My family are Greek immigrants - they’ve owned 7 pizza restaurants in CT over the past 50 years. Vernon, Colchester, New London, Rocky Hill, Manchester, and 2 others.

The CT school year is 180 days. 10% of that is missing only 18 days of school per year. Figure that a lot of families will take 3-5 days off for vacations, a kid will be sick twice during the year requiring 2-3 days off each, throw in a funeral or two for 2 days off, a mental health day or two, and about 2 days worth of half-days for Dr./Dentist appointments and you’re already at the 10% mark. Covid just pushes that over the edge.

If you would like a tour of the house, a ride in the Tesla, and to hear more about how I got to this point feel free to shoot me a PM and we can chat for an afternoon.

I honestly couldn’t believe it myself.. but that was the bill. And that’s with running normal electric, an electric stove, and electric water heater too.

It’s because they like to fashion themselves as the speed police, and if you go around them, it circumvents their mission of prohibiting your speeding, so naturally they speed up to prohibit your passing.

Unfortunately I never ran the oil heat before replacing with the heat pump, so I can’t give a real world example.

However, theoretically Heat Pumps are just as cost effective in CT as gas per BTU, averaged over the year.

Some quick math, for 100,000 BTU’s of heat, assuming a 95% efficient Gas/Oil Boiler/Furnace, it would be $1.30 for Gas, $2.15 for a Heat Pump, or $4.56 for Oil (at $6/gallon). The Heat Pump however really shines in Summer, where it can cut your electric bill by 50% over using window AC’s or a standard whole home AC.

Yes I did in 2017. Here's the Zillow link. I bought it 1/6/2017 for $49,000 and a $250 Smoke Detector Credit. I just sold it for $212,700 this year. I also bought this one for $54,900 11/27/2019 and just sold it for $275,000.

I live in a $2.5 Million Dollar mansion now, with no mortgage and have a Tesla. I oversee my investments, but I wouldn't call that working.

I started a candle business when I was 16 in High School for $250. I was making upwards of $30,000/yr after a few years. Worked a full time job at 18 for $9.60/hr. Took all that money, and bought a house for $48,750. Renovated it. Rented it. Used the equity to buy another house. Repeated. Repeated. Now I’m 25 and retired.

If a 16 year old in High School can turn a candle business into an early retirement by 25, then it’s certainly possible for just about anyone to accomplish.

Also, minimum wage is $14/hr now.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

Heat Pumps are great. For my 2300 sq ft poorly insulated house, my electric bill was $80 in the summer (Set at 68 degrees) and $500 in the dead of winter (Set at 70 degrees).

Much cheaper than running Window AC units and Oil Heat.

If you don’t like working a minimum wage job, then start a business.

But starting a business is risky. It’s time consuming. It requires a lot of knowledge. It requires taking an income loss before any gains.

For many people, being an employee is highly preferred, but you take a hit on your income potential for the convenience it offers.

My dog was hit by a car and it was an $8,000 out of pocket medical bill. While we were in the ER room with him we saw another family come in with a very pregnant Chihuahua. From what we overheard the mother couldn’t give a natural birth and needed a C section, which the family wasn’t willing/couldn’t pay for. They ended up taking the dog away without treatment. I cringe to think what the family ended up doing… cutting up their own dog to save the puppies or letting the mother and puppies both die.

You defaulted to insults when you were proven incorrect. It’s not becoming. Do better.

I’ve invested in a number of these towns and have seen the housing inventory. When you have to literally crawl on your hands and knees to reach the toilet in your apartment.. and that’s the standard for housing in the area, I’d call that a blighted area.

Bloomfield I would consider retracting from the blighted list. It’s not blighted be like those other towns.

Do you have any sources to back up your unfounded claims or is resorting to childish insults the best you can come up with?

The median teacher salary equalized for full time is $106,000 in CT. (Link) And tradespeople make $150/hr.

I’m not sure how you think that is somehow correlated to minimum wage work?

As someone who has toured huge swaths of real estate in these towns, I can safely say they are blighted. There is an absurdly high number of vacant and derelict properties in these towns specifically. They are not towns people generally choose to live in when provided other alternatives.

Sure, there are small nice parts of these towns, but that doesn’t offset the general blight these towns suffer. The median income of Rockville is $25k. Bristol is higher and less blighted (it’s gotten much better the past decade). And Bloomfield is just the suburbs of Hartford, so it’s affected by Hartford’s Blight, though does ok on its own.

Those areas are definitely blighted. The median income in each of those towns is just about minimum wage. I’ve toured a great deal of properties in all of those towns and can definitely see the disparity between them and the Farmington Valley.

Yes, teenagers are doing most of the food service, cleaning, and country club jobs in the area. Teaching and Trade work are among some of the highest paid professions in the state, so they can certainly afford to live wherever they work.

Interestingly enough, wealthier towns have the highest percentage of teen workers, so those towns are actually rather self sufficient for minimum wage labor. Apparently teens from wealthy families get accustomed to nice things, and then get after school jobs to pay for those nice things.

I’m sure the state offers grant money for projects such as these.

Exceedingly few people work in the towns they live in. That’s a highly unreasonable ask.

It’s perfectly reasonable to gatekeep wealthy towns. Nobody is entitled to live anywhere they want. I’d be fully in support of putting in some more multifamily housing in Hartford, Bloomfield, Bristol, Rockville, New Britain, or other blighted areas for low income individuals. Clean up those areas and make them nice instead of trying to creep into already established towns.

As a property manager, I know that the major property management softwares like Yardi have an option to have AI set rents. It says it calculates the best rent according to market trends and is so adaptive that rents can change daily. I had not considered how easily Yardi could use this to just fix prices, being the dominant market shareholder for PM software.

The PM’s might not have know it was price fixing, they were just using the software as intended.