After a grueling day rating homes I am interested to hear some reactions. Most of the homes in my groups area ranked houses in the 4-6 range with a couple 1-3s thrown into the mix. One thing that I noticed however was that my home ranking scale seemed to change while I was in this neighborhood. For example, a home I normally would call a 4 became a 6 when I compared it to surrounding homes. Also, I found myself being bias to home selection. If we drove past a particularly gruesome home it had to be rated. However, if we drove past a "nicer" home for this particular area I felt we were less likely to rate it.
What did the other groups think? Did you find anything shocking, disturbing?
Chris, can you tell us what neighborhood you were in?
ReplyDeleteSam and I walked around the neighborhood behind K. There were a lot of 10s.. every house had a good paint job, nice roof, tidy yard, etc. The streets and sidewalks had some cracks, but we had to actively look for them in order to notice... because there were so many beautiful homes distracting our attention.
No foreclosures, but 3 of the 30 homes were for sale.
We were over by the Kalamazoo Country club behind the D&W grocery store
ReplyDeleteI was thinking the exact same thing, Chris. I had to modify my standards because I was a lot less lenient at first with the ratings. However, once I saw some condemned and vacant houses, the ones that just needed some repairs didn't seem nearly as bad. I saw one house whose roof had totally caved in, which made me reconsider a roof that I had initially rated very low.
ReplyDelete(We were over in the Douglas/North St. area, by the way.)
During our adventure, my group went to an area in Portage, right next to the lake. What I found interesting is that there were more houses for sale near the lake than a few miles away from it. The houses by the lake were also older, and more unkempt than the houses outside of the lake area. Also, my group did not know we had to do number rating :/ whoops!
ReplyDeleteAs Toni and I were looking up the data for the assessment values, etc. we were finding a bunch of professors and familiar names! It was weird to see what they had paid for their homes and taxes. They seem like very personal numbers but they are so available, it was very odd.
ReplyDeleteWe saw a lot of "one story houses," and it was kind of a quiet neighborhood (near the airport) with gloomy streets. It wasn't a very lively neighborhood, and a lot of the homeowners left their houses and yards a little bit dirty.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree that I choose some of the more gruesome homes to rate in comparison to normal looking homes. This is because our class discussions have been on foreclosures, so we wanted want find the boarded up, rotting homes as evidence of foreclosures in our town. We even got excited to see condemned homes because this was exactly what we were looking for. During my ratings, I tried to rate the best and worst house on the street, especially if they were near each other. What I noticed is there were more awful looking homes than nice ones. For every two or three wrecked homes we found a gorgeous one a few doors down.
ReplyDeleteMy group was north of downtown, on the other side of the railroad tracks. There were a fair amount of notices on the doors, boarded up windows, some were condemned and a few had fire damage. I think that my standards were lowered as well. What I considered like a nine, would probably be more like a five or six in the neighborhood behind K. We also noticed lots of churches, beware of dog signs, and strange looks from residences. Several times we felt a little unsafe, or that it was best if we kept moving just in case.
ReplyDeleteI don't know what you're talking about Maureen; I used a number rating system. That said, I was amazed by the number of empty houses. We were in a fairly nice neighborhood (no caved in roofs), but there were a startling number of empty looking mcmansions.
ReplyDeleteWe were confronted by a nice old man named Tom, who turned out to be a fabulous resource. He pointed out about 3-4 houses that were vacant, and talked about his building a little. 35min later, we were finally on our way.
ReplyDeleteSurprisingly, in the Edison neighborhood, the roads were actually in better shape than some of the houses. Some were in decent shape, some not so much. But they ALL had some singular issue that would require a fair amount of money to fix. Some had sagging roofs, broken up walkways, plastic bag windows, peeling paint, or poor fencing. We only moved ourselves along once when some hoodlums were walking our way. Otherwise it wasnt too bad. Got a few looks from people, but Laura's Caddie helped us blend in!
Our group was in Portage in an area with both commercial and residential buildings, pretty close to the airport. We included commercial buildings in our survey which made some of the comparisons really interesting. The first commercial building I rated was a really nice Italian restaurant with nice brick work, pretty landscaping, and a well-paved sidewalk. After we started exploring a little, we found that right behind it was an entire block of abandoned and disheveled office buildings. The contrast between the two really struck me.
ReplyDeleteIn the residential area, we found that a lot of streets seemed to have a consistent style of house which didn't necessarily correspond with how well-kept their yards and roads were. For example, we drove down one street full of one-story houses that looked overall pretty nice, but then we got to a street of two-story houses and a lot of the yards were unkept and the pavement on the street was cracked and looked pretty old. I took a picture of one of the houses from our survey and posted a link to it on Twitter. You can check it out here: http://twitpic.com/4kt97i
You guys, share some of your comments on our outline. Thank you!
ReplyDeleteIt was interesting exploring places so close to K that I have never scene before. I definitely agree that I choose some of the more gruesome homes to rate. This is because our class has been discussing foreclosures. It's hard not to be drawn to the worst houses on the block.
ReplyDeleteI was actually suprised by how many homes were not for sale. Back at home, a subdivision like the one I visited in Portage would have had many more vacancies and sales. I think this is a very positive silver lining to the area, even if it may be changing soon.
ReplyDeleteRichard, my car appreciates the shoutout.
ReplyDeleteI thought, overall, the houses in Edison neighborhood were decently kept because there was not a lot of litter/debris/trash in the area despite a few foreclosures and a possible meth house.
I work in the poorest county in the US, and some of"poor" regions in Kalamazoo look like Taj Majal comparatively.
Our neighborhood was right on the edge between Portage and Kalamazoo. It was, what I would consider, a very typical American neighborhood. The houses were not too large...a lot of ranch style homes...and things were fairly well maintained.
ReplyDeleteWhat was most interesting to us (we also posted this observation to the twitter) was how much the home prices had dropped. All had gone down over the past 3 years, but when looking at some of the past sales, we saw some houses sold in the late 90s which had depreciated in value by almost half.
I think this drop illustrates what we read about in Foreclosure Nation about the home market being saturated and thus houses not being worth as much.
I definitely agree with Chris about modifying my rating system. It was hard to assign numbers to the houses and I think I was much harsher on the first homes we saw,gradually going easier on them. When you think about every neighborhood you have ever seen it is difficult to assign a ranking.
ReplyDeleteThis whole practice of rating houses was new to me, yet very interesting. My group rated houses on about 7 or 8 different streets, we could all see that houses were kept in better shape depending on the street they were on. Also i think are group was like Chris's in that most of the homes fell within the 4-6 range of the rating scale.
ReplyDelete