what it was) cleaning out the frig from the food hoarding and excessive cooking and wondering if I could get to the store for old people time as now suddenly Whole Foods has closed one store in NYC and in turn has a wait list for deliveries. Well they will soon have many shoppers as the unemployment list continues to rise. And that was 10 days ago and with all the state systems crashing and burning that number will again change and more is coming. See what I mean.

The End Zone

The biggest scam of the Trump nightmare is the tax breaks that provided Real Estate Developers with a tax break to develop in specific areas of a city called “Opportunity Zones.”  The opportunity is that they get a ten year tax break in which to write off capital gains and hold their interest with little concern to overall use, income generation or even purpose or occupancy rates until they sell the building.  And as always property on land regardless of what sits on top is what determines value so having a structure sit vacant with overpriced under utilized facilities is not a problem, return on investment is.  And there are structured payments in line with expectations under conventional development that investors expect in REIT’s or more structured lending packages. Not this one.

The current Congress in between Impeachment hearings are looking into the next Trump fraud to see how to circumvent this after reading about one of the more infamous fraudsters of another decade was brought to the forefront for his role in these capital plans.   Michael Milken was one of the 80s dynamos that gave us Trump and right there is a reason to hold suspect.  He, however, did time.

Chris Christie, the former Governor of my new current State home is another who is profiting from these vaguely needed high end luxury developments alighting my area where rents are Manhattan levels without the benefit of living in Manhattan.  But like the former Governor, they seem to be out of gas.  Maybe Trump was right to leave that lemon.

Here in Jersey they are called “Investment Opportunities” and you see the shiny key syndrome going on all over Jersey City as it was declared an “it” city like Nashville was five years ago but this is still Jersey with all the reputation, the commute issues among others that frankly have allowed some development to go through but like all things in Jersey, you don’t mess with the people here or they will push back.  And this past week we saw them stand up to AirBnb and prohibit the unfettered growth in the fake home sharing business that is like WeWork only smart enough to have beards by having real people rent out homes or rooms to provide the face of the average host.  Wrong, wrong and more wrong as they too are largely investors and businesses that are buying or leasing properties with fake hosts posing on the site as the actual owner.  Gee Trevor in Nashville has a hell of a lot of properties and sure enough they found that in Jersey that was the case and they said, fuck that shit. Watch the growth of rentals add to an already large rental market with overpriced units aligning the landscape. The it city status was not something they ran amok on as they did in Nashville and again AirBnb rears its ugly head with the party house bullshit that led to a shooting.  In Nashville they have plenty of shootings in the street but its AirBnb that provides the security they need to keep those Bridezilla floats alive and chugging down the streets of the city.

Meanwhile across from my building they are erecting a 20 floor luxury build that was in the pipeline a little late for entry but if this is an “investment” it will pay back in the views that now blocked and the increased traffic to an already congested area.  Its all good that my view is partially gone as they are building more and more with other views and eventually all good things crash and this is one coming hard.  Let’s hope rents fall instead of the buildings however.

But despite it the boon of apartments, storage units and other odd builds that rarely offer affordable housing or development that the everyman can use as Congress is finding.

Lawmakers Increase Criticism of ‘Opportunity Zone’ Tax Break

Congressional Democrats are calling for investigations and legislative fixes in the wake of reporting by The Times.

By Eric Lipton and Jesse Drucker
The New York Times
Nov. 6, 2019

Lawmakers are voicing mounting concerns about a federal tax incentive, known as an “opportunity zone,” that is supposed to encourage investors to pump money into the nation’s poorest neighborhoods.

Leading Democrats in the House and Senate have sent a flurry of letters demanding answers and action by federal agencies after recent New York Times articles detailed how wealthy investors and real estate developers, including those with ties to the Trump administration, are poised to profit on the initiative.

In August, The Times highlighted how tax-advantaged money was beginning to flow to development projects that were underway in affluent neighborhoods even before the opportunity-zone incentive was enacted as part of President Trump’s tax cuts at the end of 2017. The initiative enjoyed broad bipartisan support.

An article last month described how the financier Michael Milken, a longtime friend of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s, is among the investors who stand to benefit from the way the Treasury Department is writing the rules governing the tax incentive.

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Finance Committee, said he was introducing legislation this week that would eliminate hundreds of opportunity zones in relatively wealthy neighborhoods.

Other lawmakers have written letters, citing The Times’s reporting, to Mr. Mnuchin and called for investigations by the Treasury Department’s inspector general and the Government Accountability

The tax incentive is supposed to help struggling communities by attracting new businesses, housing and other real estate projects. If investors with capital gains — profits on stocks, real estate or other assets that have increased in value — invest them in one of nearly 8,800 opportunity zones, they get a discount on their capital gains tax bill, as well as the potential to avoid any future capital gains taxes if the new investment increases in value.

While the incentive has driven money into economically ailing cities including Erie, Pa., and Birmingham, Ala., much of the money has gone to projects that were already planned or being built in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods in places like Houston, Miami and New Orleans.

Two Democrats and a Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee introduced a bill on Wednesday to require funds that invest in opportunity zones to file annual reports with the Treasury that disclose details of their development projects and any new businesses.

The bill would impose $500-a-day penalties for failure to file the report and require the Treasury to make the reports public. The Treasury also would have to release an annual report on job creation and poverty reduction attributable to the tax break.

“It’s our job to conduct oversight and ensure the zones work as intended everywhere,” said Representative Mike Kelly, Republican of Pennsylvania, a co-sponsor of the bill.

Mr. Wyden’s bill would go much further. It would make it harder for developments that were underway before the tax break to qualify for the incentive. It also would disqualify about 200 zones that are adjacent to low-income census tracts but are not themselves poor.

“We’re seeing examples that are enormously troubling” among designated zones, Mr. Wyden said in an interview, citing the Times articles. “I am proposing to terminate those zones until we get out in front of this.”

A number of industries are already not permitted to benefit from the tax break, including liquor stores, massage parlors and racetracks. Mr. Wyden’s bill would expand that prohibition to self-storage facilities and luxury housing, which have been popular destinations for opportunity-zone money.

Some of the loudest calls for changes in the tax incentive are coming from members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who in many cases represent poor urban areas that were supposed to see some of the biggest opportunity-zone investments.

Representatives Emanuel Cleaver II of Missouri and James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, both Democrats, said they were extremely disappointed with how the opportunity-zone initiative was playing out, though they acknowledged that the results might improve over time.

Mr. Cleaver said he had spent many weekends organizing meetings in his district to bring together business leaders and local officials to try to lure opportunity-zone dollars to distressed neighborhoods in Kansas City and Independence, Mo.

“We thought the companies would be beating on our doors, saying, ‘Please, please, we want to build this or build that,’” Mr. Cleaver said. “But it just hasn’t happened.”

Mr. Clyburn said that when a real estate project did come to his district, it was to serve college students, not poor residents.

“The program needs to be tweaked — or it needs to experience its funeral,” said Mr. Clyburn, the third-ranking House Democrat.

Representative Ron Kind, Democrat of Wisconsin, one of the original sponsors of opportunity-zone legislation, said he wanted to at least make sure that the measures forcing greater transparency were passed into law.

“There seems to be unanimity and bipartisan agreement that would be nice to move the reporting requirement bill forward,” he said in an interview.

But Mr. Kind said he was troubled by the heavy investment that appeared to be taking place so far in “shovel ready” real estate projects that would most likely have been built even without the tax break.

Lawmakers asked the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, to evaluate the tax break, including how various census tracts were designated as opportunity zones. And at least two House committees are planning to hold oversight hearings into the tax incentive.

On Monday, the top Democrats on the two congressional tax-writing committees, Mr. Wyden and Representative Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, wrote a letter to Mr. Mnuchin asking questions about The Times article on Mr. Milken and Mr. Mnuchin. The congressmen said it was “deeply troubling” that Mr. Milken appeared to receive special treatment.

Mr. Milken, in a five-page letter posted on his website after the article was published, said he had played no role in recommending to any government official that a county in Nevada where he had invested be designated an opportunity zone. He said he had never discussed his investment with Mr. Mnuchin.