I didn’t get out for a ride today until the afternoon thunderclouds were rolling in, and wasn’t but four blocks away from Chez Dog when the first raindrops began to fall.
Summoning my inner Belgian, I pressed on, and atop the Col du Austin Bluffs Parkway, by the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, I stopped to snap this pic of the Front Range using the Canon PowerShot 300HS‘s fisheye-lens feature. This sort of effrontery must make real photographers feel the way I do when some mouth-breather with a netbook and a Twitter account proclaims himself a writer.
Meanwhile, the other day I cycle up to Grandview Overlook in Palmer Park and see another cyclist there. We start chatting, and he mentions that he used to live in California, and I ask why he left, expecting some tale about selling some shitbox condo for a bazillion dollars and buying the Broadmoor as a pied-a-terre until something of quality hits the market.
“Couldn’t get out of there fast enough,” he said. “The bank wouldn’t work with us, so we handed them the keys and said, ‘See you.'”
Now, I don’t know the backstory. But the dude went from “owning” a house in California to ranching the view from an apartment in a tough part of Bibleburg, and that’s got to sting, no matter how nifty the Front Range looks from the saddle of your bicycle.
Mad Blog Media 
We used to joke in Honolulu how we went from owning a door and a couple windows to owning a room or two. Bank owned the rest and I owned a couple of Old Guys jerseys. That was a given.
Back then in the late eighties/earliest nineties the Japanese economy was driving the market outa sight for mere mortals. Everyone cheered when the Japanese bubble burst, except for those local speculators who were counting on the Nippon economy to keep driving our prices outa sight and our locals off of cliffs.
It rarely works out for the working stiffs. The only way to make money in real estate in Hawaii, if you were a working stiff, was to cash out your inflated equity and leave. Something we were never good at. Timing was everything.
Khal: I rented a decent sized 3-BR condo in Kailua for around $1500 a month. But the guy who owned it had a mortgage payment of around $2000 a month, and the renter’s market was so saturated that he couldn’t get more than 3/4s.
I got lucky … I was young and irresponsible and didn’t want to get bogged down with anything, so I wasn’t going to mess with buying. And my Army housing allowance covered the whole thing. (Damn government entitlements!!) But lots of guys got suckered into buying when the real estate agent promised them that prices could only go up. (“Invest in land … they’re not making any more of it.”) When they PCS’d, they handed over the keys to a rental management company, assuming they’d get a check each month. But when the market started rumbling (which, thanks to the buying/renting inversion, was early to mid ’90s for the Islands, well ahead of our mainland collapse — although it should have been a clue, yeah?), they found themselves underwater real quick.
I’m convinced that any business that has brokers needs to go away. Selling something that’s not yours to sell only creates the illusion of wealth. Or maybe just acknowledge that real estate and Wall Street are just legalized gambling and take away all the rules, turn the whole country into one paramutual, off-track, national casino.
Kailua, eh? Nice place to ride. I rode my tires off on some of those roads. In the summer, I’d leave work at the U of Hawaii at Manoa, ride over the Pali on a commuter cobbled out of a triathlon bike and hammer my way home on the Windward side through Kailua, Olomana, and Waimanalo back to Hawaii Kai.
So were you at Kaneohe Marine Base Hawaii or whatever its called these days? Just as we were moving here, the Navy was moving the P-3’s from Barber’s Point NAS to Kaneohe as a part of base consolidation. The sad part was that Barbers went from being clean and nice (but of course, part of the DoD axis of evil) to cluttered with litter and beer bottles. So much for aloha aina…
Turns out we just missed making a killing, at someone else’s expense, of course. We moved off the rock in 2001 when housing prices were still stumbling along. When the U.S. economy tanked after 9-11 and the Feds kept dropping the prime, folks in Hawaii were bidding up the price of houses on the promise of cheap mortgage payments at rock bottom interest rates. At one point I got on the Intertubes and saw that our old neighborhood’s homes had doubled in price. Yes, of course I kicked myself….but I really don’t like what that system does to folks who are not in a position to play the game, i.e., most of us.
Prices for homes were obscene, even considering its Paradise, eh? Esp. given that most jobs are in the service sector there or the military and people are increasingly in debt up to their eyebrows.
Stationed at Shafter, technically in Honolulu as far as the post office was concerned. At the foot of Tripler.
A bunch of us rotated in at the same time, and the commander at the time was on his 4th or 5th tour there. (Funny … just about everyone would love one tour, but somehow there’s a scratch my back, i’ll scratch yours thing going on with assignments, so the same guys go back and forth.) And he explained how you could live five miles from the post but it would take an hour to get there because of crazy rush hour traffic. Or you could live in Kailua, 20 miles away, which only took 30 minutes to drive. So a bunch of us wound up living there.
IIRC correctly, it was a 30 mile ride one way from my apartment (basically on Lanikai Beach) clockwise, on the Kam Highway, around Waimanalo, past the Blow Hole, to this coffee shop in Diamond Head marina where you could fill up with a smoothie and a bagel. Or, 40 miles counterclockwise to Haleiwa, for fish tacos or what have you. Then the reward on the way home were road-side huli huli chicken or malasadas. Yeah, life was good. I’d ride 60-80 miles carrying nothing but one water bottle, a spare tube, and my credit card.
Re: that commander. Funny guy. Total haole but had been there 4 or 5 times. Used to be a light fighter, snake eater, black ops guy, but had gotten old and fat like the rest of us. So, he decides to run the Honolulu Marathon. Everyone ran it, because the military entry fee was only $2.
So, last time he ran it was 20 years ago, and he remembered the start looking like such-and-such. And his wife is driving him there at oh-five-hundred, and he didn’t bother to read the parking instructions. And he has her cut through all kinds of barricades getting to what he thinks the start is.
A cop stops him, but the cop is a reservist who knows him and waives him through, tells him he can’t park but she can drop him off. So he gets dropped off right at the start.
The start for the Honolulu Marathon goes like this: all of the pros get right up front, then folks who claim they can run a 2:30, then 2:45, then 3:00, then increments of ten minutes all the way to five hours. And my boss, who got dropped off late and right at the starting line, doesn’t take the time to find his place.
So the next day in the sports section, there’s a picture of the starting line. From left to left, it goes like this: bib #3, 130 lb Kenyan; bib #7, 145 lb Kenyan, bib #1, 135 lb Kenyan; bib #6, 150 lb Kenyan; bib #23,237, 250 lb white dude; bib #2, 145 lb Kenyan …
The real estate game is just that — a game. Unless you were fortunate to own some CA property and smart enough to sell it near the top of the bubble – and then move somewhere without a bubble or where the bubble popped so your costs were much lower did you really make any money? In any case, you don’t :”own” shit….just stop paying your property taxes and see how long you “own” a house you have fully paid off. I’ve never thought the American Dream of home ownership benefitted anyone except the housing/mortgage/home improvement industry. We pay rent in Iowa and pay rent in Italy…and when/if we want to leave, 30 days notice is all it takes and we’re out of there! No home improvement expenses, property taxes, insurance, broker commisions, mortgage interest, etc. Instead we put our dough in a bank…where at least (for now) we can get our hands on it almost instantly and take it wherever we want to go. Maybe not for everyone but it’s worked well for us…we didn’t have any big paper wealth when things were going upwards and we don’t have any big paper losses now that things have crashed. The home ownership idea was cooked up by guys like Ford who needed people to keep working for him after the rent was paid for the month and their bellies were full….getting ’em on some sort of installment payment plan was key to keeping them slaving away making his cars despite the horrible boredom of assembly line work.
Admittedly, being a tenant is easiest of the three options (tenant, landlord, or mortgage-payer). I hated being a landlord after my wife’s parent’s townhouse was trashed and we had to eat most of the costs to fix it.
Being a tenant can suck, too. Back in grad school, I got the boot ride out of my hovel after my first wife and I got divorced and I had sublet the spare room to a housemate to cover costs. Landlord was a good Catholic and wanted that house rented to a “couple”, so he finally decided to boot the two of us, both Ph.D. students. The next place I found was another share with other grad students. The house was an expensive shambles owned by a slumlord. We practically starved making the heating payments the first year. So landlords are sometimes a PIA.
I don’t mind paying the mortgage instead of a landlord after a couple of those situations where I found myself at the mercy of someone else. We get to make most of the decisions. Except for the ones involving the bank, the assessor, the zoning committee, etc., etc.
Yeah. Its a mixed blessing. Or a mixed curse.
Ya kinda need to decide what you want to be and go be it, early. I look around my house and see a bunch of stuff I don’t really need, stuff I wouldn’t have if I only rented. Lawn mowers and rakes, Round-up and Weed-n-Feed. I know every dime I made off of a home sale I really spend years ago on those little things.
Had I never married, I’d probably be a renter. Growing up in an Air Force family didn’t exactly dispose me toward a fixed location. And my folks didn’t buy their first (and only) house until the old man was 50. I’m 57 and have bought three houses, including his.
Of the three, we’ve owned two great houses — the one outside Weirdcliffe, which we actually owned outright, and this one in Bibleburg, which we owe money on. But man, have we spent a ton of money on the places, this one especially.
And for what? Not much. Property-tax valuation is down, and so is actual value. We live in a great neighborhood, surrounded by good people … but there are plenty of nifty little rentals around here, too. Different strokes, as the man says.
Hey, if a sprinter can win a mountain stage, Congress can compromise with the President.