California property values collapse as water shut-offs begin... wealthy community to go dry in days... real estate implosion now inevitable

Wednesday, June 17, 2015
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Tags: California drought, property values, real estate collapse

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(NaturalNews) Water shut-offs have now begun in California, where government-ordered restrictions are starting to leave large communities high and dry. As CBS News is now reporting, the Mountain House community of 15,000 residents will run out of water in just a matter of days.

"The community's sole source of water, the Byron-Bethany Irrigation District, was one of 114 senior water rights holders cut off by a curtailment notice from the state on Friday," reports CBS.

And just like that, the property values of millions of dollars worth of homes belonging to 15,000 residents nosedives toward zero.

After all, what's the value of a home that has no running water? California isn't Africa... yet... so the idea of carrying your own buckets of water for bathing isn't widely accepted.

Get ready for a real estate collapse in Collapsifornia

As Natural News readers know, I saw all this coming. In a May 7th article entitled Why the California water crisis will lead to a housing collapse, municipal bankruptcies and a mass exodus of climate refugees, I wrote:

How many California homes and businesses are headed for a zero-water future? Many millions. How many Californians are aware of all this and already have their homes on the market so they can move somewhere else? A very small number... a tiny fraction of the total number of home and property owners invested there.

What these people are unfortunately not yet seeing is the catastrophic consequences of a continued drought and how it can utterly destroy the value of their property.

In that same article, I also foretold what's going to happen next: plunging property tax revenues, municipal bankruptcies, a wave of climate refugees fleeing California and the collapse of the California economy. Unless rain starts falling out of the sky, all this is going to start unraveling like clockwork. (Count on it.)

"A number of water districts plan to sue the state on the grounds the State Water Resources Control Board has no legal authority to cut off some of California’s oldest and most protected water rights," reports CBS. And so the water wars begin: there's not enough water to go around, and the courtroom serves as the new battleground over a resource that the state of California has squandered for far too long.

The Collapsifornia real estate collapse has already begun

Just as I predicted in May, the collapse of real estate valuations in California is already well under way.

As the Washington Post now reports:

Rancho Santa Fe resident Randy Woods was feeling burdened by his lush landscape and opted to downsize. ...The drought has dampened demand for large estates in San ­Diego County.

Woods said his girlfriend is among those struggling to sell. Her home boasts a yard designed by Kate Sessions, a well-known landscape architect and botanist who died in 1940. But now, the rare palm tree specimens, the secret garden and the turret-shaped hedges are a liability rather than a selling point.

Another friend, Woods said, has seen the value of his nine-acre plot plummet from $30 million to $22 million.

Did you read that correctly? A multi-million-dollar estate has lost over 25% of its value virtually overnight due to the issue of water. And this collapse in property prices is for properties that still have running water. What happens when the water supply to a $30 million estate is cut off? The value collapses to almost nothing. Who wants to live in a $30 million mansion and pay seven figures of property tax each year to the same California government that cuts off your water supply? Who wants to live like a third world refugee in a $30 million estate?

Nobody in their right mind, it turns out. Not even in California.

Freak out and get out, or be the last one holding worthless property

As this drought has unfolded, my message to Californians has been consistent and simple: freak out early and you might still be able to sell and leave. But if you delay, you'll be among the last people holding near-worthless property.

This isn't difficult to predict. As the sell-off begins, property valuations will plunge in an accelerated manner. (It has already begun.) The more water gets cut off by the government, the more desperate people will be to sell and leave. The term "motivated seller" will be ratcheted up to "panicked seller" and then finally "fire sale!"

People who buy the properties will soon be able to pick up once-prized real estate for dimes on the dollar. But it's a gamble: If the rainfall comes back, property valuations may recover. And yet, according to nearly all the people who live in California right now, this drought is all caused by man-made global warming. And because I don't see China shutting down its coal-fired power plants anytime soon, there's no end to this drought if the climate change alarmists are correct.

Welcome to Delusionville, where the power of magical belief in Big Government can overcome any drought

California, it seems, is reverting back to a barren desert. Meanwhile, far too many of the people who live in California remain in a state of absolute denial over where this is all headed. Overall, I love California optimism, and many of my best friends live in California. But as anyone who lives in Los Angeles knows all too well, California is also the home of fantasyland dream weavers... people who live in their minds instead of reality. (Oh yeah, and I have a really awesome script I need you to read... it will change the movie industry forever!)

Delusional thinking is also a key trait of California's political leadership. These are people who think money falls out of the sky and water runs uphill. They've recently even decided that California should cover the health care costs of the children of illegal immigrants.

And why not? If you're going to live in Delusionville, you might as well dress it up with all the false hope and delusional wishes on your list: free health care for everyone, unlimited debt spending on entitlement programs, magical waterfalls of free H2O falling out of the clouds, and so on.

I once lived in Arizona, and many of the street names there envision concepts that are total fiction: Waterfall Lane, Great Spring Drive, Surging Rivers Rd. and so on. (Most of the rivers in Southern Arizona are bone dry riverbeds nearly all the time.) Wouldn't it be great if California renamed its own streets and thoroughfares to match its own fantasies? Everything Is Free Hwy and Limitless Entitlements Drive seem especially fitting. Why not open a new swimming area called No Consequences Beach?

I think I'll also take a long, meandering drive down If I Think It, It Must Be Real Highway, where "positive thinking" overpowers negative obstacles to such an amazing degree that you don't even need to wear seatbelts or turn on your headlights.

Desalination is an environmental nightmare

For those who are saying, "There's no water problem in California! It has the entire Pacific Ocean right next door!", you need to look into the catastrophic environmental destruction tied to ocean water desalination.

Not only does desalination use fossil fuels which emit the very same carbon emissions that the California government insists caused the drought in the first place, the desalination process itself pollutes the ocean with high concentration salt brine that kills marine ecosystems and destroys ocean life along the California coastline.

And that's on top of all the Fukushima radiation that's already causing a marine ecosystem collapse in many areas of the coast. Add more salt brine to the mix and you get a state where rich, self-entitled Hollywood celebrities demand their lush, green lawns at the expense of ocean life, climate change and the global ecosystem. If that happens, California will lose all credibility as a "green" state, and its wealthiest residents will be living an ecological lie.

The new green, it turns out, is actually BROWN.

How dare we think ahead!

I fully realize it's entirely evil of me to think ahead and point out what's coming. There is no person more hated in modern society than someone who tells the truth. (Just ask Donald Trump, who's now running for President by abandoning political correctness and stating the obvious.)

But when I see headlines like Rich Californians balk at limits: 'We're not all equal when it comes to water', I can tell you without hesitation that California's water woes have only begun.

If you live in California and don't have your own individual water supply -- a private well that still works, large-scale rainwater collection in a rare area that still has rainfall, access to a private year-round stream, etc. -- you either wake up to what's coming or you get steamrolled by it.

Think of California as a jumbo jet that has just run out of fuel and is plummeting toward a mountain. You can either grab a parachute and bail out, or you can plug in your headphones and keep watching the in-flight Hollywood entertainment, pretending nothing bad is happening outside your immediate focus.

I know this isn't the good news you wanted to hear. It's much nicer to turn on the local TV and hear how Gov. Jerry Brown is going to brilliantly solve all of California's problems by using the magic of wishful thinking and sleight-of-mind economic trickery. Meanwhile, in the real world, the taps are running dry, employers are fleeing the state's high taxes, the almond orchards have shriveled into dust, the flood of non-citizen immigrants is draining the state's revenues and property valuations are about to fall off a cliff.

Perhaps the California that has been promoted by socialist-minded propagandists can be recreated as a virtual reality destination for Oculus Rift fans, but in the real world, nobody wants to live in third-world conditions and drink their own recycled urine. Not even Ed Begley, Jr., and he's a pretty cool dude who's willing to do almost anything to save the planet.

Hence the coming wave of recently-bankrupt California climate refugees who will flood into neighboring states seeking water, low-cost housing and free entitlements. That's not gonna win friends in neighboring states, trust me. If you're living in California right now, I urge you to strongly consider where things are really headed and start making a realistic list of your options.