You Could Own the Aliens' UFO!
You Could Own the Aliens' UFO!
1,066 square-feet could be yours for the paltry sum of $289,000
I’m lucky in that the landlord from which I rent his spare toilet for $875 month happens to be one of my best friends that I’ve known since middle school. (I realize it’s bad praxis to fraternize with landlords but he’s my friend and also lets me pay rent late, so ultimately who’s to say what’s right?)
He’s promised to never raise my rent, but the reason why that would never be possible has a lot do with why I got such a sweetheart deal in the first place: The house next door at 880 Bellows Avenue.
America’s housing is racially segregated in 2021 and yet you’re still more likely to live next to someone of a different race than you are to someone in a different tax bracket. At the end of the day, we Americans like to live around people who look, talk and act exactly like ourselves.
I was proud to break that stereotype when I moved to Bellows Avenue, that was until I familiarized myself with the tribe of aliens that lived next door.
I could deal with the around-the-clock in-fighting and petty crime and rotating cast of characters that were always on edge of a psychotic breakdown, like the time the matriarch of the family drove into the tree in my backyard in the middle of the day and walked away with the pace of somebody strolling into a Kroger. There was also the time her son got arrested for soaking her car with gasoline, with her and a baby inside, and threatening to “cook both you bitches alive.” Another time her other son tried to sell me a rocket propelled-grenade that he “found” on a construction site.
What was harder to tolerate was their general filth. Multiple bags of trash left on their back doorstep for days at a time for the rats to pick apart. Trash, including dirty diapers, strewn about their front lawn. They didn’t care about any of it, and to this day I am still amazed at how much trash a single family could produce given that I never saw them carrying anything into the house in the first place.
The day the tall alien child told me that they were moving will probably be the highlight of my 2021. They became probably the only people in the last 50 years to sell real estate at a loss when they took a $7,000 rinsing to sell their property to some freak from Westerville for $30,000. That freak took two shipping-container dumpsters out of the house and sold it almost two weeks later for $75,000. That was in March 2021.
That same 1,066 square-foot house, with some modest renovations you can see in the header photo, hit the market last Friday for $289,000. The current owner had planned to rent it out, but he spent “much more” cash than he originally anticipated since the house had to be ripped down to the studs.
If you have spent at least 15 seconds browsing renovated houses in Columbus, it’s a look with which you’ll be quite familiar:
Compare this to 879 Bellows Avenue, the house across the street that was abandoned when I arrived but recently went on the market for $325,000 before dropping to $309,000. Keep in mind these were different renovators with different backgrounds:
This is the aesthetic to which I have come to know as, “Landlord Gray.” Why take a risk when it’s clear what the people want, even if it means producing the same house over and over and over again?
I’ve seen probably five to 10 couples who were enticed enough by the pictures to come to The Bottoms and see it for themselves, but apparently if you are looking to spend $300,000 then you want to live in a neighborhood where you can pretend poor people don’t exist.
These houses, however, will eventually be sold as the gentrification that consumed East Franklinton moves west over the Route 315 overpass that divides the neighborhood into different socioeconomic status.
I’m not the first person this has happened to, but it’s harrowing to realize that you’re being priced out of your neighborhood by people with fancy front porches they never use and privacy fences in their backyard. People whose interest in living within your tight-knit community only extends so far as a good opportunity to increase their personal wealth by investing in an “up-and-coming neighborhood” as realtors love to say about a neighborhood where, statistically speaking, you have the greatest chance in the state to fall victim to gun violence.
My landlord could probably get $1,200 a month by kicking my ass to the curb and replacing me with somebody who sees that as a sweetheart deal. Despite him saying that he will never raise my rent, these renovated houses means property taxes will quickly surpass what I’m paying in rent and nobody ever got into the landlord game to rent property at a loss.
That lesson is basic economics means I’ll be forced to abscond to the nearest affordable neighborhood, which in this case is The Hilltop, and prove to some other landlord that I can be depended to fork over my hard-earned cash when the time comes because I need a roof over my head like everybody else. I’ll undoubtedly be pay more in rent than the last tenant did, which means I’m jacking the rent up on people in the Hilltop like what happened to me in The Bottoms.
That’s the beauty of capitalism: Personal success always comes at the expense of other people. Once you realize that, it suddenly makes more more sense why the bourgeois and petty bourgeois desire to live in neighborhoods where everybody looks, talks and acts like them.
THOSE WMDs. How to get the biggest benefits from walking… The Baloney Detection Kit: Carl Sagan’s rules of bullshit… The biggest mistakes people make while job searching… How do you forgive a murder? The ongoing search for forgiveness in Charleston… Her pain was unbearable; why did doctors turn her away?