Gentrification: How DIY and Cheapskates Guaranteed the Poor Will Never be Able to Afford Those Old Houses

Society has a moral obligation to keep houses in habitable condition.

Houses Don't Have to Die

Gentrification fascinates me. I think it's perfectly understandable that a neighborhood becomes run down; residents age and their kids move away to start their own families. It becomes more and more difficult every year for the elderly to keep up with yard work and home repairs; streets and sidewalks crumble from snowplows and the weather. Trees destroy fences and storm drains deteriorate. Eventually, people pass away and their homes are sold to young couples, drawn to older neighborhoods because of their irresistible charm.

In many cities, however, young families have long been absent from these once-great neighborhoods. Unfortunately, they are not unwilling, but rather unable, to buy older homes in less desirable areas not because of the distance from shopping or the the racial makeup of the area, but rather because they are financially unable to overcome the challenges of getting a mortgage (which is difficult enough) in addition to securing a loan to repair decades, or even more than a century of neglect and abuse at the hands of incompetent DIYers and cheapskates.

This Old House That Only Bob Villa Could Afford to Fix

On the one hand, it warms my heart to see an old Victorian mansion saved from a painful death, a back hoe clumsily smashing it to bits. On the other hand, I hate seeing people taking advantage of the poor. Gentrification is an incredibly complex topic, but the experts often leave out an issue that can't be ignored: Foundations fall and lead paint chips and peels, rain seeps in under bad rain gutters and window frames don't insulate as well as they used to; necessary work on these old homes was often done by amateurs either not willing to admit that the repair work was beyond their ken or not wanting to spend the money to have a professional do it correctly. Eventually, this lack of competent repairs and construction (in addition to commonly used toxic building materials such as asbestos and lead-based products) doomed these neighborhoods - through a total lack of regulation over even the most lenient building codes - to become less and less desirable over many decades.

This wasn't purposefully done to bring the neighborhood down, it was done in the spirit of freedom from government regulation. Ignoring that building permits are some of the most common sensical regulations around, the intrepid DIYer of days past often snubbed his nose at the shackles of building permits and housing inspections.

And of course they did all that snubbing in utter disregard of the fact that this structure would most probably outlive even their grandchildren's grandchildren.

A house rots for no reason while a family fights over the money.

The Irresistible Charm of an Old House

I love old houses for the same reasons a lot of people do: The wood paneling and floors, leaded or stained glass windows, elegant staircases, high ceilings, regal fireplaces, tiled bathrooms and kitchens and if you're lucky, a claw foot tub. China cabinets built into the wall. Ornate radiators. "That place" where the coal chute used to be.

There's magic in an old house, even without a spirit or two roaming in the attic.

I've always loved old houses, but never had the opportunity to live in one until a few years ago. I was looking for a rental and came across an ad on Craigslist for an old house in of all places, Manitou Springs, the place to live in our area.

Manitou Springs used to be a resort town for people hoping to escape the hot, dry summer. It's up in the hills at the bottom of Pikes Peak. It has several natural therapeutic springs and a cheerful little creek, which made it an ideal gathering point for the Utes long before the first white settlers came to the area. The sun sets early in the evening, cooling off the whole town, which is a welcome relief from the hot, dry weather out on the plains. Most of the houses were built without plumbing or electricity and were only meant as summer residences. Families had to have money to build and vacation there.

The house was built in 1896, and built well. This was no plain log cabin. There were chilna cabinets and glass-front bookcases built into the walls. The doors were solid wood with carved moulding around each of them. The floors were lovely, warm wood. The original gas light fixtures - very fancy fixtures - were still intact. The core of the house was well built and strong.

And then there was everything else.

I felt sorry for this house. More and more so the longer I lived there, although I knew there were problems the first time I walked in. Everything was put together haphazardly, like kids adding on to a Lego creation with incompatible building blocks. The kitchen had been the kitchen, but now it also doubled as the entrance to the house. The front door, now technically facing the back yard, had originally faced a street that had been reduced to part of the neighbor's yard and an easement.

I could hear the hissing before I even started down the stairs to the basement.

The stairs were a fright, obviously added later on because someone got tired of going outside to get down to the root cellar. They were narrow and the ceiling was low enough that a grade-school kid could bump their head on the way down. The ceiling of the finished downstairs room was quite low, which could be expected because the original owners probably had to pay a great deal of money to cut the cellar out of the solid rock the house stands on. The hissing noise was coming from back by the old coal chute, which had been covered up decades before with glass blocks. The boiler had sprung a leak and was shooting water against one of the rock walls. It reminded me a lot of the basement in The Silence of The Lambs. We left that room, the property manager assuring us that they were replacing the boiler that day, and went into the downstairs bathroom.

I couldn't even stand up without tilting my head, the ceiling was that low! Although if I moved a little, I could stand up straight if I put my head between the supporting beams of the upstairs floor. There was a claw foot tub, but I couldn't even stand up in it to shower (there was a hose and nozzle). The enamel was badly worn.

But you know what? I didn't care! This was Manitou Springs, and I fell in love with this house instantly. It had a really cheery energy. I put down the deposit and first month's rent immediately and moved in a few days later. The landlord wanted to fix the windows before we moved in, but I said it was okay that they replace them while I was in the house. I watched them take out the original windows, so I got to see the inner structure of my old house, and it was incredible. No rot, no bugs. Built well and built to last.

And then there was the rest of the house, and the garage, and the porch.

For about a month, we thought about how to do a lease option on the house. From there on out, we just thanked the Universe that we weren't stuck owning the poor thing. There may have been additions done professionally, many years ago, but they were not in the majority. The owner paid to have the windows professionally installed, but that's one of those things that is incredibly hard to do yourself, and you won't save any money doing it yourself.

The owner, however, didn't have a professional come paint the house after the windows were installed. And generally, why would you need a professional to do that, except the guy was pretty drunk when he came and stared at my boobs the whole time while his wife painted around the new windows. This is probably the treatment the house saw time and again in its 120 years. Drunk people doing shoddy work because it saved the owner money.

The same drunk guy told me that a couple years before I lived there, he and his wife installed the kitchen ceiling after it collapsed in a rainstorm. And apparently this was not done immediately after the rainstorm, so who knows what kind of mess that was. There was no interpretation that would have said this ceiling was flat. There were cracks all over it. The kitchen, which was probably destroyed in the same tragedy as the ceiling collapse, had also, most likely, been installed by the same inebriated employee of the owner's contractor business.

This had nothing, however, on the poorly-installed bathroom. Black mold grew all around the shower and the ceiling because there was no ventilation whatsoever. I think toddlers could have better installed the tile on the floor and bathtub stall. The inner workings of the toilet were lifted from many other toilets, but not recently. Although the toilet itself was new.

Our electrical system had not been replaced since it had been installed in the 1930s. When we walked through the living room, the lights would flicker. A good jump would turn them on and off. There were no three-prong outlets in the old rooms, only some very old outlets, the kind of which I had never seen before. There were old light switches, the ones with a button for on and a button for off.

No way had there ever been any lead paint abatement. Although you'd practically need a chainsaw to remove the many layers of paint on the walls (and over the wood paneling - ouch!).

Houses are able to accommodate several generations if they are well-cared for.

The outer layer of the house, which I imagine had once been wooden slats, had been covered in chicken wire and then adobe. There was something seriously wrong with this setup because the adobe was falling off in huge slabs from a good portion of the house. The rain gutters had not been replaced in decades and the roof was a fright. And those stairs I talked about? when the house was built, they didn't exist. People walked or rode a horse up to the house. But at some point, someone wanted a garage and if you build a garage you need a way up to the house and ladders aren't very practical. I don't know what the old stairs looked like, but the 14 stairs we had to traverse every day were steep and downright deadly in the winter.

They were installed by a guy who genuinely believed he was a DIY master. The rainstorm that made 5 of the bottom stairs crack off would prove otherwise. Definitely no permit to do that work. The couple that owned the house after him managed to have a deck installed on the retaining wall without a permit; both the stairs and deck were installed in the last decade!

When I left the house, the deck was twisting. You could stand below it and see it twisting as the retaining wall moved and settled above the garage.

I'm not even going to discuss the condition of the garage. It was that bad.

The plumbing inside our house wasn't too bad, but the plan concocted so many years ago to draw sewage away from the house was amazing in its stupidity. Most old houses, and even many old neighborhoods, have old clay sewer pipes. At the time, I'm sure it was all they had, but it's a pretty dumb idea in hindsight. Of course they crack. And of course trees and shrubs weasel their way in there just fine, especially in the seams, completely clogging the lines. Which is, you know, super fun, because then the sewage backs up in the root-filled pipes and eventually, when you flush, it comes out in your bathroom instead of shooting off to the waste treatment plant. The clay pipes weren't the issue, though. It was that some genius decided to embed a good portion of the pipe in the home-made, permit-less 20-foot retaining wall that allows the house to perch high above the street below, I assume so they could build the garage.

So when the plumber came every month - and he had to come every month - to snake the sewer pipe because of all the broken sections and tree roots, he would lament that they should just pay him the money to bypass the pipe in the retaining wall, although I understood why they wouldn't. Even at $200+ per visit, that wasn't anywhere near the $50,000 he was estimating the sewer repair would cost.

And all this was on top of a hill that was eroding away by the foot each year. Except for the year I lived there, when it eroded a lot more due to heavy rains. Yes, eventually, there is a good chance that house is going to slide off the hill.

So in addition to the $240,000 asking price for an 1,800 sq. ft. house, it would require additional tens of thousands of dollars more in repairs and upgrades.

Counting my Lucky Stars

In 2012, there was a major forest fire just outside of Manitou Springs. We could see the fire licking the top of a nearby hill before we were put under a mandatory evacuation order. Then, in 2013, the flooding began. After big forest fires like the Waldo Canyon fire, there is a huge amount of runoff and debris that comes off the burn scar that can cause flash flooding and mud floes.

The condition of the house in Manitou was enough to scare me away from buying it, but the fire and subsequent flooding was a whole pack of nails in an entire cemetery of coffins. We moved as soon as we could.

Last winter, I started looking for a house to buy because in our area, rentals are becoming unaffordable. I had a limited budget and realistic expectations, but even with my low expectations, my options were surprisingly bad. We looked at home after home with bad electric, plumbing, or major foundation issues. We looked at more than one house built on a lot which should never have been improved; houses literally cracking in half. As in, split down the middle, the drywall ripped in two or the bricks cracked in half. Our realtor even said there was a time limit of how long we could be inside one house for safety reasons. We saw another house in which there was a wall covered with black mold; there was so much mold we couldn't tell what color the wall was. We saw a house that was more like three different houses all built into one. It had been for sale for a year and a half without so much as a lowball offer. Bad wiring, bad plumbing ... I began to worry I wouldn't have a place to live (renting was out for me). We finally found a place, but we made them replace the 6 breaker boxes with just one and disconnect the free-standing garage because it was wired so badly. We ignored several issues, but wish the owner had disclosed that the manhole in our driveway that was only for our house; it keeps the city sewage from backing up into our basement. My ceiling upstairs consists entirely of asbestos tiles, but they've been painted over several times so unless there's a collapse, we'll be okay.

This last weekend, though, we discovered that the foundation of the back part of the addition is in no way sealed against flooding. No French drain but more importantly, no tar sealant on the foundation wall. So my basement is flooded and is beginning to smell. And do you think the previous owner thought to tell me about this issue? Of course not!

And my house was built in the 1940s. What about the houses built in the Victorian era? How many of those poor old houses were built as single-family houses then converted into apartments? And not professionally converted, either. Nope, just the homeowner, over-confident in their ability to put up a wall and install electricity and plumbing.

Gentrification Secretly Began Many Decades Ago

Family homes of years past were meant to house several generations, and often did. Experts lament the poor losing their old homes, but fail to recognize one of the biggest factors for this loss: Most old houses would require a small ransom not even to restore them to their old glory, but just to make them livable again. Experts overlook the cost of lead paint abatement or mold removal. They overlook repairs that would cost as much as a year's salary for many young families. We have allowed the slow destruction of our communities for too long.

There was a time when building a house meant holding on to a tiny piece of eternity; there was great pride in building something that would last for many generations to come. Unfortunately, we have lost those values. We can no longer afford to put developers before our environment and our citizens, especially if they are building houses that will only last for a couple of generations.

Our country's infrastructure is badly in need of an overhaul. We have been cheap for too long. That doesn't just mean our public roadways and bridges, but our houses as well. People must be able to afford the houses they live in; they must be able to afford to buy a place in which to live in the first place. We must choose to reinvest in our infrastructure to ensure our nation's prosperity for future generations.