Thank God for Matt Yglesias

Anyone who’s had a few drinks with my wife and I will have heard fairly strenuous variations on the theme below, so it’s cause for celebration when someone else — in this case, Matt — steps up to carry the colors:

Dear Urban Land Company: Sending me more emails about the units available at your new ugly condo dubbed “the Floridian” will not compel me to buy one of them. Week after week, month after month you keep emailing me about this property. Evidently, you’re not selling units. That’s because you’re asking for too much money in a neighborhood that, though lovely, now has excess condo capacity. If you lower your price, I might buy one! And if not me, surely someone else will.

Ah, but how it chafes the smooth bottoms of investors everywhere to suck it up and take a loss. These huge projects, conceived, bought, and built in bulk, have a big bottom line. Probably the fools who have poured money into the “Floridians” of the world have been experiencing tiny little losses every day, waiting for their luck to change, their cup of nickels diminishing bit by bit before the great slot machine of big-budget real estate development. Not exactly the sort of experience that puts an investor in the mind to say screw it and agree to a drop prices so steep that the units will sell and the profits vanish completely and irrecoverably.

I’ll let Tyler or Megan carry on with the econopsychology; sadly, I suspect that Matt’s in for a few more dozen emails from UrbanLandCompany.com.