Roadside Gods, Real Estate Ghosts, and the Truth Under the MLS
☕📰 If you want housing clarity with hotdog stand energy, this is the place to be.
This week, Wolf Richter1 dropped a housing market breakdown so precise, like wow. He shows how demand is plummeting, prices are absurd, and the system’s running on fumes. Check out his June 4th piece here.
My own Friday Footnote—Why Your Gut’s Not Wrong—picks up where Richter leaves off. Think of me as a backroad companion to Richter’s highway analysis.
Richter:
Demand destruction sets in when prices are too high, a fundamental economic principle.Me:
We are not operating on a single-variable supply-demand curve anymore. We are in a multi-variable distortion zone, where the pricing floor has been permanently warped. Welcome to Behavioral Econ 410.
Richter:
The problem is that home prices have exploded in a fantastical way during the Fed’s interest rate repression… it did a lot of damage… the consequences of which are now here for all to see.Me:
The New Hampshire real estate market behavior is no longer anchored in rational economics, but in memory, trauma, and recalibrated perception.
Richter:
Many homebuyers remain on strike, now in its third year… waiting for prices… incomes… rates…Me:
This isn’t just a weird moment. It’s the next phase of a housing system… And you? You’re not a consumer. You’re a character in someone else’s sales funnel.
Anyway. I think the two of us pair pretty well on a bun.
🚨 A Quick Note Before We Keep Going
Coffee with Steve is growing.
By Labor Day, I want to cross 1,500 subscribers.
And I need your help to do it.
If you’ve ever read something here that made you laugh, pause, yell, or forward it to a friend—invite that friend.
Post the link.
Screenshot a paragraph.
Drop “You gotta read this guy” into your group chat.
📨 Forward this to 3 friends
📲 Share it on socials
🎯 Paste it in a Discord, a Slack, a weird neighborhood Facebook group.
🧨 THE ROAD TO 1,500
Current count: 636
Goal: 1,500 by September 1
That’s: 864 humans in 86 days
No bots. No fluff. No ad spends.
Just real people who give a damn about housing, story, truth—and maybe the occasional haunted hotdog stand.
AND IF YOU’RE NEW HERE
☕ Hit subscribe. Stick around.
You’ll get weird, honest, housing-market-meets-ghost-story dispatches straight from the trenches.
📈 636 ➡️ 1,500
🏁 Labor Day
LET’S GO!!
💭 This Week’s Big Ask:
SEND ME YOUR WEIRD ROADSIDE FINDS. The hand-painted alien gas stations, lawn dinosaurs, cryptic signs, flamingos in tuxedos—whatever made you slow down, laugh, or do a double-take. Bonus points if it’s been there for years and no one can explain why.
Photos. Quick stories. Drop 'em in. Let’s build the strangest travel guide New England’s ever seen.
Coffee and Courage at the Ground-Level of Community Care
Most morning iced coffees at Dunks, you don’t notice the quiet dramas playing out in the parking lot. But she said it was love, and she took nine months before she even whispered the word trafficked in the passenger seat of that car two spots over from you, showing up week after week.
🎧 Outlast | A Playlist by Coffee with Steve
This week’s playlist is a war hymn dressed in ghostlight. Opening with Johnny Cash’s The Man Comes Around, a gravel-throated reckoning that says judgment is already here. Jay-Z and Frank Ocean’s No Church in the Wild drops like smoke, questioning divinity. By the time Fire Starter and Lunatic Fringe punch the ignition. Then Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy blows wide open. Human, Radioactive, Glory and Gore drive home the theme, and the second half shifts toward aftermath and confrontation. In the Air Tonight, Paint It Black, Bellbottoms kicks the damn door down. We finally come full circle with another Johnny Cash “Hurt” by Johnny Cash, only to end on Power by Sons of Legion that’s the ash-choked anthem that plays when while you’re still standing.
Subscribe to the full Coffee with Steve experience here. Or don’t. It’s your inbox—you decide. Pick what you want, skip what you don’t, and keep me around as much (or as little) as you like. I promise, we’ll still be friends.
If you’re a certain someone from Wolf Street reading this…
Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone you’re here.
1a. This, of course, is a lie. I’ll tell everyone.