Blood on the rooftops:
Fear and loathing in Sarasota County's real estate market
Tempo News' John Susce goes after the Herald-Trib, the Sarasota Observer, and Florida's top real estate psychic, Hank Fishkind
-- John Susce of Tempo News, reprinted and edited with permission of the author, 01/07/08
-- jsusce@msn.com

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The Sarasota Observer, the Herald-Trib, and Hank Fishkind pull out the Tarot cards: "Oh look, the Hangman -- that's always good, isn't it?"
Take a close look around Sarasota and you can observe the new “fiscal conservatives.” If you are any sort of reasonable and observant individual, you can easily recognize the bovine offal that is being written and spoken by economic and political leaders, often designed to take the spotlight away from developers and pro-development governmental insiders as the real culprits in the bottoming out of the local and state real estate markets.

Who are these folks? First of all, there is the mouthpiece of self proclaimed “fiscal conservatives,” The Sarasota Observer. For years, while their developer cronies have been ripping off public money and land to increase profit margins [mostly via egregiously low impact fees - ed.], the paper hasn't uttered a word. The housing market has now come crashing down, putting Sarasota at what can only be described by anyone who took a basic high school economic course as 'on the brink of a financial disaster.'

Meanwhile, the newspapers are attempting to blame the folks that said years ago that the Emperor had no clothes.

Example: Sarasota Herald-Tribune's Rod Thomson stated this a few weeks ago about Bill Earl and his group, Citizens for Sensible Growth: “If given their way, they would ruin the economy and throw thousands out of work or stop another Michigander from fleeing that state’s wrecked economy.”

Someone should tell Thomson that the horses had already left the barn long before Earl and his followers overturned governments in the recent Sarasota (city and county) and Venice elections.

Instead of attempting to absurdly blame others for their corporate welfare scams, these "fiscal conservatives" need to acknowledge the incredible economic devastation that they are solely responsible for creating and maintaining. According to Professor Robert Shiller, co-founder of the index of the Standard & Poor’s/Case ShIller index of house prices, and an economic academic at Yale University, “No matter how you look at the data, it is obvious that the state of the single family housing market remains grim."

But instead of getting out of the way, they are publishing those ridiculous, inane, and foolish manifestos appearing in the Observer, which is sponsored by the Argus Foundation, and are actually calling their opponents "Socialists."

Hank Fishkind's golden words
To add injury to insult, as a financial disaster is descending upon Florida, the Sarasota Observer is featuring their mouthpiece, Hank Fishkind, on the cover of their edition of Gulf Coast Business Review. He is described as “Florida’s pre-eminent economist” and, according to the Observer, “his word is golden.”

Just for non-laughs, here are some of the golden words of Florida’s pre-eminent economist, Hank Fishkind (note carefully the dates):

07/12/06 — “We are moving from an extraordinary real estate market to a normal market... Southwest Florida’s housing market has been 'on top' for so long that a decrease will seem unusually slow... Fundamentally, this is a great housing market.” (Naples News, 07/12/06)
11/07/06 -- "With the drop in demand, prices have stopped rising, but they have not fallen nor are they likely to do so. Now that demand has stabilized there is no reason for prices to fall for single-family homes” (Fishkind press release / WMFE radio script)
07/26/07 — “Dire warnings and negative news about the housing market are overblown and, outside of Miami’s condominium market, we have hit bottom months ago.” (Fishkind on WMFE radio, via numerous real estate blogs -- example)

For those failed predictions and other hallucinatory assessments by Fishkind, The Observer, in an article written by Matt Walsh, recently rated Fishkind as a '10' on the credibility scale. I wonder what Walsh thinks of assessments lower than 10?

What are some of economic changes Fishkind (who, according to Walsh, is “economic adviser to the biggest corporate clients in Florida”), would make in Florida? Here are some of the changes recommended by the guru of the local “fiscal conservatives:"

1) unlimited gas tax
2) increase of 5 cents in sales tax
3) impose sales tax on gas
4) gas indexed to inflation
5) toll roads
6) K-12 public education funded with states sales tax

     [EDITOR'S NOTE: Susce isn't the only reporter going for Fiskind's throat lately -- in an article in the January 6 Fort Myers News-Press, the newspaper noted that Fishkind had recently recanted his bogus optimistic predictions of the past. However, like a Jehovah's Witness repeatedly setting upcoming dates for the Second Coming, Fishkind is still at it. The paper reports that Fishkind is now incredibly predicting that the upcoming January election will definitely turn things around for the real estate market in Florida:
     "If the market is depressed and there are homes for sale and nobody's buying them, you can't simply expect that offering more homes for sale will make a difference," said veteran Florida economist Hank Fishkind. Fishkind isn't a professional pessimist. He predicted in August the real estate market had already bottomed out and was showing signs of a turnaround. He has since revised that prediction in light of the subprime mortgage lending crisis, and now predicts the turnaround will begin later this year.
     If you keep predicting the same thing over and over and over again, at some point in time you will get lucky, the predicted event will happen, and thus you are a genius. That would appear to be Fishkind's modus operandi here. Still, other than for the sake of blind optimism or blind luck at hitting the target, we should believe Fishkind this time around... ummmm,... why, exactly?]

This isn't fiscal conservatism, this is economic idiocy
Does anyone have any doubt why Fishman is economic adviser to the “biggest corporate clients in Florida”? Does anyone wonder why there is no mention of impact fees on developers and only sales and gas taxes that effect working folks more discriminatorily? Could it be why Fishman words are considered “Golden” by the so called “fiscal conservatives”?

Here are some of the other comments that “fiscal conservatives” like Walsh, Thomson, and the rest of the economic idiots who cover financial matters at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune refuse to single out as culprits in the financial disaster facing Sarasota:

 “The area’s growth will take off like a rocket in 2007 and you’re about to enter a boom to end all booms”
   -- urban planning expert Bob Gibbs;
 “We have 10 more active years, here and around Florida”
   -- Judy Shoemaker, President, Sarasota Association of Realtors;
“What’s happening in Sarasota Real Estate is a perfect storm”
   -- Elliot Rose, executive V.P. of Florida Operations, Coldwell Bank.

And, of course, there is Michael Saunders, owner/operator of Sarasota County's biggest real estate brokerage firm. When asked by Sarasota Magazine in their July, 2005 issue if an over-inflated real estate bubble will soon burst, she replied, “Absolutely not... This is not frenzy. It's part of solid growth, it’s sustainable... This real estate market is not only driving our economy here, but also our whole national economy.”

Sadly, Saunders was, in retrospect, half right in that assessment. Miami's and southwest Florida's markets collapsed first, creating a huge Florida sinkhole that quickly sucked the rest of the country into the newly created abyss.

This was a national economy that was recognized two years later as nothing more than a Ponzi Scheme that needed Citigroup Inc., Bank of America, and J.P.Morgan to reach an agreement on an $80 billon fund to buy some of the $320 billion in assets held by so called structured-investments vehicles, known as SIV’S. an agreement called “flawed” by Josh Rosner, whose New York-based firm analyzes finance and real estate investment vehicles.

This local and national economy that was built on false assumptions of greed that went against the Puritan ideals -- to work hard , to save for a better life -- didn’t die from fiscal conservative ideals and principals. It was killed willfully and purposefully by newly created Gilded Age policies, initiated by the selfish greed merchants of corporate welfare, more commonly referred to as “fiscal conservatives.”

"Blood on the rooftops - Venice in the spring
Streets of San Francisco - a word from Peking
The trouble was started - by a young Errol Flynn
Better in my day - oh lord!
For when we got bored, we'd have a world war, happy but poor"
-- Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford, Blood on the Rooftops, 1976

This is a reprint of an article originally printed in Tempo News. John Susce is a reporter for Tempo News -- he has been covering stories about real estate and HUD housing in Sarasota County for a number of years. This article was reproduced with the permission of the author.