Buy, Mortimer, Buy!

For a few thousand bucks more, the bank offered to throw this one in with the house we bought. What am I, Rockefeller?

Think big, think positive, never show any sign of weakness. Always go for the throat. Buy low, sell high. Fear? That's the other guy's problem. Nothing you have ever experienced will prepare you for the absolute carnage you are about to witness.    -Trading Places

OK, so it was 2008-2009, and we were broke. Our Internet business was suddenly exempt from the Interstate Commerce Clause because interstate commerce visited us about as often as the Santa Claus, and we began to wish he'd bring coal so we could burn it for heat.

The optimists in the comments at MarketWatch figured the DJIA and your shoe size would converge in mid 2010, or would if you were still wearing shoes, which was unlikely. The pessimists were picking out their wardrobe for the coming year, a sort of Mad Max leather/Omega Man bandolier melange, while planning for their Waterworld tinkle-drinking/On The Beach diet.

What would sensible people do in such circumstances?  Go shopping for a house.

Fortune favors the bold, and God looks after fools,drunks, and little children, and since we're as foolish as the next person, have children, and after the last three years of economic delirium tremenswe could use a drink, my wife and I decided that we weren't just going to take a zero off our mortgage.  We were going to find the cheapest, more or less habitable structure within driving distance of where we were, and buy it and live in it.

Remember 2009? Every news outlet was filled with advice on cheap houses you could buy. They were the same news outlets that told you it would be a sound investment to install granite countertops and a stainless steel wine cooler in your kitchen six months before.  Let's pick the first one we find on memory lane: CNNMoney's Radical Cheap: $1000 Homes. What sort of advice did the mainstream media have for us househunters? 

Cleveland is another city with many incredibly inexpensive homes. On Ardenall Avenue, in East Cleveland, McMullen Realty has a listing for a four-bedroom, one-and-a-half bath house for $1,900. It's been vandalized inside, but the outside is in good shape...

..."East Cleveland has a beautiful housing stock," she said. "These houses just need someone to come in and love them a little."

I'd never been to East Cleveland, so I took the street they mention in the article and put it into The Google, as our former president charmingly referred to it. And The Zillow. And The City-Data.

Ah yes. If Fallujah is too far to commute to your non-existent job, why not East Cleveland! I did indeed immediately locate a house that sold for $1200 last April. Of course, the city still charges you close to two grand a year in property taxes to live there, which even with today's rock bottom interest rates works out to a $32,000 second mortgage. But think of the amenities the city offers for the money. East Cleveland ranks very highly on City-Data. High pollution, lotsa rape, plenty o’ robbery, burglary, and car theft; you name it, they've got it. I don't believe I've ever seen crime data that's given in thousands per hundred thousand population before. And if you are thinking of getting your tax money's worth back in an education for your kids, City Data ranks schools in Ohio on a 0 (worst) to 100 (best) scale. Shaw High School in East Cleveland is rated a "1."

Hungry for more news of East Cleveland, I did find a local news report from 2009. The mayor said he would have gotten to the bottom of accusations that a dead hooker in the local motel was killed by local law enforcement, if only the police hadn’t released pictures of him dressed as a woman, which ruined his chances for re-election and interrupted his investigation. It must have been a big relief for the local populace to be reassured by the police chief later in the news story that as far as he knew, the murdered woman wasn't killed by the well-known local serial killer, but likely an entirely different person. Phew!

As I said in my earlier essay, people vote with their feet. People voted with their feet, big-time, in East Cleveland; 10.7 % of the population has left in the last ten years. CNN/Money thinks it would be great if you moved there. Not them, of course. You.

You see, there’s a real problem with 99% of the places where you can get a house if you’ll just take it. The houses are just a giant, graffiti-smeared tax and regulation anthill, surrounded by a desert of crime. The local government (the ants) would like to stake you out on that anthill because the last guy came to his senses and escaped to anywhere else.

The major media is never going to admit this, because it would raise uncomfortable questions for their political bedfellows. Their entire map, outside a few urban areas, is marked: “Here Be Monsters.” You know, law-abiding, perhaps God-fearing, salubrious monsters. Some of those monsters even procreate and don’t commute to work on recumbent bicycles, and we can’t encourage that, can we?

Let’s say you have a job that pays well, but requires you to live in a particular place. Maybe you’re the Mary Kay beauty consultant for the mayor of East Cleveland, and you’re really raking it in; whatever. Perhaps you should examine whether the money justifies the quality of life you suffer to get it. Think outside the box. Might as well -- all the windows are broken out of it anyway.

Maine Family Robinson Dirty Dozen Checklist for Purchasing a Cheap House:

·      Ignore the dullard media.

·      Home Inspectors are useless to you. You’re the home inspector.

·      You can find out all sorts of things on the Internet. Do. Use The Google. The Zillow. The City-Data.

·      Figure out how to make a living wherever you go. I’d do that first if I were you

·      Live near, but not at, places others go on vacation

·      Towns with real industries in them have lower property taxes

·      Live in a village. Only the wealthy or the toothless can survive out in the woods or in the big city

·      Avoid talking to realtors. Never bother going to a house you don’t already know all about

·      Forget short sales. Buy empty houses

·      Neglect is always preferable to bad remodeling

·      Bring cash

·      Forget all cosmetic considerations on a house. Learn what the bones of a house are worth. Forget all cosmetic considerations from the mayor, too