nothingugly

  That’s what my house is worth, according to the Alemeda county assessor’s office. That’s an annual $8,697, or $725 a month - in taxes. Turns out that the assessors office is running “6 months behind”, according to Mary Vanderbeck, an “acting” asset service manager. I asked if there were any way that I could avoid paying the $4,964 semi-annual tax bill, and instead pay what I owed - about eight hundred bucks. “Nothing even comes into my mind” she said.

  “Aren’t you astonished that there’s no way to fix this? Ten thousand in taxes on a $135,000 house is quite a bit of money.” “The only thing that surprises me is that you got a $650,000 house for $135,000.” She added, “You were lucky to get a house from people who couldn’t afford to pay for it. I’ve heard some real eviction horror stories - people taking sinks, you name it.” They’ll refund me the difference. Eventually.

  I did let her know that this was a fix & flip gone horribly wrong, and that I was saving a house that was red-tagged in mid “fix” for a quick flip, but that didn’t seem to help.

  In other news, there’s a house for sale on my block for just a little less than a hundred grand. Why? Because the city has red-tagged it, too, and put a $50,000 “prospective lien” on it, just like mine. Because of illegal work done at least twenty years ago. We were informed by the Community and Economic Development agency that there is “no grandfathering” of unpermitted work. This means any house in Oakland can be slapped with this “compliance plan” nonsense at any time. Until the unpermitted work is repaired, you will accrue fines. This is being used all over West Oakland, and it’s done from the street - the inspectors drive by and make a judgement call based on what they see, not on the records (My neighbour’s “violations” included a fully permitted vinyl siding job and stair railings that dated from the original construction of the home in 1908). He was “notified” by inspector Kim Nguyen, who placed her business card under his windshield at 7 am with a note saying, “Please call me.”

  For those of you who get hit with this, FIGHT IT. I’m told (friend of a friend, so take it with a grain of sait) that signing the compliance plan is an admission of guilt. Get a lawyer, talk to other departments, do what it takes to not sign that document. Once you do, you’ll have to fix the violations, which means drawing your house ($2,500), pulling permits ($500?) and fixing the problem. And you have to do so on their schedule - and if you miss the deadlines, you’re out the $2,000 bond, and back to square one.

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I got a question about the previous post, and it’s been on my mind.

Nice post. So here’s my question: why bother? I grew up in the Bay Area and know Oakland well. I would never live there. Crime is bad. The city government is corrupt and inefficient. The housing stock is falling to pieces.

However, these are things you’re obviously well aware of. So you must have a very good reason for buying a place in Oakland. What is it? I’m not trying to argue. I’m trying to figure out why a smart, energetic person is bothering with Oakland. Can you help me out here?

  I’ll go one step further. Why live in a place where they’ll burn your house for complaining to the cops about drug dealing? Or where there are two recycling centers in easy walking distance - and one is a polluter and the other is a haven for crack-heads?  In a city that has a well deserved national reputation for street crime?

I’ve done some travel overseas, and when I’m asked about the US, I’m usually stumped.  After all, most Europeans seem to think of the US the way most Americans think of Texas… boorish, belligerent, and in poor taste. I answer, “Well, the US is really REALLY large.” In other words, we’re talking about people, not “crime rates”. In city hall, I’ve definitely run into my share of obstructions, and I haven’t even applied for permits yet. However, I also found Betty Marvin, who ran the Oakland Cultural Heritage Survey. She has every block of West Oakland memorized, and when I mentioned my address, she asked what had become of the church two houses down. At no cost, she provided me with an overview of Oakland architectural heritage, and found a picture taken of my house in 1987.  I’ll be using it as a restoration guide, and the Mills Act she pointed me at may help mitigate tax issues.

  Finally, my immediate neighbourhood. My right hand neighbour is a good friend and fellow NIMBY denizen. On my left, there’s a gracious family whose roots in that house go back almost a hundred years. I’m across the street from brand new yuppie condos. 7 minutes from the bay bridge toll plaza. 8 minutes by bicycle from a Bart station. I’m a 5 minute walk from my woodshop. Many of my friends in the area are either in the trades, artists, or both - so there’s a ready supply of skilled friendly help for this project.

  On Friday night, I attended Art Murmur on my friend’s double decker bus. We drove through the Acorn projects in the wee hours of the morning and got nothing but smiles.

  There’s even a potential upside. West Oakland was gentrifying quickly before the crash, and condo projects are starting - even now. As gas prices skyrocket, the suburbanites who bought places in Tracy have moved to be closer to their jobs. I’m within four blocks of Emeryville, Pixar, and more condos than you can shake a stick at. Ten years ago, it was solid industry.

  Finally - if I’m lucky - this house is my way out of cubicle life. I’ve paid cash, and I have some left to fix up the house with. In a year, I’ll be broke, unemployed, and I’ll own my own house free and clear. How much money does it take to live a life well? I’ve made some compromises, but I get to live the life I want to be living, surrounded by happy people who have made a similar set of choices.

  There is risk. I’ll lose some tools. I may get mugged on the street. It’s possible my house will be broken into. I’m panhandled daily. Shopping carts rattle by the front window all day. But you know what? It beats the shit out of working in a cube.

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I’m trying to buy a house in West Oakland. The price is right - about 135K. The place needs… well, everything. The previous owner bought three places, side by side, and did a lot of “work” on them, so they could flip the houses. All of it was illegal, and all of it was BAD. Want new walls? Just smack up some drywall over the old plaster. New outlets? No sweat - wire those bad boys in before the new drywall goes up. They won’t see the wires; they’re between the two layers of plaster. But the  absolute best? The roof. You can see daylight through this roof. You can whiff basketballs through this roof. The mold is so bad that I have to wear a respirator. The floor has traces of green from alge. But the kitchen! it looks FAB, does it not? Want to remove a stairway and not fix the siding? Cut the door in half, nail it shut, and call it waterproof. NEXT!

  In other words, it’s exactly what I’m looking for. I’m delighted. However, the City of Oakland is doing everything in it’s mother-lovin’ power to stop this sale. Why? Probably because they LIKE crack houses. My diligent and excellent escrow company has been “working” with the City of Oakland for almost a month to try to get this thing sold.

  First, we pull the title. YOW! Ug-LEE. There are numerous liens on the property from the city. Apparently, when the owner walked away, the crack heads moved in. The city cleaned it up a few times, and tried to charge the owner for the service. Now, the owner has fled, so the city is owed the cleaning charge. Also, there are numerous fines from “red tagging” - All the work was done without permits. There are three additional liens which were recorded in error (how do you record a lien by mistake? Three times?) Then, there’s the doozy. The city has a $50,000 “prospective lien” on the property. And, to cap it all off, the city is in the process of declaring the property a “Substandard public nuisance”. Now, this is all well and good. The guys who “fixed” this house weren’t going to correct anything, and city wants to get paid. However, here comes a buyer - me - paying cash for a crack house in West Oakland. Not to fix it and flip it, but to live there. You’d think they’d want to help.

  Here’s where the fun starts. Escrow contacts the city, and the city informs us that the “prospective lien” is ACTUALLY only for $5176, and they refer us to an inspector. The inspector’s boss has been known to return emails, though it usually takes 48 hours. The inspector herself hasn’t returned an email, ever. And she’s running about 30% on phone calls. In fact, the city of Oakland’s voicemail system has been entirely unavailable twice. So, since we’re now three weeks into the 7 day escrow, I decide to trot down to city hall.

  I lean that, we (the seller and myself) have to file a “compliance plan” with the city. The intent, presumably, is that we follow through with the compliance plan to remove all the issues that the property now has. However, to do this, we have to work with the inspector. Oh, and draw up plans. And file a $2000 bond. And pay about $1600 in fees. BEFORE the buyer owns the house. What happens, I ask, if the deal falls through? I’m informed that it has happened in the past, and the buyer attempted to get the fees and bond refunded (I guess they were out the plan drawing charge, which typically start at $2500). The inspector told me that the city of Oakland - i.e,:, her - told them to fuck off, and the buyer was left with no money, and the city was left with another crack house. Oh, and one of the violations? Well, my door is right bang at the top of the stairs. No landing. I go to the historical department, and pull a photograph taken in 1988, showing the door in the current position. The historical department guessed that the porch had been glassed in sometime in the 1920s. So, I’m forced to correct a code violation from 1925 before I can move into a crack house?

  After three or four rounds of this, (not to mention the good old runaround to other departments, but that’s a side issue), the inspector calls me back and informs me that since it’s an all cash transaction, I can actually just take responsibility for all of the above issues, and we can FINALLY transfer title.  The seller - a bank - drops the price of the house by the cost of the bond - $2000 - and the approximation of the fees - $1600.

  The summary, though, is pretty sad for Oakland. What it really means is that it’s effectively impossible to use a loan to buy a house which has been declared “substandard” by the city. Only the worst of the worst manage to get declared substandard, but it’s a bureaucratic roach motel. Essentially, the city is going to ensure that once a house has been identified as a nuisance, it’s pretty much going to stay that way, racking up additional fees, and never get sold.

  My house will close August 5th. 36 days after entering the 7 day escrow period.

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Not the most thrilling post ever, but the big secret of this “blog” is that I use it to inform people who need to know about my plans. Ie: people who might be bidding for construction, relations, etc. I finally got my soil reports, so I know enough to finalize my site plan. We have a landslide that prevents building in certain areas - or, at least makes it prohibitively expensive.

The shop has been revised a bit to work with the terrain. I moved the water tank so it would be a little less visible. I’ve also removed a few windows from the shop. The house has some cute lighting in the kitchen, which should represent a decent approximation of my LED lighting. I’ll also probably embed upward facing LEDs in the shelf that runs around the perimeter of the kitchen and bedroom. No idea what I’ll do for a vanity; I’ll boil that bridge when the pot calls it black.

Floor plans with dimensions:

• House, first floor
• House, second floor
• Shop, first floor
• Shop, second floor

Site planning:

• Without detailed elevations
• With detailed elevations

Salamanders? We’re still waiting.

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I’m not building a house, really. More like a giant pile of paper. Papers like subdivision maps, soil test results, perk maps, applications for minor subdivision, biology and geology reports, well water tests, botanical diversity analyses, and proctology reports. Sorry, not even my joke. But all of those things are required before we can subdivide, which is the precondition for applying for a permit to build.

Of all of these, the biggest hurdle is the dreaded California Tiger Salamander. Known as simply “CTS”, the California Tiger Salamander has been used as a lever to slow development. Any port in a storm, I suppose – people rightly object to these horrible McMansions appearing in what used to be cow pastures. Sadly, family projects like ours are what really get stopped. The builders can afford to get involved in “mitigation”, or the purchase of wetlands for preservation, typically at a ratio of 2:1 or 4:1. That is, for every acre of habitat they destroy, they buy two acres of wetlands from some clever hippies who DID take that deal to buy swampland… The cost of all of this is passed on to the buyer (at a 20% markup), who has some savagely complex loan to pay for all of this, and everyone makes money… right? We all know how this ends, but I’m not going to get into a diatribe about sub-prime loans.

Everything is controlled by the county, who stands to profit quite a bit from our project. $10,000 for the permit application to subdivide, and about $20,000 for the house permit. $30,000 if I build a larger home. The county would love to approve our permits. However, the CTS decision is in the hands of California Fish and Game. Fortunately, the biologist took a quick look at our land, mumbled “Give me a break” and dashed off a quick report saying, “Ain’t got none.” So now we wait… and wait. The most recent word is that Fish & Game is re-writing the standards for CTS in Sonoma county, and they’ll make a decision about our parcel only after they’ve done so. Holy ex-post-facto, captain! We’re told that, typically, it takes the state between 8 weeks and 6 months to make a decision. In exceptional cases, it can take more than two years. Of course, since they’re rewriting the policy, there’s no telling when they’ll get around to it (our biologist was told by the state: “We’ll get to it when we get to it.” Oh, we’re also told that a verdict of “no salamanders” from a state licensed biologist can mean a mitigation ratio of as low as 0.2:1. Apparently, you can’t PROVE you have no salamanders. It’s exact opposite of math – an example provides positive proof.
In the meantime, I’m getting my septic system designed and doing soil testing, choosing building sites, and refining my designs. It’s nice to not be in a hurry.

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Plat of LIVE OAK SUBDIVISION in the Rancho Roblar de la Miseria, Sonoma county, California.

We’re groping our way through what looks like just the very beginning of the Great Salamander Issue. The first step is to do a survey, to see if we really have salamander habitat. That then goes to the county and then…. who knows. If we’re lucky, it’s a tempest in a teakettle. If not? Well, then we get into things like environmental impact reports, mitigation, and all kinds of hairy and expensive tangles. Some folks think all this will cost us about 8 grand, other estimates have ranged as high as $300,000 for mitigation alone. If it comes to that, we’ll probably have to sell it all, and someone who can afford all this mumbo jumbo will come plop McMansions all over it, which would seem to defeat the original intent of the restrictions. For now, we do the survey and hope for the best.

Which brings me back to the ranch of the “oak of the misery” - our little subdivision. In the process of pulling out relevant documents, I was sent this scan of the original 1927 plat map of the area. Someone paid a lot of money for it - $5. It’s drawn & lettered in a lovely hand (engineering lettering of that era really makes ours look impoverished). Look at the high res image; the thumbnail doesn’t do it justice. There’s an image out there of the original 1857 Rancho, but I can’t really correlate what little I can discern with the land that I know. I imagine our 13 acres are a mere speck on this map.

It also shows a railroad along Pepper road - the Petaluma and Santa Rosa railroad. I never knew there was any such thing, but there it is. Apparently it linked San Francisco, Petaluma, Denman, Liberty, Roblar, Two Rock, Hessel, Cummingham, Sebastopol, Graton, Forestville and Santa Rosa - all around the turn of the century.

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Nothing ever really goes as expected. Monday was to have been the day that I get my first container. I want to house building materials and a temporary workshop. I had the trucker inspect the delivery site on Saturday. Monday, he picked up the first of the two containers. Sadly, it’s bigger than his trailer could handle. 24′ - it’s an odd sized box, and they’re retiring the entire line. That’s why we were able to pick it up on the cheap. The extra four feet was enough to unbalance the trailer, and his maximum safe speed was 30mph.

A friend recently acquired a 40 foot trailer that’s capable of loading and unloading a full size container all by itself. Magic! The plan was that we’d do a “dry run” up to the property with this thing to ensure it can get around all the corners and onto the land.

Well, that was the plan. It turns out that Sonoma county has some pretty serious rules about containers. Here’s the breakdown:

• We need a permit to use a container as temporary (or permanent) storage.
• The permit has to be part of a building permit for a structure.
• We can’t get a building permit until the subdivision is complete.
• The subdivision won’t be complete for another 6 months.

Holy catch-22, batman! I reached the trucker right before he crossed the Richmond bridge. He turned around, and we had him drop the container off at NIMBY. It was sold before it even hit the ground - and at a 50% profit. That’ll cover all the screw ups and pay the trucker. Container #2 will, I’m told, sell for $2500 or so, and I only paid a grand. I’m having NIMBY keep the profit. The net result is that the trucker made money, NIMBY made money, and I’m not out a dime. And now I know how to do this…. once I can do so legally.

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