For Sale: The $100 House
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
All numbers are per 100,000 residents, anually:
Murders: 46
Rapes: 40
Robberies: 763
Assaults: 1440
Burglaries: 2060
Thefts: 2430
Auto Thefts: 2280
Arson: 88
As a 25 year old guy, you might think it's a cheap place, but try convincing a gf or a parent to visit you.
I have friends doing urban homesteading. Your first purchase should be an alarm service followed by web cameras watching the property. The goal is to intelligently cut your potential risk, they haven't had any problems - so far.
Also, you're forgetting about the "Broken window effect" which says that crime flees an area when the surroundings simply look better.
I'd totally be in if Google would open a Detroit office. ;-)
I predict that this is what'll happen with a lot of the rust belt cities: as prices drop low enough, people will move in and the city will be transformed into something no longer so rusty. Kinda like how Boston reinvented itself with high-tech after all the textile mills moved south in the 40s and 50s.
Startups, and coders in general, need to move quickly. All the services a modern city offers come into play -- from the guy you hire to design the logo, to the superintendent who fixes the radiator, to cheap and fast burmese takeout.
Those $100 houses are much more conducive to an artist colony, where people are willing to put in more effort and deal with reduced efficiency for greater freedom, and complete control over the outcome. It might be interesting to found a "hacker's colony" along the same lines but it would have to be pretty non-commercial, or be composed of hackers who already had remote working arrangements with paying customers. I mean, if the taxis won't even go to your neighborhood, you're not going to get a lot of client meetings done.
I wonder how much it'd cost to build a giant glass dome on your block. Properly designed it seems like you could have SoCal weather in your dome year round, with some security and ability to have interesting house designs to boot.
Edit: To answer my own question with some googling, rough cost estimates of building a giant greenhouse are about $8 per square foot... (using polyethylene, not glass). So to cover a city block, with a 20 foot setback, would cost about $1 million... I guess I might have to scale back that plan a bit.
$55 per $1,000 in assessed value due in property taxes, per year.
$75 if the property isn't covered by the "homestead" exception (i.e. you get one discount for a primary residence, everything else gets assessed at $75 per $1k.)
I rather doubt the city assessor's office will agree that the fair market value of your $1 house is $1, particularly after you invest money in making it habitable and/or after you successfully cause the neighborhood to be desirable.
Though for a fraction of what you pay in rent in San Fransisco you could own a perfectly suitable house in a perfectly suitable neighborhood in much of the Midwest.
Wow. I remember discussing that exact idea with a hacker colleague back in probably 1995 or so.
Buy a block. Fix it up. Surround with barbed wire fence.
I friend of mine that I haven't caught up with for about 10 years now owned 4 houses on Appoline last I knew. He probably owns at least a dozen now. He had them setup almost like "rooms". One had the PC and TV on the first floor and a gym in the basement. He "lived" in another, one was for his mom, and the other for a cousin.
Many cities require a permit and inspection before you can get hooked up to utilities. So gas and electricity will be harder and more expensive.
My cousin opened a restaurant by the old Tiger stadium and he is doing well. He DJs too and loves the Detroit scene. It has its own culture. Between Detroit, Windsor, and the Detroit suburbs there is a lot to do.
I grew up in Royal Oak, MI which is where the young professionals are settling now. We have a good downtown with decent night life, a lot of restaurants, boutique clothes stores, and good coffee shops. The winter weather isn't that bad. If you want bad--try upstate NY or upper MI.
My only complaints:
1. You need a car. No matter where you live expect to drive everywhere you go. I live downtown in Syracuse, NY and love walking to most places.
2. There are parks and such in the suburbs but the majority of lakes (aside from the great lakes) were sold off to the highest bidder. I really admire the twin cities in MN where someone decided to turn their beautiful lakes into public parks. When comparing MI to MN, I really feel like someone sold out the MI people.
If only Detroit wasn't so cold...
Might not be a bad place for a cheap summer home.
[Edit: though if a large hacker-driven entrepreneurial project actually managed to take over a city block, I would seriously consider moving in. I wonder how the music is in Detroit these days...]
If you succeed in rehabbing in a depressed area, various rent-seekers will demand that you "share the wealth".
These folks often have considerable political clout, which has something to do with why those areas are depressed.
For some of them, your success is a problem because they're been paid to "improve the area". Since you succeeded without help, something is wrong, and it's not them. Or, you owe them.
Can you imagine a Michigan YCombinator where they would own a block of houses and provide a place to live? A self contained entrepreneurial village? It would have to be an outsider as the locals just don't think that way.
Interesting idea, though. Seems to me that as more and more people find themselves able to literally work from anywhere, this will happen more and more often. Why move to the end of the world to live cheaply, when you can just move to a cheap city within your own country and enjoy the same benefits, but with a similar culture?
Much love for the folks in Silicon Valley, but lately we've got this series of tubes thing that can ship your code to your customers from just about anywhere. I used to live in St. Louis. Nice place! As of 2004 a roommate and I split a nice two-bedroom apartment, in a safe neighborhood with a nice twenty-something atmosphere, for about $800 a month.
If rent is $800 and your California-ramen-profitable startup is clearing about $3,000 a month then in St. Louis you can probably eat your ramen in a modest house which you bought to have a place to consume ramen in.
I tend to take a more romantic view, one that says that it doesn't matter so much if you don't live in SV or Cambridge, MA even if the current metrics show that your startup will be more successful in those places.
I wonder whether SV/Cambridge will lose a little pull since VC has dried up a lot. Also, buying a home is going to get a lot cheaper in rural places. Of course, not all cheap places are equal, but what if it truly, really didn't matter where you located? There's crucial things to research like infrastructure, high speed network capability, the reliability of the public utilities. The Midwest US could be a great place to found a startup.
It seems to me the desire to reach ramen profitability by operating cheaply can outweigh the cachet of advice and networking in the meatspace.
Yes, the huge is freaking huge. I didn't actually think to look at aerial photography until after I'd bought it. I could probably start my own artist's colony just with the one house. Or hacker colony, whatever the hell that means. I guess with a big enough pipe, that would work out.
See the half-hexagonal bay window structure on the second floor? That's going to be the library.
The neighborhood is mostly blue-collar, mostly rentals now. In the early 1900's, or 1890, when this house was built, it was the Place to be Seen. I'm told there's a slight trend towards gentrification; these houses are truly stunning, and they built them to last.
I guess for the sake of fairness, I should quote city-data.com:
2007:
Murders 0.0
Rapes 37.7
Robberies 153.5
Assaults 255.9
Burglaries 1220.1
Thefts 3668.3
Auto thefts 323.2
Arson 115.8I'm not planning on staying in the valley forever...might be fun to be involved in reinventing a once great city's downtown.
A friend of mine's blog about buying and fixing a house in Corktown in Detroit. It is very interesting to see a dilapidated house that is from 1856 be renovated to a 4000+ sq. ft. place. He is very handy and has done habitat for humanity for years so it may be a stretch for some people to do.
Nonetheless, a personal look at white middle class living in Detroit.
How many places don't allow foreigners to buy property? (I've heard that Mexico has restrictions on foreign property ownership within a certain distance of the ocean.) How many charge more?