3638
Slum Lords
Ellen DeGeneres is selling listing her home for 52% more than she paid for it about a year ago. I forgot to write down how many million--noticed it in the WSJ. She owns others. Don't know if she ever actually lived there. Here's an item by John Updike that appeared in the Autumn 1998 American Scholar.

The superrich make lousy neighbors–
they buy a house and tear it down
and build another, twice as big, and leave.
They're never there; they own so many
other houses, each demands a visit.
Entire neighborhoods called fashionable,
bustling with servants and masters, such as
Louisburg Square in Boston or Bel Air in L.A.,
are districts now like Wall Street after dark
or Tombstone once the silver boom went bust.
The essence of the superrich is absence.
They're always demonstrating they can afford
to be somewhere else. Don't let them in.
Their money is a kind of poverty.
– John Updike, Slum Lords

There was also an item in the WSJ today about a wealthy Japanese-Hawaiian who is letting homeless people live in his properties in expensive neighborhoods. Supposedly, amassed his wealth by being a slum lord. Now people are just a bit suspicious that he's doing this to drive property values down so he can buy out his neighbors. Makes sense doesn't it? Do bad by doing good. You probably aren't happy when the county buys property in your neighborhood for housing vouchers for the poor.Source URL: https://maryelizabeth-winstead.blogspot.com/search/label/real%20estate
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3625
Less Federal money for housing assistance
That's the story today in the Columbus Dispatch. Licking, Fairfield, and Pickaway Counties are closing their Section 8 housing lists. The paper says the federal funding has dropped. I'm guessing there's more to this story than meets the eye. So I took a look at the law at the HUD site. The formula for FMR (Fair Market Rents) was changed during the Clinton administration--it was too complex for anyone but a government bureaucrat to understand, like what percentage of the people live in a census tract, but I was able to read the date. However, I'm just guessing it has more than a bit to do with what's happening to real estate in those counties. During the last real estate boom, they were hot, hot, hot. Unbelieveable housing development going on with easy access to Columbus via free-ways. I'm thinking some pretty cheap houses and acreage was bought up by developers, and now low income owner occupied housing has been replaced with middle income and upper middle income neighborhoods. Every exit of the free-way has many restaurants, Krogers, Target, Wal-Mart, auto parts, video stores, etc. Every community is trying to pass bond issues for new schools. All these areas need infrastructure--roads, police, fire, water systems, parks, etc. Are rents higher than before? You betcha! It's called progress.

The federal government got in the housing assistance business during the Depression. People were desperate. My parents took in borders to make ends meet and they had jobs. What was unemployment then? 20-30%? Do you think the Congress of the 1930s intended to make this assistance permanent? (Actually, since gov't programs don't ever go away or get smaller, they probably did.) Today, you feel you are borderline poor if you don't have cable, a cell phone, 2 TVs and 2 cars. Maybe sending tax money to Washington so they can send a smidgen back for housing vouchers to live in wealthy counties with an unemployment rate of about 4.5% isn't such a terrific idea.

Can I hear an Amen?Source URL: https://maryelizabeth-winstead.blogspot.com/search/label/real%20estate
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3621
The eagle has landed
Last year a pair of eagles began nesting in an old hawks' nest in the trees along Alum Creek behind the building where our friend and artist Charlie Rowland works. This year, the hawks reclaimed the nest until the eagles returned and chased them off. The hawks don't give up easily and have been trying to dislodge the eagles for a couple of weeks, without success, according to Charlie. Here are some ODNR photos. In one, the hawk has swooped down on the eagle, and the eagle has turned on his back in mid air to flash his talons. The hawks will go up to about 200 ft and then dive on the eagle. Charlie says he's betting on the eagle.



Source URL: https://maryelizabeth-winstead.blogspot.com/search/label/real%20estate
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3609
Are you filthy rich?
Like the two bathroom house in the 50s and the three car garage in the 90s, the new status symbol is multiple laundry rooms. Today's WSJ shows a 12,000 sf house on 2 acres in Payson, AZ that has nine(!) combined washers and dryers, a main laundry room and a pet washing station. It's listed at $7.9 million (price includes $1 million of collectibles, 5 classic cars and a stocked wine cellar).

The amount of laundry we generate surprises me, but we have enough clothing and bedding that really, I do laundry only every 10 or 11 days. And the laundry room is in the basement. I incorporate the trips up and down the stairs into my exercise routine. I change the sheets weekly, pillow cases about every 2-3 day; towels get about 3 days use; dish towels about 2 days; bathroom hand towels maybe a week. But yesterday I gathered everything in the closets that was red, rust or fuchsia, and loaded them into cool water. I usually ignore the labels that say "dry clean only," especially if it was made in China and written in Spanish. I can't even remember the last time I had a 100% red load of laundry. I don't wear much clear, deep red--I'm terribly pale, and my husband even moreso, so we go for the warmer tones of rust, peach, coral, etc.

If you flip this, and put a space between the sink and units with counter space, my laundry room looks like this (photo from the internet), installed with the former kitchen cabinets, and it's all behind bi-fold doors, sharing space with the kitty litter unit.
Still, I wonder what rich people do to get their clothes so dirty that they (or their house staff) need so many laundry units, don't you?Source URL: https://maryelizabeth-winstead.blogspot.com/search/label/real%20estate
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3544 The American Dream

Banks have been offering home mortgages to undocumented workers using a taxpayer ID instead of a Social Secuity number, and it's not illegal to do so. You don't have to be an American citizen to own property here. Think about all the rich European rock stars and middle eastern oil magnates who buy multi-million dollar homes that eat up our coastlines and forests so they can drop by a few weeks of the year. They are actually cheap tax shelters because their own property taxes are confiscatory.

Now a new bill has been introduced (H.R. 480) by John T. Doolittle R-CA to amend the Truth in Lending Act to make such mortgages to illegals difficult (I was going to say "illegal" but we know that there is an army of lawyers out there working for advocacy groups that will find the loophole, so I downshifted to "difficult").

When there is a practice or law so clearly working against the average, tax paying, law abiding citizen, I always say the trite and true: FOLLOW THE MONEY. Who benefits when undocumented workers buy homes? MurrayT has a home in Florida and the recent tornado wiped out some of those homes. He says FEMA is trying to find the home owners to give them aid--but they have fled fearing arrest for being in the country illegally and are afraid of the INS. Property owners paying taxes in that county and paying high insurance premiums and the rest of the nation (me) who donate to the very inefficient Homeland Security Department are paying.

But the banks with their fees and the real estate industry (now in sort of a slump) and all their linked industries like home inspectors, title examiners, insurance companies are not innocent. Local taxing districts probably don't care as long as the county or township gets its share. Nor are advocacy groups innocent, like La Raza, who normally would turn up their noses at a so-called American value. But they'll preach it brother, oh yes, "the American dream," how could you deny this to hard, working immigrants? Read their own material. They intend to "retake" the southwestern U.S. which Mexico lost in a 19th century war.

The sovereign Mexican government is the big bandito behind all this. And we have so many trade treaties with Mexico it would be hard to sort through. How about that latest one allowing Mexican truck drivers to deliver Mexican goods within the U.S. when we can't even inspect our own trucking industry. But our banks are doing lunch with their bancos you can be sure. Illegal immigrants sending money home, supporting (destroying?) villages and towns left with no young men, is the second highest source of income in Mexico, with oil being number one and tourism number three. The quasi-American left who will weep bitter tears over the 5% rich in this country who pay most of our taxes (but never enough, right?), have no problem turning a blind eye to the inequities in Mexico with the richest Spanish-Mexicans (they have very restrictive laws regarding citizenship) at the top of the government and industries and the poorest Indian-Mexicans at the bottom. Why should Mexico ever clean up its act and be responsible for its own poor and unemployed and create some upward mobility if we're willing to support them with the jobs and social benefits?Source URL: https://maryelizabeth-winstead.blogspot.com/search/label/real%20estate
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