My wife (a real estate agent) will drop any client who goes on and on about race. She says the legal exposure would be too great, even if she could get over her personal disgust.
She works in a brokerage where ALL the agents are ethnically Chinese, and this is a real issue, because there’s a belief that as long as conversations are in Mandarin the law doesn’t apply, nor do “American” social and ethical norms.
Even if the client can legally do what they please (NOT a given) the professionals cannot facilitate discrimination in housing.
It can be very blatant indeed. She’s certainly had clients whose first question is to find out if any of the neighbors are Black. Or what percentage of the building is Black.
There’s also a reluctance to accept offers from people based on their race/ethnicity and the belief that they will be “difficult to deal with”. Leads to very awkward conversations and difficult decisions. One client said the only offer she’d accept from an Indian buyer was a cash one with no contingencies.
Of course she will. My question was whether getting the dream house she fought for was enough to erase the pain. It is possible to carry two conflicting emotions, and for the negative one to go deeper and last longer than the positive one.
then I expect you don’t know what it feels like. I’m glad she was defiant, and I’m glad she won. I hope that was enough to take away the sting. I can’t know how bad the sting was, and neither can you. What I’m arguing for here is to be able to hold on to the sense of how awful it is to be on the receiving end of bigotry, even while celebrating a victory over it. Even after the victory, how much of the awful remains behind?
I know this an oldish post but I wanted to chime in here that I had something very similar to post-partum psychosis after my son was born. I wasn’t as delusional as this lady but I was delusional enough to Google safe surrender laws in my state and some other things I’d rather not share. I knew there was a chance of post-partum depression and we were alert for that, but my mental state deteriorated so quickly there was no chance of intervention. I literally could not speak the words that I needed help.
I got help. Thanks to my husband he brought in an overnight doula and made me get some sleep, and I was sane when I woke up.
But I came away from that experience knowing something nobody ever wants to know. I know how things like this happen.
I don’t disagree with you and like you I hope that after all is said and done it’s worth it. The article gave the impression that it was, but of course we’re only getting it from the writer’s perspective and who knows how she’ll feel a year from now or whatever.
My sympathies. Once, a long time ago, I discovered what it’s like to be inches away from homicide. It’s a very bad place to be, even when one manages to control the urge; it’s an altered mental state.
Yeah, it’s like even being in that state of mind is traumatic. One of the many reasons my beloved son is my only. I can’t risk it again. There’s nothing that can prepare you for it. I’m just so grateful we made it through. But every time I see a new mother loving on her infant I do feel a sense of grief that it was just survival for us. And even though that nightmare mental state lasted only a few days, I was still garden-variety depressed for months afterward. But you know, COVID times.
While I’ve never lived in the suburbs, I understand that condo HOAs are generally different from suburban HOAs - less malicious and predatory. I think it’s because the have more actual work to do, which leaves them less time for annoying people.
Besides, if you want to own your own home and you want to live in the city, what other choice do you have? Someone has to keep the elevators running.
I live in a suburban house with an HOA. It’s not a condo, it’s a freestanding house, but the homes in this neighborhood are all very close to each other on tiny plots of land (where usually you only have one side yard, the other side yard is your neighbor’s) and some of the houses are duplexes. It’s like being in a condo in some ways.
The HOA has rules but they aren’t overbearing and are usually sensible. Rules like you have to keep your (tiny) yard maintained and can’t do crazy crap on the outside of your house. Otherwise they mostly leave people alone.
We’ve lived here more than a decade and never had a problem with them. Once a tree in our landscape died (a tree planted before we bought the house) and they threatened a fine if it wasn’t removed, so I got rid of it myself. (It was a tiny tree.)
That’s another advantage of condo HOAs - other than your front door, you don’t really have an outside of your house, so to speak. That leaves much fewer grounds for harassment.
I used to do groundskeeping as a job years ago, enough that I got to hate it. When my wife (at the time my fiancee) and I were looking for our own place, we mostly looked at condos because I just didn’t want to deal with that stuff. (Neither does she to be honest.)
The opportunity to get this house was too good to ignore though, and the tiny yards make it feel more like a condo than anything else. And we pay a reasonable sum for someone else to keep it maintained. We also got tile and artificial grass in our side yard so that’s one less thing to worry about.
I guess that’s one way to do things, but the smart thing after that would be to expect a return visit from the person who dropped off the money, this time to take it back - and possibly also to exact some vengeance.
A Michigan lawyer is in a wee spot of trouble for allegedly trying to break into the home of a former co-worker in which he was reported to have had a “romantic interest”.
Isn’t it romantic?
Sweet symbols in the moonlight Do you mean that I will fall in love perchance?
This is what they consider an “assortment of concerning items”
Smith was found wearing latex gloves and carrying a backpack that contained a loaded handgun, a large knife, handcuffs, rope, masks, a hammer, a crowbar, duct tape and latex gloves, according to the Royal Oak Police Department.
That poor woman. Jesus god, what that man had planned to do to her is fucking nightmare fuel. The fear she will live with now is heart wrenching.
Am I the only one wondering about “masks”? What sort of mask? N95s? Lone Ranger-style eye masks? Mardi Gras feathered masks? Costume masks that look like celebrities? Balaclavas? Latex hoods that obscure identity but make the person look freakish?
