PALO ALTO (KPIX 5) — A home that may be infested with rodents is on the market in Palo Alto with a staggering asking price.
Neighbors were stunned when the dilapidated home went on the market for $1.8 million.
“We thought it would possibly go for $650,000, maybe $700,000. Then when it came out originally for $1.6 million, and then they raised it to $1.8 million, we were like, I’m kind of dumbfounded,” neighbor Dave Ashton said.
The house is in such bad shape that prospective bidders can’t even go inside to take a tour. Part of the house is being held up by wooden posts.
“It’s obviously uninhabitable,” Ashton said.
Realtor Debbie Wilhelm said if the home’s eventual new owners plan to bulldoze the house and start fresh, they will likely have to add nearly $1 million on to the price tag.
“I think it might be infested with, like, rodents, and it’s hard to even stand in it for three minutes,” said Wilhelm.
The seller received two offers Tuesday, and Wilhelm says it will sell to a group of investors.
It amuses me to watch people borrow up to their eyeballs to pay 7 digits for a vermin-infested shanty in a borderline- slum, except that the laughter dies in my throat when I consider that I and all the other taxpayers in the rest of the country will be paying taxes to A.) bail out more banks on the next wave of defaults resulting from the loosening of lending standards and B. for evermore water infrastructure to steal water from everywhere else to accommodate the hordes of lemming still poring into the western states and bidding up prices on crapshacks like this, or maybe cheapjack new subdivisions in other places.
At some point rather soon, like within 20 years, there will just not be enough water from anywhere or enough other “liquidity” to keep the show going out there, and people will flee these places as fast as they piled into them. The past 100 years have been anomalously “wet” for CA and other western places, but now that it is moving back into the extreme drought that is its natural state and that is greatly aggravated by the extreme water needs of agriculture AND the massive populations that have settled out there, all the dams and aquaducts we can build won’t suffice even if the rest of us were stripped naked to pay for a pipeline from the Great Lakes. It would be really nice if the rest of us weren’t being robbed of the wherewithal to maintain OUR critical infrastructure so that 50 million people could pretend that you can live in a desert the same way you would in Kentucky or Pennsylvania or Illinois or Missouri. We’re going to be needing what we have to accommodate all the people who will be fleeing CA and other desert states in another couple of decades.
Although I agree completely with your sentiment, Palo Alto is pretty nice fucking place and I think it’s likely to retain good value for a long time to come.
Palo Alto home prices dropped 25% in less than 6 months during 2008.
Why buy in Palo Alto when you can get some fine Section 8 housing in East Palo Alto?
I wonder if they allow drive by shootings in Palo Alto. They do in East Palo Alto. I wonder why all those liberal billionaire do-gooders don’t use their vast riches to revive East Palo Alto.
CA was one of the states most badly hit by foreclosures and catastrophic loan losses during the collapse of the credit bubble and housing market.
Sure, it might not be so bad this time, since so many cash buyers put a “floor” underneath it, or so it would seem. The trouble is that many of these large “cash” buyers didn’t really pay with cash, but got lines of credit that permitted them to circumvent the mortgage process, and came to the table with “cash” from these lines. These large investors might have a very difficult time liquidating the large inventories of SF homes they bought in foreclosure so as to avoid having to drop prices steeply to find buyers.
FWIW
A short walk (1Mile) north of Palo Alto You have the most expensive zip code in the US.
Atherton CA. 94027
Cheapest listing right now is 3M and goes up from there to over 22M
OH and get this. The property taxes on the house with the asking price of 22m+ for the year 2013
was $143,650 and that is on a tax assessment of $13,697,603
So if it sells for the 22M the property will be reassessed to close to that amount. The property tax will then be somewhere around $230.000 A YEAR!!!
In 1992 E Palo Alto was Murder Capitol of the US.
You wouldn’t want to turn off of HWY 101 going the wrong way in your Limo.
I’ve been to East Palo Alto while negotiating with the corrupt politicians when we were building an IKEA store in that fine city. The project finished well over-budget due to all the crap we had to deal with in that shithole.
East Palo Alto is a separate city from Palo Alto.
Back in the 1970’s a friend and I needing money, contracted to install those cardboad political signs in advance of an election. We had to staple the posts to the sign and then plant them in our assigned area in the middle of the night. We got paid per sign, cash.
They assigned us to East Palo Alto. And Foster City. That was a scary way to make money. Never did it again.
‘The past 100 years have been anomalously “wet” for CA and other western places, but now that it is moving back into the extreme drought that is its natural state’
—-Chicago 999444
How do you know that? What possible incontrovertible, verifiable precipitation data do you have to make that statement? Please include the following centuries. 19th. 18th. 17th. And 16th. I won’t hold you responsible for anything earlier.
I’m waiting.
There are four true deserts in the US (see map below); Great Basin, Mojave, Sonoran and Chihuahuan, all conforming to the basic definition of a desert as being a place of very low rainfall and restricted plant life. Of these, the former is a predominantly cold desert, receiving much snow in winter, and many parts are not much difference in appearance to some of the adjoining lands. The other three are hot for most of the year and more closely resemble a desert of popular imagination, containing large areas with very little plant life, just sand and barren rocks, or sparse grassland, often mixed with many types of cactus.
Outside these four large areas are other regions sometimes considered to be a desert but receiving too much rainfall to match the strict definition, and these include the Colorado Plateau of north Arizona and south Utah. Additionally there are several places named as a desert that again do not strictly qualify such as the Red Desert of southwest Wyoming, the Painted Desert of Arizona or the Escalante and San Rafael deserts of south Utah, while other named deserts fall within the larger regions, for example Black Rock Desert in the Great Basin, or Lechuguilla Desert in the Sonoran.
SSS,
Tree rings. We have trees here that live for thousands of years. Sometimes a tree of that age is disassembled and its rings are studied. It is from this that we have learned that the 20th century was unusually wet. We also know that since the 800’s, California has had two terrible droughts that lasted more than 100 years each.