The houses where B.T.K. murders took place are … still houses, and people still have to live there. Creepy.
After I posted the link to Condoflip, grey-eyed John Fleck emailed to ask if that was a joke or not. I wasn’t sure, but I was pretty sure people did buy and sell unbuilt condos– very windhandel, as the Dtuch would say (tangent: a search for English results for the word on Google turns up things like an article on the surge in the skateboarding industry).
I told John that I’d be willing to offer him a nice tulip bulb in exchange for his daughter’s hand in marriage, and he replied that she wasn’t for sale but for the right tulip, I could have her collection of beanie babies.
Apparently, though, people still make money in the tulip market, just as they make money in futures, a.k.a. windhandel— just not with the same profit margin of the bubble days of the 17th century (or the late 90s, in the case of futures trading). The city of Holland, Wisconsin. for example, has a thriving tulip industry.
Still, I don’t think I’d buy a big pile of rare of tulips as an investment any more than I’d buy Dennis Rader’s old murder houses– stigmatized property.
Secretly Ironic 