With the real estate boom over the past 7 years and the massive increase in subprime lending, extended credit, foreclosures, have you noticed a degradation in the qualities of neighborhoods concerning basic home maintenance and upkeep?
I’ve noticed in a lot of neighborhoods around me (older from the 70s to newer in the 00s) that you can pick out the homes where people over extended themselves. In the older neighborhoods people are neglecting to replace roofs, paint, fix their driveways, weed their lawns, etc. and I’m thinking it’s probably a result of financial problems. Even the newer neighborhoods you can pick out the homes where people just ran out of money. The house has sliding doors on the second level where a deck is to be built but it’s five years later and no deck is in place. At night you can see into the houses since they never had the money to install shades/blinds/curtains. A lot of the McMasions look barren inside since they probably couldn’t afford to furnish the thing. Less and less people doing landscaping.
I have absolutely no problem with subprime lending, it allows people to get into a home who would not have had the chance otherwise. The massive forclosure rate is because people cannot pay their bills. They get into a variable rate mortgage and when that golden 3 year period is up they freak out at the interest rate hike and all of a sudden can not afford their bills…this is due in large part to two very different ideas. 1) predatory lending by not so reputable mortgage or home loan companies. ABC home loans gives jack and jill a great break and approves them for a 200K loan when both of them have 500 credit scores. 2) people not taking the time to look into the plan they are signing up for.
This in my opinion does not lend to people mistreating their home. I know plenty of wealthy folk who let their homes go to shit. And plenty of other not so wealthy people who keep their homes immaculate.
I do not think they have anything to do with each other. Subprime lending and a trashy home.
Don’t forget the aging population who live on a fixed income who can’t get out to weed their lawns, fix their roof, or move the mower from the front to the back…
While I’m not sure that’s the case in my neighborhood, I will say that that’s a big reason I haven’t bought a house. My family is pushing it big time - my husband and I are 32 and 36 with two kids, but we still rent. They like to point out that we could probably get a no-down-payment FHA yadda yadda and pay less in mortgage than rent, which might even be true. But what do we do when the furnace needs replacing, or the water heater blows or the roof starts to leak or the bathtub overflows and damages the dining room ceiling? And they all go, “Uh…”
Exactly. When I say we have no savings, I mean we have *no *savings. When something goes wrong now, I call the landlord and the problem goes away all by itself. A down payment is only one of the reasons you need several tens of thousands in the bank before buying a home, I think. I wish more people would think of that before buying a house they can’t afford to upkeep, much less improve.
We get the same thing, WhyNot. I’m 41, husband is almost 48 - and I get it from everyone too. Even my landlady - who is, this very week, replacing the furnace and A/C in my townhouse. If I owned that puppy, I’d be paying for it. No thank you - I have enough debt as it is - and we live paycheck to paycheck (especially considering sometimes he doesn’t even HAVE a payched) so it just wouldn’t work. And I don’t want to risk losing a house, KWIM?
It’s a big problem in my parents’ neighborhood, Hampshire. Part of it is definitely because some families are stretching so hard to pay their mortgage that they can’t afford repairs. A bigger problem, though, is that quite a few of the houses have been foreclosed on, then snapped up for rental housing. The sleazy new landlords won’t pay for maintenance or repairs. (To be fair, there are also some well-maintained rental properties in the neighborhood, but there seem to be fewer of those each time I visit.)
It’s a lousy situation. The value of my parents’ house has plummeted, even though it’s in great shape, because of what’s going on in the neighborhood. They’d like to move, but now don’t know if they can afford to.
I don’t think its subprime lending, I think that they don’t care. My friend’s parents were a great example of this. They bought a new home ten years ago that had French Doors in the kitchen so that you could access a deck. They never built the deck. They owned two houses, a townhouse, and two condos during the ten years that they lived there and they just never cared enough to build a deck.
I have a friend who owns his own place and I think still hasn’t gotten around to putting up curtains. His place is pretty empty which is funny because he’s lived there for two years.
In my neighborhood, the “tightening” of the market is leading to degradation of a few homes. In recent months, three people tried selling their homes and eventually gave up. They’re now renting out the homes and living elsewhere - the one across from me had already bought another house and moved into it, so for about four months, they were carrying two mortgages. Ouch.
Sadly, their tenants put exactly zero effort into upkeep - they’ve turned off the lawn sprinklers so the lawn is now about 50/50 bare dirt and weeds. Another house further down the street hasn’t seen its lawn watered or mowed in weeks and the weeds are knee-high.
The people who owned the house on the corner apparently didn’t put much effort into screening their tenants, and we now have a front yard filled with garbage as they just dump their garbage at the curb, but they’ve overfilled the trash can, so the garbage company won’t take it, or the recycle bins that they’ve also overfilled with garbage. As a result, garbage blows around and gets re-distributed to other lawns. Plus, they’re LOUD. The sheriff has been called multiple times in just the past two weeks for public nuisance and disturbing the peace.
I would also add, builders reacted to the big demand for "Mcmansions’, by putting up many cheaply-constructed houses, which are now falling apart. I once was in 10-year old “McMansion”-the walls had plaster cracks, the doors stuck because the jambs were out of plumb, and the roofs were giving out (cheap, rock-bottom grade shingles). Once such a house begins to deteriorate, its like cance-the cheap windows are no good-so they must be replaces. then the foundation cracks, and you have water in the basements. Results: instant slums!