Idle Essay Day…
Item: Are you reading this? I don’t even know for sure whether Funny about Money is appearing online. I think it is. The last post I published appears to be visible. But who knows? Firefox caches things in inscrutable ways. I may be writing this in some phantom site, and a phantom published page may be coming up in the Twilight Zone.
I feel distinctly like I’m in the Twilight Zone. Most of my websites are nonfunctional, particularly Writers Plain & Simple, my key marketing site, which actually had a decent number of followers.
Then some guy had the nerve to notice WP&S’s disappearance and spam me with an offer to fix it, for a small fee!!!!!
Shee-ut.
As usual, everything happens at once. I just posted a new Fire-Rider story, but I’ve been so distracted with this mess I haven’t been able to even try to market it.
Then my neighbor Sally announced (once again) that she’s putting her house on the market. This time she’s serious: she’s rented an apartment in a Scottsdale old-folkerie.
The last time she stuck her Realtor nephew’s sign in the front yard, the Perp showed up that very day and tried to buy the house. She hates the Perp and says she won’t sell to him, but she simply does not understand that you can’t refuse to sell to a qualified buyer just because you don’t like him.
The Perp, I’ve learned, is roundly feared and hated by the other neighbors. This is the guy, in case you haven’t been following Funny for the past ten years, who vandalized my pool shortly after I moved in — to the tune of $10,000. SDXB and I took him to court and won. When he lost, he threatened the judge, who was so alarmed that he would not let SDXB, me, or our lawyers leave the courtroom until after a police officer reported the Perp had gotten in his car land driven out of the parking lot.
My lawyers were alarmed, too. Terrorized, actually, is le mot juste. They urged me to move out immediately and put the house on the market forthwith. They wanted me to take an apartment and be gone ASAP.
Well, I’d just bought the house. I couldn’t afford the tax hit involved in buying a house and turning right around and selling it, and even if I could, I’d also had a bunch of upgrades installed right before I moved in. By this time, I’d only been in the place three or four months.
I had a German shepherd and a Ruger and a bad attitude, so I stayed.
Nothing happened except that the German shepherd took after the poor little psychotic Son-in-Law when he tried to enter through a side gate. Scared the guy so bad he never came back.
But obviously the Perp has not forgotten. If he gets Sally’s house, he will work very hard, indeed, to make my life miserable. And he won’t have to work very hard at all: What he’ll do is rent the place to the slimiest trash he can find and let them do the job.
One of the houses he turned into a rental was occupied by a creep who abused his children so violently that the neighbors across the street sold their (very nicely renovated! recently renovated!) home and moved. When asked what possessed them, they explicitly said that the screams of this guy’s tortured children were frightening their children to the extent that they felt they could not stay in the vicinity.
We had not yet made an enemy of the Perp, who lived right next door to SDXB, who had witnessed this creep abusing a pair of puppies (the creep lived directly behind SDXB). So SDXB passed this bit of intelligence along to the Perp, who called the renter and told him that the neighbors had said they were going to call Child Protective Services if they heard his kids screaming while he was beating them again.
The creep moved out that night. Following morning he and his “family” were gone, skipped out.
So that’s the kind of folks the Perp rents to.
He’s been out of the rental business for awhile. When he first bought and moved into the house next door to SDXB, he started buying up homes in this neighborhood, which is only about two blocks wide by three blocks long. He would watch and find aging original owners — since the houses were built in 1971, these people were getting on in years, and they also had no idea what their houses were worth. He’d then go to their doors and offer to buy the house and pay in cash.
He obtained six houses in this area that way, all of which he turned into rentals. He would tell mortgage companies he was buying them to house family members or to move into himself (until relatively recently, you could get anyone’s real estate paperwork online through the County Assessor’s office, so you could find the deeds and mortgage agreements — that’s how we know he was lying to mortgage lenders).
He would chop down all the trees on a property — he really dislikes trees — and then rent it out. Any maintenance was done by him, and much of it was out of code. He built what Down-Easterners might still call a “summer kitchen” (they’re Romanian refugees, and their customs are a bit different from the natives’) on the back of the house next door to SDXB’s and bragged that he’d tied into the city sewer without a permit. He presumably installed the electric and plumbing without benefit of permit, too.
A house next door to some friends of mine is back on the market. I almost bought that house during the crisis described above, but it needed some very costly renovation. Much more than I’d spent on this house. I felt I couldn’t afford it.
Now it’s on the market for about $400,000. However, my house may be worth over $300,000 now. And the house in question has been HUGELY renovated. It’ really is gorgeous. The only thing I don’t like about it is that it doesn’t have a gas stove, which pretty much is a non-negotiable for me.
But. With the Perp breathing down my neck…I might manage to make my peace with a glass-top stove. I do most of my cooking on the propane grill, anyway. Next grill could have a gas side burner…wtf?
So that’s where we are now. General frustration. General fear. Ongoing hassles. And I’m not getting any work done while all this disruption continues.
If you can read this post, please say hello in the comments! 🙂
Oh, wow! I’ve only been reading you for a couple years, so did NOT know all of this. If he does worm his way back into the neighborhood, get another german shepherd. And why didn’t anyone call CPS on the child beater? Or did they and nothing happened?
I think most people will avoid bitching to the authorities if they can. No one wants to rock the boat…especially not if they’d put themselves at risk. A guy who’s violent toward kids is likely to be violent toward anyone else.
Too old to handle a high-energy powerhouse like a GerShep. That’s why I’ve got the short stuff: they can’t drag me into the street or into a dogfight.
Hello there! Sorry that life sucks for you right now. Do enjoy your posts.
I see your post. You’re right, the Fire-rider artwork is museum-worthy.
LOL! Glad you like it. But does it make you want to buy, buy, BUY???
I see your post -cannot believe no one called child services.
Well, the Perp said he was going to.
SDXB was doing some repair work on his roof when he saw two little puppies locked in a wire cage and left out in the direct sun, on a broiling hot day. When he told me that, I said he should call the SPCA or County Animal Control, but he said he didn’t want any trouble with the neighbors.
See? That’s just kind of how people behave. Most people are afraid to make waves.
Hullo to you! I received this through my email subscription. If I couldn’t follow your daily life on-line I’d get the DTs! Time for some pictures of your two furry helpers me thinks…
Absolutely! You’d be surprised how challenging it is to photograph a weird little character that’s in constant motion with a superannuated digital camera. LOL! I’ll try to get some new pix.
Hullo….Funny…..MAN this Perp character sounds like a real piece of work….What I don’t understand is at the sale price numbers your quoting the rents won’t support any kind of return on investment for a landlord. You may be worrying about nothing. And to be clear your neighbor has every right to sell the property to whoever she wants at whatever price she wants….she just can’t discriminate. Sooooo for example if the “perp” makes an offer and discloses he’s gonna make a bunch of changes to the home or abuse it…your neighbor can decline the offer and needn’t give a reason. She doesn’t even have to counter. If he belly aches….tell him to call a cop!!! What happens many times is OP’s get impatient and take the first offer from someone who can “fog a mirror”…
I don’t think a rate of return would matter to him. He’d probably be happy to take a loss just to have the opportunity to make me crazier than I am.
He was at her door the minute she listed the house the last time. She listed it under market, but not so low that it would’ve made sense to turn it into a rental.
He could claim she’s discriminating. When the judge found against him in our case, the Perp announced that it was clearly because he (Perp) was an Eastern European immigrant. In fact, part of the grounds of defense against me and SDXB was that we were bigots whose behavior was discriminatory against him as a non-American refugee.
I hope you’re right. My Realtor friend here in town also said a seller can refuse to sell to a specific buyer. But…when I took the real-estate licensing course, we were told there are some fairly extreme anti-discrimination laws in this state. For example: the neighborhood on the west side of the lightrail tracks that border our neighborhood has, over the period since the Great Recession, turned Black. The large apartment-house developments over there are now almost 100% African-American. It’s my understanding you’re not allowed to tell a buyer that, and that you’re not allowed to refuse to sell a house because of “who” a prospective buyer is. If you can’t refuse to sell to a person because she’s, say, African-American, then it’s only fair to assume you’re not allowed to refuse to sell to ANYONE on the basis of the person’s race, religion, or nationality.
Why would it be any less reasonable for a person to assume a “no” to a bid that was higher than the amount the house sold for was racially motivated than that it was motivated by a rabid dislike for Eastern Europeans? If you can’t discriminate — or even appear to discriminate — against one group of people, you shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate against any group of people.
Big difference between discrimination AND preference….To be clear discrimination is wrong and shouldn’t be tolerated. However it is a tough case to prove AND if one is successful in a suit …. tough to monetize the damages and collect. I remember once placing an offer on a place and was unsuccessful. When the place settled I saw that it went for less than I had offered. I had a good relationship with the listing agent and he shared that a local “kid”….in his 30’s that had grown up in the neighborhood….had won. She remembered him growing up and felt he was “deserving” of her kindness and took a financial “hit” to do the “right thing”…. It was my understanding this was legit and made sense to me….
Just want to add to the chorus – your neighbor can DEFINITELY refuse to sell to the perp. He can scream about anti-eastern european bias (is that even a thing?) all he wants, but he would have to prove it. All your neighbor has to do is say that the perp was found liable in court for the damage to your pool, and that is why she does not want to sell to him. Thats a matter of court record, and a perfectly legitimate reason for refusing to sell to someone. Perp will get laughed out of any court in the land if he argues discrimination given these facts.
You appear for me!
I’m surprised there’s no mechanism to report these jokers without giving a (full) name or a direct phone number so that they don’t know that you’re the neighbor who reported them. What a pain and what a cloud to have hanging over your head 🙁
There is a Silent Witness number — you can call the cops about something you know to be ongoing or to report someone you believe to be involved in a crime. As a practical matter, neither SDXB nor I thought to report the puppies to the police rather than the SPCA. I think SDXB told the Perp about it.
As for the alleged child abuse: I was not a witness to it and so really could not be calling CPS or the cops about that. CPS here is a) underfunded and understaffed; b) widely known for its incompetence; and c) pretty abusive itself. A situation has to be extremely bad indeed for anyone in their right mind to risk putting a child “in the system,” as it’s called. Even the courts here will return a child to drug-using parents rather than subject the kid to that.
I can see your post. I get the email notice of your posts.
So glad you’re with us! 🙂
I received your post via email as usual.
I love your writing, it is sassy and funny. Remminds me of the banter of
some of the kids I grew up with in Brooklyn.
But I would move. Now.
LOL! If I had $400,000 to spare, I’d move now, too. But…well…
Well, late to the party, but this post and the rest of your FAM site are showing up for me. *waves*
Glad to hear it. Come to think of it, I should post an announcement: we’re in the process of changing servers again, so I don’t know whether there’ll be a hiatus or not.