Wednesday, June 8, 2016

I would bet you money on this

Here is an example of a lovely old home that WAS not too far away.  It stood about a hundred years before this wave of unbridled growth and greedy developers knocked it down and put up two houses on hormones. They are over sized and fill up the lot.  No room for vegetation and trees except a little square of lawn for the dog to poop.  And I would bet money that the new houses with their shoddy materials and construction, won't last 50 years.  What a shame.

This got demolished and replaced


With two of these.


Notice the crappy wood used for the stairs.  Bet they will be replacing those stairs within ten years.  The greedy developer is Vic Remmers, who is doing a lot of this.   I read he owns 141 properties in Portland.  I wonder how many will be demolished.

The house that was torn down was not in bad repair.  It needed some paint and a face lift.  Here is the listing for the old house, which is still on Zillow, but a little wrong.  It has some old facts and some new facts.





 The original house sold for $600,00.  One of the new houses sold for $938,000 and one sold for $927,000, which totals to $1,865,000 in sales and is  $1,265,000 more than what they paid for the house they knocked down .  My research says that it costs a builder around $300,000 to build one of these houses.  The likely gross profit to the developer/builder (after paying for materials and worker bees) is therefore well over half a million dollars.  Yes, developers are making a killing here at our expense.

Portland city government used to value trees and green spaces.  Now they will let builders and developers destroy anything and build anything no matter how ugly.  They say we have to squeeze in to make way for the mongol hordes.  But I can't see how building giant single family homes helps us in any way.

Here is the lovely new landscaping (aka a place for the dog to poop).


And here is the new deck.  I bet it won't last very long in our weather.  Looks like really cheap wood.  It is my experience that when even the visible materials are poor, the hidden materials are even worse.


Here is a house in Portland with its trees cut down in preparation for demolition.  Many of the houses they are demolishing are very nice houses.  Nicer than the replacements.  Nobody wins except the greedy developers.

source

So this is why I beg you not to move to Portland.  We don't have room for you without destroying our lovely city.  You won't like it anyway when all the good bits have been destroyed.

4 comments:

Sharon Kwilter said...

I don't understand how they can cut down all those trees. Portland has such a fit when homeowners try to do it.

Sharon Kwilter said...

http://www.oregonlive.com/front-porch/index.ssf/2016/06/new_development_rules_would_li.html

donaleen said...

There are many contradictions in this. People think of Portland as being green. This is not green.

Those new rules are maybes. We will see if they get them by the developers....

Unknown said...

It's sad to see this old beauty of a house torn down, and worse to know there are others going too. Take many photos and post them all (or publish a little book on these homes)!