Just got back from circumnavigating the ‘hood on the bike. The weather is gorgeous, and this is the first time I’ve felt like getting out of the house and riding a bicycle. Either I’ve been hiding in a hole for a very long time, or the area around the Funny Farm is gentrifying at something just under Mach 10. It’s hard to believe the difference: North Central really has become the new Encanto District.
Just a year or two ago, about every third or fourth house in our corner of North Central’s affordable sections was looking a bit tired. The sections where the richerati live were always reasonably well cared for, but the houses are old and they also looked a bit out of date.
Well. No more!
Over in Richistan, big expensive old ranch houses on half-acre+ lots have been renovated and painted, their landscaping spruced up, and they are to die for! Almost every house has been upgraded and spiffed up. The whole area over there, up and down roads I haven’t explored in a couple of years, looks absolutely great.
Then over here in the poor folks’ ghetto, hardly anybody’s house is badly run-down. Maybe one or two need some major work. Quite a few houses have been fixed and flipped. Or just fixed up. Most houses (except my neighbor’s, wouldn’tcha know it) are freshly painted, the landscaping looks good, the roofs are new (thanks to the hailstorm not so long ago). Lawns are green and mowed. Desert landscaping mostly looks up to date and tidy. Dead and overgrown plants have been cleared away. What can one say?
The neighborhood to the north of us used to be seriously run down — not a very good neighborhood at all. There was a drive-by shooting up there some time back; the city let a facility for delinquent boys go into one house, causing all the neighbors to give up on maintaining their homes or to sell to people who didn’t give a damn; the Fry’s grocery store behind the tract was, to put it nicely, not a good neighbor.
But that area now looks much, MUCH better. Dead landscaping has been revived. Homes have been repaired and painted. Some of those old Levittown-style houses are actually very cute, with new coats of paint and upgraded elevations. Some people have gone so far as to install fancy new facing — stone and brick — on the old tract boxes, to surprisingly good effect. And on the feeder street that buffers our part of the hood from that part to the north, people have run freaking amok fixing up places. As in tear everything out and rebuild the interior from the slab to the roof. Amazing.
Of course, this means our property values are going through the roof. That’s good in a sense: maybe I can get myself to Scottsdale if our prices catch up to similar construction in more upscale parts of the Valley. And bad in a sense: should I prefer to stay here (inertia precludes moving…), my taxes soon will be unaffordable. Oh well.
At this point, the only seedy part of the immediate ‘hood is the section right around where I used to live, about two blocks to the north and two to the west. Everything else on that street has been fixed up, but my old house is still a wreck. And it seems to depress the properties near it. Either that or it’s so bad it makes everything within two or three lots look sad.
The woman who bought the house from me on the Bubble’s uptick, a former GDU colleague who quit a tenure-track job to run off to California with a lover, never did get another job after she moved back here. She never seriously tried. What she did was borrow money against the house’s ballooning value and live on that.
Consider: I bought that house for $100,000, back in the day. It was, I believe, around 1994. I sold it in 2004 for about $210,000. She ultimately borrowed over $400,000 against the house, so we’re told. Of course, she paid virtually nothing on those loans. And she let the house run down slowly.
Finally she was evicted. The bank couldn’t resell the house. It went to pot. (So did the bank…) A number of shady renters lived there and it continued to rot away. At one point the house was on the market for an astonishing $60,000! That was when even low-end houses in this area were selling for something over a hundred grand.
The people who bought at that price were, shall we say, a “cultural problem.” They showed no interest in renovating. They evidently wanted to live in it, but they didn’t have the money to fix it up, or else they didn’t have the cultural wherewithal to do so. It soon became a shambles.
It looks a little better, but it’s still pretty much trashed.
Which is a shame: I really did a lot of work on that house. When I sold it to my distant friend, it was cherried out pretty nicely, with expensive tiling and appliances and a yard like a city park.
No more.
It’s funny how one blighted property will depress the properties around it. And it’s sad to think the blighted property was once my house.
Fortunately, though, it’s not now. 😉
My part of the ‘hood is in pretty good shape, with just a couple of exceptions. One owner is deliberately letting two historic old trees in the front yard die. And my neighbor hasn’t been able to paint the woodwork she replaced in the eaves and dormers…so that looks pretty tacky. But other than needing a coat of paint, her place looks passable.
My house will soon need a coat of paint, too. In fact, I should call Bila the Bosnian Painter and see a) if he’s still in the bidness and b) if he’ll do the job for a reasonable price. I’ve always liked Bila. He’s a good man and an interesting one. And he does decent work without wasting time.
At any rate, it’s kind of startling to see that much change in what seems like not very much time. I guess when the boob thing started I crawled into a hole and pulled it in behind me. Either that or we’re looking at gentrification on steroids.
That’s great news. Change like this isn’t often noticeable as it happens but when you take a step back and really compare it to a few years ago, you can see the difference. Sorry about your old house, that’s never fun to see.
I expect sooner or later somebody will grab that house and do a killer fix & flip. As long as real estate values hold (which they may not…this IS a boom & bust economy), there will be money to be made in renovating and reselling the place. Resale values will have to be fairly high, though, to repay the amount it will take to do the repairs and re-landscape the lot.
This IS great news….and I can think of no better way to get a “feel” then on a bike. In real estate “a rising tide raises all ships”….Many times what happens is that folks get priced out of an area so they “compromise” and buy in an area just outside of “Richestand” and fix up the place which attracts new buyers…it’s almost MAGIC. Might be a good time to see what the place is worth BUT would caution against any large improvements. IMHO selling a place with “good bones” is smarter than $20K spent on improvements that the new owner just may not like….Best of Luck.
Yeah, I’d agree with the thought about renovations. Unless you’re in the business of fixing and flipping, you can get contractor’s discounts, and you really know what you’re doing, you should renovate to live in the house and please yourself, not some imagined buyer.
No doubt a lot of buyers, for example, wouldn’t care for the upgrades in my house. I have all tile floors a) because I think they’re easier and cheaper to keep clean than carpeting and b) because I have dogs. When you have pets, tile floors go a long way to make your life easier: hair sweeps or vacuums right up, there’s no place for dog ticks to hide, and poop, pee, and barf are easy to clean up and de-stink. And the kitchen counters are Mexican tile because I personally am not nuts about granite. It’s wonderful…just not to my taste.
But a lot of people think a house is not adequate unless the counters have been replaced with stone slabs, and many people simply prefer carpet on the floors. IMHO, other than keeping the place clean and in good repair, you do best to let the new buyers decide what they want in the house.