No Regrets

Mad as a Hornet

The latest dispatch from the species turf wars here in the wilds of Marin involves a rather dramatic emergency yellow jacket nest removal: having set up shop under the dirt in the planter near the front door, hornets had been stinging Answerjack every morning as he left for his run, and then again when he came back. (Why he did not simply come and go through the back door remains a mystery).

The first line of defense was spraying the ground with some eco-friendly, very Marin product at sunset, when the nest is the least active. When Jack got stung as usual the next morning I went charging out to vanquish the critters with the completely useless spray and promptly got stung 5 times, zap zap zap zap zap, including one sting on my scalp which still hurts so much it requires concerted effort not to whine and/or cry all day.

Clearly, heavier artillery was required—removal pros, very nice young men in protective gear who came out, gassed the lot of them with some turbo-charged toxin, and extracted the nest, which was fascinating, thousands of incubating larvae and emerging imagoes in a sophisticated structure roughly the size of 2 footballs in multiple levels seperated by post supports, like a parking garage, all made from paper the little fuckers manufacture in their mouths from plant matter. Here is what I learned about yellow jackets from my new buddies, the removal guys:

• They are the crankiest and most aggressive of all stinging insects
• They can sting multiple times without dying
• They also bite
• They can bite and sting simultaneously
• They are carnivores, and carrion eaters
• They are cannibals that will eat their own kind, as well as honeybees—you know, the nice, useful bees.
• They breed constantly and do not need a queen
• They can kill you
• Their nests cost $350 to remove
• 
  Here, too, is what I learned on my own, the hard way:
  If you fish an expired nest out of the green bin to shoot a picture or two, some of the larvae will have survived the gas and still be squiggling around. One will be born. Shoot fast; they emerge with a taste for flesh, poised to sting, and mad as  hornets.

Lightning Strikes House, Twice

1573 Arbutus Drive, circa 1990

Long before the term “short sale” entered the common vernacular, my ex-husband and I lost our family’s home and equity through one. The events leading up to the short sale demonstrated, in high relief, the curious combination of disengenuousness and duplicity that ultimately put the “ex” in ex-husband. It was a stressful time for everyone touched by it, but my children emerged intact out the other side and grew into splendid adults—thoughtful, interesting, and responsible. The house changed hands several times, my ex-husband moved to a third-world country ruled by a military dictatorship, and I remarried.  In 2006, our former house was acquired by the current owners for $995,000. Let’s round up the numbers and call it a million dollars for a nice, thoroughly unremarkable, 3-bedroom, 2 -bath, 55-year-old suburban ranch-style house within prime commuting distance of San Francisco.

Through Interweb magic, I learned that 1573 Arbutus Drive is again on the market. It's as a short sale listed at $685K, more than $300K less than its closing price in 2006. I visited the house last week during an open house conducted under a lowering clouds by an improbably optimistic real estate agent.

Short sales carry about them an unmistakable air of desuetude—there's no gain for the about-to-be-ex-owners beyond a marginally less crippling blow to one's credit, so often people will not even bother to sweep the floors before the house is shown. And—voice of experience—the Stations of the Cross on the way to Short Sale Golgotha include Lack of Maintenance Funds, and Too Dispirited to Pick Up a Paintbrush, which can result in significant aesthetic deficits for the house. This house was no exception, a little pocket of Appalachia blighted by deteriorating pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey “enhancements” perpetrated by the guy who bought it in our short sale and tried, unsuccessfully, to turn it into a micro-McMansion.

Tarted up in lurid, chipped paint, dragged down by an excess of hardware, and burdened by a gargantuan fiberglass bathtub wedged into one of the minuscule bathrooms, the modest bones of the old house were barely discernable. The recognizeable stuff was bad news. Wasn’t that the same deck, now glossed over in worn paint, that needed to be replaced 17 years ago? That cook top, the same one that was in the house when I owned it, had been bought, used, at a restaurant liquidation sale in 1985. Industrial-cool then, it now looks like a health hazard. And whatever possessed the McMansion fetishist to install those down-market fake-granite Formica counters?

Muffled screams and crashes were coming from one of the bedrooms, where a multitasking teenager was jabbing at the controls of a video game while emitting streams of invective into a cell phone. “Fuck, blah blah, fuck, blah blah, fuck. Fuck fuck fuck,” he was saying, and my heart went out to him. Strangers were trooping through his family’s home, drawn by the blood in the water of a sale at less than market value. Someone was going to benefit from his family’s misfortune, and he had no say in the matter, other than that stream of futile fucks.

The kid had drawn a line in the sand against an approaching tidal wave churned up by grownups—bankers and real estate brokers and his unlucky parents. It stood for something like, “This is still my fucking room. I’m staying put, even during the fucking open house when I’m supposed to be gone so strangers can fucking pass judgment on my family’s taste and hygiene and finances in fucking freedom.” My own teenager had drawn a similar line all those years ago, expressed somewhat more elegantly.

There was no way to act upon the impulse to put my arms around him and whisper into his ear that he was going to be fine, that what was happening now was indeed a very big deal, but it would get smaller and smaller and then one day be just one memory among many, one domicile among many, and frankly, Sweetie, one sadness among many, because that is life. I wanted to tell him about the defiant note my 10-year-old daughter and her friends penciled in tiny letters inside what was now, for the moment, still his closet, claiming the room as forever hers, imbued with her spirit.

It’s not, of course, nor would she wish it to be. Owners have come and gone over the years, and the little girl is now a woman with her own home. It is filled with love and warmth and cheer—qualities and capacities that she and her brother and sister took with them when we left the house. These were not the only things—there was plenty of bad stuff to work through—but they are the most enduring and authentic, and therefore the most valuable. They were ported over with great care to the places we lived afterward, and, eventually, to the kids’ own apartments and houses. That is itself a kind of magic, and a more accurate measure of the real worth of a home than the crazy mad fluctuations of real estate values. It’s what I wish for that teenager and the family whose turn it is to leave behind the house on Arbutus Drive.

As for the rest: in the end, Sweetie, it doesn’t mean fuck-all.

 

Shelter: Zillow, Zillow on the Wall

Once upon a time, obsessing over the price of real estate was pretty much confined to those who dwelled in storied regions like San Francisco and New York City. Now it's a national pastime, with homeowners throughout the land fretting about the downward slide in value of what is, for most of us, the largest single investment we'll ever make. The fabulous realm of Interweb offers many easy entry points from which to explore the treacherous terrain created by the implosion of the housing bubble, and provides helpful tools so you can pinpoint where just about any property stands, literally and metaphorically, in the vast rubblescape. There's no rational explanation of why you would want to do this unless you really have to.
I'm a bit of a Zillow.com abuser, myself, and yes, I know about the site's inherent inaccuracies. Still. We bought our house about this time last year, just as the economy started to grind to a halt. Although SF area real estate historically maintains mostly peaks with few valleys, odd slumps of value can occur. And they have now: through the magic of Zillow, I know that the house Answerjack and I tried to buy in the Oakland hills (full price offer, which the sellers rejected, hoping for a bidding war which never materialized) is currently valued at 20 percent less than what it sold for last March. A bit further removed, the house I used to own in Walnut Creek, which 3 years ago (long after my tour as chateleine) sold for more than triple what I paid for it, is down 25 percent. The owners of this sad house—clearly hanging on by a thread last year—lost it; it went REO. The couple from whom we bought our current house have their new place on the market, 9 months after moving in.
This is the background against which I sit down at my computer, type my address into Zillow's search field and await, with bated breath, the pronouncement of the oracle: fair, still, or not? Magically, still yes. Fairer even than what we paid last year. My intense relief—we are very lucky—is tempered by diffuse guilt—so many people, no more or less deserving than we, are not. I am fully prepared to see the value of this investment slide and am committed to riding it out. And in my own little kingdom with its peculiar laws based on the magic of good will, I hope, every day, that everyone else, too, will be carried safely out of the valley, their families and hope and confidence intact.

My Tschotkes, My Self

This is my favorite sheep. Now it's boxed up, along with its fellows and hundreds of books and thousands of CDs.
Like many people, I don't like to think of myself as materialistic. I can offer all sorts of quite plausible rationalizations about how while I am certainly fond of creature comforts and all my "stuff," I'm not really attached to any of it.
This is a flat-out lie. The facts speak for themselves: over the past 6 years Answerjack and I have devoted a considerable amount of energy and more than a little cash to schlepping 15,000 pounds of "stuff" from sea to shining sea and  back again, and in the past few weeks I have been maniacally mono-focused on moving it all once (please just once!) again. Even after the ritual pre-packing disbursement of excess goods to charitable organizations, offspring, friends and the junk man, there's still an astonishing amount of stuff left to be organized, wadded in newsprint or bubblewrap, placed in boxes, taped, labeled, stacked and, a week from today, loaded onto a great big truck.

The sheer quantity is partly a function of our stage of life—you don't get to be this age without acquiring personal goods, and then some—and our circumstances: marrying in mid-life merges established households, and weeding out the redundancies can take years. Who knew? A lot of the stuff reflects our interests and/or obsessions, like  33 boxes of books (yep, I counted 'em); 4,500 or so CDs; and 11 boxes of the unclassifiable ephemera I use to make art.  Then there's my collection of sheep tschotkes (one weensy box) and the exotic electronics that stoke Answer's audiophilia (many many boxes, the originals in which the equipment arrived from artisan's workshops in the heartland or just-in-time manufacturers in Asia).

Here is what our living room looked like before:

(That's Ravi and Megumi's she-wolf Kona, visiting for Christmas. The rental looks pretty good in photographs, huh? Trust me, it's a dump.)
And now after:

All the books and CDs are packed, and the crate awaits the cats—Miss Minxie and Murphy, the Serial Killer.  I weave my way through the stacks of neatly labeled boxes that compendiate our life, which is not the same as actually having our life. One more week!

Shelter: Monster House, Part One

Monster House,  Cynthia Romanov 2005
August, 2002

Here is one explanation for how we came to acquire a massive, cash-sucking, colonial-revival brick pile in an ossified old-money enclave in Baltimore: the peculiar insanity that besets refugees from overheated real estate markets like San Francisco, wherein victims are rendered completely senseless by the sharp retort of a bigger bang for the buck in a less volatile market. An alternative explanation is offered near the end of the post. You can decide for yourself which is the more plausible.
A house hunt in an unfamiliar place is difficult under the best of circumstances, and we had some of the worst. Answerjack had taken a job at a hospital in a community of strip malls and Pentecostal churches just outside Baltimore and was living nearby in a furnished apartment. I was still in Oakland, wrapping up a major project at work and joining him on weekends. Fridays, I’d fly across the country on Fridays to be driven around Baltimore by the don of the mob of local real estate ladies, our search handicapped by a dearth of inventory and our specs of an acoustically viable space for the biggest home audio system speakers in the known universe. Answerjack, a serious audiophile, had come to our relationship burdened with these behemoths, which had only ever been installed in spaces specifically designed around their needs. We'd barely survived a to-the-studs remodel on one coast, and were absolutely certain that we did not want to do the same on the other. The house had to be turnkey.

One Sunday afternoon, the real estate lady took us to a 6,000-square foot classic brick center hall colonial revival. It  had languished on the market for months and just that day been reduced to a price that was OK by California standards but pretty exorbitant by any other. As we pulled up to the curb the broker got a call that an offer on the house had just been accepted, but she urged us to go ahead with the tour anyway, informing us, “It’s on the best street in Guilford!” which caused me to frame the excursion as a sort anthropological expedition to see how the haute bourgeoisie live in Baltimore, not exactly a party but a lot more appealing than whiling away a couple of hours at BWI, waiting for my flight home.

Brick center-hall colonials of all sizes share certain characteristics: they are boxy, symmetrical, have uniformly-spaced multiple-pane windows, and a door in the middle. Fans of the genre place enormous importance upon the external variations—veranda wings, porticos, fancy brickwork on the chimneys and such—that distinguish each house from its neighbor, and use subjective terms like “gracious” and “elegant” when describing them. To a non-fan, they all look like the drawings of not very creative children. Plus, coming from the geologically dynamic Pacific Rim, their profligate display of brick, which in California is simply incipient rubble, topped with slate roof shingles so heavy that a single tile shaken loose would smash one’s skull like a melon, filled me with a vague sense of unease.
3801 Greenway, a prime example of the genre, was on a vast corner lot with standard-issue landscaping that could have used some attention. It sat well back from the street, down a long cement walk through a huge expanse of thirsty-looking lawn leading to an oversized  door with a shiny brass plaque inscribed with the owner’s name. The lady of the house was waiting for us on the threshold because, as we found out later, the doorbell did not work.

Here is what I saw during our sweltering (the house did not have central not air-conditioning) 20-minute tour: three stories of enormous rooms crammed with furniture; 4 fireplaces; original workmanship of a quality that no longer exists at any price; and some tragic pockets of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey remodel blight, including a hideous '70s kitchen designed by the owner of a brick company to showcase his firm's product. The entire mishegoss was presided over by a recently widowed superannuated southern belle, who during her 17-year tenure as chatelaine had obviously figured out the absolute minimum home maintenance that would allow her to show her face in public without being pelted with rocks by her fellow Guilfordians. She was pious—the house bristled with crucifixes and there was a lovely old  prieu-deau in her bedroom—and smelled great (Hermés Caleche—I saw it on her dressing table).

Here is what Answerjack saw: a 30-foot living room that was big enough for his speakers.

We thanked the owner and the broker for their time and drove to the airport, chatting idly about the jumbo house, trying to guess the number of rooms—12? 13? —and bathrooms—7? 8?  Imagine—she and her husband had rattled around in that gargantuan place for years; they’d bought it after their kids were grown! We snickered over a needlepoint pillow on one of the sofas that depicted the owner as the figurehead of a ship, bearing the legend  “La Belle Hélène.”  We assured each other that somewhere in Baltimore a house was waiting for us, and sometime soon we’d find it. I flew back to Oakland and Answer returned to the land of strip malls.

Late that night, Answerjack was abducted by aliens, who skipped the tacky probe part of the abduction and went straight to insidious mind control, compelling him to drop a note in Old Belle’s mailbox the next nmorning, thanking her, again, for the tour of her Lovely Home. Should anything happen with the current offer, we would be interested, read the note in handwriting that resembled my husband's. Belle called him pronto: the putative buyers had run away screaming after the house inspection. She knocked 50K off the price and Answer bought it on the spot, as is. He called me at work that afternoon and presented it as a fait  accompli.

Because Answerjack is a highly intelligent man, responsible and reasonable, I thought he was joking. He had to be, because no intelligent person would buy a house after a 20-minute visit during which the owner dogged his every move. No responsible person would buy, as is, a 75-year-old old house that had just flunked its inspection, a house that lacked air-conditioning, which in Baltimore's pestilential climate is as essential to human survival as a functioning furnace is to inhabitants of Anchorage. And no reasonable man would buy a house without discussing the purchase with his wife.

It took a bit of conversation before I realized that is indeed what had happened. I was having a hard time making sense of what sounded like a garbled dispatch from a distant planet—Answer's voice, or something like it, explaining that the buyers who had dropped out just didn’t understand old houses, but he did, and this was a Great Old House, and now it was ours.

Home, Again

Love, at perhaps the 100th site.
It's been quite a journey: we've poked through dozens of houses during our epic 4-month quest for shelter and electronically screened hundreds more. We had a full-price offer rejected by greedy sellers, wooed and lost a decrepit old high-maintenance charmer to a sugar daddy sweeter than we could afford to be, and inhaled so deeply of Nag Champa and other combustible resins at a property in Marin County that we were moved to make an offer on  a log cabin. We looked at lovely homes in unfortunate settings (above a freeway, perched in a slide zone, straddling a fault line) and crappy two-by-six wood-frame constructs in gorgeous groves of redwoods pruned to frame jaw-dropping views. We saw houses accessed by vertiginous flights of mossy stone steps leading up to (Piedmont) and down to (Fairfax) the front door, and a few sturdy, snooze-inducing ranchers on level ground with striking views into the neighbor's windows. We watched  hideously overpriced properties languish on the market and good properties close very quickly. We got to know our two real estate agents (one in Marin, one in the East Bay) really, really well. I made the 5-hour round-trip overnight schlep from our temporary domicile in the hinterboonies to the SF area 19 times. Tomorrow I drive in for the 20th time, to sign the papers for our home.

Our search ended where it started: Marin County. The house is in Fairfax, not far away from the log cabin and the needy old dear, up a twisty road in some spots too narrow for two-way traffic. Unlike the three previous houses Answerjack and I have owned together, this one is ready to move into—no walls begging to be knocked down, no earth to be moved, no knob-and-tube wiring to be replaced lest the house burn to the ground the first time Jack revs up his sound system. The house was very well built by a local  contractor for his family, a simple thoughtful design, no architectural gimcracks or geegaws. Escrow closes next week. We're renting back to the sellers so their kids can finish the school year, and then we move in: home again, at last.

Japan: Messengers of the Gods

Divine messenger at ease. He knows he's cool.
The beautiful, ancient city of Nara is chockablock with Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines, and famously mercenary deer. Camera-ready attractions are conveniently clustered inside Nara Park, which is ruled with an iron hoof by a cartel of deer that has successfully leveraged the legend of one of their own bearing the god of a local shrine on its back into an entitlement  program that gives them the run of the place in perpetuity.
Signs warn that Nara deer can be bossy, and they are. Each year their pointy little horns are ceremonially sawn off and the stumps blunted to nubbins to prevent them from inflicting serious damage on sightseers. Enjoying protected status as messengers of the gods, they are free to work the crowds, aggressively soliciting shika-senbei (deer crackers) sold at stands throughout the park and terrorizing small children. Here the herd skillfully separates a little girl from her mother to shake her down for whatever she's got in her Hello Kitty purse. She's about to scream, but she's not going to bleed.
It's worth running the deer gauntlet to get to the treasures of Nara, which include the Daibutsu, the largest of Japan's large Buddha statues, appropriately housed in the world's largest wooden building—the Chinese-inflected Daibutsu-den, an architectural marvel whose vast dim interior is scented by the sillage of 1300 years worth of incense. The Kasuga Taisha Shinto shrine at the far end of the park is reached through a primeval pine forest so deep and dense that all sound is absorbed, and walking there becomes an act of silent meditation. Surrounding these major foci of worship are dozens of minor shrines and temples consecrated to various deities and spirits. Being in Nara is like visiting St.Peter's—you don't have to be a believer to be moved by what is evidenced there; you just have to believe in belief.

Answerjack and I are equal opportunity respecters. We light candles in cathedrals and touch the foot of Saint Peter in Rome. Jack's kissed the Wailing Wall, and we leave chocolate and whiskey at Marie Leveau's crypt in New Orleans. In Nara, we paid our respects to the Buddha and the kami with offerings of incense and yen. At a small shrine near Kasuga Taisha, our guide wrote the characters representing our deepest personal wish on an ema and we hung it on the shrine's fence, bowing in accordance to custom. We really meant it.

It would make such a heartwarming story if we had found a house immediately upon our return to the States. Not. In fact, the batch of newly listed houses that I stumbled through in a haze of jet lag and dismay constituted a nadir of sorts, the sorriest assortment of greed-driven failed flips, REOs and down-market staging yet. It is a measure of my despair that when I saw on Craig's List that an acquaintance was renting out guest quarters in the lower level of her house in the Bay Area, I was seriously tempted to give her a call, even though I know for certain that she is barking mad: the idea of moving there during what was shaping up to be an interminable  house hunt seemed, briefly, to be an improvement over making the 300-mile round trip schlep from the foothills every 4-5 days. The moment passed, thank heavens, and we found our house a week later.

  

Shelter: The Roar of the Crowd

40 Marina Cove Court, San Rafael, California

Isn't this an adorable house? It's even cuter in person. It sits on a hill overlooking the marina in San Rafael; a little room perched up a short flight of stairs off the master bedroom has a bank of windows dedicated to the view, which when the house was built as a weekend cottage in 1930 must've been a picturesque cove filled with fishing boats and the occasional yacht. It's still awfully atmospheric, albeit a lot more crowded than the water or the shore was 78 years ago.
The house seeps charm from all pores. Check out the beams in the living room. They're in the garage, too, which is a space just waiting to be converted to a music room for Answerjack. Unlike most of the houses that pique my interest, this one would not require massive structural and aesthetic interventions, although the walls are begging for a coat of flat paint to cover an array of faux-finish sins.
The kitchen has a BTU-spewing cook top, a small Sub Zero refrigerator and about 5,000€ worth of swoon-inducing copper cookware from Dehillerin, presumably not included in the sale.
The yard is a leafy jewel,with little benches tucked away here and there, inviting you to pause, contemplate the vistas, and just try to hear yourself think over the incredible roar of traffic. It is hands down the very noisiest house, inside and out, that I've ever looked at on either coast. It overlooks Point San Pedro Road where it turns into Third Street, one of the busiest thoroughfares in Marin County. The RE broker and I stood outside in the shady bower, desperately shouting insane denials like "MAYBE A NICE BURBLING FOUNTAIN WOULD HELP MASK THE NOISE" at each other before getting a grip and fleeing to the car. It's a pity, because were it not for the traffic, which is truly terrible, I'd have made an offer on the spot.

I know what comes next: someone will fall crazy in love with the house's considerable charms, buy it, and wake up (early, every morning—it's a prime commute route) to a screeching nightmare of never-ending noise. Or, best-case scenario, a nice hearing-impaired couple will snap it up and dwell there in perfect peace and contentment. Sigh.

We're still looking.

Code Busters: Acronyms From the Front

Rivoli, Robert (impasse) Cynthia Romanov 2008
The code to real estate-speak is pretty transparent, the stuff of rueful jokes swapped by suckers lured to open houses promising a "first time on market fairy-tale cottage w/original architectural details and great bones" only to find themselves touring a plywood shack, untouched since it was tossed up some weekend in the middle of the last century, complete with a 7-digit price tag and a hundred-page disclosure. Here are some up-to-the-minute, new-to-the-local-market additions the lingo, and the free translations thereof: "BOM" (back on market after being yanked for a reality check); "seller motivated" (it's going into foreclosure); and—unthinkable in this neck of the woods only a few months ago—"new price" (the property has languished on the market at an exorbitant asking that last year would have been accepted without question but is not flying in the current economic climate, forcing sellers to adjust their expectations downward). "REO" is the Queen Mother of RE suck-itude: the bank owns the property and the (now-former) owners are SOL. And here's a radical term, familiar to the cogniscenti: the "apples to apples" deal. That means—and we're talking true real estate sedition here—that a 3-bedroom, 2-bath house in a desirable Bay Area location which sold 6 months to a year ago for, say, a million dollars, is now listed on the market at exactly what the current owners paid for it.

This is major news, not yet widely broadcast in the areas Answerjack and I are targeting for our house search (Marin County, Berkeley, Oakland Hills) but common enough in the nether regions of the greater Bay Area as well as most of the rest of the country. It's creeping closer to the anointed real-estate sacristies that have thus far enjoyed dispensation from the harsh economic exigencies of the open market. It's good news for some—perhaps Answerjack and me, since we have no house to sell before buying a new one—and very bad news for others, rapacious speculators and hapless homeowners alike. Now, no one is going to weep for the speculators who contributed so generously to the creation of our profoundly dysfunctional local RE dynamic. Old Testament types may invoke phrases like "just desserts." But I've been thinking about  regular families, specifically the kids whose homeowner mommies and daddies, whether through lousy judgement or simple bad luck, find themselves mired in the current RE mishegoss. Whatever their parents did or did not do that resulted in a "seller motivated/new pricing!" deal, to say nothing of the dreaded REO—these kids are taking the consequences squarely on their vulnerable little chins.

I've been haunted by our look-see of a "distressed" house in a fantastic Marin County location (privacy, sweeping vistas, acres of adjacent protected open space). The back story of xx Upper Fremont is painfully apparent: a family with a couple of kids bought this disaster zone 2 years ago at the height of the market, did not have the liquidity to make even basic repairs, recently tried to sell it for about what they owe on the loan but the buyer backed out. Now it's BOM, and to the blurb copy claim that it is through "no fault of the property," the only reasonable response is "Liar, liar, pants on fire." The place is a wreck. I mean truly a wreck: two illegal units, one of which does not have a kitchen. The master bath is ripped out to the studs. Sub flooring only throughout. Not a single closet has a door. There are no window coverings. The kids, teenagers apparently, live in the non-contiguous lower unit, apart from their parents. The two units are dirty, smell bad, and, as our Marin agent, who is incredibly nice and has seen a lot in her time, noted with sweet understatement, "This is not a happy place." Indeed. People, it's not even a safe place: the inspection performed at the potential buyer's behest notes that the extensive decking is rotting away from the house, the roof has reached the pull-by date, and just about nothing is up to code. The owners and their kids have been living like muleskinners for the past 2 years. It's days away from foreclosure, becoming a REO.

Now, I've admitted in previous posts that a catalogue of massive flaws in a house is but sweet nothings whispered into the ears of a couple of real estate romantics house restoration sluts like Answerjack and me, but our offspring are grown. Whatever Mum and Paternicus chose to do with the kids' eventual inheritance has no impact on the quality of their day-to-day lives. Plus we have demonstrated an ability to learn from past mistakes, which is why even we passed on this bleak house. So what's been haunting me is how the Marin owners, who are clearly living on the margins, got in so far over their heads? What bank enabled them to tie their kids to the tracks of a runaway train of  grandiose/greedy speculation that home values w0uld continue to skyrocket? How did they figure that the awesome view of the sunset from their crumbling family seat would make up for the lack of a reasonable expectation that the roof would still be over their heads come dawn?

The answers to these questions are in the headlines of the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times just about every day, and yeah, I've read all the articles and analyses. But observing first hand how the national RE crisis is playing out for one just one real, live family among the 233,ooo homeowners facing foreclosure last month alone is sobering. Here are our local stats, county by county. Read 'em and weep, if not for the people who can't pay the mortgages, then for  the kids who are attached to them, through no (de) fault of their own.

Shelter: A Cautionary Tale About Greed

Here are those cute little pigs again. Behind them is 6766 Armour Drive in Oakland's Montclair district, the first House That Got Away from us. It was a bit of a surprise when it did, because we made a full-price offer with a swift clean close (20 days), and there were no other offers on the table. But the sellers, perhaps nostalgic for the good old days when multiple buyers would whip each other into a competitive lather while their RE agents frantically added digits to contracts before sprinting to the seller's door to tender their inflated offers, declined. Wanted to drum up a bidding war, which never materialized. After a few more open houses, only one other offer dribbled in, so Porky and Petunia here had to take it.

Escrow on the sale of the property just closed. Public records indicate that it sold for 10K under asking price. The sellers had to carry the mortgage for a month beyond the proposed close of escrow for the first, full-price offer—ours—as well as pay the rent on the stunt furniture.

And we're still looking for a house.