Steve Fernlund and The Long Way Home

This week I’m writing about short-term vacation rentals (STR) and their impact on prices in the local housing market. It’ll take a long way home to get there, so bear with me if you can. Try as I might, I could never understand Twitter. It sucked me into a time-stealing scroll through the outrageous and the boring each day, and I never figured out how to “post” anything or gather a “following.” I'm not an influencer. So when it was taken over by one Elon Musk, a highly overrated businessman, and his villainous friends in the private equity world, I closed my account and spent that hour of Twitter each day doing something more productive. Then, another nefarious capitalist, Mark Zuckerberg and his Meta, started “Threads,” an online clone of Twitter. Once again, I struggled to figure it out. Eventually, I garnered 36 followers, quite a few more than I have with this column, yet far from the number of followers the so-called influencers have. Last week I “re-posted” a missive on Threa