ABSTRACT

Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill of Massachusetts was Speaker of the US House of Representatives from 1977 to 1987. He is closely identified with the phrase “All politics is local,” a lesson he learned when he suffered his one and only electoral defeat in running for the Cambridge City Council in 1935.1 If politics is local, how much more so is real estate, whose cliché is that the three most important considerations are “location, location, location”? European languages fix this with their term for real estate, immobilier in French, and cognate nouns in German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.