Sale pending on Welwyn Road

22 Welwyn road

22 Welwyn Road, in Riverside, new construction asking $4.595 million. Nice house on an excellent street, but it does illustrate what's happening to our housing stock here in town. This property sold in just 17 days back in 2013 for $2.375 million, when it was a modest, but recently completely renovated home. It could have easily served as a home as is, but now the same property is in a totally different price range, appealing to a totally different buyer.  I'm not suggesting that $2.375 is "starter home" material, but this does illustrate the transformation of areas like Riverside to ever-more expensive houses.

This is nothing new, naturally. Pal Nancy and I returned to town in the early 1980s, and by the end of that decade had witnessed the invasion of the merger/acquisition guys (at least, I think that was the hot occupation back then). And while it will surely break the hearts of most readers, membership in our local little yacht club changed from one comprised of a variety of income levels to a new beast, weighted heavily in favor of multi-millionaires. Nothing particularly wrong with that: it offered the opportunity to crew on better boats, for instance, but with the money came demands for more luxurious facilities, which drove up dues. (It also saw an influx of arrogant, nasty people, but that's another matter.)

All of which is just to make a general observation on the changes to the town that have occurred over the past half-century. Better to see increased prices than depressed ones, especially if you already have a seat on the gravy train. but the town is almost unrecognizable from what it was. And I'm sure people who grew up here in the 20s felt the same way by the mid-60s, so ....

I do worry, though, about our current state budget woes and the Democrats' focus on curing them by raising taxes on the rich again. Not that I'm in a position to do so, but I'd be awfully wary of sinking, say, $10 million into something as illiquid as a house while knowing that I was in the crosshairs of my enemy.