Coronavirus

Crap this is all we need, an invasion of Citiots!! The Washington Post had an article about a NYCitiot who escaped COVID by retreating to my hood that was reprinted all over the country including Snoozeday and Chicago Tribune. Lately it seems that NY licenses are getting almost as numerous and Masshole ones, the most popular "from away" licenses around here...

The property next to me with a barn and modest apartment just sold after being on the market for 5 years. When you build your "Pine Box House" - You know, the house you expect to leave in a pine box - one really doesn't give a flying feck at a rolling donut about increasing property values.

Please move along folks, there's nothing to see up here. You'll miss Starbucks, UBER, Door Dash and reliable cell phone service...

Maine home prices up 17% as sales to out-of-state buyers increase
pressherald.com/2020/09/22/maine-home-prices-up-17-as-sales-to-out-of-state-buyers-increase/

By Glenn JordanStaff WriterSeptember 23, 2020
Matt and Elli Carter and their children, Maeve, left, Alden and Reed in front of the home in Cape Elizabeth they bought this summer. Low interest rates and rising prices allowed the Carters to refinance their home just four months after they bought it.

When Matt and Elli Carter moved to a larger home within Cape Elizabeth to accommodate their growing family of five, they were able to secure a 30-year mortgage with an interest rate of 3.6 percent.

That was in May. The Carters are now refinancing their loan at 2.6 percent, a reflection of rising home values and historically low interest rates.

Tight inventory and a surge in sales to out-of-state buyers continued to push Maine home prices upward in August. The median sales price of existing single-family homes jumped 17.4 percent from a year earlier, to $270,000, according to a report released Tuesday by Maine Listings, a subsidiary of the Maine Association of Realtors.

The median indicates that half of the homes sold for more money and half sold for less. The number of home sales increased only slightly, by about 1.3 percent, from August 2019.


The share of homes sold in August to people moving to Maine from out of state increased by 9.7 percent from a year earlier, to roughly one out of every three transactions.

“This is the wackiest market I’ve ever seen,” said Karen Jones of Coldwell Banker Realty, a past president of the Greater Portland Board of Realtors who has been in the business for 22 years. “I truthfully don’t know how long we can sustain this.”

The statewide inventory of single-family homes listed for sale has been declining steadily over the past decade, according to Maine Listings data, which pegged the current supply of properties on the market as taking 2.6 months to exhaust. In the summer of 2010, it would have taken 23 months to sell through all the available listings. In the summer of 2018, inventory was sufficient to last 5.2 months.

“There was probably an eight-year span when there was not much in the way of building for residential homes,” said Tom Cole, president of the Maine Association of Realtors and managing broker of Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate/The Masiello Group in Brunswick. “That’s caught up to us.”

Meanwhile, Maine’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic has resulted in transmission rates among the lowest in the country, which makes the state an appealing destination for those seeking to escape crowded metropolitan areas.

“If I’m worried about being in New York in a 200-unit building, Maine is looking pretty good,” said Tom Landry, broker/owner of Portland-based Benchmark Real Estate.

In August 2019, buyers moving to Maine bought 482 single-family homes. Last month, that number rose to 707 homes. A recent analysis by the online real estate database company Zillow ranked Portland 11th in the country among most desirable midsized cities, pegging the share of homes that sell above list price at 38.9 percent and noting that they usually go under contract within two weeks.

When Mark Poirier of Portland listed his 3,000-square-foot Spanish-style home on Brighton Avenue in early summer, he received five offers, all of them well above the asking price of $595,000. The house eventually sold for $665,000, more than double what he had paid for it five years ago.

“It’s an excellent time to be a seller and a tough time to be a buyer,” said Poirier, who moved into a smaller house he purchased a year ago and had been renovating. “There’s not a lot of inventory and there’s a lot of demand.”

For the three-month summer quarter, home prices in all 16 counties rose from 2019 to 2020, according to Maine Listings, and by double digits in a dozen of them. Franklin County led the way with a 29.5 percent increase in median price to $194,250.

Not far behind Franklin was Washington County, with a 19.3 percent increase in median price to $158,000. Al Rummel, broker/owner of Due East Real Estate, said he has 12 agents spread among offices in Calais, Lubec and Eastport, and they’re busier than ever.

“We’ve had a couple of sight-unseen, full-price cash offers,” Rummel said. “It’s insane.”

Rummel said vacant land is also selling more than usual. After two decades of selling real estate in Washington County, Rummel understands the appeal of a rural area adjacent to the Down East coast, but he knows it’s not for everyone.

“You have to be ready to be up here,” he said. “There’s no shopping. You’re too far away from the grandkids. There’s no fine dining. Somebody asked me, ‘Where can I get dry cleaning?’ Well, there isn’t any until Ellsworth, and that’s 100 miles away.”

Even so, Rummel said his agency already has sold more real estate this year than in all of last year. More sales are pending, but appraisers and housing inspectors are all backlogged because of the demand.
Cumberland County saw a 10.5 percent drop in the number of homes sold, but an 11.1 percent rise in median price, to $375,000.

Landry, of Benchmark Real Estate, said homes listed between $300,000 and $600,000 are the most likely to inspire bidding wars.

“Absolutely unprecedented buyer demand,” Landry said. “The higher end is not quite as robust.”
Sandy Johnson, a broker for Town & Shore Real Estate in Portland, said she sees two different demographic groups that are looking to put down roots in Maine.

“One is the baby boomers that we’ve been seeing for a while,” she said. “They’re coming to Portland and settling into urban condos. They can travel without worrying and have medical facilities close by.”

The other group, she said, is younger people with our without families who have decided they want to spend at least a portion of the year away from a metropolitan area “where they can feel safer and their children can play outside.”

She said she doesn’t know how long the trend will last.

“And, of course,” she said, “it’s confined to people with means.”

The pandemic that reached Maine in March resulted in home sales falling by 15 percent in April and 21 percent in May compared with the same months a year earlier. Since then, the market has bounced back such that sales for all of 2020 are only 0.7 percent behind those of a year ago, Cole noted, which was Maine’s best year on record.

Regionally, single-family home sales rose by 5.7 percent in the Northeast with a median sales price of $349,500 – an increase of 10.4 percent over the same month a year earlier. Over the same period, national sales increased 11.0 percent and the median price climbed 11.7 percent to $315,000.

“The increased demand for the smaller supply of for-sale homes has created intense competition in some markets, leading to higher pricing,” Cole said. “As more for-sale inventory comes onto the market, we should see a balancing.”
 
Texas is dealing with an huge influx of Californians, hopefully not enough to turn the state blue and screw everything up.
My cousins are stocking up on ammo. 8-)
 
Well the opera is over, BUT the Fat Lady ain't gonna sing...

The Metropolitan Opera to skip season, for first time in nearly 140 years
pressherald.com/2020/09/23/the-metropolitan-opera-to-skip-season-first-time-in-nearly-140-years/

By RONALD BLUMAssociated PressSeptember 23, 2020
NEW YORK — The Metropolitan Opera will skip an entire season for the first time in its nearly 140-year history and intends to return from the pandemic layoff next September with the company’s first presentation of a Black composer, Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.”

This season was to have started this week, but the company announced June 1 it had pushed back opening night until Dec. 31. In all, 218 performances of 23 operas were lost, raising total cancellations to 276 since the 2019-20 season was cut short by the novel coronavirus on March 12. The orchestra’s international tour next June also was wiped out.

Met General Manager Peter Gelb said additional losses projected at $54 million raise the total for the company to $154 million since the pandemic started. “I think that all of the performing arts in New York are in the same boat,” he said.

“The earliest we thought we could schedule it was in the 23-24 season,” Gelb said. “Given the huge upheaval and social change that is taking place in America right now, it seemed wholly appropriate that when we come back after missing an entire season we should open with this opera.”

Tickets for 2021-22 will go on sale Oct. 12 and Gelb hopes people will role over their tickets from 2020-21 rather than seek refunds. He also hopes for early negotiations to revise contracts that expire next summer with The American Guild of Musical Artists, which represents the chorus, and Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, which represents the orchestra.

The Met intends to shorten some of its presentations when it returns and start more performances at 7 p.m.

“We can’t resume performing until the pandemic is over with a vaccine that’s widely available and herd immunity having been achieved, and even then the audience is going to return slowly,” Gelb said. “One of the things that we have to mind going forward is a way with our unionized employees, new economic arrangements that the company can afford going forward.”
 
From a friend

covid news very bad
highest world infection yesterday

the steady USA 40k a day 1k deaths a day is very troubling
the phony vaccine news is creating lax attitudes

this may well continue thru the end of the year. it is surprising
 
Coronavirus mutation emerges that may bypass mask-wearing, hand-washing protections
New strain contains higher loads of the virus, may be more contagious
Coronavirus mutation emerges that may bypass mask-wearing, hand-washing protections

MTB, I'm severely disappointed. FoxNews??? You channeling someone you often chastise??? Kids don't try this at home, leave the science to the professionals...

The headline is so, so scientifically incorrect. A strain of virus doesn't contain a higher load of virus, that's like saying a dozen of a mutated clam is more than a dozen of the original clam. What it should say is that an infectious dose of this viral strain may contain less virus than the original strain, but the average person who gets his scientific news at Fox wouldn't understand that.

I've read the paper, which has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, and they have many "mays" in it and in no way do the authors suggest forgetting masking and hygiene. This mutation seems to make the virus more contagious, but since it infects by the same mechanism as the original strain, it makes hand washing and mask washing even more important.
 
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exactly the shoot down of the non stop BS fox NEWS PUTS OUT :D

MTB, I'm severely disappointed. FoxNews??? You channeling someone you often chastise???

WHO

AH/BOZO?? LMFAO!!!
 
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WHOOPS some dirty boidy brought the bug

Virginia sees 1,300 new coronavirus cases, now reporting 132,940 statewide
There are now 2,722 deaths from the coronavirus in Virginia
 
RUT-ROH, Coronavirus may be causing an invasion of Filigree Siberian Hamsters from cities to suburbs! And I thought it was only causing an invasion of Maine or Massholes, NYCitiots, Joiseyites, etc...

Pandemic, restaurant slowdown blamed for rats in Portland neighborhoods
pressherald.com/2020/09/27/pandemic-restaurant-slowdown-blamed-for-rats-in-portland-neighborhoods/

By Matt ByrneStaff WriterSeptember 27, 2020

In Portland on Thursday, Wendy Stanley looks through the screen door on her home through which a rat may have made its way into her basement recently. She has since patched a hole in the screen that she believes may have been made by the rat. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

When the global pandemic forced the abrupt shutdown of Portland’s restaurants in March, human diners weren’t the only ones left to scamper home, hungry.

Rats in Portland were forced to look for new food sources after they could no longer rely on regular dumpster loads of restaurant scraps and discarded leftovers.

And Portland is not alone.

Across New England and in other parts of the country, changes in daily life brought by the pandemic are one possible reason rats are seeking new stomping grounds. And with more people working and learning from home – and eating fewer meals out – rats are following.

“Before COVID-19 and the slowdown, we’d see and get calls from areas where there are lots of restaurants,” said John Emerson, Portland’s wastewater facilities director. “But now there has been a marked reduction in restaurant activity and we haven’t seen as much in the area.”

Exterminators such as Nathan Jewett, of Big Blue Bug Solutions, are fielding more calls from residents who say they are seeing and hearing more rodent activity in or around their homes. Rat-related calls at his business are up 20 percent in Portland, Jewett said. If he includes mice, calls are up 57 percent from last year, he said. The spike started in April and May, he said.

“I got to say, it’s been a record year,” Jewett said. “I think people are home more, they’re seeing things, they’re hearings things.”

Insidious and opportunistic, rats are a hardy bunch, Jewett said. They swim, they climb, and mostly, they chew – through plastic garbage bins, compost buckets and other barriers that stand between them and a meal.

Restaurants that stopped regular extermination services would sometimes call back, frustrated, when their tiniest, unwelcome diners still found a way inside.

“They’d call us back, because after the shutdown, with fewer food sources, (rats would) come and take whatever they can, causing damage.”

The sudden changes in daily life even prompted the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to issue a warning in May about possible aggressive rat behavior or unusual sightings, as the population adapts to a world with fewer trash-generating businesses operating at full tilt.

Jim Fredericks, who has a Ph.D in entomology and wildlife ecology and works for the National Pest Management Association based in Fairfax, Virginia, said the shift of rat activity away from dense urban areas with restaurants and food-serving businesses happened across the country at the start of the pandemic.

“Rats are very habitual; they’ll go to the same trash can or dumpster,” said Fredericks, who spent 10 years in mammal pest management before joining the national professional association. “So when the food wasn’t there, they became more bold, even venturing out during the day, when they experience that food stress.”

Fredericks said that rats will stay where the food is, and if people are generating more food waste at home, it’s no surprise that rats follow. As restaurants come back online and serve more meals, Fredericks said he expects the rat activity to return.

“We’d fully expect those populations to rebound, despite the best efforts of the pest control municipal workers,” he said.

Unusually vigorous rat activity has been reported in Boston and surrounding communities, as well as in New Orleans and other U.S. cities. Fredericks said New Orleans’ famed Bourbon Street entertainment district, with its block after block of bars and restaurants, was a prime example after the shutdown, when they would venture out during the daylight in search of a meal.

Fredericks also said large construction and excavation projects can be a culprit, too. “Rats live a portion or a majority of their life in these subterranean places, so when they disturb these habitats, you get rats on the move,” he said.

Local exterminator Will Weaver said he could not be sure that rat activity in residential neighborhoods is directly tied to the COVID-19 shutdowns, but has entertained that thought as he responds to more neighborhood-based called.

“Its hard to link it right to the pandemic,” Weaver said. “There is less food coming out of less restaurants, but a lot of them did come back on line. There could be an increase in household trash. People are working from home.”

In the last few months, Weaver said he’s responded to a flurry of calls from the North Deering neighborhood in Portland, and is currently dealing with flare-ups of rat activity in the Parkside area.
“It’s the nature of rats,” Weaver said. “They never quit, and they move in more every year.”
There are other factors that have nothing to do with coronavirus, as well.

Emerson, Portland’s wastewater facilities director, said each time there is a major construction project in the city where soil is disturbed, rats inevitably are sent scurrying from their nests. Emerson said he’s fielded about half a dozen complaints from residents near Mackworth Street, the site of a major sewer separation project that has required extensive excavation of the street.

Emerson said the city contracts with outside exterminators to proactively bait the sewers each time it undertakes a big project.

In the 12 years he’s been in his current role, Emerson said he’s also seen the rise of home composting and curbside compost pickup, which also attracts and drives rodent activity.

Portland resident Wendy Stanley has lived in her Roberts Street home for 15 years, and saw a rat in her basement for the first time in early September. She suspected the critter found its way in through a damaged screen door.

Stanley said neighbors suggested to her that it was related to the ongoing construction at the intersection of Deering and Brighton avenues on the USM campus, a couple of hundred yards from her street. But she’s not so sure, and is also skeptical of a pandemic link.

“I heard that logic, but I don’t know,” she said. “I hope they stay away. It’s not a pretty sight.”
The issue is not limited to Portland, either.

South Portland’s municipal health officer, Joshua Pobrislo, has been on the job for four years. He said his predecessor in the position did not take rats calls, but now that residents know he’s available to check out residential pest infestations, he’s seen an across-the-board increase. One recent flare-up occurred near Mill Creek Park, he said. It’s unclear whether the increase in calls is related to a true change in rat activity, or whether more people are calling him because they know he will respond.

In South Portland’s Mill Creek neighborhood, Barbara Everett received a rude reminder of the rat population when her dog, Nellie, caught and killed one in her backyard.

Everett said she spent a lot of time on her back deck this summer recovering from surgery, when in July, just as a construction project got underway on Waterman Drive at a Central Maine Power property, she began seeing rats run through her yard in broad daylight. At night, when the rodents are most active, her dog would bark for hours, bothering other residents.

At the advice of Pobrislo, Everett tore up ground cover, installed crushed stone near the foundation of her house and spent time and money to make her yard as rodent-proof as possible.

“I’ll admit, my garden was overgrown, but I’ve been here for 20 years and I’ve never had rats in years,” she said.

The issue requires more than one homeowner’s action to correct, however. One nearby resident has a vegetable garden that attracts rat activity, and other neighbors said they were unwilling or too feeble to undertake the preventative work of eliminating food sources, trimming shrubs and keeping yards tidy.

“I worked my tail off and spent a small fortune doing all that (work), and my neighbors, one of them said, ‘I’m not doing it,'” Everett said. “So if my neighbors don’t trim up their shrubs, it’s my responsibility to pay for the exterminator for the whole street? And now I have to keep my dog in because she’s driving people crazy? I’m at my wit’s end.”
 
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