I walked past the teabagging party on the Common today. Fox claimed it was about 700, but to me it looked like a lot less, and it also looked like half the folks there were gawking at/mocking the tax protesters.
Bob Reich has the lowdown on reasonable responses to their idiocy. Of course, a reasonable and measured response isn’t exactly going to help when you’re trying to talk to people who don’t know fascism from a kick in the teeth. But hey, take what you can get.
There’s an ambulance and a police cruiser outside Orleans right now, and the EMTs just loaded someone on a stretcher into it. Fight? Heart attack? Slip and fall? No idea.
Down the street from me is a rather beautiful set of condominia, one of which has just popped up on the market: 7 Park Ave #1. Asking price: $1.1 million.
It’s a very nicely done and very spacious unit, but it also seems like a lot of money for the neighborhood, and in particular a lot of money for something with aluminum siding and no yard. Plus, the Zestimate is only $620k. Even given that the Zestimate can be wildly inaccurate, I became curious: What was the previous sales price?
Zillow usually has the sales history, but didn’t in this case, so I looked it up on Mass Land Records. It turns out it was sold in 2002 by Lalo Development LLC to Gorka Brabo for $1.00. Yes, one dollar. Sounds like that’s a token transfer from a business to the person who owns the business. (Based on this page from city-data.com I’m guessing the Brabo family owns Lalo Development).
There’s nothing wrong with buying something for a dollar, especially if it’s just a title transfer from a company you own to your personal property. But it sure makes it harder to figure out what the original cost was, and that makes it hard for me to guess whether $1.1M is in line with the money put into the place.
Another weird detail: Brabo is also listed as the sales agent for the unit. Does that mean he’ll take a realtor’s commission as well? That would be pretty brilliant.
Anyway, Zillow guesses the property is worth just over half the asking price. Anyone care to hazard guesses about the eventual sale price, the amount of time it will spend on the market, and what you’d be willing to pay for a Davis Square loft-style condo?
Print anything three times, and it’s true. It’s the case for politics and it’s the case for bogus trends.
And it might, maybe, be the case for leases and deeds.
I’ve seen a few stories about the scam of breaking into a place and claiming to have a lease, and I can’t tell if it’s just an outlier or if it really is happening more, but it’s brilliant in its simplicity: All you need is a fake lease, a fake deed, a crowbar, and some new locks.
First, prep your fake paperwork. Ideally in triplicate, because if you have three copies it looks more real. Then break into an empty and foreclosed house, change the locks, set up and pay for utilities, and you’re home free. Claim you pay rent every month. When the rightful owners show up, say they must be mistaken, because some other guy owns the place. If they don’t pay you to leave, it’ll take months for them to evict you, months in which you’re living rent-free.
Brilliant and evil.
The variant I hadn’t heard of before takes a little more organization, because it involves faking ownership yourself with a bogus deed and title transfer, then writing leases and, I think, collecting rent. Of course, the group seems to be some kind of cult: ” Johnson said in a telephone interview that the organization is based in Nevada and headed by an archbishop who is her uncle, King Solomon II. She described herself and her uncle as sovereign, which she said means among other things they are not required to pay taxes, mortgages or homeowner association fees.”
And you thought a no-doc ARM was ridiculous!
Boston.com is reporting that City Hall has been dubbed the world’s ugliest building. And yes, it’s an unwholesome grey blob that looks kind of like an oil platform from Star Wars. And the word “brutalist” is perhaps the least-appealing name for a movement of architecture, even if it actually refers to the “rawness” of the concrete (in French, béton brut). And City Hall Plaza is almost uniquely unwelcoming for anything but a large-scale political rally, circus, or riot.
But City Hall does look pretty awesome from up on Beacon Hill, on a sunny day, when the light striking it turns gold and you can see the water behind it.
Which, if you think about it, is almost certainly the angle you’d have if you stood at a conference table with an architectural model of city hall on it. It would have looked great at those pitch meetings. It just doesn’t work as well for anyone who has to beside its grey eminence on a windswept plaza turning their collars against the chill rushing between the skyscrapers and the sea.
Would an announcement of a Palin/McCain rally in Davis Square produce dozens of comments asking “wait, is this a joke?”
I don’t know if it actually happened or not. I certainly didn’t see anything when I went through at eight, but it could have been over by then.
Sometimes I’m annoyed that I live in a safe state, because my vote counts for less and politicians don’t pander to me. And as much as I dislike pandering in general, you know I’d love to be pandered to as much as the next guy.
And then I see really horrible ads like this one, about how liberals take godless money:
What a reminder how lucky I am to be in a place where everyone pretty much agrees on most of the basics, and it’s a matter of policy and extent and whether someone has actually taken cash bribes or not.
I went to bed early, and M. was in the other room watching, but kept the volume low so I could sleep. Still, I could tell when the Sox mounted a comeback, because I could hear cheering from the entire street.
Rumor has it that the anti-gay-marriage ballot initiative (Proposition 8) in California is gaining in the polls. To fight back, one pro-marriage group has put together an ad appealing to small-government types, suggesting that Prop 8 means crotch-checks at the altar.
Secretly Ironic 