The homebuyer’s course said always look inside the house before buying
August 15, 2021 9:22 AM   Subscribe

“A block that had once been home to more than 100 people was down to six who lived amid the ruins of another era… And then, for reasons that no one in Peoria could fathom, people from all over America began snapping them up.” (SLWaPo) posted by hwyengr (45 comments total) 27 users marked this as a favorite
 
I had no idea this was the situation in Peoria's south end. What excellent storytelling.

As a non-homeowner/construction expert, how expensive is it to completely demolish a single-family home? The article mentions a school slated for demolition but the city doesn't have $1.2 million to demolish. Is it that much for homes too? For the folks who bought "houses" for a few thousand dollars, how much money would they have to spend in order to demolish the old homes and have an empty lot? If they instead abandon the homes and they're auctioned again due to foreclosure, do they just stay empty until they burn down or there are no buyers?
posted by rogerroger at 9:45 AM on August 15, 2021 [1 favorite]


As a Peoria transplant who sees an immense amount of potential in this beautiful, hurting city, and has no idea how to help the people on the south side live the lives they deserve… this article did not feel good to read. It just made me feel more hopeless.
posted by obfuscation at 9:59 AM on August 15, 2021 [12 favorites]


Yeah, this was Jaffe’s second article for the Post this year about the south side. The first was even sadder.
posted by hwyengr at 10:04 AM on August 15, 2021 [1 favorite]


For the folks who bought "houses" for a few thousand dollars, how much money would they have to spend in order to demolish the old homes and have an empty lot?

It varies greatly by the house, but assuming a substantial foundation &c., something in the 10-15k range would be typical for a single-family home.

If they instead abandon the homes and they're auctioned again due to foreclosure, do they just stay empty until they burn down or there are no buyers?

Yep. Which is to say, things continue in pretty much the same manner in which they were continuing previously.

As someone who lived a fair chunk of my adult life in a majority-abandoned city, the thinking of the buyers here is challenging to understand. Like, why do think it's so cheap? It's cheap because no one wants to live there. Not in a "I don't want to live there myself so I'll just rent it out" sense, but in a "there are no tenants because literally nobody is interested in living there at any remotely viable price, or maybe any price at all" sense.

But I suspect this may be another aspect of the Great Sorting that's been going on for so long. The geographically tiny bubbles of wildly inflated real estate are also the places where a lot of people live, and often where everybody they know lives. If that's your reality I expect the idea that a house (in a legit city! one with economic and cultural activity of various kinds!) could be literally worthless might be really hard to process. Maybe especially if it's a city, like Peoria, whose problems don't generally make the national news.
posted by Not A Thing at 10:21 AM on August 15, 2021 [13 favorites]


As a non-homeowner/construction expert, how expensive is it to completely demolish a single-family home?

It's going to depend on a lot of things (like house size, location, etc.) but somewhere in the $15k - $20k range is typical in my limited experience. And you could expect additional costs if you have environmental issues like asbestos, fuel oil tanks, etc. that would require additional work to remediate.
posted by Dip Flash at 10:24 AM on August 15, 2021 [3 favorites]


What are these people going to do when it comes time to pay property and school taxes? Or when the city sends them a bill for mowing the weeds, or worse, demands that they tear down the house?
posted by Bee'sWing at 10:43 AM on August 15, 2021 [6 favorites]


One comment from the article that caught my eye was that local contractors won’t accept work there, presumably because it’s dangerous, and/or carries risk of theft and vandalism. So the dollar cost of demo and renovation might be beside the point.

If people were buying the properties and actually trying to live there in sufficient numbers, that could change. It could be the next Detroit. Since no new industry is cropping up nearby, however, it’d have to be remote knowledge workers, and IMO they’d look at Bloomington first.

Sadly, it sounds like it’s just a bunch of flippers hoping somebody else does all the hard work for them. Scavengers gnawing the corpse.

I was in Peoria in the early 90s working on a contract for Caterpillar, but I never saw the South side. There did seem to be a lot of urban renewal stuff happening downtown. But the Great Emptying was only just getting started back then.
posted by panglos at 10:44 AM on August 15, 2021 [6 favorites]


I adore the south end of Peoria. One of my children went to school there; I put together a photo project on the area during my last couple of years in Peoria, amateurly studying the architecture and built environment of the area, and briefly became the leading expert on Peoria's streetcar neighborhoods (including the ones in this article). (This is mostly just because I am the only person who read the last expert's book, and he died.) Two of my good friends are doing an AMAZING project where they're walking and photographing literally every street in Peoria (FB-only project, sorry about that), and researching bits and pieces of the city and talking to everyone they run across. One is a librarian with the Peoria Public Library; the other is a mental health counselor specializing in drug harm reduction. LOTS of good info, especially when they're in the South End. Part of their whole thing is that the South End is NOT THAT DANGEROUS (during the daytime, for people not involved in drug dealing), but people (by which I mostly mean white middle-class people) get really weird about going to the South End. I used to park my car down there, unlocked, on the street, with the key in the ignition (it was stuck). Never had a problem.

"The article mentions a school slated for demolition but the city doesn't have $1.2 million to demolish. Is it that much for homes too?"

Hello, I am one of the former school district officials who sold this school that has been slated for demolition for about ten years now. We could not afford to demolish it, so we sold it at auction for -- this is true -- $10. It's a HUGE piece of property and a big old building. The guy who bought it was convinced there would be a lot of architectural salvage money in it. He never even managed to pay the property taxes, IIRC. The city eventually took it for lack of tax payments. The asbestos was a lot of what prevented us from demolishing it, but it's all hella dangerous and falling down, and just making it safe enough to demolish will take some money.

My oldest attended his early elementary years in the new school building across the street that replaced this one. Because community services were so bad in that part of the city, we had a laundry in the school with a bunch of industrial washers and dryers, where parents could come do laundry (or kids who weren't really being parented could do their own laundry during the school day). We had a full-service medical clinic inside the school that could see both students and family members, and was one of the primary contact points for getting birth control into the hands of adults on the South End AND treating the utterly rampant gonorrhea epidemic.

I think a lot of these buyers think they can do what a lot of people did in Detroit -- buy very cheap houses, rehab them, and as the city starts to renew, they rise somewhat in value. But Peoria doesn't have the industry or regional population to support that. Caterpillar moved its HQ to Deerfield, Illinois (outside Chicago), and the union jobs at Cat require a fair amount of apprenticing/training and most of the guys who work them live in Peoria's suburbs (such as they are). People on the South End who have jobs mostly work as custodians or food service workers at either the hospitals or the schools, which are the city's largest employers other than Caterpillar.

There are so many great programs trying to revitalize Peoria, but there aren't the jobs. There isn't the transportation infrastructure. (A high-speed rail link to Chicago would be a game-changer.) The EPA has Peoria under a billion-dollar stormwater remediation order that the city can't afford and so mostly keeps putting off while raising water taxes. There's SO much racism and it's impossible to make a dent on problems in the South End because of the racism of the whiter parts of the city to the north. There's been a complete disinvestment from city services -- police, fire, schools -- which at first was for Republican ideological reasons, but I think it's tipped into irreversible. The mayor at one point put in a tax ON OTHER GOVERNMENT BODIES (schools, parks) because there was no more blood to wring from the private-property stone. My house in Peoria was valued at just over $100,000 and we paid $3600 in yearly property taxes, for incredibly slow fire response and schools among the worst in the state. More than half the high-value lots downtown, the ones that could bring in real taxes, are owned by non-profits (hospitals and churches, mostly) and have surface parking lots because they're not taxed and so don't have to do anything productive with them. The city continue to dump money into suburban-type new neighborhoods on the north end, where density may be 1-2 homes an acre rather than the 12 to 24/acre that the South End can have. The property values are better, but the road upkeep and utility costs are ruinous, because you need SO MUCH MORE road/wire/pipe to serve many fewer people.

These houses on the South End are FULL of lead (61606 was the highest-lead ZIP in the US at one point, maybe still), and the city has repeatedly refused to put any money into lead remediation. I knew a couple of local people who, in around 2008, bought South End houses for around $4500, dumped $15,000 into renovating them, and managed to sell them or rent them. The cheapest you could buy a LIVEABLE house in Peoria in 2015 was around $21,000, and you would probably be still be dealing with lead paint and constant maintenance of a falling-down older house that wasn't well-maintained. If the houses do get renovated and flipped, they mostly get flipped to slumlords, who proceed to do zero maintenance. (And try to rent to Section 8 renters, because they pay reliably.) The city knows who the slumlords are, but doesn't really do anything about them.

Because it's a river city, there's a HUGE rat problem, especially in older parts of the city that are closer to the river. The sewers are so old that twice while I lived there, the city busted people (and yes, they sent cops and arrests were made) who were shitting in their backyards because none of their toilets worked and they could not afford to get them fixed OR find anyone who could do the work. (Did the city consider just sending a plumber? No, no they did not.) We tried to never have snow days because so many of our students ate free school breakfast and free school lunch and that was IT, and didn't have access to food on weekends.

The city has a grant program to build wheelchair ramps on inaccessible houses. In a lot of cases, the $1200 ramp on the front of the house (that the city paid for) is worth more than the entire rest of the house. Gorgeous ramps in front of falling-down properties.

I can talk about this for literally hours and with great specificity, ask me anything. If I don't know, I'll lob it to friends still in Peoria who do.

"What are these people going to do when it comes time to pay property and school taxes? Or when the city sends them a bill for mowing the weeds, or worse, demands that they tear down the house?"

They won't pay them, and the houses will be tax auctioned again. They will not be knocked down, because the city can't afford to. You can actually squat for a really, really long time, if you can make do without utilities.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:46 AM on August 15, 2021 [205 favorites]


Regarding costs of demolition: the costs include paying people to take down the structure, close off and/or remove utility and sewer connections, remove the rubble and dispose of it properly, and remove concrete and refill in the foundation hole. On preview: and manage any hazardous issues like asbestos, lead paint, etc.
posted by holyrood at 10:49 AM on August 15, 2021 [2 favorites]


What an interesting article. This dynamic has played out in Baltimore for a long time. The city has over 15,000 vacant homes. The city owns many of them through tax foreclosures, but quite a few are owned by private investors. In my experience, many people wrongly assume that the owners are wealthy people who invest in real estate for a living, but I think the typical owner is probably more like Culver - a naïve amateur investor with little to spend who thinks that buying real estate is a ticket to wealth and who has little to no understanding of the local dynamics that resulted in the house's abandonment in the first place. After all, these are extremely distressed assets. Some investors make small amounts of money flipping vacants to other investors, but investors speculating on the underlying conditions that make the houses worthless changing have generally lost their shirts. If you were a sophisticated investor, you'd never touch most of these properties.

Obviously these investors aren't helping the situation by buying vacants and sitting on them, but they're more symptom than cause. There's simply nobody who wants to put these properties to a productive use. If there were, you couldn't buy one for $5000. The math for repairing the properties doesn't make sense because most of them need to be gut-renovated and the houses' locations puts a low ceiling on what a buyer who intended to live there or rent it out would pay for it, because for the most part people who can afford to would rather live in areas without such severe social ills.

It's just misery stacked on misery. Abandonment is driven by miserable conditions in the places that are abandoned, and the people buying up these vacants are mostly people like Culver burning through their money to chase fantasies. At the end of the day, nobody knows how to reverse the downward spiral in areas experiencing high abandonment and Culver will most likely lose his entire investment rather than providing a legacy for his kids.
posted by vathek at 10:55 AM on August 15, 2021 [16 favorites]


Current resident of Peoria, and it speaks to the insanity of the current real estate tulipmania (which now has apparently eclipsed '08) that people are buying houses in a city whose name they cannot pronounce. (And it's not that difficult. Pee-OH-ree-ah.) Eyebrows has already listed the most egregious problems with the city; I may be past the point (age- and likely-future-income-wise) at which I could reasonably expect to become the owner of a house that I could and would want to live in, but that's no reason to purchase a home for the price of a decent but not top-end iPad.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:23 AM on August 15, 2021 [11 favorites]


Well, at least the taxing authority is getting something when these houses are bought at auction.

Part of their whole thing is that the South End is NOT THAT DANGEROUS (during the daytime, for people not involved in drug dealing), but people (by which I mostly mean white middle-class people) get really weird about going to the South End. I used to park my car down there, unlocked, on the street, with the key in the ignition (it was stuck). Never had a problem.

That's been my experience in many places where I'm told I should be afraid. I've had worse experiences being hassled by cops than people who live in supposedly dangerous places. Between racism and the "if it bleeds.." stories in the local news, people get really weird about neighborhoods populated with poor people.
posted by wierdo at 11:37 AM on August 15, 2021 [17 favorites]


I’m think I’m doing what is Peoria’s best hope for a rebound, being a remote worker here. We’ve got gigabit fiber, are close enough to Chicago and St Louis, and the houses that aren’t in danger of falling down are still very modestly priced.
posted by hwyengr at 11:58 AM on August 15, 2021 [14 favorites]


As someone who lived a fair chunk of my adult life in a majority-abandoned city, the thinking of the buyers here is challenging to understand. Like, why do think it's so cheap? It's cheap because no one wants to live there. Not in a "I don't want to live there myself so I'll just rent it out" sense, but in a "there are no tenants because literally nobody is interested in living there at any remotely viable price, or maybe any price at all" sense.

Yeah, I feel like these folks somehow managed to miss that time (I guess close on a decade now) when there were a lot of $1 properties in Detroit? They had a list value of $1 because their practical value was negative, and it seemed like everyone understood that, but now we're hearing about people whose desire to own a house is so extreme that they don't stop to consider that a house under $10,000 is going to be under $10,000 for some reason? Certainly buying such a property sight unseen seems like the height of folly.

(There seemed an interesting contrast between the story's two main focal examples, in that Cook went in with his eyes open and a pretty good understanding of what he was getting and what he'd have to do to make it habitable, and Culver seemed frustratingly unwilling to realize that his dirt-cheap house was not really a bargain at all.)
posted by jackbishop at 1:44 PM on August 15, 2021 [3 favorites]


Mitigation of Asbestos and Lead is so expensive...

It's kind of a good thing in one respect that no one wants to live there. Buy all the properties and pay for the demolitions and make kickass parks. Don't have the money to do that, but would be cool. Then, people would want to live there.

If only I were a capitalist who wanted to disrupt things...

That said, I do feel the allure of "buying a house" for $750.
posted by Windopaene at 2:32 PM on August 15, 2021 [1 favorite]


Cook went in with his eyes open and a pretty good understanding of what he was getting and what he'd have to do to make it habitable

One of my quibbles with how the story is written is that Cook (the guy who buys a pool) is a renter, living in one of the properties bought by an investor (not Culver, it's someone else who is not named), while Culver is an actual investor who doesn't live in the home he bought. That's not super clear, since the article's headline is about "real estate investors" and the article repeatedly refers to Cook's "home" (which -- I'm a renter too! -- it absolutely is his home, but in this article it would be helpful to differentiate renter vs investor).

The writer was probably trying to capture daily life in the neighborhood, but none of the investors live there so he profiled an actual resident. By not reminding readers throughout the story that Cook is a renter, the writer misses the opportunity to show another reality of this phenomenon -- the far-away investors are counting on renters to actually do the work of strengthening the community, making improvements, adding art, life and supporting the local economy with their purchases -- and then plan to cash in when/if the home's dollar value grows. So I totally sympathize with the folks who are duped into buying these cheap houses, but I also think that the dream of becoming wealthy by being a landlord can be pretty exploitative too.
posted by rogerroger at 2:49 PM on August 15, 2021 [36 favorites]


I can understand the logic. I live in the city opposite to this one; the share house I lived in when I moved out of home recently sold, and it earned more money for its landlord just in price increase over 20 years than I earned in wages. Without even thinking about rent, my house makes more money than I do just by sitting there. I can completely understand why people would think a house is a sack of giant’s beans, better than working, invulnerable to crisis, outside the ordinary markets where demand varies. It’s magic in the literal meaning.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 3:06 PM on August 15, 2021 [8 favorites]


And there are a whooooole lot of people who don’t understand that sometimes the magic beans run the other way. Which is extra surprising given that there are still a lot of people not whole after the 2008 crash, yes? Even if we’re just thinking about USA attitudes.
posted by clew at 3:10 PM on August 15, 2021 [1 favorite]


Don’t understand, or can’t bear to understand because it looks like the only choice.
posted by clew at 3:11 PM on August 15, 2021 [1 favorite]


Also, did the article just put Cook on the hook for water theft?!?
posted by clew at 3:12 PM on August 15, 2021 [6 favorites]


Super-cheap housing sounds great if you live in a place where it's super expensive but there's a level of home valuation that that's hard to come back from if you go below it. The total tax that a city needs to bring in to be able to provide services doesn't go down just because home values do and the cost of renovation is not much cheaper in a cheap house than in an expensive house. So there's this downward spiral of people abandoning houses because they can't find buyers and can't afford the taxes; cities getting stuck with thousands of abandoned houses that they can't afford to even demolish; cities raising millage rates because the tax base is so small; rinse and repeat. Without huge amounts of outside, state or federal money, I don't know if places that have gone below that line can come back.

When I moved to Pittsburgh in 1989, you could buy a six bedroom, grand center staircase, Edwardian brick mansions for $50K but you'd need another $50K to renovate them to anything resembling modern code and then you have to heat that monster in the winter. But no bank is going to give you a loan for that so you have to do it bit-by-bit as you save enough money for each project; doing most of the work yourself.

Pittsburgh had enough reasons to exist and gravitational attraction that it never quite went below that line and now has grown back to the point that we're on the flip side with house prices and apartment rents becoming too expensive for young people. It would be nice if things could stay in the middle where people could afford housing but that housing wasn't collapsing around them.
posted by octothorpe at 3:20 PM on August 15, 2021 [12 favorites]


"Also, did the article just put Cook on the hook for water theft?!?"

I mean kinda? But also hard to imagine Peoria slumlords caring. And the utility (Illinois American Water) is fine -- better than the electric/gas utility, whose emergency response plan depends on there NEVER BEING A BLIZZARD in Illinois and Missouri at the same time, because blizzards are known respecters of state borders -- but they once spent two years bouncing my payments because of a computer error and nobody could figure out how to fix it. And I once spent six years seeing how weird a check I could write that they would still cash. I gave up after I drew a picture of Illinois, a picture of the US, and a water molecule, and they still cashed it.

I struggle to imagine a slumlord caring enough to notice his water use is too high (and a lot of them probably just consider it a business expense) -- a lot of them build into their business model evictions and heat shutoffs and having all their copper wiring stolen and so on. So water theft would be shruggo. And I struggle to imagine Illinois American Water tracking down an unknown user of an abandoned property spigot; they'll just shut the water off and call it a day.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 3:56 PM on August 15, 2021 [13 favorites]


Apparently a lot of people grew up imagining the American Dream was real, unlike the title quote of the previous post.
posted by zenzenobia at 4:03 PM on August 15, 2021 [2 favorites]


It's amazing that in this way too big country a simple house to call your own is too much to ask. I can't wrap my mind around it.
posted by bleep at 4:58 PM on August 15, 2021 [7 favorites]


I’m confused by the combination of people who need housing, housing left to rot, postindustrial jobs, and free secondary education. We have really screwed up if we can’t coördinate those to fix the first two.
posted by clew at 5:21 PM on August 15, 2021 [4 favorites]


What are these people going to do when it comes time to pay property and school taxes?

A long time ago I did something like this (not having read the article) even further downstate in an even more structurally fouled up town. The property taxes were on the order of $300 a year. Given that I was trying to make a go of it down their, and had overcommitted financially and such, it was still a pain in my butt. But we're talking pennies in the grand scale of things.
posted by wotsac at 6:14 PM on August 15, 2021 [2 favorites]


It's amazing that in this way too big country a simple house to call your own is too much to ask. I can't wrap my mind around it.

You can certainly own a house some places for almost nothing. But finding work, friends and support infrastructure? That's a hell of a thing.
posted by wotsac at 6:16 PM on August 15, 2021 [6 favorites]


This article appeared in the newspaper owned by a bicentibillionaire who could rebuild every house in South Peoria without noticing in the slightest.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 6:23 PM on August 15, 2021 [19 favorites]


Well, playing pretend astronaut is not cheap.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:29 PM on August 15, 2021 [7 favorites]


After I watched a video about Orthodox Christianity, I got some recommendations for Russian-government-sponsored videos about how happy Americans who had moved to Russia to live the simple life with cheap property and low taxes were*. There's definitely a yearning bubbling up to somehow grasp a life of owning-a-house-of-my-own that's increasingly out of reach.

*And also no support for LGTBQ people. The first video started right off the bat with "Texas was too liberal with the gays, so I moved to Russia."
posted by clawsoon at 6:42 PM on August 15, 2021 [7 favorites]


You can certainly own a house some places for almost nothing. But finding work, friends and support infrastructure? That's a hell of a thing.

No but I mean that's what I mean. You can't live where there's a lot of people, because that's a privilege you have to pay extra for apparently and no one can afford it. But you can't live where there aren't enough people either, because then you'll be by yourself. So you can't afford to be all on your own, you'll be super uncomfortable, but you can't be around too many people, because only a certain few deserve that. So okay what are supposed to do, just, everyone go live in the woods now? Has civilization turned itself inside out all of a sudden?
posted by bleep at 7:58 PM on August 15, 2021 [3 favorites]


History runs in cycles. In the 1930’s the Soviets recruited american workers to come live in their communist utopia. For African Americans, the people who I first read about moving to the USSR, it might actually have been a better place to live than America in the 30s but it was still the USSR under Stalin.
posted by rdr at 9:37 PM on August 15, 2021 [2 favorites]


This article buries the lede like you wouldn't believe. The real story is that two criminals from Sarasota & Texas bought a bunch of properties at an auction which were clearly labelled as uninhabitable and un-repairable, "teardowns" that the City couldn't afford to demolish (like Eyebrows' $1 school). Then they sold those properties at huge markups and claimed they were actual houses you could live in and fix up. Why get angry at the victims who got fleeced, even if their dreams were silly, pathetic, or greedy?
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 12:40 AM on August 16, 2021 [16 favorites]


I told this a lot before here, but this seems like the definition of what my grandfather used to say to me, "Augie my boy, sometimes I cannot afford a bargain."
posted by AugustWest at 1:23 AM on August 16, 2021 [6 favorites]


Mod note: A couple deleted; weird, tri-derail comment makes it seem like you just want to disrupt the thread. Cut it out.
posted by taz (staff) at 2:12 AM on August 16, 2021


Eyebrows McGee: I once spent six years seeing how weird a check I could write that they would still cash. I gave up after I drew a picture of Illinois, a picture of the US, and a water molecule, and they still cashed it.

As an aside, I now sign all electronic pad-style credit card terminals by drawing a cheerful fish, using my pinkie finger. Not a single clerk objects, and a couple have noted my smiley-fish approvingly.
posted by wenestvedt at 6:28 AM on August 16, 2021 [4 favorites]


What are these people going to do when it comes time to pay property and school taxes?

Wotsac: The property taxes were on the order of $300 a year.


I did this -- not as cheap as these guys, but Wifey and I had a windfall of about $20,000 ten years ago, and searched for an hour radius of the city we're living in for a nice small town with cheap property, and we spent about $10,000 on a 2,500 square foot house in a town of 2,100 people. The property had one owner for fifty years, but from 1990 on it was a series of contract-for-deed or other short-term owners (likely flippers), and had been empty for about 5 years. About half the locals I've talked to said they thought the county had condemned it.

Our taxes are about $400 a year; the county-appraised value keeps going down every year even though I've clearly cleaned up the place, replaced the roof and fixed broken windows, etc, but we've owned it for 9 years and this spring celebrated having an operable toilet for the first time (my wife revelled more than I; the utility sink in the basement probably prefers I use the new toilet now too).

But, I have a nice gainful job and a good home in the big city; this house is my hobby. Aside from materials for what I feel like working on (I only pay cash, not that I could get a mortgage on it), it probably costs $2,000 a year in utilities and taxes, which isn't too bad for a hobby which should result in a fully-paid-for place to retire eventually. Well, a hobby where, like this past weekend I pulled up linoleum and cleaned up the mold that had been growing underneath it, but a hobby is a hobby.
posted by AzraelBrown at 7:22 AM on August 16, 2021 [10 favorites]


Instead of the stupid I14, the same money could be used to remediate any house in the US that had lead pipes and asbestos. Would provide more and better jobs too. Should really be done at the federal level, instead of state level or city.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:01 AM on August 16, 2021 [6 favorites]


If Cook owned his house could he afford to maintain it, do you think? Possibly what this calls for is a new kind of Homestead Act.
posted by clew at 9:09 AM on August 16, 2021 [3 favorites]


This article appeared in the newspaper owned by a bicentibillionaire who could rebuild every house in South Peoria without noticing in the slightest.

This is true (he doesn't actually "have" the money, as it's all paper, but he has it enough to be able to do this), but he can't do it for the hundreds of other communities in the US just like this and fix Flint's water problems and the zillions of other problems in the US which, people always point out, could (individually) be fixed by this billionaire or that billionaire caring enough.

So what do you do? Well, not look to billionaires to solve problems because, not only do they actually not have enough money to Fix What's Wrong, you have the coordination problem and every one of them would want to fix their preferred issue in their own way with their own attention span (imagine Elon Musk deciding that he wants to fix the transportation infrastructure. He'd talk about hyperloop non-stop and then move on to something else in six months). No, you need the government. And you need the government to have a goal, and a long term plan to reach that goal. We need a Marshall Plan for the US and that seems completely out of reach at this point in time.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 10:15 AM on August 16, 2021 [15 favorites]


What's interesting is that per the latest census Peoria is actually in pretty good shape compared to its peers:

Midwestern comparison The link focuses on South Bend and what it's done differently, but Peoria is only down 13k from its peak, and it's population decrease would be possible with a different population makeup, meaning a smaller number of people per household, while the vast majority of houses are still occupied. That is not what happened.

Peoria also shows that 1930s-1950s style of urbanism (small lots, small homes, but still an overwhelming amount of single family) isn't particularly more sustainable than what came later (cul-de-sacs, looping streets, larger lots).
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:03 PM on August 16, 2021 [1 favorite]


What's interesting is that per the latest census Peoria is actually in pretty good shape compared to its peers:

For all the hand-wringing about Caterpillar moving their execs to Deerfield, those same executives had already moved from Peoria to its white-flight suburbs.
posted by hwyengr at 1:45 PM on August 16, 2021


Harvey Kilobit: The real story is that two criminals from Sarasota & Texas bought a bunch of properties at an auction which were clearly labelled as uninhabitable ... and claimed they were actual houses you could live in and fix up.

Did they misrepresent them, though? I looked at some listings on the site from the article, and they all have a lot of AS-IS fine print without any real description of the houses, and are up front about the owner having never seen the property either. This may be more a case of putting an expert-mode investor tool (sight-unseen property auction sites) in front of rubes, kind of like the Robinhood has done. That doesn't make the investors much less shady, I suppose. People who want that dream badly enough will deceive themselves, no con needed.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 9:54 PM on August 16, 2021 [1 favorite]


Related: the guy renovating abandoned properties into affordable housing in Louisville, Kentucky.
posted by bashing rocks together at 2:31 PM on August 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


"Midwestern comparison The link focuses on South Bend and what it's done differently, but Peoria is only down 13k from its peak"

Oooh, fun, the two post-industrial Midwestern cities I've lived in! Some of this I agree with and some I don't -- South Bend is a MUCH better transit hub than Peoria, partly because Peoria's leaders have resisted a direct interstate link to Chicago or reinstatement of passenger rail. (But it also can't be overstated that downtown South Bend is 75 minutes from downtown Chicago and connected by commuter rail, and downtown Peoria is 2 1/2 hours from downtown Chicago by private car; longer by any other method -- I really think high-speed rail would be game-changing for Peoria.) And while South Bend's leadership has frequently been pretty fucked up, it's been a lot better and more proactive than Peoria's, and much more likely to see projects through. (PS, Coveleski Stadium is awesome, go see a game there.)

And yes, to agree with the link, South Bend is legit a much better immigrant destination than Peoria, and has the restaurants to prove it. There was a lovely article several years ago about African immigrants (I want to say from Ethiopia/Eretria, but I might be making that up) who migrated to Indiana under a farm-immigrant program, and they loved the land, and they called it "the Indiana" because their English was a little uncertain around definite articles, and they'd write to family members in refugee camps extolling the virtues of "the Indiana" and its farmland. And it had amusing stories of refugees moving to "the Indiana" expecting the whole urban American enchilada they'd seen on TV about NYC, and discovering they lived in rural farming country, but almost universally falling in love with "the Indiana" anyway because of its beautiful land and friendly people.

Also, Catholicly speaking, the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend is WAY more welcoming to Spanish-speaking immigrants than the Diocese of Peoria and has been for more than six decades, which is particularly sad because the bishop of the Diocese of Peoria is a CSC from Notre Dame (and Fort Wayne-South Bend) but he suuuuuuuuuuucks and is only interested in English-speaking Catholics. I have lived in places with WAY FEWER Spanish-speaking Catholics who had WAY WAY MORE Spanish Masses -- there is one Spanish Mass per week in the entire city of Peoria. In Durham County, NC, which has around 10,000 Catholics sum total, by census estimate, who are only 4% of the population, all four parishes have Spanish Mass, and you can choose from 8 of them on any given Sunday. Peoria has 20,000 Catholics on parish registers just in the city limits (15% of the city population officially enrolled), and one Spanish Mass, and only because they HAVE to, and it's distant from most native speakers. Peoria's Catholic schools have affirmatively made a decision to serve wealthier white Catholics who live in the suburbs or who are avoiding the public schools, like in St. Louis, and are actively avoiding outreach to the city's large population of Catholic Latino immigrants.* South Bend has made very different decisions, and as a result has much more vibrant Catholic churches and schools.

But I think as much as the author wants to deny it, the fact that the University of Notre Dame is adjacent to South Bend (you can literally walk from to the other) and Bradley University is in Peoria is a huuuuuuuuuge difference. Notre Dame is the #19 (US News) university in the US (and that's without a med school, and with a shitty law school); Bradley is a regional university that is unranked nationally, and costs fully as much as Notre Dame. Notre Dame's alumni are unusually rabid, and it has unusually committed non-alumni fans due to the football. Notre Dame has the 7th-largest endowment in the US, bigger than Northwestern's or Duke's, about $12 billion. They can PAY for development initiatives in South Bend (like a hydroelectric plant on the St. Joe River) because they have SO MUCH MONEY. Bradley's endowment is $300 million. Saint Mary's College's endowment's is only a little smaller than Bradley's (that's the women's college across the road from Notre Dame that enrolls 4,000 students; Bradley enrolls 5,500. Notre Dame enrolls 8,600 on that $12 billion endowment). Notre Dame is an enormous benefit to South Bend that has done a lot to keep the city viable. While it's not a single-college "college town," I think having Notre Dame right there has contributed a lot more to South Bend's continued viability than diversity of employers (which owe a lot to Elkhart and its RV base) or medical establishments (Peoria has more and better ones) have, and much more than the author is willing to admit. And like, I get it, Notre Dame is so fuckin' full of itself that it needs to be told it's not so great ON THE VERY REGULAR. And reminded that South Bend has a bunch of great colleges ON THE VERY REGULAR. But I think its wealth, fans, and influence can't be denied as a major force in South Bend's continued viability.

*When Trump was elected, my oldest child attended the most Spanish-speaking public school in Peoria, where about 20% of students were native Spanish speakers, virtually all Catholic, most of whom were immigrants from Mexico, mostly from Michoacán and Jalisco, many without documents. The day after Trump was elected, I was in the school for the day, and most of the teachers were in tears all day, and they reported an absence rate in excess of 15%. Parents were simply afraid to send their children to school. Attendance rates were shockingly low all week. The city leadership welcomed Trump's election, as did the Catholic diocese. Virtually all the outreach to Latino immigrants in Peoria came from the public schools, on a voluntary basis from the teachers. There was nothing from the Catholic diocese. Who have hardly any employees who speak Spanish, so couldn't have done any outreach if they wanted to. Which they very definitely did not want to. But the Diocese is very "we have SOME Catholics who belong to country clubs and speak good English, and SOME Catholics who are undocumented immigrants and speak no English, and definitely Jesus wants us to make the country clubbers feel better about themselves" which Jesus very clearly does NOT, but when the bishop's on board, what can you do?
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:53 PM on August 20, 2021 [3 favorites]


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