Foreclosure Fallout: Houses Go for a $1
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Ron French, Detroit News, August 13, 2008
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The fact that a home on the city’s east side was listed for $1 recently shows how depressed the real estate market has become in one of America’s poorest big cities.
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The home, at 8111 Traverse Street, a few blocks from Detroit City Airport, was the nicest house on the block when it sold for $65,000 in November 2006, said neighbor Carl Upshaw. But the home was foreclosed last summer, and it wasn’t long until “the vultures closed in,” Upshaw said. “The siding was the first to go. Then they took the fence. Then they broke in and took everything else.”
The company hired to manage the home and sell it, the Bearing Group, boarded up the home only to find the boards stolen and used to board up another abandoned home nearby.
Scrappers tore out the copper plumbing, the furnace and the light fixtures, taking everything of value, including the kitchen sink.
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Tuesday, the home was wide open. Doors leading into the kitchen and the basement were missing, and the front windows had been smashed. Weeds grew chest-high, and charred remains marked a spot where the garage recently burned.
Put on the market in January for $1,100, the house had no lookers other than the squatters who sometimes stayed there at night. Facing $4,000 in back taxes and a large unpaid water bill, the bank that owned the property lowered the price to $1.
$1 sale to cost bank $10,000
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Dollar property sales are the financial hangover from the foreclosure crisis, said Anthony Viola of Realty Corp. of America in Cleveland.
Lenders that made loans to unqualified buyers during the height of the subprime market now find themselves the owners of whole neighborhoods of vacant, deteriorating homes.
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So desperate was the bank owner of 8111 Traverse Street to unload the property that it agreed to pay $2,500 in sales commission and another $1,000 bonus for closing the $1 sale; the bank also will pay $500 of the buyer’s closing costs. Throw in back taxes and a water bill, and unloading the house will cost the bank about $10,000.
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Meanwhile, the new owner will owe $3,900 in property taxes in 2009 on her dollar purchase unless she challenges the tax assessment.
While selling a home for the amount of change most people could find between their couch cushions is unusual, some abandoned homes in Detroit sell for $100; vacant lots can be purchased for $300.
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Email Ron French at rfrench@detnews.com.
(Posted on August 14, 2008)
Comments
I did the math, and if you can get an interest rate of 9.68% or lower, with a 30-year term, you can finance this thing for no more than one cent per month. (Not counting insurance or tax escrow, of course.) However, with any mortgage, you have to be faithful in making those payments, and make sure you pay the full amount, or the bank will foreclose.
Not that subprime mortgages are available any more, but if there were, you might only have a payment of a half-cent a month.
Even during the housing bubble, Detroit never saw any of it. During a Spring 2007 weekend auction of some 300 foreclosed Detroit properties by a Texas auction firm, the average auction sale price for those houses was less than the average price for a new car.
Posted by Question Diversity at 6:18 PM on August 14
I saw this on another site yesterday. The house was totally stripped of everything. It is on the east side of Detroit, near the city airport. Anybody that bid a dollar should demand 75 cents back in change. Location, location, yeah, I guess you could tear down the house and keep the land until the government needs land to house radioactive waste. Otherwise, it is just a total waste of a dollar. The way I understand it, the new owner may just inherit the over-due water bill and back taxes. Anybody with an I.Q. that registers above 75 should be wary of property in and around Detroit.
Posted by Roller at 6:18 PM on August 14
Detroit is the only city in the country where the police tell you NOT to stop if you are involved in an accident. The price of the car and the legal ramifications are worth the price of not becoming a tragic assault victim.
Posted by Tim at 6:24 PM on August 14
“it wasn’t long until “the vultures closed in,” Upshaw said. “The siding was the first to go. Then they took the fence. Then they broke in and took everything else.”
Making it way overpriced at $1.
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080807/COL10/808070432
Satire, but probably accurate.
Posted by Edward at 7:35 PM on August 14
The siding was the first to go?
Man, I would be looking up that siding salesman. That stuff is supposed to be good for 40 years…guaranteed and all…
It is supposed to stand up to all environmental factors, including urban blight. I guess the air in Detroit is really toxic.
Posted by at 8:14 PM on August 14
Why is Detroit never mentioned when diversity is preached and discussed? If diversity were such a strength why is it that it’s always the whites who leave? If diversity were such a strength wouldn’t it have benefited the whites as well as the African - Americans to have stayed?
If diversity were indeed such a strength there would be absolutely no need to advertise it, to legalize it, or to mandate it. The fact that all of the above is necessary to cram the concept of diversity down whitey’s throat, is absolute, irrefutable proof, that diversity is a nothing more, nothing less, than what it has always been, and what is will always be, a damn lie!
Previous to last year, I was last in Detroit in 1965 as a teenager. I went back to Detroit a year ago — to a professional conference. I was absolutely shocked at this latest version of of Motown!
Being from the South, I am acutely aware of what happens when African - Americans take control of municipalities. I have watched as African - Americans have taken over the once proud, beautiful, clean, and neat Southern towns in Alabama and turned them into extended garbage dumps. Although Detroit does have its beautiful hotels,business buildings, and convention centers, it also has one big, sprawling, ghetto area just out of sight. I took an afternoon and just drove around the city - amazing. Abandoned buildings everywhere! Winos sleeping in the streets at noon! It looked like a scene out of the movie Enemy at the Gates or the country of Haiti! Furthermore, judging by the stares which I received by the some of the local residents, it was obvious that these areas which I had accidentally driven into had not been frequented, either too often, or by too many whites (once several started running toward my car in an obvious attempt to stop me - they didn’t)!
Moreover, this Detroit variety of African - Americans were amazed that I, a white southerner, was not only polite, but that I could speak in coherent sentences! I did not drive a pick - up truck with a gun rack, was not a NASCAR fan, and did not fly the confederate battle flag from my antenna (well it was a “rental” car after all - ha)!
They had formed the opinion that all southern white males were fat red necks who somehow fed off of the labor of African - Americans. Their conclusion that this variety of southerner, replete with his stunning German wife and ability to speak foreign languages (we had the Spanish, French, and Chinese at the conference) was somehow an aberration!
At the hotel’s nightclub later in the evening, I danced the Argentine Tango with my wife — which prompted one of the African-Americans, who was there with a group from the conference, to ask me the following day: “just who was doing all of the work when I was taking the time to learn such an intricate dance”. Jealously! He was not impressed when I told him that I had no African - American working for me! He had apparently assumed that every white man from the South had to have African -Americans doing all the work; and, working for nothing - slavery!
I, on the other hand, found the African - Americans at the conference, save three, to be a pompous, arrogant, condescending, ignorant, fat, lazy, and totally incompetent lot.
Many could not string a coherent sentence together to save their life but spoke in some kind of Ebonic gibberish! I will never forget the fat African American male who told me that he was making $174,500 a year from the city of Detroit. I thought to my self- how the hell is that possible - he can’t even tell me what his job is “suppose” to be!
Detroit came across to me as being drab, gray, and impoverished. I was not impressed; albeit the city that I call home, Mobile, Alabama, probably would not have impressed this variety of hip hop residents either — but at least Mobile is generally clean. Detroit had street after street piled high with over flowing trash (along with winos and junkies urinating and defecating in the same streets during the middle of the day).
Detroit is a prime example of just what happens when the whites leave. In my humble opinion, there is a threshold of just how many African - Americans proportional to the white base is necessary before the whites haul ass! And I don’t care how much money is poured into the area — that is the always the invariable result. When the threshold is crossed the whites leave and the result is one dollar houses. Detroit has crossed the threshold!
As I have said repeatedly here before. There are four cardinal rules that are necessary in understanding African Americans.
(1) African - Americans can not survive without whites.
(2) The sole purpose of African - Americans’ survival is to get over on the whites.
(3) There is absolutely nothing that any white can do that will ever assuage the African - American. No amount of money, no amount of affirmative action, no amount of political correctness, no amout of anything, ever! Without white guilt there is no white money!
(4) If the whites ever quit paying off the African -
Americans’ extortion, there will be anarchy, rioting in the streets, and revolution.
As long as the whites continue to roll over for the blacks there will be example after example of Detroits!
MoMo
Posted by MoMo at 8:25 PM on August 14
The stripping of homes for copper and other metals is an indication of how much the U.S. is already a Third World country. Stealing copper, etc..is quite common in Africa, but is now becoming quite common here as well. This country is really entering a new and frightening phase of history.
Posted by at 8:52 PM on August 14
The story of the uncivilized savagery sounds like similar stories from Africa.
Posted by at 9:09 PM on August 14
It is said that when the Western Roman empire fell, Rome herself was mostly deserted for a couple of centuries but in time she came to flourish and rise once again.
So too will Detroit. Please take a look at this. This was from 1965 as part of Detroit’s bid to host the Olympics.
http://www.archive.org/details/DetroitC1965
The mayor in question is Jerome Cavanagh and what happened during his tenure as mayor is also quite interesting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Cavanagh
How heartbroken he would be if he saw what is beloved city had been reduced to. However we must not despair or snicker about this. We must commit ourselves to be as brave and stoic in the face of this disgrace and organize, spread the word and look for opportunities to turn the tide as this site is helping to.
Posted by Uther at 9:18 PM on August 14
Crisis = opportunity. Why not buy block after block of detroit for next to nothing, as close to the downtown core as possible, and just hold it? At some point the gubbmit will want to “revitalize” the city, and maybe your blocks will be right in the middle.
Posted by at 1:00 AM on August 15
It might make sense to buy the house for the land, and wait a decade or so while the ebb and flow of detroit *might* make its black population decline.
Heck, its value will shoot through the roof even with a Hispanic population.
Posted by A Brainwashed Canadian at 2:23 AM on August 15
Thats 1 dollar too much and dont forget you have to pay the outrageous property taxes on these delapidated pieces of junk that are worthless and wont sell.
Dont get stuck with a piece of trash. Of course you can always be deliquent on the taxes and let the city county seize the property. Thats the smart way to go if it wont sell and it wont.
Posted by at 8:16 AM on August 15
Why would someone who doesn’t have a death wish want to live or even deal with Detroit in any way?
Posted by Bobby at 4:57 PM on August 15
It might make sense to buy the house for the land, and wait a decade or so while the ebb and flow of detroit *might* make its black population decline.
Heck, its value will shoot through the roof even with a Hispanic population.
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Even though Detroit now resembles a warzone that even blacks are fleeing in mass numbers, if some form of gentrification took place there, blacks would soon be screaming that they have been robbed of “their community” and priced out of their old hood. Just as they have started to complain about parts of Harlem experiencing gentrification, and just as they are complaining that San Francisco isn’t black enough anymore. They would conventienly forget, that Detroit was a white community first, one which was built by white hands, and demolished by black hands. Once they move in on any area, after a while, they start to think of it as theirs and theirs alone. They become quite territorial. Of course, whites dare not see any community as belonging to them, or they will cry racism at the top of their lungs.
Posted by at 5:11 PM on August 15
“Meanwhile, the new owner will owe $3,900 in property taxes in 2009 on her dollar purchase unless she challenges the tax assessment.”
$3,900 a year in taxes for a burned out shell of a home? I don’t pay that much on my $350,000 home.
Posted by at 6:43 PM on August 15
That house worth a dollar? I’m trying to figure out how much the owner would have to PAY me in order to get me to take the house off his hands.
Posted by Xenophon at 6:51 PM on August 15
Detroit. A once great city. Built by Whites. Destroyed by blacks.
Posted by at 11:02 PM on August 15
Banks should be allowed to practice redlining. No liberal would lend his own money to a project in such a neighborhood.
Posted by at 12:33 PM on August 16
“Banks should be allowed to practice redlining. No liberal would lend his own money to a project in such a neighborhood.”
Instead they have to respect ‘different’ loaning standards for those who live inside government marked ‘enterprise zones’. Been that way over 40 years.
Posted by at 1:55 PM on August 17
In response to Uther about the fall of Rome, he would to well to read about it in more detail and compare it to the current situation. Rome fell not because of the barbarian hordes at the gate, but because of the enemy within. The hundreds of thousands of foreign slaves that welcomed the invaders with open arms, the 1000’s of legionnaires that were recruited from outside Rome. One of the first major defeats of the Roman empire was at the battle of the Teuteburger Wald in 44 B.C. by, as you may have guessed, a Germanic tribal chief who was raised in Rome, trained in the legion and given Roman citizenship. This battle was an epic milestone in history, it for all time kept Rome from advancing beyond the left bank of the Rhine. Those Germanic and Scottish tribes are all what kept Rome in check from swallowing all of Europe, a Europe that now desperately needs their services once again.
Posted by ciccio at 2:29 PM on August 17
D.E.T.R.O.I.T = “Don’t Ever Try Renting Or Investing There!!!”
Posted by White is Beautiful Robert at 4:25 PM on August 17
I wonder how many years the taxes on the house were unpaid. Even if the $4000 represented 2 years of unpaid taxes, that still seems pretty steep for a house that was apparently in a neighborhood of houses that were not worth $50,000 each PRIOR to the mortgage debacle.
When you consider that low-income people can “rent” a nice apartment or house for virtually nothing through HUD housing, it is hard to see why anybody would want to purchase a small house in a bad neighborhood.
Things in Detroit will probably continue to get worse, although I tend to agree with the person who posted above that an influx of Hispanics could help to stabilize Detroit. A big part of Detroit’s problem is that the housing supply is too large for the declining population, leaving lots of boarded up houses.
Posted by at 12:39 PM on August 19