Candy and Candy, the ultra-luxury residential developers, just spent $500 million on a development site in Beverly Hills (the old Robinson's-May Store) that the seller bought three years ago for $33.5 million. Nice profit.

Candy and Candy are planning on building 252 condos on the site, meaning that the land value per unit is about $2 million. This is a nutty price for land and I don't see how it can end other than badly.

However, as noted in the LA Times article, Candy and Candy are the developers of One Hyde Park in London, where a unit just sold for 100 million pounds (almost $200 million USD; it came out to almost $10K per square foot, or twice the nutty $5K per square foot that the very high-end apartments in NYC are selling for). Here's a story on that sale.

So, this suggests that for the price of a low-income home in Mexico, (about $18K USD) you could buy about 1.8 square feet at One Hyde Park.

When does the high-end residential madness end? As the LA Times article notes, these high-end purchases can have unhappy endings: "Shuwa Investment Corp. shocked the U.S. commercial real estate industry in 1986 when it paid $640 million for the Arco Plaza complex in downtown Los Angeles. After Shuwa's fortunes collapsed, the complex sold again in 2003 for about $270 million."

I used to work across the street from the ARCO Complex in downtown LA and it is still shocking to me that anyone paid $640 million for it in 1986. It's just not that impressive of a project and the two office buildings on the site are as plain Jane as they come.

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I appreciate what Al Gore is trying to do for the planet, but perhaps it's time he makes some changes in his own house.

I have always considered Snopes to be a good source of information, so here is what they have to say about an item about "Glass Houses" that has been circulating on the internet. Of course, the original copy was written by a partisan and is exaggerated, as partisans on both sides of the aisle often do...e.g., the house in Crawford surely doesn't have *every* available green feature...and I am surprised Snopes didn't point this out. But if Snopes can be trusted, and I think they can, the general point is a good one. If Fox news hasn't given this "story" extensive coverage yet, I am sure it will be coming soon.