Buying a House in a Ghetto: Bad Idea?

In My Humble Opinion
44

I guess it depends on how bad the crime is there. Maybe you can find the police logs in the paper for the past few months?

Bad parts of cities aren’t always so bad to live in. My great-grandparents built their house in the thirties, and three housing projects grew up around them - two on the same street and one a block away. My great-grandfather died when I was 11, and by the time I was 18 it was clear that great-grammy was going senile. Her only son, my maternal grandfather, was dying of cancer and couldn’t bear to put her in a home, so he begged my family to come care for her. We did. In the almost three years we lived within a stone’s throw of those three housing projects that had police visits nightly, the only incidents we had were a young kid stealing a sick duck and the police coming over one night to ask if they could look in the basement for an escaped suspect - he turned up in someone else’s basement.

Of course it could easily go the other way too.

45

Here’s my experiences living in what I considered the ghetto…

I discovered I did not like being woken at 2:00 am by a drunken threesome arguing in the alley behind my house, with one threatening to shoot the other.

I discovered I did not like not allowing my child to go outside to play in his own back yard because the unsupervised children in the neighborhood would jump the fence to jump him or steal whatever wasn’t cemented down in the back yard (this included the swings on the swingset). Ditto for not being able to allow him to ride his bike or have neighborhood kids over to play (who would then attempt to walk out of our house with items tucked within their shirts/pants/jackets).

I disliked not being able to send my child to the school that was right up the street. A combination of daily police visits (with sirens blaring), YouTube posted videos of fights within the school, high teen pregnancy rate, low education scores, and just an overall lack of student-teacher respect (much of the time, it went both ways) were a huge deterrant.

I disliked having my car broken into–not once, not twice, but three times. Each time was a major expense to get items repaired.

I disliked it when the police had to block off the street while they investigated the death of the man across the street who got knifed and bleed to death on his front porch—directly across the street from my house.

I disliked looking out my back door to see a buyer sampling the crack in the car of the dealer in the alley behind my house.

I disliked not being able to sit in my livingroom and watch television because (1) a house two doors down from me got a bullet through it’s living room window a few months earlier (not sure how THAT happened, but since it was an older couple, we assume it was a random act) and (2) the bass from the cars driving down the street was so loud, it cause my windows to vibrate, and (3) the music from said cars drowned out the volume on my television.

I didn’t mention the neighbor who sat in his front porch and smoked pot (and prevented me from being able to allow my windows to be opened for the majority of the summer months) and the police force who did absolutely NOTHING when I called to report another neighbor’s domestic violence incident on several occassions.

Good og, I’m glad to live away from there. Sorry for venting.

46

We bought a house in a (slight) ghetto, about seven years ago. The house behind us was a meth lab for several years prior to our arrival, and is still abandoned, as far as I can tell.
Several doors down there was a house with an elderly woman on social security whose dirtbag grandchildren proceeded to move in and take over and turn the place into a thriving circus of narcotic sales. They also had a perpetual “yard sale” consisting of several dozen lawn mowers and other small engine type tools running for months, except for a few isolated several-day stretches where the city would come tell them they had to take down their cardboard “open” sign. I can understand this, because I too have accidentally accumulated stockpiles of lawn mowers and needed to clear my garage of numerous weedwhackers and chain saws.

We had people running from cops crash our gate and sprint through our back yard a couple times. We once had a bunch of cop cars and a swarm of officers in our driveway with a K9 patrol very interested in our privet hedge, where apparently an arsonist had holed up after throwing a brick and a molotov cocktail through the window of a bar up the street.

I’ve had my car broken into three times. All three times the tweakers rummaged around, stole the pennies in my change cup, threw the maps in my glove box around the car, didn’t break anything, and left valuables behind (once, a nice little pocket knife). Once they stole a cache of pens (I am a compulsive pen hoarder) and approximately $0.27 worth of pennies, leaving behind a cell phone charger, a $200 sheepskin and a bag full of surgical tools which, if nothing else, would have made an expensive set of roach clips.

We’re surrounded by strip clubs and hooker boutiques. One club just moved in half a block from an alternative high school, that’s very helpful ladies, thanks.

All in all, though, it’s on its way up, and I feel like we made a good investment. Our neighborhood isn’t becoming “wealthy” and gentrifying by any means, but it’s cleaning up little by little as other “normal folks” like us buy houses and live their normal lives. You might be a contributor to this in your own prospective neighborhood. We bought our house dirt cheap and despite the current housing market, feel very optimistic about selling a few years down the road. I don’t think we’ll clean house on our investment, but we’ll definitely be better off than had we bought less house for more money in a nicer neighborhood. We don’t feel unsafe. There isn’t much violent crime here, and we can live with a little property crime. It’s a little ghetto, but it’s “tweaker crime and hookers” ghetto, not “war zone” ghetto.

I would feel very different about an area where my personal safety or the personal safety of my family members was at serious risk. I don’t mind my car getting rummaged now and again, but bullet holes through the living room window? No, thanks.

47

I’ve never known a buyer to be able to sample the product of a street seller - they were probably sharing some sherbert dip.