Abandoned McMansions soon to become Affordable Housing?

[El Pinko]

Let's hope so...


http://www.dailybulletin.com/ci_8915171


Vacant to affordable

City manager: Make foreclosed homes low-income
Will Bigham, Staff Writer
Article Created: 04/13/2008 09:27:09 PM PDT

A rule change that would allow California cities to purchase foreclosed homes and convert them into affordable housing will be pitched to state administrators this week by Claremont City Manager Jeff Parker.
The proposal would allow local administrators to address two lingering issues at once - the need to meet state affordable-housing requirements, and the desire to shrink the growing stock of foreclosed homes.

On Wednesday, Parker will travel to Sacramento to discuss his plan with officials from the state Department of Housing and Community Development, which administers the state's affordable housing program.

Currently, cities are credited with meeting state affordable-housing requirements only for newly constructed projects, Parker said.

[Systematic Chaos]

1. Section 8 multi-family dwellings, here we come!

I'd love to see some of the looks on the faces of the rich twits if this comes to pass in their neighborhoods. :rofl:

[Breeze54]

12. You mean duplexes? townhouses? apartments?

Great idea!

[notesdev]

20. McMansions aren't in rich neighborhoods

They carved those things mostly out of farmland, in areas nobody lived before. They were for people who wanted to live rich but in reality weren't rich enough to support that lifestyle... hence, the collapse.

[Johonny]

32. a lot are in middle class neighborhoods.

Down in LA middle class neighborhoods were bought up and McMansioned. So you have neighborhoods where there are 4-5 houses on a block "worth" 2-3 times the rest of the neighborhood. I'm looking to buy a house and it's pissing me off the only thing really on the market are these McMansions.

[DJ13]

2. Anyone want to hazard a guess on.......

......how upset remaining home owners in those McMansion neighborhoods will be when a good percentage of surrounding homes begin being populated with low income families?

[lonestarnot]

4. Too fucking bad!

[Eric Condon]

14. Yeah, and guess what?

:nopity: :nopity: :nopity: :nopity: :nopity: :nopity: :nopity: :nopity: :nopity: :nopity:

[mainegreen]

25. Wow! It will be just like the city!

In fact, it will be just like my city!

My city rocks by the way. Having poor people, middle class and rich blended all together makes for a nice city with no bad areas.

[Junkdrawer]

30. Holy Divine Justice, Batman...n/t

[marmar]

3. Thom Hartmann predicted that a lot of these vacant McMansions will end up as....

.... apartments or boarding houses. ..... Meaning finally there'd be an efficient use for them.

[SoCalDem]

18. Not the first time this has happened..

Port Townsend, WA has some of the most gorgeous Victorian mansions being restored when i went there in the 70's.. these started out as Whaling captains' homes and after a time, were used as boarding houses and apartments.. One we saw had several layers of linoleum..NAILED and glued onto inlaid teak & mahogany floors..and one had a 4 story circular staicase up the middle with a frescoed domed ceiling..it had been WALLPAPERED over, but was saved..

At one time this house had been turned into a boarding house with about 15 rooms to rent..

people do what they have to so..to get by..

[XemaSab]

5. That'll help real-estate values

Turn Trey and Buffy's million dollar McMansion into housing for Destiny, her 5 kids, her boyfriend, her sister, her sister's 5 kids, and her sister's boyfriend. :P

I'm all in favor! :D

[El Pinko]

8. CA real estate values are going to continue to plummet regardless.

All the appreciation of the 2000s was illusory, based on speculation and totally decoupled from the stagnant incomed suring the same period.

I don't think McMansions becoming apartments or condos will make an appreciable difference, especially if they are run well.

[csziggy]

6. Why not? Mansions built in the early 1900s have been

student housing around here for decades - until the real estate boom. Then they were converted back into single family dwellings, offices or torn down to make way for higher density usage.

[FredStembottom]

7. I recall Thom Hartman predicting sub-divided McMansions....

....about 6 months ago. I hadn't thought of that and wasn't sure of what to think of his prediction. But he related today's situation to the millions of sub-divided rentals that were made from Gilded Age mansions. We all have experience with those! :think:

Is this his prediction coming true in record time???

[Lydia Leftcoast]

28. Six months ago? Joe Uris of Portland's KBOO radio was

predicting this six YEARS ago.

[FredStembottom]

31. Well.... for all I know Thom predicted it in 1972......

6 months ago is just when I heard him say it.

[juno jones]

9. The key is going to be accessability.

There has to be infrastructure in plase regarding public transportation, human services, etc. Too many Mc mansion neighborhoods are relatively remote from many services(such as hospitals), with no real jobs in any kind of walking distance. It has simply always been assumed that people would commute to and from these neighborhoods with their own transportation.

It is probably do-able,and I am all for it, but certain conditions need to be met before they dump a bunch of poor people out in these neighborhoods.

[Breeze54]

11. Not if they're rented with Section 8 HUD Housing Certificates.

They just have to be safe and decent. Transportation is the renters problem.

If they became 'public housing', that might be a different story.

[notesdev]

21. Someone thinks it through

Wishful thinking by the others to think that remote exurban McMansions are going to end up as low-income housing.

Good luck having poor people live in an area where there are no jobs, then needing a car, then needing to spend 3 hours on the road every day in that car at current fuel prices... to say nothing of where they're going to get these jobs in the worsening labor market.

One aspect of this mess people forget is that US wages haven't risen in real terms for a very long time, we've just been able to buy more stuff for it as consumer production got moved offshore to slave labor economies. But now the dollar is tanking and all those imported goods are becoming more and more expensive.

The best route from here is to get rid of the illegal aliens so that American wages aren't undercut by half-price Mexican 'scab' labor. There are no longer any jobs that Americans "won't do" - as if there ever were.

We can thank George "The Economy Terminator" Bush for that one.

[Breeze54]

10. That's a great idea!

I hope they do it!

[Manifestor_of_Light]

13. Sounds like a new version of the commune!

Cool!!

[Breeze54]

15. No, each family would have thier own apt, like an apt. building...like this...

;)



Danvers, MA old hospital turned into affordable housing apts

[Fredster]

16. They could section them off into

Very large four family apartments and in very good areas with good schools and
public transportatopn.

Who really needs 5 to 10,000 S.F for a family of three or four ?

[tomreedtoon]

17. Trouble is, those McMansions are CRAP CONSTRUCTION.

I had a friend with a two income family, who bought one of these "new houses." It's not technically a McMansion, but it was new construction and pretty damn large; two story, seven bedroom.

Last time I visited, he was having the master bedroom bathroom torn apart and being rebuilt - the right way - because the construction company had screwed up the drain system. It didn't drain.

And the expensive houses at Disney's Celebration, near the Florida Magic Kingdom? They didn't even have plasterboard on the inside walls of their attached garages. Cheap.

I'm sure the McMansions are built along the same lines. They're cheap construction, they're poorly insulated, and they'll fall apart in ten years.

Which doesn't make the apartment idea bad. But Der Gropenfuhrer better not pay a huge sum for those rattletraps.

[notesdev]

22. Similar experience here

I am renting a place that was rebuilt in 2004. While on the outside it is very nice, I have had to fix so many things it's not funny. It's like the Chinese came over and built this place, with the way that things are put together at odd angles and don't quite fit right, seals break left and right, and a whole host of other problems that aren't apparent on first inspection but are unavoidable if you live there.

The lesson I take from this is that when I am ready to look to the market as a house buyer again, researching the builder's reputation is key, as is understanding the nitty-gritty of home construction. If I'm going to take on a 30-year obligation for it you're darned well right I'm going to audit the heck out of every component from the roof to the foundation.

[DS1]

27. Yep. I had a friend who bought a 4 bedroom house (for himself)

and the inside was CRAP! You could see the ceiling bending down over the kitchen, and this house was so new the sod hadn't even settled yet. Holding a lamp in the bathroom revealed where they hadn't even put plaster/putty over the sheetrock nails, and had simply wallpapered over them all and then painted the wallpaper.

[Rosemary2205]

29. Yep, 1900's mcmansions made good multifamily homes - not these

There's an area I know about in Atlanta and in Detroit where the mcmansions of the turn of the century era were turned into multi-family rentals when the bubble popped in the 1930's. Good sturdy well built homes that will no doubt last centuries. The foam and vinyl mcmansions of today will likely be landfill long before the year 2100 gets here.

[spinbaby]

33. There's another reason it won't work

The shoddy construction's been pointed out, but we also need to consider that McMansions are usually built out in the suburban sprawl where there is no public transportation and it's too expensive to bring in public transportation. Mansions from the early years of the 20th century were usually built near something.

[Jeff_The_Man]

19. I think that would be a great idea!!

[El Pinko]

23. Really? Is that what you think, Jeff_the_man?

Tell us more.

:eyes:

[yorgatron]

24. welcome to the ghetto-burb.

it's only a matter of time.
the entreprenurial spirit will find a way,some houses on likely corners will become convenience or liquor stores.
lawns will wither and die,from neglect or water rationing.
bicycles will become popular since nobody will be able to afford gas.
the drug of choice will be meth.
Stockton will lead the way.

[juno jones]

26. I weep to say that I can see that.

Especially in Stockton.... :(