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foreclosures

Foreclosing on the neighbors

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In an odd way, the foreclosure of Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum amounts to a kind of foreclosure for the neighbors, too. There’s the obvious effect that when the lender unloads Dave’s house at a bargain-basement price, our property values will drop into the basement, too. Actually, they were already headed for the basement: now they’ll just ride on down to the sub-basement without getting off the elevator.

But there’s a much larger effect: Dave has been financially distressed since he divorced a year or so ago, and his emotional depression has shown in a sharp increase in his native slovenliness. He never was into anything that might be called “pride of ownership,” but over the past year, his normally trashy lot has become a real eyesore. Also, as it develops, Dave has been cultivating a public health hazard.

SDXB came by this morning, and out of curiosity we visited the abandoned house. Both gates into the backyard, from the front and from the alley, are unlocked and easy to open. The backyard is chuckablock full of debris, old chemicals, bottles of pool acid, old batteries, and stuff highly hazardous to kids. We have, for example, these fine gasoline cans, located behind an open tool shed replete with bottles of old insecticides.

Mighty nice, eh? How would you like your kids to get into this stuff?

Ah, yes. Then we have the issue of the swimming pool. The pool has been drained; evidently has stood empty for quite some time. Though it’s enclosed within a wrought-iron fence, it’s easy to enter: the fencing ends at a screened porch whose two exterior doors have been ripped off, creating a nice corridor through which the curious may pass without obstruction.

Once you’ve passed through the aluminum structure, where, by the way, you’ll find a heavy-duty battery charger with enough juice to flash off big sparks and give you (or the kiddies) one heck of a zap, you come to this:

And at the bottom of this concrete-lined hole in the ground you find a collection of lost toys marinating in a fine little mosquito-breeding Okeechobee Swamp:

It explains where all the nasty little biters have been coming from for the past several seasons: straight from casa David to su casa.

Maricopa County, where we have been dwelling cheek-by-jowl with Dave, has a growing problem with West Nile virus, a disease carried by mosquitoes. And as we know, mosquitoes breed joyfully in standing water. Every year more and more people come down with this ailment, and every year we read of several deaths related to it. The most vulnerable to serious complications are the elderly.

Dave’s next-door neighbors are in their nineties.

I am in my sixties; many of the locals who have died of this disease were between 60 and 65. The most recent death I’ve read about was of a man in his 80s. My house and yard have been overrun with mosquitoes for months. This, evidently, is where they’ve been coming from. My house is clear across the street—imagine what the mosquito swarms have been like for the old folks next door to Dave!

After you’ve enjoyed the scenic view, don’t miss Dave’s old battery collection on your way out:

Maybe an enterprising kid can get a little extra mileage out of one or more of them, using the handy-dandy battery charger left on the back porch.

And as we say good-bye to Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum, we pass by the famous Weed Haystack, still gracing the front driveway as it has from time almost immemorial:

Dave's Weed Haystack

Always visible from the street and from front yards in all directions, this fine landmark remains as a symbol of everything Dave has done for his friends and neighbors in Royal Oaks.

Hm. Maybe I could sell guided tours.

Long before Dave’s lender foreclosed on him, Dave foreclosed on the neighbors. He foreclosed on our property values, on our safety, and on our health. I guess we have to say thank you to the irresponsible and unethical lenders who forked out $320,000 in loans against a property worth about half that and handed it over to a recently divorced man who hasn’t held a regular job in years. If they hadn’t sunk him over his head in debt, Dave and his pet mosquitoes would have stayed in that house forever.

Foreclosed!

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Poor old Dave, proprietor of Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum, is finally moved out, having spent a week and used the services of three male friends equipped with pickups, a flatbed, and SUVs to haul off his collected junk. He’s posted a do-it-yourself “For Sale” sign in the front yard (“Drastically reduced!”) and ridden off into the sunset, leaving his weed garden behind.

This afternoon some kinda seedy-looking guys climbed over the weed haystack in the driveway to ogle the peeling batten around the eaves. Evidently they were calculating what it would take to revive the decrepit house to its former glory…or at least to rentability. Early in the evening, a father came by in the wake of his toddler’s tricycle. Dad and son broke into the back yard through the side gate and disappeared into the weed jungle. The kid’s trike is gone now, so either they came out and went on their way or the cockroaches carried the hardware off.

Old Dave, as we learned, was foreclosed. My neighbor and I found that out when the notice was mistakenly slapped on her front door instead of Dave’s. He borrowed $320,000 against the place. Zillow values it at around $307,000. Even though it has a pool (soon to be a mosquito pond, no?) and a good-sized corner lot, there’s no chance it’ll fetch that much. Another foreclosure in similar condition around the corner sold for $268,000.

In a way, I’m sorry to see Dave go, despite the mess he lived in. The trashed condition of his property and his habit of parking a used-car-lotful of rolling stock on the front lawn affected the property value of houses all around him, and that was irritating. But at least Dave was quiet. I dread what’s going to end up in that dump next.

O.K. There’s a remote chance someone will buy the house for a song, fix it up, and live in it. More likely, though, some speculator will grab it out of foreclosure, throw a cheap coat of paint on the outside and some apartment-house carpets on the floors, and rent it out. This will add to the already thick population of rentals in the neighborhood. It will join the place that houses Biker Boob, a Hell’s Angel who roars up and down our residential street on his unmuffled Harley and who uses the garage to conduct a shade-tree mechanic’s operation, complete with LOUD heavy-duty shop equipment that he starts up at 7 a.m. every weekend and operates until after 11 at night, and the shack whose out-of-state owner rents to SEVEN unrelated adult men, all of whom park their cars on the front yard and none of whom is interested in hacking back the knee-high weeds on the property.

The other possibility is that the new owner will be yet another of those folks who buys on the cheap, thinking he’s found a bargain, without having a clue to what’s involved in maintaining a forty-year-old tract house. Once they get moved in and discover how much it costs and how much work is involved in taking care of one of these places, they just let it go to pot.

Either way, the result is the same: a run-down house on a run-down lot, dragging down property values in the our little six-square-block development. Add to this recurring phenomenon the City’s kind decision to rip out a whole row of houses to make way for the train tracks, and you can see if you want to move up but stay in town, you’re flat out of luck. There’s no way you can afford a comparable (or even a lesser) house in a better-maintained neighborhood that’s located in the central part of the city. The only way to get back into the middle class is to move way, way out into the sprawl on the outer fringes of the metropolitan area.

You, too, can drive two hours each way to work. You’ll love it. It’s the American way!

Small glimmer of light in the tunnel

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(Hope it’s not a headlight!)

Yesterday evening I walked Cassie past a foreclosed house a block to the west. The place has always been trashed: the people who lived there for years took pride in running it down, and so by the time they were tossed out, it was quite a mess. The “For Sale by Lender” sign has been up for several weeks.

Curious to look inside, I kicked the back gate open and found…lo! brand-new double-paned windows and Arcadia doors! A brand-new heat pump, merrily humming away in near silence. Through the windows, some of which still had the manufacturer’s plastic wrap clinging to the glass, I could see new cabinetry, appliances, and countertops in the kitchen. The house was tiled throughout with attractive Saltillos. A closer look at the structure revealed brand-new roofing, and it had a new paint job inside and out.

Dang! It looked pretty darned nice. Only things remaining to be done were to install a shade structure over a large patio slab, to revive the landscape, and maybe to put in a couple of shade or fruit trees. Since the grass is already pretty much dead, it wouldn’t take much to xeriscape the yard.

So I was standing in front thinking maybe I should consider buying that place, since it’s offered for significantly less than I could net on my house: it’s smaller (less work! lower utility bills!) and all the other houses around it are well maintained. Archie, the resident across the street, is a right-wing crazy, but that’s OK: for unknown reasons, he thinks I’m a right-wing crazy, too, so as long as I don’t disabuse him I’ve got a friendly neighbor. Pretty quick along came one of the other dog-walking regulars, a neighbor named Mike.

Mike knows what’s going on around the neighborhood, in extended detail. The house, he says, is in escrow: selling price is allegedly $260,000.

“That will pretty much set our prices for the next few years,” says he.

“Yup,” say I, knowing that now there’s no chance of escape.

Mike said the lender had put about $60,000 into the place. Some time back, Archie said he’d talked to the rep, and his story was that the upgrades cost $30,000. Assuming the tile floors were already in, I’d say thirty grand for the roof, air-conditioning, windows, and kitchen is closer to the truth.

Well. If the outfit that ended up owning that decrepit rathole fixed it up to this extent, maybe the same thing will happen with Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum. Even a coat of paint on the outside would help: the place is a wreck. Right now the girlfriend has mounded the weeds she’s pulled during the past three or four weeks into a big haystack on the driveway. Somehow she manages to drive around the stack and park her car on the slab the between the closed garage and the stack—how, I can’t imagine. The garage, of course, is packed with junk, so there’s no way to get a vehicle in it. Take that back: about two weeks ago, Dave hauled away enough debris to get his pickup in there, but the mother of the new baby can’t put her car in out of the heat.

So maybe there’s hope: if a lender has to clean up a property to unload it, maybe the outfit that ends up with the Weed Arboretum will at least clear the brush and paint the tired (not to say “exhausted,” “debilitated,” or “comatose”) exterior. That would sure help a lot.

Mike has done a lot of renovating and upgrading on his house, another half-block to the west and dangerously close to the coming construction mess. Asked what he thought would be the effect of the train track project on our property values, he said he was disgusted when the City refused to give fair consideration to the residents’ request to turn the streets now opening onto 19th into cul-de-sacs but instead ramrodded its own half-baked concept past everyone’s objections.

During the construction of the trolley-car tracks, he said, our property values will drop significantly, and the foreclosure situation will drag values down further.(He’s calling it the “trolley”; I call it the “train”; no one who thinks the scheme is the biggest boondoggle to grace Arizona since the Freeway to Nowhere calls it by the City’s pet name, “lightrail.”) However, he has learned that neighborhoods near completed segments of the trolley-car tracks already are showing increases in property values. So, the folklore to the effect that trolley lines improve property values may contain a grain of truth.

We’ll see.

Anyway, I felt a little better about things after exploring the partially upgraded little house and imbibing Mike’s optimism. Maybe we’re not on a handcart to hell but on a roller coaster, instead. Roller coaster rides generally climb back up after they’ve gone down.

Recession moves in to the front yard

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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….