As you struggle to pay your mortgage or break even on the sale of your home, does it help to take a gander at Big Time Listings? This blog by a Chicago-area real estate site focuses on the sales of celebrity homes. Considering the current state of the housing market for folks who don’t appear regularly on “Entertainment Tonight”, reveling in the purchase of a $35 million mansion by Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg might or might not be just the ticket. Or try this “exclusive”:

Brad and Angelina enlarge their Los Angeles compound further; long-goateed actor quietly pays $1.1M to buy a missing link for his estate in Los Angeles’ Los Feliz neighborhood — a two-bedroom, 3,232-square-foot house that his compound had bordered on three sides

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have increased the size of their compound in Los Angeles’ Los Feliz neighborhood, with Pitt quietly paying $1,100,000 to buy a missing link for his property in the form of a 3,232-square-foot house that his estate largely had surrounded.

In a Big Time Listings exclusive, we can report on Pitt’s latest purchase, which like some other property of his was made through his Mondo Bongo Trust. Records show that Pitt purchased the property on August 6 from the estate of the late Anne Tyler Sherman.

Built in 1920, the two-bedroom, former Sherman house — whose property is shaped like a key — sits on a 0.25-acre (10,759-square-foot) lot in the Oaks area of Los Feliz. It helps Pitt round out his compound and means that Brad now owns close to 2 full acres in the Oaks…

Features in the house include two baths, a stone fireplace, a huge main room, a bonus room, and “a bar area and a secret cave,” according to the MLS.

In working up the two posts on Stuyvesant Town in New York City, I came across this rent control debate in the comments section of an article in New York magazine. The two main posters are a long-time resident of the Manhattan housing complex, which includes many rent stabilized apartments, and an opponent of rent [...]

The New York Times reported the other day that even in this brutal economy, crime is actually down in New York City.
“The idea that everyone has ingrained into them — that as the economy goes south, crime has to get worse — is wrong,” said David M. Kennedy, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “It was never right to begin with.”

…While there is generally thought to be a lag between changing economic conditions and new crime patterns, he said, it is curious that there has been no pronounced jump in street crimes associated with the most recent recession, which took root last year.

A series of posts from the political science blog Monkey Cage addresses this counterintuitive lack of correlation between crime and the economy, in relation to people’s perceptions.

A couple of months ago we did a post on the Brian Lehrer Show’s Uncommon Economic Indicators web page, where people submit signs of the recession observed around the New York City area. As we wrote, “these won’t show up in any government statistics or charts, but they turn the abstract gloom of macroeconomic numbers into a concrete picture of what’s happening in the community.” Time to check in again on recent submissions:

Odd job applicants – Brooklyn

I am helping a friend who is sick and getting treatment in Boston by packing and moving his belongings out of his apartment in BedStuy. I posted an ad on Craigslist, offering to pay 100 dollars to 3-4 people for several hours of work just to pack the place up. I received 92 postings in the last 24 hours – not just from the expected recent grads, musicians and writers, but also from engineers, architects, PHDs, construction managers, ex-Military, etc… I was shocked.

Chase bank desperate for customers – Manhattan

I was at the Chase ATM in the Chrysler building and the “customer service” reps were staking out the lobby for potential customers. There was a woman next to me using the ATM with a non Chase card and the rep approached her in mid transaction to pitch her into opening a new account. He was standing over her shoulder pointing at the screen telling her she could save the $3 service fee AND give her $100. Clearly an invasion of personal space. She declined, saying she had to be somewhere but he persisted almost dragging her into the office. I know that retail banking is getting competitive but these tactics are more aggressive than charity workers on the streets….