The evil that homeowners do

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Lately I’ve been thinking about homeowners. I’ve come to conclusion that being homeowners, and thus having their money locked up in one object - their house, makes them do some pretty rotten things. Not only property value concerns, but their feelings that they have an inalienable right to perfect peace and serenity within their neighborhoods, no matter what the cost.

Example: A friend of mine went to a neighborhood meeting one day. The subject of renovating a park came up - to make it something that kids and families would actually like to go to. The homeowners in the neighborhood opposed it. Why? It would bring more traffic and parking problems into their little neighborhood. Much better to have something that no one would want to go to.

Another example: In the affluent cities around here, the homeowners have kicked up an incredible fuss whenever the city tries to build affordable housing (in compliance with state law!). Result, no housing gets build. We wouldn’t want THOSE kinds of people living amongst us, would we? It would definetly bring down our property value!

Other examples: The situation of massive “white flight” whenever an African-American moves into their neighborhood. Somtimes, within a few months, most of the houses go on sale. Hey, the homeowners say, it’s not us who are prejudiced. Other people are, and because of this our property value is decreasing. So we just want to protect our investment. Yeah… right.

Not to mention the opposition of homeowners to any development in their neighborhoods (NIMBYism), that contribute to the problem of urban sprawl. IN fact, a massive housing shortage is in the best interest of the homeowner, so they do everything to discourage any new housing to be built.

Is there any defense anyone can give to these guys? Does anyone else agree with me? Is it the system? Wouldn’t it be better if we all were forced to rent? Tell me your thoughts…

2

So, are you proposing that the state own all the housing? I bet you’ll like your choices in that case!

Actually, some of what you mentioned touches on why I am so glad that Houston does not have zoning.

3

We live across the street from a park. The park takes up a whole block, the basketball and tennis courts are on our side, the kiddy-type play equipment is on the other side.

I really like sitting on the porch, watching the kids play HORSE (or whatever it is they play), just watching people in general. (I do live in Iowa.)

But when the weather warms up and I want to sleep with windows open? Uh uh. The basketball goes on all night long. I figure it’s a trade-off – closing the windows ain’t no big deal. (Although I’d feel differently if I didn’t have central air.)

I’m all for parks, and having them in neighborhoods rather than on the edge of town, or in unpopulated areas, means that someone’s gonna be keeping an eye on things.

As far as the race of any potential neighbors? This is small-town Iowa, and we sorely lack ethnic diversity.

I don’t care who lives next door, as long as they turn the music down after 11. I’ve been known to retaliate with Roger Whittaker.

“There’s a ship raising anchor in the HARRRRRRRRRR-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRR”

(or something like that – haven’t had to play it for awhile)

4

I’m going to go out on a limb and say this is a bunch of hooey. (Especially seeing as how you live in San Mateo.) I’m thinking you’d have to go pretty rural to find a neighborhood that didn’t already have non-white homeowners, meaning: No reason to move and no where to move to if you were that small-minded.

There are several homes in our area for sale, but only because housing values are skyrocketing and real estate people are beating down our doors wanting to sell our houses. (I don’t know where these people are planning to move to. Unless they leave the state entirely they’re just going to have to pay as much to buy another place.)

“Mrs. Krabappel, are you trying to seduce me?”

5

The only defense I can give is that I’ve never seen the above happen, and I’ve lived in rural, urban, and suburban neighborhoods of various degrees of wealth.

IMHO, if a white guy is dumb enough to put up his house for panic sale just because a black guy moves onto the block, he deserves his fate. Fortunately, I’ve never lived in a neighborhood full of dumb white guys.

6

I’ve lived in a good number of places, and hadn’t witnessed anything remotely like this, until I moved to the Southeastern U.S. Then, I admit, I heard exactly that phrasing from some neighbors, when our house was on the market. The genuine ignorance of the remarks really blew me away, but I certainly wouldn’t cast all homeowners into the same mold. I’d never heard such things before, and as I attribute them to a cultural viewpoint, I doubt I’ll ever hear them again.

7

This would make a great debate, I think.
An inalienable right to peace and serenity within their neighborhoods? Those bastards! Don’t they know their property belongs to “the people” and not just the people who actually pay for it and live there? As for “white flight”, I hadn’t heard that one since the 70’s; wasn’t that the subject of an “All in the Family” episode?

8

In Calif, USA, where I am, the City Council makes the decisions on this. The council is voted in. People just think ours sucks & the council sneers & says, so you shouldn’t have voted for us.

9

Ahh, neighborhoods. Affluent white males and their stay-at-home wives and their 2.5 children. I live in one of those.

Last year, we had a woman buy a house in our neighborhood with the idea that she was going to take in 4 pregnant female college students. She had to apply for a “group home” permit to do so, so she did, and the city approved it. When the homeowner’s association found out about it, they went balistic. Raised such a fuss that the city reneged on the permit, and the woman was not allowed to move in.

These are the same group of people who consider themselves Christians, and were quick to put up anti-abortion and pro-family political signs when such topics came up in the local elections. I had a hard time with this - on the one hand, they want to ban abortions and severly restrict young girl’s access to birth control. On the other hand, when someone wants to take in some single, pregnant women and help them out, they say “Not in MY neighborhood!” Sick, if you ask me. Very sick.

10

Well, maybe they have small children, and they worry about a higher traffic problem, and the potential for more accidents. This could be a neighborhood where you can play catch in the street without fear of getting run over, and they would like to keep it that way.

If I work, and save, and sacrifice to buy a nice house in a nice area, then you’re damn straight that’ll I’d be mad if someone wanted to build low-income housing in my area too. While I could care less what “THOSE” kinds of people are, the property value of my home is very important to me.

This is the same as the last example. If the value of my property is going down, for whatever reason, then you bet your ass that I’m going to move. It doesn’t take long for a very nice area to turn into a bad area once those values go down. You can rant all you want, but blaming someone because they don’t want to loose money is foolish.

I would certainly hope not. On of the things I hold dear is the ability to own something…to call it my own. And if I started to think that the value of my home was declining because of near-by housing, then yes, I’d sell and move on.

11

It seems I have to balance my good little liberal instincts with my crusty curmudgeonliness here.

For most of us, our homes are the only major asset we’ll ever have (right now, my 401K is worth about 1/5 the assessed value of my home. I plan on using it to help pay something toward the little Kunilous’ college, and maybe have something left to help finance our retirement. You’re damn straight we’ll fight tooth and nail to “protect” our neighborhood and cut our losses if we see something we don’t like. For those of us who aren’t cashing in stock options on our dot.com startup, this is all we have.

My parents were just about the last people who stayed in the old neighbrohood after it became integrated, and they did watch their property values go way down. Some of the turnover was because of retiring homeowners who wanted to get out of their large homes and into something smaller, some of it was panic selling. Even leaving the issue of property values aside, the neighborhood got rougher and rougher. So while I applaud my parents for sticking it out until my mother died and my father was in his 70s, they paid a price for it.

As to whether we’d all be better renting – obviously you haven’t rented from a landlord who won’t make repairs, won’t police the tenants, and in general is using the property for a cash cow. You can have it. We’re much happier buying, thank you.

I understand all the words, they just don’t make sense together like that.

12

Hey, I never said it happens where I live now. San Mateo (due to the fact it has a lot of renters and lower income families, I would guess) is fairly tolerant. But it happens almost as a rule. White flight does exist. How many truly mixed (African-American and whites) neighborhoods have you seen? Maybe here and there, a neighborhood or two… but it’s quite rare.

There have been numerous exposes of housing discrimination in different cities. A white guy goes to the inquire about houses for sale, and is shown the houses for sale. A black guy goes in, and is told there are no houses for sale yet.

Actually, to anyone familiar with self-organizing systems, it clearly doesn’t require much discrimination for the different races to seperate themselves. It doesn’t need to be redneck-town, it just needs a few people to start the trend of race seperation.

13

[quote]
If I work, and save, and sacrifice to buy a nice house in a nice area, then you’re damn straight that’ll I’d be mad if someone wanted to build low-income housing in my area too. While I could care less what “THOSE” kinds of people are, the property value of my home is very important to me.[\QUOTE]

And there’s the concept I can’t fully comprehend: exactly how the label “low income housing” translates into lower property values. Does the phrase "translate into “tacky boxes of crumbling drywall or old trucks on blocks dotting the front lawns” with crack dealers parked on the street corners? Perhaps there is something here I simply can’t grasp. I’ve never seen a high income buy good taste, high class or elevated morals.

Again, I see no correlation between the races of my neighbors and the value of my property. Are we envisioning the “trucks on blocks” and “crack dealers” again? Pardon my lack of understanding, but while I’ve lived in several different regions, this still seems like quite a leap. Perhaps someone can explain this to me.

I believe that my property values are determined by more than my income tax statement and my racial heritage, thank goodness, and if my net worth is so dependent upon the fears held by others towards people who are different from them, then I am probably living in the wrong neighborhood.

14

I live in the Southeast. My neighborhood is predominantly white (70-75%) with 20% black and the last 5% mixed between MiddleEast, Indian and Oriental families. No one has “fled” the neighborhood because of the non-white families moving in. The property values have not gone down. I have owned a home in this neighborhood for 12 years now. The only reason that I would leave is because I would prefer to live in a quieter area and we are becoming quite congested with everything that is growing up around us. However, I live in an area that is growing in geometric proportions. I prefer to live on the outskirts of town, usually outside of the city limits. I think that where I live is fairly well integrated. We have several large universities and teaching/research hospitals nearby that lure people in from all over the world. So I’m lucky to be able to live around many different ethnic groups.

That may make me an unusual southerner, but I wouldn’t be the only one. The south is changing, slowly, but changing.

15

Well, yeah, I’d like peace and quiet in my neighborhood. Why is this a bad thing? Are you suggesting no one should have peace and quiet? Why shouldn’t I try to preserve the peace and quiet in my neighborhood, when that is one of the reasons bought the house in the first place? Do you have any idea what a hassle it is to move? I can’t just hitch my house up to a car, and drive it somewhere else. Am I supposed to take my kids away from their friends? I have a much larger investment in my house than just money.

My mother-in-law just had someone say to her that they (the other person, not my M-i-L) would have to move because a black family bought a house in the neighborhood. This would be in Oakland or Macomb county, MI, part of the Detroit metropolitan area. Hardly rural. I imagine it’s pretty rare, though, anymore. My neighborhood is new, and is ethnicly mixed from the start, so I doubt I personally have to deal with this.

It is too clear, and so it is hard to see.

16

This is exactly my point. Let me ask you something - what do you think should happen to these low-income people?

  1. They should go somewhere else to live, not to my neighborhood.
  2. I don’t care what happens to them.
  3. They should have some sort of housing.

Now, you can’t argue (1), because there would be someone else in any other place arguing the same thing, so it’s a logical contradiction. (2) is the prevaling attitude. In San Jose, CA, working men and women often can’t afford a place to live. In some cases they rent “floor space”, in others they are simply homeless. But of course the sitation will take care of itself, I guess, since the homeless have such short life expectancy!

On the other hand, if you agree that they should live somewhere, then your opinions above show the fundamental flaw in the system, since they have led you to contradiction. This is exactly why people should not be allowed to own homes.

Don’t you think there is a place for morality here, or is just bottom-line?

17

all of us rent???,
I want to be able to tear down a wall, if I so desire, and run wires hidden from sight (not a lupm under a carpet. I want to install perminate lighting fixtures. try to get a landloard to allow that. I bought a house because I want to be the one responcible for it’s upkeep. We the people of the neiborhood should decide weather or not big brother builds a park here, why should anyone else? - they don’t own land here (now if they want to buy some - then we’ll talk). The people who live in an area should decide if they want a nice park build or have it stay a dirt lot - not people from other towns and definately not someone elected to run a county or worse a state who has never been there and even if they have, has no land in that area.
As for so called ‘white flight’, 1st I thing it is a non issue, it probally was a factor many years ago. but why the F$%^ do you care if a homeowner wants to sell his home, what f^%$en bussiness is it of yours why he wants to sell, It’s his land and he is just selling it for crying out loud. And you say that no one shold own their home, just because they might sell it when someone of another race moves into the area.
I remember readi g somewhere that one of the Founding Fathers wanted to include property in the Dec. of Ind. as one of the rights all men have.

18

This is a topic well worth debate, and I would commend Ray Suarez’s book “The Old Neighborhood” to anyone who wants a little deeper insight into it.

In my experience, here’s how the cycle usually goes:

  1. Nice, new housing is built, and immediately occupied by upwardly mobile people who want a bigger house, nice, new schools, etc.

  2. 15 or 20 years go by. There’s natural inflow and outflow, but in general the neighborhood remains stable.

  3. The first group of homeowners see their kids grow up and move out, get ready for retirmenet and look to sell the home.

  4. Because there are newer, nicer neighborhoods springing up, the latest wave of buyers, while still upwardly mobile, aren’t quite as (relatively) well-off as before.

  5. The neighborhood gets a little poorer, the schools drop down a notch. At some point, THOSE PEOPLE (you can fill in your least-favorite group) start to move in.

  6. At this point panic selling among the original reamining homeowners AND the second wave of upwardly mobile neighbors kicks in.

  7. Many houses go up for sale in a relatively short time and owners take the first offer. Property values implode.

Does “white flight” play a part in this? You betcha. But some of it is the natural “turnover” of a neighborhood. Even if we live in the same city as our grandparents did, how many of us live in the same neighborhood our parents grew up in?

When it comes to housing, we’re all bigots.

I understand all the words, they just don’t make sense together like that.

19

I can sympathise with a lot of the NIMBY thinking (Not In My BackYard), since it recently happened in my town. A little background: we’re in a flood zone. Floyd knocked quite a wide swath through this town last fall, and a dozen or so houses were bought outright by the state and condemned. The town is at the intersection of three rivers, and pretty much all of the buildable land already has houses on it (except for a few small parks, and where the stripmall burned down three years ago – oh, but now I’m hijacking myself).

So, when a developer came in with a plan to use about 60 acres of stream and swamp (they call it “wetlands” now), along with another 40 or so acres of town park that they wanted to buy out from under us, to put in a couple of hundred condos and a sea of blacktop for parking…well, you can bet people got a little upset. The area where they wanted to build is straight down about thirty feet from the nearest road, and, as I mentioned, has one of the three above-referenced rivers running through it. The main concession to flood prevention was that the actual condos would be built high up enough so that they would stay above water. (Unspoken corrolary: while the entire parking lot, and most of the rest of the neighborhood, became a good-sized lake.)

The entire town was up in arms (I’m not even touching on the traffic problems this would have caused, since it’s harder to define them), and, after a couple of very loud public hearings, the developer withdrew his plans. But, of course, they still own the original land, and could do something else with it.

That kind of NIMBYism is good (or do I just think that because it was in my town?), since it dealt with gaping flaws of logic and godd sense in the original project. The condos would probably have been middle income (i.e., yuppies without kids) rather than lower, but I don’t remember that aspect coming up at all during the discussions.

Other kinds of NIMBYism (I’ve seen people organize against schools, day care centers and, increasingly, house of worship) are harder to defend. Nothing like that has come up in my immediate neighborhood, so I haven’t had to think about it personally.

I haven’t seen any “white flight” in this town, but we’re pretty well out in suburbia. I think the “one middle class black family moves into the neighborhood, all the white housewives shriek and pack their bags” is a '70s phenomenon, at least around here. But in the neighborhoods and towns immediately surrounding the larger inner cities, it’s a slightly different story. My in-laws live in an old streetcar suburb of one of the major blighted cities of north jersey, and there has been some grumbling in that town about “those people” – not necessarily black, but coming in from the city – moving in. (Though we heard that more when it started, about a decade ago.) But, all in all, it seems to be going well, probably since the economy has been strong and crime has been down. Property values are still going up (due to the great economy), or at least holding steady. If the thing that people fear actually happens, and the sky doesn’t fall, then they don’t fear it anymore.

So my short answer (after the above long, convoluted answer) is that, yes, property owners are more conservative, because they’ve got more to lose. People with kids are also more conservative. Anything you’ve got that you can lose makes you be more careful; that’s just the way of the world. Keeping everybody with nothing so that they won’t be afraid of losing it is a pretty rotten answer, to my mind.

I’m your only friend
I’m not your only friend
But I’m a little glowing friend
But really I’m not actually your friend
But I am

20

<<<<<property owners are more conservative, because they’ve got more to lose. People with kids are also more conservative. Anything you’ve got that you can lose makes you be more careful; that’s just the way of the world. Keeping everybody with nothing so that they won’t be afraid of losing it is a pretty rotten answer, to my mind.>>>>>

I agree with Da Ace. You call it ‘evil’, and I hadn’t thought of it in those terms. We have the most invested and the most to lose.

There was a pawn shop that opened up down the road from us, and we campaigned against it. Why? Not because of that particular business owner, but because of what usually ends up following that kind of business.

When you want to buy a house, to raise your kids, and support your local schools, where do you want to do it? Next to a local tavern? Or surrounded by other neighbors who are seeking the same things that you are?

Judy

“Um, according to who? Nothing more than a high brow troll, though occasionally the bi polar personality swung in a constructive direction on innocuous topics.” Omniscient