To many, the county is shangri-la, a place to attain nirvana.  They associate it with “the good life”.

Unfortunately, year-round residents see past that illusion.  They know the ugly truth.  Of 42,000 year-round households, over 4,000 families live below the poverty level, which is an embarrassingly-low $22,050 for a family of four.  Can you imagine trying to make it on $22,050 per year?

Recently released statistics show that the worst conditions are in Woodbine, where 24% of families live in poverty.  Wildwood is next at 20% under the poverty line, with the median income just $30,974.   To extrapolate, that means that another 30% of year-round families in Wildwood make between $22,050 and $30,974.  Yikes!

Families are also struggling in Wildwood Crest with 11% in poverty, West Cape May with 10%, West Wildwood with 8%, and North Wildwood with 6%.

Here’s another telling statistic.  Cape May County had 317 homeless people in 2010.  That number includes 54 families totaling 157 people.  Another 160 individuals were labeled homeless and nine more were classified chronically homeless, meaning they’ve gone a full year or more without a home.

So where do they all live?  Why don’t you see them pushing around a shopping cart with all their possessions, like in Philly or Atlantic City or any big city?  The answer is that the NJ Social Services Department uses a half dozen local motels to house the homeless.  Since most don’t have a vehicle, driving past one of these motels gives the illusion that the rooms are mostly vacant, but they’re not.  Families, couples, and individuals are living in these motel rooms, with little more than a couple beds, a bathroom, microwave, and old TV.  But, at least they have heat.  Some other families are put up in temporary housing provided by churches.  Sadly, some live in the woods, under the Boardwalk, or in dilapidated abandoned homes.  These poor folks don’t have heat in the winter, and stay warm by piling on layers of clothes.

It’s a shame, a disgrace, that our country with so much has so many folks with so little.  Our government “by the people and for the people” isn’t exactly for all the people.  We need to change that.  As individuals, we have compassion.  But as a nation, we have less compassion than we should.  When will we all truly care?

- Mountain Man

Let’s back up and give some background on this hot topic.

The energy companies that extract natural gas from beneath the ground used to only drill vertical wells.  Problem is, most of the natural gas lays in horizontal pockets.  To maximize profits, the companies came up with a way to drill horizontally, called directional drilling.  But that wasn’t enough.  The gas was hard to get out from the countless fissures that deep underground, so they came up with an extraction process called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for short.

Fracking involves shooting pressurized water, sand, and a host of nasty chemicals designed to hold the fissures open so the gas can flow freely.  These chemicals and compounds include formaldehyde, benzene, ammonium chloride, acetic anhydride, methanol, hydrochloric acid, propargyl alcohol, and even diesel fuel.  In all, 65 of their substances are labeled hazardous by the EPA.  But here’s the kicker.  Thanks to former VP Dick Cheney and his 2005 coup called the Halliburton Loophole, the energy bill passed by the Republican-majority Congress that year exempted fracking from laws regulated by the EPA, i.e. the extractors do not have to tell what chemicals they use, or comply with clean water rules.  Hmmm.

What’s this all have to do with people.  Simple:  water.

No one knows how the chemical brew affects underground water supplies.  Check out the movie “Gasland”, available on the internet, to see how some families have seen their water supply contaminated.  Also, the average fracking well consumes on average 4 million gallons.  Halliburton contends that 98.5% of their fracking mixture is water and sand, leaving 1.5% a mystery fluid.  That comes to 40,000 gallons per well, at least half of which is lost into the ground and never recovered.  Where does it go?

Natural gas extraction in the eastern US is targeting the Marcellus Shale, an underground deposit that runs from Ohio and Kentucky through West Virginia and Pennsylvania all the way to New York state. It’s the second largest gas field in the world.  Some locals, driven by greed and ignorance, have been signing leases with the extractors for as much as $5,000 per acre, plus royalties on the amount of gas taken.  The prediction is that unless derailed by long-needed regulations, as many as 100,000 wells will dot the 54,000 square mile landscape by 2030.

So the question lingers:  Where will the 4 million gallons of water per well come from?  Can local streams and acquifers handle the withdrawals?  Obviously not.  And what effect will injecting this toxic mess into the ground have on water supplies?  We can’t risk finding out!

- Mountain Man

This past year, our thoughts in the warm months turned to many other diversions.  First up was The Free Meal Center, Cape May County’s first-ever daily soup kitchen.  We formed a non-profit organization on January 25, 2010 and took possession of the 4,275 square foot building situated on 2.38 acres on March 15th.  We spent the next eight months gutting the interior and improving the grounds and exterior of the building, thanks to the hundreds of dedicated volunteers who pitched in to make it a reality.  We received our building permit the day before Thanksgiving and now the renovations can proceed.

We also began the second story addition to our real estate office in Wildwood Crest.  The complicated footing is now in place, with a three-foot concrete block foundation above.  When the warm weather returns, we’ll begin building skyward.

We also began site work on our restaurant/sports bar in Green Bank, West Virginia.  We purchased the seven-acre bottom land on July 1st.  The beautiful property has 750-foot frontage on Routes 28 & 92 and 1,050 feet along Deer Creek, a 50-foot wide river that takes water from the Allegheny Mountains to the Greenbrier River.  The site work is just about done and the riverfront has been transformed into a beautiful setting. 

As you can see, we keep ourselves pretty busy.  And so, you’ll excuse us if we only find the time to relax and write blog posts in the winter.  Sit back and enjoy the next four months of opinions and observations on real estate and life in general.

- Mountain Man

The weather the last couple months has been, well, extreme.  Just look at the facts.  The resort town of Whistler, British Columbia received an incredible 18 feet of snow in November.  That’s November, mind you.  That’s 216 inches of the white powder and nearly four times the November average of 58″.  In fact, it’s nearly 20% more snow than the snowiest month ever at Whistler.

In England, it was as low as 7 degrees Fahrenheit this week.  There has been snow in Madrid, Spain and Paris, France.  Temperatures in Alabama and Mississippi have been in the teens.  In Florida, the orange, grapefruit and vegetable crops are threatened with huge die-offs due to temperatures in the 20′s.  The poor iguana’s are freezing to death and dropping out of the trees.

Even here in southern New Jersey, where we’re surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean and Delaware Bay and the influence of their relatively warmer water temperatures, it was 9 degrees Fahrenheit this morning.  Heck, some winters we don’t even have to wear a winter coat.  For the past six weeks, my winter coat has been my best friend.

We were optimistic this autumn when meteorologists reported an El Nino was warming the Pacific Ocean.  That means a warm winter, doesn’t it?  But they are attributing this excessive cold and snow to an “Arctic Oscillation”.  Yeah, right, whatever that is.

Anyway, we received an email this morning from my old friend Icky Kitikmeot, an Inuit eskimo living outside Cambridge Bay on Victoria Island in the Northwest Territories of Canada.  He shed a light on this entire weather thing.

It seems Icky was out muskox hunting last week about 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle when he came across a valley lined with giant fans.  He lost count there were so many.  Stealthly sneaking up to a pre-fab quonset hut, he couldn’t believe his eyes.  Inside were dozens of men of apparent Middle Eastern descent.  Icky laid quietly for hours, listening to their conversation.

It seems that they were definitely Al-Qaeda or something, and their goal was to disrupt next month’s XXI Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver and Whistler, and at the same time cause havoc in the empirial Western World.  They laughed about the 14,000 fans they had positioned on Victoria Island that were blowing the dickens out of us infidels in North America and northern Europe.

Thanks to Icky, I’m about to alert our U.S. Department of Homeland Security about this situation.  Think they’ll issue a “level white alert”?

- Mountain Man and City Girl

http://www.MountainManandCityGirl.com

The federal government, especially the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), institutes policies that are decimating the herds of wild horses and burros in the West.  Since 1971, the BLM has “removed” 270,000 wild horses and burros from federal lands and taken away 20 million acres of their range.  That leaves just 37,000 animals remaining, but another 12,000 are slated to be “removed” in 2010.  The preferred way of rounding up these majestic beasts is to chase them with helicopters – freaking them out in the process and separating mothers from offspring.

Bison are another victim of government interference, this time mainly the State of Montana is the culprit.  There is a well-spread myth that the Yellowstone bison – if they wander out of the National Park – will spread brucellosis to cattle.  The problem with that argument is that there has never been a documented case of that happening.  Never.  And the cattle in surrounding areas are all vaccinated against brucellosis anyway.  That still hasn’t stopped State of Montana-hired riflemen from slaughtering 6,631 Yellowstone bison since the winter of 1985-’86, including 1,616 in ’07-’08. 

So what is really behind all this genocide of certain species?  You guessed it – Western ranchers and the cattle industry.

There are 31,000 ranchers in the West who are utilizing 260 million acres of federal land (yes, you and I own it) to graze their cattle.  And they pay a pittance for the opportunity.  The cost is just $1.92 per Animal Unit Month (AUM).  An AUM is defined as a cow and calf or 5 sheep or a horse.  In other words, a cattleman pays $23.04 per year to graze a cow and her growing calf.  No wonder it costs $52 million more per year in administrative costs than is collected in fees.

Cattle are not easy on the federal lands.  They overgraze the land, leaving behind the undesirable weeds.  They trample vegetation and compact the soil, causing erosion and soil loss.  They foul streams and wetlands with fecal matter.  With the BLM issuing 7.8 million AUM’s a year and the US Forest Service another 6 million AUM’s, you can imagine the impact of nearly 20 million non-native cattle on the environment.

There’s another cost.  Each cow produces 600 liters per day of methane.  That releases the yearly CO2 equivalent of burning 418 million gallons of gas or 19,263 railroad cars of coal.  Yikes!

So what is the bottom line?  Western cattlemen feel that it is their right to have nearly exclusive use of federal lands for their benefit.  Wild horses and burros and bison be damned.  And so the powerful cattlemen lobbyists pressure Western Senators and Congressmen and Governors to make sure that these animals don’t consume feed that they feel is for their cattle.  The same mentality leads to the shooting of coyotes, wolves, mountain lions, etc. in the name of protecting their precious cattle.

Something is wrong here!

- Mountain Man and City Girl

http://www.MountainManandCityGirl.com

Anyway, allow me to make some observations about sports.

Sports on television are being started too late in the evening.  Last night’s college football championship game between Alabama and Texas started at 9:38pm Eastern time on a Thursday night.  None of my buddies stayed up that late, nor did I.  Our bedtimes are around 9:00.  The same goes for kids, which are the future of sports viewership.

Forget the West Coast.  Put games on at 7:00 Eastern, and let the Left Coast folks watch it at 4:00 in the afternoon.  That makes a lot more sense and would definitely multiply viewership amoungst the old guys and young kids.  Plus, guys in California would have a great excuse to leave work early to catch a World Series baseball game, NBA final, and so on.  When I lived in SoCal, I loved to get up on a Saturday morning in the fall and flip on a Penn State football game at 9am.  That was great.

The pro sports seasons are waaaaay too long.  Hockey starts in October and ends in May, the World Series ends in November, the NBA wraps it up in mid-June, and the Super Bowl is in February.  Give me a break!  By then, only the diehard fans give a hoot.  The casual fan is on to other things.

And yes, you guys ARE role models.  Stop the denials.  Kids look up to you, and you teach that it  is alrght to be moody, disrespectful, not a team player, and, sadly, even a felon.  Growing up, my sports heroes were guys like Sandy Koufax, Johnny Unitas, and Jerry West.  They were squeaky clean, the proto-typical All-American boys.  They didn’t carry guns, get in brawls, and beat their wives, unlike many of today’s “idols”.  And then there’s Tiger Woods, who let down an entire generation of kids.

As far as sports for kids on a participation level, that too is slipping.  The reason?  Parents.  It seems like every parent knows more than the coach.  And the umpires or referees.  How often do you read of a parent assaulting a coach or ref?  Too frequently.  Other parents scream at them the entire game.  What message does that send?  It’s no wonder that so many kids start dropping out of sports as they progress through school. 

Kids want to play sports for the love of the game.  They love the crack of the bat, the smell of a baseball glove or pigskin, the swish of a basketball net, or crunch of hockey skates digging into the ice.  The sounds and smells and comradie of sports make it what it is.

So, as we age, we continue with sports by living vicariously as a spectator, rather than an athlete.  But who can afford to take the wife and two kids to a game and shell out $500 for tickets and food?  So we resort to TV and these ridiciously long seasons and late night games and infinite commercials.

It’s discouraging.  Joe DiMaggio, where have you gone?

- Mountain Man and City Girl

http://www.MountainManandCityGirl.com

Pennsylvania will now permit up to 250 table games in larger casinos and up to 50 in smaller resort casinos.  Table games are poker, baccarat, blackjack, roulette, craps, and similar games of chance.  The cost of licensing is $16.5 million for the large casinos and $7.5 million for resort casinos, which is a drop in the bucket in the scope of the big picture.  The 14 casinos in the state should add an additional $250 million per year to state coffers.

Atlantic City, the No.2 casino city in the United States after Las Vegas, has seen reduced revenues for over a year, putting an added strain on New Jersey’s already bloated budget deficit.  The monopoly Atlantic City once enjoyed on gambling on the East Coast is ancient history.

Connecticut has three Indian casinos that allow slots and table games, making them the first to cut into Atlantic City’s lucrative market.  West Virginia was next, first having slots at two dog tracks and two horse tracks, then adding table games in 2007.  They recently granted a full gambling license to the infamous Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs.

Delaware has one poker venue in Wilmington, plus video poker and slots at the three “racinos”, as they call their race tracks with legal gambling.  It won’t be long before table games are installed in each of the sites.

So what is Atlantic City to do?  They will lose much of their Philadelphia area gamblers once the table games open next November or so.  Delaware’s table games will debut around the same time.  No doubt entrepreneurs will add restaurants and resort hotels near the casinos, further damaging Atlantic City’s bottom line.

Atlantic City will need to take advantage of what it’s already got for the dozen casinos, employing 36,000 workers, to be profitable.  That means marketing non-gaming venues.  Upscale, fashionable restaurants with trendy surroundings are already a big draw, as are the 200 retail, brand name, and outlet stores.

Atlantic City also has big name entertainers going for it.  Not a night goes by that the city doesn’t feature a dozen acts targeting every age group.  Glitzy, nouveau nightclubs, with a regular parade of celebrity sightings, is turning AC into a mecca for the 21-40 year old crowd.  And they have bucks to spend.

AC also offers championship boxing matches, plus those new martial art/kick boxing/in-a-cage fights.  There’s also college basketball, including the Atlantic 10 tournament each March.

Last but not least, there’s the beach.  Geez, no other casino in neighboring states has the sparkling white sands and bikini babes.  And the beach is a great place to watch an air show or fireworks or lifeguard competitions or throw a frisbee or ….

Well, maybe Atlantic City should be saying, “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”  Time will tell.

- Mountain Man and City Girl

http://www.MountainManandCityGirl.com

Well, that is unless you consider it not really a word, since it was made up by the two brothers who wrote the song for the Disney movie.  In that case, the longest word is “antidisestablishmentarianism”, at 28 letters.  Can’t you remember back in the 1950s or ’60s being so smug because as an eight year old you knew the longest word in the English language?  That tongue twister originally meant, basically, opposition to the proposal to disestablish the Church of England.  Yikes.  Not to be outdone, some folks have added “pseudo” to the beginning of the word to stretch it to 34 letters.

In the category of English place names, there’s an 85 letter word for a certain hill in New Zealand.  I won’t bother typing it.  The two longest words in the entire English language are, well, a bit extreme.  There’s a 189,819 letter word that is the chemical name for a protein.  And the overall winner is the 280,000 word name for DNA, that molecular structure that embodies life.  The word is so long that it reportedly has never been written.  Duh.

We certainly have come a long way from the days when cavemen pointed and probably said, “Ugh”. 

The evolution of our civilization is directly tied to the evolution of our sophisticated language.  As communication became more effective, humans could interact better and progress was made.  Of course, earth still had to endure millenia of slavery, savagery, and wars, but in the end things got better because we became better communicators.  Ideas were able to be passed from one generation to the next, with each generation improving on the past.  Socrates taught Plato, who taught Aristotle, who taught Alexander the Great, and so on.  Later on, Leonardo da Vinci was followed by Copernicus, who was followed by Galileo.  Continuing the procession of ideas and thought, Darwin was followed by Einstein, blah, blah, blah.  You get the picture.

Without the continuing upgrading of language for the past 30,000 years, where would we be today?  Schools wouldn’t exist, teachers wouldn’t teach, there would be no books, no pencils, no computers.  We’d still be hunter-gatherers, living in small clans and wandering the land.  Life would be eat or be eaten, stay warm or perish.

So as you read this, contemplate the 600 generations that improved communication.  We exist as we do because the human spirit strived to be better.

- Mountain Man and City Girl

http://www.MountainManandCityGirl.com

But solar power is the exception.  New Jersey is mandated by the state’s Energy Master Plan to provide 20 percent of its energy through renewable sources by 2020.  To reach that lofty goal just 10 years away, the state is offering monetary incentives to get it done.  And alternative energy providers are lining up to cash in.

The state set up a system whereby solar systems – whether at a private residence or a commercial site – can earn Solar Renewable Energy Certificates.  Each 1,000 kilowatt hours of energy produced earns the provider one credit.  These credits are currently selling for just under $700 apiece.

The buyers of these energy credits are the utility companies, which are the ones under the gun to supply 20 percent renewable energy.  If a utility doesn’t meet the 2020 goal, they will be penalized with a Solar Alternative Compliance Payment.  So if they’re going to shell out the bucks anyway, why not go solar?  It’s good public relations and reduces dependency on coal, oil, etc and their associated price fluctuations.

There are currently over 50 renewable energy projects on the drawing board in New Jersey.  As more farmers and large landholders become aware of this new income source, more and more projects will be planned in the Garden State.  The key is for the solar farm to be located near high transmission lines, which makes getting the electricity they produce easier and less costly to get on the grid.  And besides getting paid via the credit system, the providers also get the current rate per kilowatt.  It’s win-win.

There is one caution to anyone thinking about having solar panels installed at their property.  Since this is a fairly new and lucrative business, a lot of inexperienced and unqualified companies are looking to install your solar system.  Like anything, get quotes from at least three companies and ask for references and about projects they have already completed.  Be careful and choose wisely.  After all, this is New Jersey!

- Mountain Man and City Girl

http://www.MountainManandCityGirl.com

The problem with appraisals in today’s real estate market is that properties sold via a short sale, sheriff sale, or foreclosure are being used as comparables when evaluating the price of a regular home.  About 25% of realtors have had a sale fall apart because of a low appraisal.  The National Association of Home Builders reported that 25% of their new home sales likewise were shot down by low appraisals.

In 2009, over one third of all home sales nationwide were either foreclosures or short sales.  A short sale, of course, is when a lender let’s the property sell for less than the amount of the loan, figuring its better to unload the property quickly, get some cash, and move on.  These properties, on average, are selling for about 25% less than a property not in distress.

In an appraisal, the appraiser uses an approach in determining value by comparing similar recently sold properties in the same area.  Allowances are made for differences, such as more or less bedrooms, a detached garage, swimming pool, etc.  In a normal real estate market, where foreclosures are rare and short sales nearly unheard of, this is an effective method to determine true value.

But in today’s topsy turvy real estate market, appraisals show no differentiation in a distressed sale vs non-distressed sale.  And therein lies the problem.  They are, after all, two different markets.  And so, the family that always paid their mortgage is being penalized because their property is being weighed down by those that didn’t or couldn’t handle their financial responsibilities.  Is that fair?

Buyers attempting to purchase a conventional property nowadays basically have three options when the appraisal comes in under the agreed upon price.  Either make up the difference in cash, get the buyer to lower his price, or do a cash-only deal (using a home equity if necessary).

Until the real estate world returns to normal, “appraisal” will continue to be a four-letter word to realtors, builders, buyers, and sellers.  Let’s hope the end is near.

- Mountain Man and City Girl

http://www.MountainManandCityGirl.com