I drive into or through St. Louis about 10-15 times per year, although I’m never there for more than a few hours. Anyway, for the past 18 months or so I’ve seen billboards that say “Ug buys ugly houses.” Interestingly enough, along a stretch of I-44 there’s a neighborhood that used to be a bunch of abandoned houses, but is now nice new homes. Are these the work of “Ug”?
Is “Ug’s” plan to buy every negelcted and/or abandoned house in St. Louis and replace it with a new one? Who is “Ug”? And more importantly, does he have a fighting chance? I’m all for gentrification, and St. Louis is an awesome city that could stand to have its neighborhood revitalized and have some taxpayers move into (instead of out of) it.
This is just a guess but "Ug’ is most likely taking advantage of a gentrification boom rather than creating it. Gentrification happens for complex reasons but the main one is that traditioanlly desirable neighborhoods become so expensive that the type of people that would have chosen them in the past can’t afford them anymore but they still have money and a lifestyle they wish to maintain so they buy on the less-desirable fringes of those neighborhoods and improve them. This trend spreads out through certain areas.
When this happens, some companies may try to cash in by buying up property from less savey, lower income buyers by offering them more cash than they may have guessed and no hassle. These companies then “flip” the properties in a fairly short time and maybe do some rennovation to maximize their payout.
Most of Boston is now seriously gentrified and the trend started in the early 1990’s. The last, formerly despicable neighborhoods, are starting to succumb and there is no affordable housing in the national sense of the word and little even by Greater Boston standards very close to the city.
I really don’t believe that companies can engineer this trend. It just happens and they try to take advantage of it.
My understanding is that ‘Ug’ is the mascot for a company that purchases homes regardless of location, state of disprepair, etc. The company than fixes up the home and sells it or bulldozes the site and builds something nicer and newer. My realtor told me awhile back its an alternative for a homeowner who needs to sell and can’t find a buyer, the downside being the homeowner rarely gets near the value they expect in the sale.
Well, if what “Ug” is buying is a boarded-up house that’s been derelict for 30 years, he’s actually doing the owner a favor by getting it off their hands. If, in fact, there even is an owner; aren’t most abandoned and/or derelict properties just that: abandoned. I don’t mean to steer this into GD territory, but I don’t see how tearing down an abandoned house and replacing it with a nice, new one is a bad thing.
The “Ug” billboards have been around for quite some time, but I’m pretty sure they don’t have anything to do with the new homes you’ve seen along I-44. I think the nearby Missouri Botanical Garden has more to do with that. Here is an article on the redevelopment that has been going on in that neighborhood over the last few years.
“Ug” is actully a mascot for the company Homevesters . They are in the buisness of taking slightly run down houses, or houses where the people have to close REALLY quick (forclosure, Divorce, Death, etc) and fixing them up and then selling them. Otherwise known as “Flipping”. If you sell to homevesters you probably won’t get as much as you would selling to another private party, but the prices they off are at least competitive with the “flipping” market. I sold my old house to them because I was moving out and the house was pretty much falling down. It would have cost me over $40k to fix the house to sellable condition, while homevesters offered me about $50k below what I could have sold it for in perfect condition. So they probably made a profit of $10k or so on my house. It was worth it just so I didn’t have to lay out the money (which I didn’t have) and time to fix it up.
Thanks for setting me straight. While I’m glad that the MBG revitalized that once-decrepit neighborhood, it saddens me to learn that “Ug” isn’t some gigantic urban-renewal company that’s going to buy every derelict property in STL and replace it with something new and shiny.