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Suburban Ruins and The Ethics of House Flipping

People turn to the past because they are looking for something that they don’t find in the present — comfort and well-being… Only the wealthy or the very poor can live in the past; only the former do so by choice.

- Witold Rybczynski, Home

Although her home has been on the market for several years now, my aunt (by marriage) isn’t stalling because buyers are asking too low. She’s hesitating due to emotional attachment to the property — it’s the house her father designed and built, and the home she grew up in. I lived there briefly myself when I was going to college nearby. Recently, she was to close on a deal with a young married couple, but then she looked up the wife on the internet and discovered the woman is well known as an area “house flipper.”

This neighborhood eschews miles and miles of Washington, DC suburban sprawl with its vestiges of pedestrian life: it is a 10 minute walk to the West Falls Church metro, and 5 minutes to a main street with a coffee shop, dry cleaner, TJ Maxx, a good balance of chains and small businesses. A bike trail is nearby.

Because of its conveniences and location, the land is pricey. Buyers willing to pay for West Falls Church real estate generally want several bedrooms and five baths. Over the years, my aunt has complained about the trasformation of modest homes — 70s-style “post-and-beam extravaganzas” as this article in Residential Architect puts it — into regurgitated palatial fantasies. Soon hers will be the only non McMansion on the block.

And gross remodeling may be its inevitable second life. For now, she’s still waiting for someone who will respect the design of the place. This isn’t some kind of a penance — the house is really beautiful. There are few places I’ve felt quite as cozy in, as I have reading a book on the back porch looking out at the garden. The use of the space, the way the windows are shaped, so much of my idea of a perfect house comes from living there that year in 2003.

A few years ago, I was guiltily obsessed with A&E and TLC house flipping programs and marveled at how often the flipper blatantly conned people out of their property. The worst of them was Armando Montelongo, a San Antonio flipper who is half as likeable as Roger Clemens, just a little less weird than that plastic surgeon on Dr 90210, an internet scam artist, and known for habitually neglecting to pay his contractors.

“Mondo” does a lot of objectionable things on the show, from piggish to illegal. He once had his wife and sister-in-law dress in beekeeper costumes to exterminate a colony of bees, so he could save $300 on a professional beekeeper. He watched them from a lawnchair, beer in hand. Then there’s something about him hiring children of illegal aliens for a demolition project. Now he’s dealing with several lawsuits — facing jailtime — not paying one contractor, owing backtaxes, and the 20 or so properties of his that went into foreclosure. The guy is a crook and A&E should have known better.

But I most despised him when he’d make false promises to whomever he’s buying the house from: that he’d never strip the Victorian wallpaper. That he likes the bar in the kitchen their father made. That he’ll keep the structure the same way, but just clean it up a little bit. A widow or widower passes, and the descendants can’t afford to keep up the house. All they want is to know someone is enjoying the home as grandpa made it. Money isn’t a main issue at a time like that. So he pretend to agrees, taking the bargain, and soon after breaks his word — neglecting the family’s wishes on TV! It’s not just knucklehead-ed behavior, it’s usually aesthetically disappointing: ironing out everything that made the home unique in order to appeal to the most buyers. A hardwood floor and granite countertop sacrificial rape of a property.

Now, my politics are more freemarket than most: I don’t believe in rent control for the reason of economic scarcity, but sale of a home has so much more at stake than most financial transactions. A price that is agreed to with the understanding the buyer will preserve without excessively altering the property, can be a binding agreement. But does this ever happen? I’m right now trying to find examples of this in real estate cases. I guess this is more of a post I’m writing as I’m thinking about it, rather than a clear statement of any kind. And any books readers might recommend on the subject are much appreciated.

Like with the Neutra Kaufmann House house that just sold in Christie’s auction. Is it only a tacit understanding that the buyer isn’t going to tear down a wing to build a gnome garden?

Here’s an example of preservation gone to an unpleasant extreme:

Richard Lucas has been trying to win permission to cut through his elderly, infirm parents’ front porch so they can get from their living quarters onto the street without climbing stairs. And for more than a year, the D.C. historic preservation authorities have found reasons to say no to a ramp.

After all, as the city’s architectural historian put it, “repeating porches of similar height and depth create a notable pattern and rhythm” along the Lucas family’s Mount Pleasant street, and the District wouldn’t want to let that rhythm be broken just to accommodate a couple of old folks who have lived in their house for 47 years.

Houses in communities respond to the changes in houses all around them, which is why I fear my aunt’s beautiful house will eventually go all Stepford. Even if they did find buyers to fall in love with it, there is the risk that given time they might give in to the status-conscious vibe of the neighborhood and build additions.

One of the best articles, one of the most linked-to essays this year, The Next Slum? by Christopher B Leinberger for The Atlantic, so immediately struck at the hearts of most of us, the unfortunate truth that the wealthy really are taking over our cities. Sure crime is down, but you try to live in Brooklyn on an artist’s salary.

One vacant home, means the depreciation of an entire neighborhood. And down like dominos the foreclosure crisis, which may likely “stay with us well into the next decade,” as Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Economy.com says in Bloomberg, puts pressure on all the neighboring homes until they too eventually tip.

It’s easier to erect a new house than it is to change an entire landscape. Recently, I learned there’s a “ghost cloverleaf” in Canton, MA, just several miles from me. Eventually I’ll check it out and post about it, until then, here’s this write up on Xconomy:

[It] was constructed between 1962 and 1968, and is the northern half of what was originally intended to be a fully working interchange between I-95, aka the Southwest Expressway, and I-93, aka Route 128, aka the Yankee Division Highway.

From here, the state’s highway blueprints called for the Southwest Expressway to continue about 10 miles north into Boston. It would have barreled through farmland and residential neighborhoods in Milton and joined up with the American Legion Highway, which would have been converted into an expressway running along the eastern edge of Franklin Park. From there, the expressway would have turned Blue Hill Avenue into a six-lane gash through Roxbury and Dorchester, eventually connecting with I-695 near the present-day intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Southampton Street (which happens to be about four blocks from where I live in the South End).

Never heard of I-695? That’s because it was never built, either. Also called the Inner Belt, it was part of a scheme laid out in 1948 to help interstate drivers and truckers avoid the congestion in downtown Boston by circling through outer Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, and Somerville. Perhaps it was a good idea at one time. But had this 7-mile loop been constructed, the Boston cityscape would be immeasurably different today.

“We do not pine for period cuisine,” Rybczynski wrote, paraphrasing Adolf Loos’ point that nostalgia is absent in most other aspects of our everyday lives. And most houses, just out of practicality due to changes in energy usage, really should be remodeled. But there are reasons we might value those floors that no matter how many times you sweep, will never seem clean. Reviewing Flipping Out, the only remaining house flipping TV show on the air today, Heather Havrilesky cleverly compares two of her neighborhood cafes. One where “tables are the wrong height for the chairs, the chairs are uncomfortable, the walls are covered in bad art, the bad stereo system blares the worst of Journey and Lionel Richie, the breakfast sandwich features over-buttered bread and that fake-smoke-flavor ham, the room is too hot or freezing cold, the teenage cashiers are friendly but inattentive, and a herd of middle-of-the-room flies circles endlessly in the sparsely populated dining area,” another a, “more corporate place nearby where everything is right. The tables and chairs are made of smooth wood and are perfectly placed, the menu is tastefully designed, the lighting makes everyone look like models at a photo shoot, classical music soothes patrons from a safe distance, cool breezes blow in the open French doors, and the small cup of gazpacho they serve has little slices of melon and a dab of pesto in it. Delightful! But it’s always crowded with people who have expensive haircuts and alarmingly nice shoes.”

As repellent and deeply wrong as the local cafe is, the overpriced, meticulously designed corporate eatery seems certain to transform you, slowly but surely, into the kind of person who pays too much for haircuts and shoes, the kind of person who experiences gazpacho that doesn’t have a little dab of pesto in it the way the rest of us experience a herd of middle-of-the-room flies. And therein lies the paradox of American upward mobility: The higher you climb, the thinner the air gets, until you can barely breathe.

Nostalgic or not, my aunt’s house as a standing protest against the McMansion-ization of suburban DC, and a call for the better days. If anyone is looking for such a property, please get in touch.

Images by William Eggleston.

Previously:

Collection or Clutter: Do You Toss or Save Grampa’s Old Paintings?
Rules for an American Fantasy Road Trip
A Hundred Chances: White Lies Post Facebook
The World’s Strangest Housing Communities

The World’s Strangest Housing Communities

“People at Eden-Olympia have no time for getting drunk together, for infidelities or rows with the girlfriends, no time for adulterous affairs or coveting their neighbor’s wives, no time ever for friends,” Wilder Penrose says in J. G. Ballard’s Super Cannes. The “great defect is that there is no need for personal morality. Thousands of people live and work here without making a single decision about right and wrong. The moral order is engineered into their lives along with the speed limits and the security systems.”

Many of Ballard’s later novels investigate the coven-like nature of suburbia — gated communities, high rises. The architecture and technologies designed to save us time and make our lives easier, only dull our senses. Or, as Gang of Four put it, “The problem with leisure, is what to do for pleasure.”

Penrose, the psychiatrist in Ballard’s fictional French business park, believes there’s a science to it: “Part of the mind atrophies. A moral calculus that took thousands of years to develop starts to wither from neglect. Once you dispense with morality the important decisions become a matter of aesthetics. You’ve entered an adolescent world where you define yourself by the kind of trainers you wear.”

Ballard isn’t the only writer to explore these themes. Jingoism at the backyard level is the target in TC Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain. Neal Stephanson wrote about “burbclaves,” lots of franchised nations in suburbia. Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower takes place in a walled Los Angeles suburb. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino sees housing communities optimistically as chocolate boxes. Then again, every example comes from the main character’s imagination. Here are several examples stranger than fiction:

The Dystopia: Alphaville, Sao Paulo, Brazil

A housing community has to be equal parts elitist and oblivious to take its name from a dystopic film. I first read about this on Ballardian, appropriately as Ballard has long championed Godard’s film. This Alphaville is a walled city in the world’s fourth-largest metropolis. Hundreds of residents helicopter in and out over electric fences. Over a thousand security guards are employed. Residents watch “TV Alphaville,” a twenty -four hour monitor of people entering and exiting the premises. The reason for Alphaville’s militarized facility is clear: income disparity. From a 2002 Washington Post article: “the richest 10 percent of the population controlling more than 50 percent of the wealth, while the poorest 10 percent control less than 1 percent.” The article also explains Brazil’s $2 billion-a-year security industry. “Brazilians are armoring and bulletproofing an estimated 4,000 cars a year, twice as many as in Colombia, which is in the midst of a 38-year-old civil war.”

The Rumor: Wedderburn, “Midgetville,” Vienna, Virginia

Spend time in Northern Virginia and you’ll eventually hear of a community of little people in little houses…but no one ever knows how to get there. Given Fairfax County is a clown car of suburban landscaping — between two main drags three blocks apart, the tract housing seems to go on for miles — it’s entirely believable.

Wedderburn was built in the 1930s, in a wood along the W&OD Railroad. These cottages –some the size of small sheds — could be seen from the train, leading many to wonder if they were home to retired circus performers. That neighboring town Bailey’s Crossroads is connected to the Ringling Brothers collaborator made it believable.

Over the years, the rumors tended toward the sensationalistic. People said the “midgets” would attack your car if you drove near it. In 2004, after deciding to sell to a land developer, Wedderburn’s true identity was revealed. George Wedderburn’s relatives, who lived in some of the cottages and rented the others, said they were sick of teenage “midget hunters” vandalizing their property. See Nathan Rustlethwaite’s Flickr set for more. Sadly, it was torn down in March of 2008.

Update: From the comments on Hit and Run, I learned there’s a similar rumor about a neighborhood in New Jersey. Wikipedia says those small houses have no occupants, but does not give any history of its construction. There’s another community of “midget houses”in Oakdale, Long Island, New York. And this website claims there are a number of real gated midget communities in Kentucky, California, Ohio, and elsewhere. Maybe.

The Utopia: Auroville, Tamil Nadu, India

“Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole,” Mirra Alfassa, “The Mother” said, announcing the city’s incorporation in 1968. Most forms of private property are forbidden. Residents use electronic cards, rather than paper or coin currency, although visitors can pay in cash. The enormous golden golf ball is Matrimandir (”Temple of the Mother,”) the “soul of the city.” It is located in a large open area called “Peace.” If this is sounding like Jonestown or the Heaven’s Gate community, it might surprise you to learn religion too is banned. “The Mother” said, “The failure of religions is… because they were divided. They wanted people to be religious to the exclusion of other religions, and every branch of knowledge has been a failure because it has been exclusive. What the new consciousness wants (it is on this that it insists) is: no more divisions. To be able to understand the spiritual extreme, the material extreme, and to find the meeting point, the point where that becomes a real force.” Among the community’s other quirk’s — public drinking fountains have “dynamised” water, water that has “listened” to Bach and Mozart.

BBC recently investigated claims that some Aurovillians sexually abuse the children who live in poverty outside the city. The reporter called it a “brazen” practice, made worse by Auroville’s absent rule of law.

The Ruins: San Zhi, “Desolation Row,” Taipai, Taiwan

This pod city might have been a holiday destination for those who dream of living in a futuristic fairytale. But from what little is written about San Zhi in English, it appears construction was abandoned as the project was just weeks from completion.

There seems to be nothing wrong with the structure architecturally. Apart from the fabulous design, it seems a functional concept. Some speculate it was designed to build more pods vertically, if demand increased. Apparently, construction was halted as a number of fatal accidents plagued construction. Ghost stories abound, (but then again, there are bloggers who still believe in Midgetville.) The buildings have since been left to rot.

The web has its fill of ghost towns and urban ruins photography, but the obvious science fiction influence and its perplexing lack of use (I’ve heard more than several people say they’d love to spend the night there) make this the strangest example of an abandoned space yet. Google Sightseeing has a feature, and Craig Ferguson’s photographs are extraordinary. (More photos here.)

The Counterfeit: Orange County, China

China doesn’t just manufacture fake Louis Vuitton bags. They also copy United States gated communities. This Orange County is miles from the Beijing airport, and 45 minutes from the Forbidden City.

California McMansions developers were flown in to develop a replica of The OC, even taking its name. Ten miles from the Beijing Olympics facilities, when the New York Times reported on it in 2003, the six-lane highways were brand new and most of the land surround the OC had yet to be developed. It seems likely that space is under construction right now.

It would be unfair to criticize them just for ignoring their own culture. After all American architecture is just a pastiche of other traditions, and plenty of replicas like the windmills in Japan, are charming enough. Good magazine notes an “entire cottage industry has sprung up in academia to tar the development with the latest post-modern jargon…Other critics, with far bigger megaphones, see the development as emblematic of China’s burgeoning car culture and its wholehearted embrace of environmentally destructive growth.”

Rather Orange County, China is a mistake largely because it was built after suburbia’s failure was widely understood. Rather than embracing Jan Gehl and Jane Jacobs’ principles of urban planning, they implemented poor land use. If there’s anywhere China should be replicating, it’s Melbourne.

China, by the way, is home to another community living in the past: Nanjie Village, a re-collectivized land, nostalgic for the days of Mao Zedong.

Elsewhere

I considered including the proposal for Paulville to this list. It is an upcoming gated community for Ron Paul supporters. But I really doubt it will come to fruition. Previously, there was the Free State project, and New Hampshire still isn’t a major libertarian mecca. The same people who value individual choice, are unlikely to move specifically to join a community. It’s just not that high a priority to one’s personal interests

Other examples I thought of, like Celebration, Florida, Disney’s suburb, which opened its gate in 1997, are not so strange once one looks at the details. The people and the secrets may be unique, but the development itself differs not much from another planned community halfway across the globe.

Planned communities always hint at mob rule in its extremes — lynchings or what happened to Kitty Genovese. You may not agree with the Super Cannes character who believes that “places like Eden-Olympia are fertile grounds for an messiah with a grudge. The Adolph Hitlers and Pol Pots of the future won’t walk out of the desert. They’ll emerge from shopping malls and corporate business parks.” But it’s something to think about before signing up for a colony on Mars.

Suburban Ruins and The Ethics of House Flipping

The World’s Strangest Housing Communities

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