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Wow, This Is Huge! But Nobody’s Here

A weekend topic starting with Suncoast News in Florida. “More dramatic will be changes to large commercial tracts on the highway, such as the moribund Universal Plaza in Holiday, which recently showed up on a video with human excrement dotting its pavement. The property is now under contract to build a mixed-use project with two seven- to eight-story luxury apartments. In Port Richey, the former Sears building has been demolished for the construction of garden apartments, and the Dillard’s anchor at the opposite end sits empty. It’s impossible, though, to talk about development in West Pasco without acknowledging what is rapidly becoming a monster issue: the housing crisis. It’s most dramatically visible in the extremes of, on the one hand, a glut of luxury housing projects that are seemingly taking up every square foot of undeveloped land, and, on the other, the ubiquitous camps where homeless people live — 62 in the county at last count — with most of them in West Pasco.”

“Less visible but every bit as disturbing is the fact that rising housing costs are forcing county residents, many of them longtime or even second or third generation, to move to Hernando or even Citrus counties. ‘The average salary here is $47,000,’ Engels said. ‘Wages are up 18%; housing is up 63%. Most of our labor force can’t afford to live here in safe, decent housing. Forty-two percent of our workers are commuting from out of the county.’ Even for people making $70,000 per year, he added, the housing situation is ‘very dire.'”

The Real Deal. “Add another legal scrape to what’s been a tumultuous year for Applesway Investment Group. A group of 123 investors filed the latest on Wednesday, alleging that they paid Applesway, an investment firm led by Jay Gajavelli, $12.4 million on a deal that never happened. The investors told a Texas court that they spent the $12.4 million to acquire an apartment complex in Houston. However, Applesway allegedly spent the money on an unrelated transaction that fell apart, leaving the investors without the apartment complex they thought they were buying for their money.”

“Applesway used the $12.4 million intended to purchase the Houston property in a desperate attempt to revive the other deal, offering it as a nonrefundable down payment, the lawsuit alleges. Applesway has been at the center of multiple high-profile foreclosures in recent months. The firm was the primary property owner in Arbor Realty Trust’s $229 million portfolio that foreclosed in April. Earlier this week, a foreclosure suit was filed on a $65.2 million loan tied to another one of Applesway’s multifamily properties in Houston.”

Bisnow Dallas Fort Worth in Texas. “A slew of office tenants in Dallas-Fort Worth have given up hope of saving money on real estate and are taking space back after hanging their hats on subleases that never materialized. Eighteen subleases totaling 2.2M SF have been taken off the market for reasons other than a new tenant occupying the space since the first quarter of last year, according to CBRE. Others, still attempting to find subletters, are working in cavernous spaces that offer as much as 10K SF per employee on most workdays.”

“Only about a dozen people are coming into the MCS headquarters on a regular basis, said CEO Craig Torrance, so a 120K SF footprint no longer makes sense. ‘Everybody who comes into our building goes, ‘Wow, this is huge! But nobody’s here,’ Torrance said.”

Korea Economic Daily. “A private fund for US real estate managed by South Korea’s Mirae Asset Global Investments Co. has seen huge losses amid the tumble of the office market, investment banking sources said on Friday. The fund posted negative 70.2% as of May 26, according to Mirae Asset’s disclosure. Mirae Asset Global created the fund in 2015 when local institutional investors were aggressively pouring capital into the overseas real estate market. As the fund saw losses amid a downturn in the office market, Mirae Asset extended the fund’s maturity in 2020 and 2022. Mirae Asset formed the fund as it acquired 1750 K Street Northwest in Washington, D.C., for $115 million.”

“The US office market suffered plunging values during the pandemic, with an oversupply of properties and remote work trends. ‘The investors could have recovered at least half of their principal if the fund’s liquidation was executed in 2020. The value of 1750 K Street has plunged to one-fourth its purchase price,’ said an IB source.”

From Slate. “They call it the ‘debt wall’. Specifically, it is $1.5 trillion in commercial real estate debt. The country’s downtown office buildings, as you may have heard, are in particularly dire shape. The return to office has stalled, and many once-vibrant business districts have fallen on hard times. According to the brokerage Colliers, almost all of biggest office buildings in Downtown Los Angeles are underwater on their loans—meaning, their owners owe more to the bank than the buildings are currently worth. LA’s office towers have, on average, more than $230 in debt per square foot, Bloomberg’s John Gittelson reports, and the only building to sell this year went for $154 per square foot. That’s a lot of water. The city’s biggest commercial landlord, the Canadian property giant Brookfield, has defaulted on more than a billion dollars of loans this year.”

“And for residential conversion, the white whale of downtown reinvention? ‘Values have to come a lot further down before a wholesale conversion starts taking place,’ said Richard Barkham, global chief economist at commercial real estate giant CBRE. ‘And in some cases, values might have to go negative.'”

From Bloomberg. “Office real estate investments trusts are trading at their lowest level since 2009 as the trend toward remote work leaves desks empty and economic pressures tighten corporate budgets. ‘There’s two ways to lose money: You can own a boat, or you can own an office building,’ Piper Sandler analyst Alexander Goldfarb said. ‘At least with the boat you can take your friends out on a sunset cruise.'”

The Hoover Institute. “The former Union Bank building in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district, located at 350 California Street, was auctioned off last week. The winning bid was $65 million, roughly 75 percent less on a per-square-foot basis than comparable building sales from just before the pandemic. The glut of downtown office space, combined with San Francisco’s high housing costs, has led many to envision converting downtown commercial spaces into residential buildings, but not one residential development firm bid on this property. Tony Crossley, a San Francisco commercial broker, estimated a residential conversion cost per unit of nearly $1,000 per square foot for this property. ‘It doesn’t make any economic sense,’ he said. ‘The math is completely upside down.'”

ABC San Francisco in California. “It was supposed to be the transit epicenter of the San Francisco Bay Area, with the $2.4 billion Salesforce Transit Center built to corral thousands of commuters and serve as the urban center of a new neighborhood South of Market. Today, the Grand Central Station of the West is a very quiet place. A near ghost town waiting for city life to return.”

The New York Post. “An Old Navy store that has been in San Francisco for three decades is slated to shutter this summer — adding to the growing list of retailers closing down throughout the crime-plagued city. The Market Street location — located just three miles away from its corporate headquarters — will shut down July 1 once its lease expires, according to a company statement. The Old Navy spot is not the only longstanding Bay Area store to suffer enough losses to close down in recent weeks. At least 20 stores in the city’s Union Square area have shuttered since 2020.”

Silicon Valley in California. “A San Jose site where a 132-room hotel was proposed has tumbled into a loan default and faces foreclosure, a fresh indicator of post-coronavirus economic maladies for the Bay Area lodging sector. The hotel was proposed at 1510 South De Anza Blvd. in west San Jose, very close to the Cupertino city line, according to San Jose planning documents. The four-story hotel would also have featured a ground-floor restaurant and a rooftop deck, the city documents show. This loan default represents one of the most recent known examples that suggest financial difficulties have begun to haunt sites where hotels have been proposed but have yet to be developed.”

Bisnow Boston in Massachusetts. “A Faneuil Hall hotel owned by Blackstone is reportedly heading for foreclosure after negotiation attempts around its delinquent $274M loan failed. A CMBS loan backed by the 178-room Club Quarters Boston hotel and three other Blackstone-owned CQ hotels in Chicago, San Francisco and Philadelphia has been in special servicing since mid-2020, and the special servicer is now ‘pursuing foreclosure,’ the Boston Business Journal reported, citing a CMBS industry report.”

From Globest. “Bank loan assets are finding themselves on the market, whether the FDIC expecting to sell the $60 billion worth retained from the Signature Bank closure sometime this summer, or PacWest selling 74 construction loans to Kennedy-Wilson Holdings for $2.4B, a discount of $200M. With increased pressure on CRE loans and greater numbers of assets becoming distressed in the near future, there’s no reason to think that the discounting has ended.”

Blog TO in Canada. “An increasing number of Toronto companies continue to adopt hybrid work models despite lockdowns fading into the past, meaning nine-to-fivers are spending less time in the office and spaces remain largely vacant. In all cases but the four-day scenario, the report found that there will be ‘millions of square feet of surplus office space until 2041’ in Toronto. Even in this scenario, only 15 million square feet of new space would be required, which is about half of the pace of demand seen before lockdowns.”

“‘As an association representing office building interests, it is unusual for us to recommend policies that would result in less office space,’ said NAIOP Greater Toronto President Christina Iacoucci. ‘However, with a likely significant oversupply of office space lasting potentially for decades, governments need to respond to changing work patterns and economic priorities.'”

The Globe and Mail. “On paper, the case for converting office buildings to residential apartments is compelling. Two recent reports indicate that across Canada, scores of office buildings could be candidates for conversion. According to a report by the Canadian Urban Institute, which delves into conditions that enable conversions – such as building type, city policy and market viability – 130 buildings in 11 cities could be converted into 22,000 housing units. A broader approach by commercial brokerage Avison Young suggests about one-third of office buildings in major cities could be converted.”

“On the ground, however, some of the few developers who’ve completed office building conversion are wary of how difficult and pricey the work can be. Oz Drewniak, president of Ottawa-based CLV Group Developments, has checked out more than a dozen potential building candidates in the last year and a half but each presented unsolvable problems. Most were too technically challenging or had too much occupancy, he says. Or the city’s sewer infrastructure wasn’t compatible for heavier residential use. On some sites, the environmental inspection or seismic assessment didn’t pan out.”

“‘We’ve learned a lot, so the next one should theoretically be easier. But it’s a challenge to find the right conditions out there,’ says Mr. Drewniak. ‘I know of developers who have purchased empty buildings, but they’re sitting on them because they can’t figure it out. When you start looking at the cost, it’s very expensive. Everybody thinks, ‘oh, an existing building? That’s easy. You just throw some new residential units in it.’ But it’s not like that.'”

“Mr. Drewniak says demolition and construction from scratch would have been easier – while the cost would have been ‘pretty much the same.’ What was saved by reusing the structure was spent on ‘all the time and work just to get it ready for a new use.’ For example, everything had to be ripped out, he says. ‘There wasn’t one pipe left.'”

“Since offices use a higher electrical voltage, an all-new electrical system was required, and as for plumbing, a residential building requires magnitudes more load capacity for bathrooms, dishwashers and washing machines in every unit. The new systems also required 1,700 new holes drilled through eight-inch concrete. ‘It was a tremendous amount of drilling,’ says Mr. Drewniak. ‘Weeks of drilling.'”

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This Post Has 76 Comments

  1. It’s impossible, though, to talk about development in West Pasco without acknowledging what is rapidly becoming a monster issue: the housing crisis.

    The MSM can never bring itself to talk about the true crisis: corrupt, incompetent malgovernance.

    1. “Wages are up 18%; housing is up 63%. Most of our labor force can’t afford to live here in safe, decent housing,” Engel said.

      You’re firing on all cylinders, Engel.

      1. “One solution, he said, could be linkage fees to pay for low-income housing. Engels proposes that those fees be spread around the community and not just assessed to developers.”

        What’s wrong with some asset deflation, Engel?

        1. I love the fees for low income housing. So the solution to housing being too expensive is to add another tax and make it yet more expensive to build housing.

          We have the worst “expert” class ever.

          1. We have the worst “expert” class ever.

            Only if they are actually trying to solve the problem.

    2. The MSM can never bring itself to talk about the true crisis: corrupt, incompetent malgovernance.

      Their salary depends on NOT talking about that.

    3. That mayor of SF being one of the better examples. She almost single handedly destroyed that city. She’s in change and flushes it all down the toilet.

  2. However, Applesway allegedly spent the money on an unrelated transaction that fell apart, leaving the investors without the apartment complex they thought they were buying for their money.”

    Die, speculator scum.

  3. ‘Mirae Asset Global created the fund in 2015 when local institutional investors were aggressively pouring capital into the overseas real estate market’

    Readers here remember those days. Oh the articles about gushers of money from Asian ‘investors’ building way too much and too costly for anyone to be able to operate out of.

    ‘The value of 1750 K Street has plunged to one-fourth its purchase price’

    The globalist scum media are dancing around the real issue and their role in it. Where did all that moolah come from? QE of course. Have you heard any criticism of central banks in this gotdam disaster? It’s only in every single sh$thole city on the planet. And the lockdowns! Not going back to normal, right Jerry? Well here we are. Put on a bib and start working on the big sh$t sandwich Jerry.

  4. ‘Everybody who comes into our building goes, ‘Wow, this is huge! But nobody’s here,’ Torrance said.”

    Poetic justice: the Fed’s private equity accomplices like BlackRock & Blackstone, who funneled huge sums to radical-left causes & getting Democrat candidates elected, are going to see their CRE portfolios shed trillions in Yellen Bux valuations as the chickens come home to roost.

    1. That’s great news. Hopefully they aren’t systemically risky or too big to fail, and hence will not qualify for bailouts.

    2. PE scum don’t really care. They get their fees either way. It’s the investors and pension funds that eat the losses.

  5. “And for residential conversion, the white whale of downtown reinvention? ‘Values have to come a lot further down before a wholesale conversion starts taking place…And in some cases, values might have to go negative’

    And what will that do to tax revenue Dick? Here’s another big problem: convert all you like, no one wants to live in these downtown sh$tholes, in case you haven’t noticed!

  6. ‘A Faneuil Hall hotel owned by Blackstone is reportedly heading for foreclosure after negotiation attempts around its delinquent $274M loan failed. A CMBS loan backed by the 178-room Club Quarters Boston hotel and three other Blackstone-owned CQ hotels in Chicago, San Francisco and Philadelphia has been in special servicing since mid-2020, and the special servicer is now ‘pursuing foreclosure’

    Blackstone and Brookfield have money. Have you read reporters questioning their ‘commitment to the community’ as they throw the keys on the desks? This is rich people strategically defaulting and it gets bigger every day.

  7. ‘Today, the Grand Central Station of the West is a very quiet place. A near ghost town waiting for city life to return’

    Read on about how much this debacle cost. You broke it bay aryans.

  8. ‘Bank loan assets are finding themselves on the market, whether the FDIC expecting to sell the $60 billion worth retained from the Signature Bank closure sometime this summer, or PacWest selling 74 construction loans to Kennedy-Wilson Holdings for $2.4B, a discount of $200M. With increased pressure on CRE loans and greater numbers of assets becoming distressed in the near future, there’s no reason to think that the discounting has ended’

    It’s going to be much worser, as the liquidations have barely begun.

  9. ‘Others, still attempting to find subletters, are working in cavernous spaces that offer as much as 10K SF per employee on most workdays’

    The air conditioning alone would break anybody. Get this: they are still building more space.

    1. “…10K SF per employee…”

      Y’all could rock a personal miniature golf course at work!

  13. “demolition and construction from scratch would have been easier”

    That’s what I’m gonna do.

    It’s not an office, it’s a 100+ year old house with utilities at the lot.

    1. Are you excavating and removing the foundation as well? A total scraper can be more expensive than just buying a lot and building.

          2. Not til the debris is gone. I suggest a dump truck for removal.

            Yes, and I’d actually recommend buying the equipment needed, then selling it after the job is done.

        3. Replying to all three replies, there are much more standing walls not pictured. I’m planning to start the initial demo myself with rolloff deliveries and pickups, followed by hiring a demo contractor for the foundation work. And lastly, south of Pueblo, north of New Mexico.

          I paid more for my car than I am paying for the cash price of this lot and teardown.

          It was listed less than a week when I offered asking, and offer accepted same day, signed the contract that same evening.

          1. I’d salvage the bricks, especially the ones on the fireplace and use them instead of brick pavers. For the main driveway and/or foot path.

  14. A reader sent these in:

    gm from the inflation is dead circus! Core Services 60bps; ex-housing 42bps. Real Spending higher…

    https://twitter.com/INArteCarloDoss/status/1662092871497924616

    “AI is real, it’s with us and has been for decades. Forbes magazine had a cover story on the coming glory of AI in 1998. So this isn’t anything new, it’s just a rationalization to pay ridiculous multiples for a small number of stocks.”

    https://twitter.com/jessefelder/status/1662114381621239808

    ‘Nvidia is now more than six times the size of Intel — even though that company still had almost twice Nvidia’s annual revenue.’

    https://twitter.com/jessefelder/status/1662116027646488577

    The only other times when the tech sector surged over 4% while overall stocks declined were at the onset and in the middle of the Tech Bust. April 2000 and March 2001. My 2 cents: Watch for times when the generals lead but the soldiers don’t follow.

    https://twitter.com/TaviCosta/status/1661951226031005698

    The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate heads into the weekend at 7.14%—that’s a new high for 2023. Spread: 330 bps

    https://twitter.com/NewsLambert/status/1662127259522682880

    $XRP has basically cut in half since bro mortgaged his house on it.

    https://twitter.com/TikTokInvestors/status/1662124958062092288

    “We’re in the worst insurance market in history…It’s the constant conversation: ‘If I have to buy the full limits, I can’t pay the debt service.’ It’s a wildly difficult time in multifamily unless you’re cash rich, which many of these guys are not”.

    https://twitter.com/m3_melody/status/1662101555061899264

    Our bank is only doing new CRE loans for customers who have deposits greater than the loan amount. Has anyone else heard of this?

    https://twitter.com/brianbeers/status/1661709875171192833

    Home buyers will be able to put as little as 1% down as payment for a home under a new program launched by Rocket Mortgage

    https://twitter.com/unusual_whales/status/1661814653624745994

    The NZ banks love to boast about their low delinquency rates. Notice that repayment deficiencies have been rising. The amount of loss-making sales (and a steady low number of mortgagee sales) suggest that defaulting borrowers are taking steps to move the properties first..

    https://twitter.com/AKLpropertynow/status/1661829423396720640

    This time it’s different 🙈

    https://twitter.com/GRDecter/status/1661148973544116226

    This Memorial Day Weekend: A Moment of Silence for Thousands of Airbnb’s in Broward County, FL

    https://twitter.com/texasrunnerDFW/status/1661777680772083727

    Sellers think it’s worth $600k. Buyers have an approval letter from bank for $392k. Eventually that will move prices to the level Buyers can afford

    https://twitter.com/Lars57360069/status/1662220218100482049

    Why would anyone buy mortgage Backed securities when they can buy pristine collateral in the flood of US bonds that must be sold to fund the new debt ceiling? Answer: don’t buy a house right now. Wait for the rates to spike and throttle the last gasps of dying purchase demand.

    https://twitter.com/windgineering/status/1662138301585801230

    1. “Home buyers will be able to put as little as 1% down as payment for a home under a new program launched by Rocket Mortgage”

      Next up: Charges of racial discrimination in lending, when people of color who willingly signed up for this deal discover their money is gone and they owe more than their recently purchased homes will sell for…

    2. “Why would anyone buy mortgage Backed securities when they can buy pristine collateral in the flood of US bonds that must be sold to fund the new debt ceiling? Answer: don’t buy a house right now. Wait for the rates to spike and throttle the last gasps of dying purchase demand.”

      A good strategy, if you expect interest rates to keep climbing with inflation, could be to create a portfolio of Tbills where you park your downpayment money until housing CR8Rs. Or if you believe a recession is coming, buy longterm Treasurys, whose value increases in a recession as yields fall. Either way, you can preserve your savings and earn an investment return while others enjoy the pleasure of HODLing falling knife real estate investments. Tbills were yielding around 5% and longterm Treasurys around 4% last time I checked. Secretary Yellen will appreciate having your business.

      http://www.treasurydirect.gov

  15. I read that an estimated 50,000 Ukrainians died defending Bakhmut, only to lose and surrender the city.

    Why?

    Because it’s nothing more than a corporate welfare program for the military industrial complex.

    Peace could have been negotiated a year ago, but war pigs gonna pig, and globalists gonna globe.

    1. “I read that an estimated 50,000 Ukrainians died defending Bakhmut, only to lose and surrender the city.”

      Trench warfare is WWI technology.

      Modern warfare and annexing land is done with EZ credit.

    2. Your so right Debt is Slavery. All this carnage for what, some perverse motive of the Powers that be.
      Rejection of the “Powers that be” by the human race . No compliance with insanity, just say “NO”.

    3. Peace could have been negotiated a year ago

      Peace was negotiated in 2014. The US didn’t keep it.

  17. Opinion
    Commentary
    How High Interest Rates Turn ‘Paper Losses’ Into Real Ones
    If you borrowed money to invest in bonds, waiting for them to mature will cost a bundle.
    By Alex J. Pollock and Paul H. Kupiec
    April 12, 2023 6:45 pm ET
    Wonder Land: Joe Biden’s administration is willing to bail out, backstop, guarantee and subsidize just about everything.
    Images: Storyblocks/Pool Via Cnp/Zuma Press

    Thanks to a sharp rise in interest rates since March 2022, the financial system is facing eye-popping mark-to-market losses on its fixed-rate assets. These include more than $1 trillion of market-value losses on the Federal Reserve’s portfolio of bonds and mortgage securities—and according to some estimates, a $2 trillion market-value loss on the fixed-rate securities and loans of the banking system.
    …
    https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-paper-losses-become-real-ones-underwater-assets-fed-held-to-maturity-interest-costs-b6534298

    1. “These include more than $1 trillion of market-value losses on the Federal Reserve’s portfolio of bonds and mortgage securities—and according to some estimates, a $2 trillion market-value loss on the fixed-rate securities and loans of the banking system.”

      Is $3 trillion in losses alot? It almost seems as though Quantitative Easing is now running in reverse.

      Some related comments are on yesterday’s thread, for anyone who is interested.

      1. Burning question of the day: How does the Fed plan to reallocate those $3 trillion in losses across the dollar-dependent part of the global financial system?

        1. Another burning question (I have many): Can the Fed afford to pay for bailouts if they are broke? Is it still turtles all the way down?

    2. ‘If you borrowed money to invest in bonds, waiting for them to mature will cost a bundle.”

      It’s amazing how many financial planners don’t get this, and offer their clients bad advice as a result. And whether you borrowed the money to buy the bonds is irrelevant to the point.

      “Thems that understands interest receives it, thems that don’t pays it.”

      — Elder L. Tom Perry

      https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1995/10/if-ye-are-prepared-ye-shall-not-fear?lang=eng

      1. “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it … he who doesn’t … pays it.”

        ― Albert Einstein

        1. “He who understands it, earns it…”

          Unfortunately savers have been getting screwed for years.

        2. Thanks for the correct attribution.

          However, I kind of like the country bumpkin translation…

  18. New York Times — It’s ‘More Expensive to Live,’ and Workers Are Tapping 401(k)s for Help (5/27/2023):

    “More Americans are raiding their retirement accounts as the cost of living climbs, and experts predict that the number of workers drawing on their 401(k)s to pay for financial emergencies may increase due to a confluence of factors, like new provisions that make withdrawals easier and high inflation that is straining household budgets.

    “It’s just more expensive to live these days, and that’s what’s putting the pinch on participants,” said Craig Reid, national retirement practice leader at Marsh McLennan Agency, a workplace benefits company. “Some of it is still spillover from the Covid pandemic. A lot of it is inflation — just the grind of daily life.”

    Some experts warn that this could be just the tip of the iceberg, pointing to the many American families struggling with higher costs. Although the personal savings rate hit a high of nearly 34 percent in April 2020 because of Covid lockdowns and stimulus payments, it has since fallen to about 5 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.”

    https://archive.is/HgJIA

    Do you remember in March 2020 when you were told “two weeks to flatten the curve” and that “we’re all in this together?”

    Do you remember? Since then, over $4 trillion in wealth has been transferred from the working class and middle class to billionaires.

    And it was all perfectly by design. Your standard of living and your assets were destroyed to further enrich the already wealthy.

    If you don’t die prematurely from the mRNA vaccines, plan to die broke. It’s a World Economic Forum success story.

    1. plan to die broke

      When my grandmother left Paisley to come to America, her mother put a gold coin in her hand and said “As long as you keep this you will never be broke.”

      She likewise put it in my hand some 50 years ago as I embarked on life.

      I’ll be giving it to one of my grandchildren soon.

  21. ‘they spent the $12.4 million to acquire an apartment complex in Houston. However, Applesway allegedly spent the money on an unrelated transaction that fell apart, leaving the investors without the apartment complex they thought they were buying for their money’

    ‘Applesway used the $12.4 million intended to purchase the Houston property in a desperate attempt to revive the other deal, offering it as a nonrefundable down payment, the lawsuit alleges’

    Nonrefundable is not good Jay.

  22. ‘There’s two ways to lose money: You can own a boat, or you can own an office building…At least with the boat you can take your friends out on a sunset cruise’

    Great point Alex, and have a good holiday weekend.

  23. ‘The investors could have recovered at least half of their principal if the fund’s liquidation was executed in 2020′

    Anger <- You are here. Maybe bargaining. 'The value of 1750 K Street has plunged to one-fourth its purchase price' Acceptance! See that wasn't so hard IB source.

  24. ‘As an association representing office building interests, it is unusual for us to recommend policies that would result in less office space,’ said NAIOP Greater Toronto President Christina Iacoucci. ‘However, with a likely significant oversupply of office space lasting potentially for decades, governments need to respond to changing work patterns and economic priorities.’

    via GIPHY

  25. “You cannot live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.”

    COACH JOHN WOODEN

  28. The Financial Times
    US politics & policy
    White House reaches deal with Republicans to avert US debt default
    Biden and McCarthy agree on terms to raise borrowing limit but must still convince sceptical members of their parties
    Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy arrives at the US Capitol for negotiations to raise the debt ceiling on Saturday
    James Politi in Washington
    4 hours ago

    US president Joe Biden has struck a deal with Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House speaker, that would avert a debt default looming in early June and bring relief to the global economy and financial markets.

    Biden and McCarthy reached the in-principle agreement on Saturday following days of tense, round-the-clock negotiations between the White House and Capitol Hill that sought to break the fiscal stand-off gripping Washington.

    The deal will raise America’s $13.4tn borrowing limit for two years, until after the next presidential election in late 2024, and will include caps on government spending over the same period.
    …

  29. My Socialist Hell: How Venezuela Uses Hunger to Control a Starving Population

    CHRISTIAN K. CARUZO
    26 May 2023

    CARACAS, Venezuela – For the past 24 years (and counting) of socialist revolution, the ruling regime has used basic needs – housing, food, jobs – to force people to depend on the government.

    Among the most important tools for this manipulation is the “Local Committees for Supply and Production,” or CLAP, a free food program born from the total economic collapse socialism caused in the country.

    https://www.breitbart.com/latin-america/2023/05/26/my-socialist-hell-how-venezuela-uses-hunger-to-control-starving-population/

    1. “Just as you would sign to receive a package, you eventually must sign a spreadsheet as proof that you received your “benefit” from the socialist regime. No later than 24 hours, every recipient gets a text message on their phone, reminding them to log in to the Fatherland platform (a Chinese-built totalitarian system to control citizens) to keep track of what items they received.

      1. every recipient gets a text message on their phone, reminding them to log in to the Fatherland platform
        The new cars come 2026 will be able to control if your car can start and once all the data on your habits are collected I am sure they will try to beginning telling you where you can go and how many trips you can take. The “anti-DUI” mechanism come 2026 cars is very worrisome. By the way, supposedly, Ford and Volvo are “hoping” to get that mechanism in their cars as soon as 2024. (Probably just a stripped down version.)
        Let’s face it, once they control our cars, we are controlled, unless we want to walk, ride a bike or take the bus. Which by the way, is one of thei goals..

  30. ‘Wages are up 18%; housing is up 63%. Most of our labor force can’t afford to live here in safe, decent housing.’

    It sux when outside speculators use printing press money to buy local housing for anticipated bubble gains, rather than for sheltering the locals.

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