Real estate makes my headlines again. Only twenty-five properties changed hands during September in this area (Dania, Ft. Lauderdale, Hallandale, Hollywood, West Park). Property is not moving in south Florida. Nobody can get a mortgage and listings average 13 months. Merely twelve of the sales were single family, the rest being condos or highrise apartments.
Six went to banks or property management companies, fully half the sellers were foreclosures. Even that is suspect, as banks are careful not to flood the market. What captured my attention is some sharpie bought a house in West Park for $43,200. This is no surprise to me, yet five years ago that was barely a down payment. Somebody got their dream home for a half-year’s wages. In Hallandale proper, only one single family house was sold this month. There are over 20,000 repossessed houses in Broward county alone, meaning the local buyers are holding back. Half the properties went to out of state concerns. At the other extreme, some dodo paid $325,000 for a condo in Ft. Lauderdale. The housing safety valve is at its limit.
[Author's note 2016: that's a typo above. The number of repossessed houses in Broward stood at 120,000 at the time. It remains in that same range six years later.]
For all the media hype, it is actually quite rare for storms to hit a given part of Florida. Not so today, as a tropical depression is dumping buckets of water on the town. Visibility is down to a half a block. Except for hurricanes, wind can be rare as well. This time it is alternating between dead calm and blasting breezes around an hour apart. This is what sailor’s call a tempest and it gets mention for its terrific violence all night and this morning. Water in the low spots is two feet deep.
Today’s trivia covers a lot of ground. Who remembers the coelacanth, the supposedly extinct fossil fish caught off the Comoros that stunned the scientific community? The universities spent years and tons of money until another one turned up. Further investigation reveals that the local fisherman had been catching them all their lives and throwing them back, commenting they were “not especially tasty”.
In my late teens, I played in a band called “Little Joe Hill”, always thinking he was some famous Australian outlaw. Turns out he was a labor organizer in Utah, where they pinned two murders on him. That bum rap got him the firing squad in 1915. Today I recommend we do the same with eastern politicians, census takers and the heads of registered charities.
From the same source, I discovered yet another gap in the Bill Gates myth. He found out IBM needed an operating system, not surprising since his mother was on the board of directors. I have previously written how he simply changed some command words on an existing program (CP/M) and claimed it was his own creation. What I did not know is that he bought that existing program for $50,000.
Let me do the math. Gates was born in 1956 and came up with DOS in 1977, I think. One has to ask where on this earth did a 20 year old who had never had a job in his life come up with that kind of money back then? Rusty and I got our first mortgage around the same time, so we know there is no way Gates could have borrowed such a then huge sum as venture capital. Somebody clearly gave, not lent, him the money. I admire the guy, but it irks me when he is quoted as an example of the successful entrepreneur when the only chances he ever took were in Las Vegas.
Later, I was busy coordinating the new bingo. Strange, when I said my act was hard to follow, it seems that was interpreted by some to mean difficult, a shallow presumption. What I meant and said was that the show is not easy to duplicate. The roots go much deeper, where every aspect of the performance is covered and rehearsed. Staff has to be trained how to verify the winning ticket and to hand signal the amount of the next jackpot across a noisy room within 15 seconds of game start.
I was up to Oakwood Plaza and stopped in at Big Lots. They’ve done wonders with the place. It appears they’ve brought in a professional to modernize the layout of the entire store. Again, very well done, even the grouping of the shelves is a better match to how real people shop. Did you get that, Publix? Winn/Dixie?
Good, because it is also clear that they have expanded the food section and prices start at 88 cents. As well, they don’t stock perishables so they have a larger variety of boxed and canned goods, such as the excellent cheese & bacon pasta I’m scarfing right now. The shelves have plenty of packaged meals that would prove handy to survive disasters like a hurricane or a recalcitrant partner who thinks others can be arbitrarily declared “100% responsible” for his bills.
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