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I met Alan while still on the job; intrigued by his ambition, I kept up with his progress. In a few months, the flea-infested carpet was ripped out, replaced with white tile floors; the stained walls were painted white (requiring three coats); the outside was painted a festive scheme of yellow and green; the once sand-choked yard was now covered with grass. The house had been resurrected, and not just into something habitable, but as the anchor of that small and struggling block. Based on the value of the houses and duplexes nearby, Alan set the asking price at $80,000.
But as the block deteriorated, with surrounding properties slipping into foreclosure and decay, it didn’t take long for Alan to begin reducing his price by increments of five and ten thousand. Over the next couple of years, as I watched Alan struggle to sell this house, his story, and the story of Sulphur Springs, have become a prism for watching how the foreclosure crisis is and isn’t resolving itself on a granular level.
The housing market works like any other. Foreclosed homes, and foreclosure-afflicted neighborhoods, don’t stay that way forever. Eventually, the homes are bought and rehabilitated, resurrected, brought up a notch. This is a painful but necessary transformation, with investors like Alan seizing the real-estate remains of what my father and I cleaned out that spring day, and in doing so creating something that attracts life to the neighborhood. Call it the foreclosure ecosystem.
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