Recession moves in to the front yard

Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum has been foreclosed. Yesterday evening the neighbor behind me, whose address is the same as Dave’s except it ends in “Lane” instead of “Way,” showed up at the door with a foreclosure notice that had been plastered on her door. She was shaken up, because at first she thought it applied to her house and was afraid she’d been the victim of a scammer. But on closer inspection we saw that it had been delivered to the wrong address and was intended for David.

My feelings about that are mixed. On the one hand, I’ll be happy to see the end of Dave’s proprietorship. On the other, I don’t look forward to another rental across the street! Maybe the new tenants can band together with Biker Boob and open an entire chain of shade-tree mechanic’s garages. And I feel bad for Dave: though there are times when I’d like to kick him in the shins, he is a sweet-natured and quiet man. Besides, given how overgrown my front yard has become what with the thick screen of shrubbery designed to block the view of the Weed Arboretum, I can’t be calling his kettle black.

Well, if we’re lucky, maybe we’ll get somebody who wants to live in the property and actually will take care of it. Not likely, though: the people who bought my old house after La Viajera defaulted are letting it go to pot. Often folks don’t realize how much it costs to maintain an aging tract house, and they just can’t afford to keep it up.

Dave owes $320,000 on a house that couldn’t have cost him more than $80,000 or $100,000. He’s been in the neighborhood at least as long as I have, and I paid an even hundred grand for my first house here. LOL! I guess it explains why he never goes to work: he’s been living on the equity!

M’hijito dropped by last night. We considered the possibility of trying to buy the place and either moving him and his roommate in there or renting it out. It’s really a wreck, though. The place has always been a disaster area—it was run down long before the Bubble came along. I’m afraid the cost of making it livable would be more than we can sustain.

Here’s how it looked when I moved in, back in 2004. Nice plywood in the front window, eh? Satan, the previous owner of my house, had quietly paid David to store the boat off the lot while the house was on the market, so it’s not visible here among the trailers and the vehicles, plus the junker car and the flatbed trailer full of ORVs are missing. Satan probably arranged to have the yard cleaned up, too: it hasn’t looked that good since he and Proserpine moved out and I moved in. The boat in the photo at the top of this post is a new model; he replaced the old one, which was nonfunctional and faded blue, with a nearly identical one in red.

M’hijito is beginning to worry that we won’t be able to turn over the Investment House before the 15-year period that we have to pay off the 30/15 loan runs, and if that happens, we won’t be able to refinance. That’s a bridge we’ll have to cross when we come to it, though. If we sell now, we’ll just break even; in fact, we might sell at a loss. Fifteen years is a long time. While it’s true that the D word is being bandied about in high places, if the world economy goes into a depression, we may have a shot at coming out of it in less than 15 years. Maybe not: as someone pointed out, the Dark Ages was actually an economic depression. But things move a bit faster these days….