A $2.5 million lakefront estate outside Chelsea, Michigan sold after just four days on the market — and the local press called it a "unicorn deal" — while working Americans in Oakland are paying $771,000 for a century-old two-bedroom house. The people who govern this country and the donor class that funds them don't just live in nicer zip codes. They live in a completely different economy.
M Live Michigan fawned over the Cavanaugh Lake Road property, quoting real estate agent Rick Taylor calling the sale a "unicorn deal, for sure, where everything just worked out so well." The listing gushed about "soaring ceilings" and "dramatic floor-to-ceiling glass" on a "coveted" lake. The buyer, Taylor said, just wanted to be near family friends already on the lake. Must be nice.
Meanwhile, The Mercury News reported — via a bot, because apparently humans can't be bothered — that a 1,034-square-foot house built in 1920 on Oakland's Suter Street sold for $771,000. That's $746 per square foot. Two bedrooms. One bathroom. A hundred and six years old. Down the street, a four-bedroom went for $825,000.
Here's the part M Live buried in paragraph nine: mortgage interest rates have soared past 7%, grinding ordinary buyers out of the market entirely. But Taylor admitted that high-end homes "often attract cash buyers, so the interest rates don't affect the market for them as much." He also noted that Washtenaw County — home to the University of Michigan and the professional class that orbits it — is "one of the wealthiest places in the state."
So there are two housing markets in America. In one, cash buyers snap up lakefront estates in under a week, insulated from the interest rates crushing everyone else. In the other, working families pay three-quarters of a million dollars for a crumbling two-bedroom in Oakland and call it a deal.
The press covers these as separate stories — lifestyle porn for the lakehouse set, data dumps for everyone else. M Live ran glamour photos. The Mercury News had a robot write the Oakland piece. Nobody connected the dots.
The people buying $2.5 million lake houses in four days and the people scraping together $771,000 for a 1920 shack are not in the same country. The political class and its donor base make policy from the first one and govern people stuck in the second.
How long before the people in the second country stop accepting rules written by the first?
