Amusing myself in the wee hours by cruising real estate listings in my zip code, I came across one of the neighbor’s houses, comparable to mine, on the market for $199,000, some $36,000 less than I paid for my place. The sales pitch shouts,
UPGRADED CABINETS, JENN-AIR APPLIANCES, ENGINEERED WOOD FLOORS, NEW LUSH LANDSCAPING WITH 12 ZONE IRRIGATION SYSTEM. NOTE**SQ FT INCLUDES 300+ BONUS ROOM OFF KITCHEN**COULD BE FAMILY ROOM,DEN/OFFICE,KIDS PLAYROOM OR???**THIS KNOELL HOME SITS ON A LARGE LOT(OVER 11,000 SQ.FT)LOTS OF YARD FOR THE KIDS TO PLAY**SEPERATELY FENCED SPARKLING DIVING POOL OFF COVERED PATIO**LONG DRIVEWAY W/ROOM TO PARK AT LEAST 4 VEHICLES
Gee, thanks, guys: Let’s invite some more chuckleheads to turn their houses into used-car lots!
It’s not an especially pretty model, and it’s a bit too close to the light-rail construction on 19th Avenue. But still…it has most or all of the amenities my house has, and they’ve set the price in the basement.
Ah, yes: the light-rail construction. Make that nonconstruction: the City has changed its mind, after having ripped out the better part of an entire row of homes in our neighborhood and spread hideous cement-gray gravel over the resulting scars. The SOBs came in here, wrecked our neighborhood, and then walked away! They’re now considering other routes to serve the west side (read “the multimillionaire developers who own the new stadium out there, not to mention the occasional politico and city official”). It’s pretty clear the proposed line past our area will be abandoned, leaving us with devalued homes and enhancing 19th Avenue’s premier characteristic as a conduit of blight.
That would explain the cut-rate price on this house, which is owned by a couple who have lived there for many years.
Not the cuttest of all possible rates, though: a house on the street just to the south of me, which was wildly improved by a speculator who bought on the deflationary edge of the bubble, is offered as a short sale at $130,000.
Meanwhile, about 100 steps down the street from the first house, another neighbor is trying to unload a bland little house, “as is” with no photos at the Realtor’s website, for $229,000. That place has been on the market for quite a while. It’s not a short sale or foreclosure, but between the lackadaisical sales effort and the unexceptional front elevation, one could easily think it is. The house doesn’t look all that bad, but it’s nothing special, either. Houses around it, though, are badly run down: the Rental Baron’s slum property was bought by a woman and her son who put way too much money into fixing up but succeeded in selling at the height of the bubble to Adam the Pool Guy, not the brightest decorative light hanging in the backyard gazebo. Adam now owes over $325,000 on a house that he has allowed to go right straight back to pot. The kids across the street from Adam inherited their house from his mother, and they also are letting the place crumble away.
It costs a lot to water a lawn around here. So people who can’t afford the water bills will just let the grass die. Xeriscape it? That costs a chunk of change, too…if you can’t afford a $300 water bill, you sure can’t afford to have someone come and convert your bermuda grass to imitation desert.
“SEPERATELY FENCED.” Heee! Well, I guess you can’t expect much better than a pitch to people who use the front yard as a parking lot from sellers who can’t run a spellchecker and haven’t heard much about periods. Another house around here is described as having an “UP GRATED KITCHEN.”
😀
Someone wants $239,900 for a very pretty little house that has been massively overimproved in the seedy neighborhood just to the north of us. What could they have been thinking? Our friends who moved out of that tract several years ago finally had to default on the house that backed on to the grocery store. The bank wants $129,000 for it.
A bank is trying to sell a house that fronts on the seven-lane main drag that forms our neighborhood’s southernmost border: $251,500, rather more than anyone should pay to live on a feeder street for Interstate 17.
Next street to the north of me, a neighbor wants $264,000 for a place that has been “upgraded” in fun-house style: red kitchen cabinets, black countertops, blue carpets. While the price is what you’d think of as about right for this area, it would take a special buyer to fall in love with this place. The present owners so loved the eyeball-popping scarlet cabinetry that they put it in the bathrooms, too.
The folks who want $289,900 for the house with the view of the 19th-Avenue nonconstruction site are still waiting for their dream buyer to come along. That place has been on the market for months. Many months.
And in the what were they thinking department, a house on my old street, about two blocks to the north of the present manse, recently came on the market for $294,900. It has some recent upgrades (2008), but it has no pool and its exterior is so undistinguished I can’t even picture which house it is—and I walk or drive by there every couple of weeks.
The $199,000 model is the same or a similar model, and it does have a pool. That’s a $95,000 range for identical houses in the same six-square-block neighborhood!
Add the slightly more decrepit tract just to the north of us into the mix, and you get a spread of $160,000, for housing that’s all pretty much cut out of the same cloth.
Think of that.
You are going to drive yourself crazy with all this research….
I’m amazed they purchased property before the route was finalized! FYI, I design LRT (light rail transit) projects in LA. We’re in construction right now, to open in 2010 (maybe), and still working to acquire some necessary parcels. But, every project I’ve worked on has needed very few property takes, just a little here and there for the traction power substations. The current one takes a few lanes of traffic down one street and then runs along an old rail corridor. People still gripe about the train being run along that route, but the freight line was there back even in the late 1800’s so they can’t claim they didn’t know a train could be there! Sorry your local transit agency is ruining your neighborhood, do I need to come work out there and set them straight?
@ Miss M.: Absolutely! We need you here. You’ll love the 116-degree summer, too: clears the head.
Apparently the route was finalized, but then, within days after announcing that federal stimulus money would solve funding problems and let them expand the 19th-Avenue route even further, they decided they didn’t have any money after all, and so whooops! Everything was put on hold.
While on “hold,” however, they continued to rip out houses, possibly because they had contracts with the demolition people. Many of the houses had already been bought out from under owners, at rock-bottom prices.
The reason they’re ripping out our neighborhood is that 19th isn’t wide enough to accommodate the rail up the middle without widening. Everywhere else, they’ve ripped out the properties on the west side. Large swaths of the strip between 19th Avenue and the I-17 are gang-infested slums, while properties on the east side are somewhat less blighted and in many areas much healthier.
Along our stretch, however, the west side is built up with tenements — slum apartments the City allowed to go in about 25 years ago, without bothering to enlarge the school and so turning what was then one of the best schools in the central city into one that is tactfully classified as “a problem school.”
Apartments, of course, are businesses. In a developer-friendly, resident-unfriendly city like Phoenix, businesses trump homeowners every time. So at Northern they switched the teardowns from the west side of the road to the east side, meaning they ripped out single-family homes instead of run-down, dangerous apartment buildings (where cops get shot and killed when they’re not safely hovering overhead in helicopters).
We asked that the City construct a wall along 19th to block noise and blight, by way of salvaging what we could of our neighborhood’s quality of living and property values. Metro workers went through the motions of conducting a poll — with questions that were meaningless and misleading and which, claims to the contrary, was never seen by many residents — and then announced the results said homeowners didn’t want it.
So that’s the story there.
You understand, the agenda is not the one advertised — that lightrail is a fine thing for the city and its residents. The agenda is to enrich the developers who put people into elected and appointed positions at City Hall, something that is fairly easy to do now with a defanged press that has laid off its investigative reporters and no longer covers local politics in any effective way.
How funny that people grutch over the route along an existing rail corridor! Hereabouts, people complain that there was no reason NOT to have used the existing rail corridors, of which there are several. And that it was ridiculous not to have run it along the already blighted freeway corridors, so carefully planned to accommodate commuters who were induced to move to the sprawling suburbs (which enriched some more — or in many cases the same — developers). Can’t win, eh?