More and more houses for sale in Vancouver.
More and more houses for sale in Vancouver. Charles Mudede

Home Sales In Vancouver B.C. Continue to Collapse: Late in August, Vancouver B.C., the most beautiful city in the Pacific Northwest (the other Vancouver is the ugliest), imposed a 15 percent tax on foreign buyers. Two months later, home sales are down 39 percent. This is "the biggest drop since 2010." (Sales were down 33 percent in September.) Next year, the city will begin to tax vacant homes and also add restrictions to mortgage insurance. Though prices for residential properties continue to rise (by 25 percent), we can expect them to cool or stabilize or begin to fall a little when the other regulations are activated. We can also expect home prices not to fall a lot (if at all) because sellers will probably leave the market and wait for the fantasy of another bubble rather than compete for buyers. Nevertheless, a friend I had dinner with in Vancouver last weekend was very upbeat about the matter. He asserted that the tax has had a real and positive impact. People do feel something is finally being done about the crisis, which has been worsened by the city's exposure to global surplus capital.

Expensive Homes In Seattle Are Flying of the Shelf: Puget Sound Business Journal reports that the market for expensive homes in Seattle is very hot. Marc Stiles, PSBJ's real estate reporter:

Of the 20 most expensive houses that have sold so far this year in the region, a quarter sold in nine days or less, with two of them lasting only one day on the market...
A part of the reason the demand for houses only a handful of humans in the city can afford is high? "Foreign buyers, especially people from China, have been boosting the high-end market for several years..." But the question is this: Can sales in the high-end market influence all other sales? Zillow’s Chief Economist, Svenja Gudell, believes they do not. She insists they can be contained. She also points out that Vancouver's affordability crisis occurred with "only 5 percent (to possibly 15 percent) of sales going to foreign buyers." But even so, does that 5 or 15 percent matter? I think that it does.

Do Not Hate On Chinese Buyers: In the 1970s, Wall Street recycled capital surpluses from the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. In the 1980s, the surpluses were coming from Japan and flooding the real estate market. Even poor, poor Africa has surpluses that do not go into its starved economy but purchases US government bonds (to the tune of $100 billion—yes, hungry Africans are paying for American consumption). In the 2000s, capital surpluses in Germany flooded capital-needy Greece. Miami's real estate market currently absorbs surpluses from South and Central America. And so, and so on. There is nothing Chinese about surpluses looking for safe bets and yield.

Treasure Hunters Find SUV and Its Passenger In the Bottom of a Ravine: This happened not far from one of the strangest places in the US, if not the world, the Tri-Cities. Nuclear waste is there, radioactive rabbits are there, evidence for Einstein's theory of gravity waves emanating from the collision of two black holes was gathered there. Then there is the wine and the wind turbines and this group that was geocaching, "which involves hiding trinkets and other items to find by tracking the objects' GPS coordinates with smartphones, clues or compasses." While looking for these trinkets, the hunters spotted an SUV 150 feet down an embankment. A woman in her 50s was in it. She was in the back seat. It is believed that her injuries will not kill her.

Yesterday, Asperatus Clouds Came to Seattle: Though they have the color and mood of clouds that are about to explode into a storm, asperatus clouds, which are related to undulatus clouds, "tend to dissipate without a storm forming." These types of clouds darkly paid Seattle and its suburbs a visit yesterday. They are very photogenic. I took a picture of them before they dissipated over a mall and our volcano.

Asperatus clouds seen from a Link train.
The remains of asperatus clouds seen from a Link train. Charles Mudede

(Indeed, it can be argued that my beef with Cliff Mass really began with clouds. But prudishness is one thing; climate claptrap another.)

Four-Year-Old Everett Girl Who Died Five Years Ago Found Encased in Concrete in a Plastic Tub: Everett detectives received a tip about a missing girl and where her remains might be located. They obtained a warrant and served it to a home in the 12600 block of E. Gibson Road. They soon found what they were looking for in a plastic tub. The story is this: She died five years ago for reasons that are not yet known. At some point, her body was placed in a plastic tub. But when the smell of her little death got really bad, someone poured concrete on it. The concrete hardened, the smell went away, and the remains stayed in the house, which the dead girl's mother and her husband (who was her boyfriend at the time of the girl's death) live in. The mother, who has three other children, is alleged to have told different stories to explain the absence of her girl: "she had gone to live with other relatives, that she had died of chickenpox and that she had drowned while taking a bath." Had the girl been alive today, which is sunny and cloudless and red and brown with autumn leaves, she would have been nine.

Stop Looking At Polls and Read Sean Nelson's: Trump Dread . It is a real feeling. It will never end until America as we know it ends.

Something I have Always Wanted to Say About Trump But the Great Fran Leibowitz Expressed Precisely: "Trump is a poor person's idea of a rich person." The fact that a lot of poor and working-class white people see themselves in this horrible man, see him as representing them in the deepest sense, see in Trump the mode of being they want to become—this is the real eyeopener of the current presidential election. We know now exactly what the soul of millions of white Americans really looks like. It is like that moment drunken Noah exposed him.

As the US helps defeat the ISIS in Iraq, Vanilla ISIS rises in the US: The specter of an empty revolution haunts America.


Bill Murray Wants the Schools in Chicago Closed Because the Cubs Won the Super Bowl: Or was it the World Series? Yes, I'm one of those colonial-type snobs. Don't care much for American sports. The Brits did it much better. Rugby is meatier than football. Cricket is more graceful than baseball. Netball is far more beautiful than basketball.