Sweet Dreams For The Peacemakers

The Peacemakers are homeowners!  Yesterday, we crossed the last hurdle for buying a home.  The Peacemakers now own a little part of the American dream!

Ever since I moved my family back to my hometown the goal was for us to purchase a house.  In fact, part of the reason we came back to St. Louis, Missouri was because I felt we could purchase one of the many homes in the city that have been abandoned many years ago and have been neglected ever since.  My city, like many cities in the industrial northern part of America, is brimming with economic blight.  This city, one of the most conservative places to live in the nation, relegated black people to one side of the city while white people reserved the other half of the city for themselves.  With each passing year, half the city got blacker and blacker with white people so many white people fleeing to the suburbs.  The schools in the black part of the city began to crumble.  Cut backs in city services began to manifest itself in the poor upkeep of city properties in the black neighborhoods.  Today, many parts of the black side of the city have been scarred and many homes sit vacant.

The city has a program for people to buy these vacant and abandoned homes.  The Land Reutilization Authority is charged with getting vacant and abandoned property into the hands of people who want to redevelop or restore the property.  But there is one particular section of the city that’s getting some seriously special attention.  Old North Saint Louis is a project to build one hundred units of new housing and rehab twenty five historic buildings in a central area around North Market Street, just north of downtown St. Louis.  The area surrounding this central location is targeted for historic restoration.  The managers of the project know that the people in these surrounding properties are crucial to the success of the entire project.  Without a supporting cast, the star act will surely flop.

We were able to find a single lot with two houses.  One house was converted into a four family flat on the cheap.  The other house was converted into a two family.  One of the previous owners decided to convert the property into rental space and make as much money as possible off of six saps.  And that’s how the property stood until now.  Vagrants have used the house for shelter.  There are mattresses strewn about and all kinds of garbage.  The pipes have been removed and many of the walls have been severely damaged.  None of the windows are intact and there are huge holes in the floors.  The roof has caved in certain parts of the house and the brickwork has given away in some of the walls as if exhausted from holding up a building that no one will ever appreciate again.  I fell in love.  The home is a canvas in need of an artist.

We looked at the guidelines and decided to make a bid for the property.  We contacted the LRA and they told us we had to contact the Old North Saint Louis Restoration Group.  The woman who answered the phone was way helpful.  She had the responsibility of approving our proposal before we could submit it to the city.  She asked for a proposal summary.  Nothing much, she just wanted an overview of what we planned to do with the property.  Simple!  We’re going to turn both houses back into single family structures.  The big house is the primary and the little house will be our guest house.  Took a week but we submitted our proposal.

The little lady came back.  Could you put together a budget? Not a problem!  Put some thought to Excel and put a little time lapsed budget together.  Over two years we’ll spend about forty grand restoring the house with about twenty man hours a week in sweat equity.  Took a little while but two weeks later we had a budget.  Is this for both houses? Not exactly, we thought we would do one and then do the other.  Could you make an additional budget for the second house? Okay.  It’s getting a bit frustrating but nothing we can’t handle.  It took another week but we had the budget extended another two years and another twenty five thousand dollars.  You need to contact the alderman for that ward and get her approval. Four phone calls and about a week or two later we got the alderman’s permission and approval.  I noticed you’re doing this out of pocket and you’re not planning on any loans.  But it would be helpful to see that you could afford a loan if you ever make the decision to hire someone to complete the project. So we have to get a letter of credit?  If you don’t mind, it would really help your proposal. Collect W2s, get tax records, collect bank statements and send all that information to Lending Tree dot COM.  Three days later I’m approved for two hundred grand.  Here’s the freakin’ letter of credit.  Now can we submit the proposal?  We could.  But didn’t you say you did this sort of thing before? Yes, I restored a little bungalow in Houston, Texas.  Do you have any pictures? Yes I do.  Why don’t we add some of those to the proposal so the board can see that you really do know what you’re doing? You have got to be kidding me!

After what seemed like forever of going back and forth for months we finally had the proposal finalized.  And we got it in just under the monthly deadline.  In order to be approved in any given month, the proposals have to be submitted for board review.  The deadline is the last Wednesday of the month.  We got it done that Tuesday.

The LRA board meets to publicly approve or disapprove the proposals for the purchase of abandoned properties on the last Wednesday of the month.  It was suggested that we make an appearance so that if we were rejected we could plead our case or at the minimum find out first hand why were being rejected.  The board meets in the penthouse of one of the old skyscrapers in downtown.  We were there with just two minutes to spare.  The little woman from the Old North Saint Louis Restoration Group was there to help guide us through the process.  We signed in, got an agenda, and took our seats.  We flipped through the pages of proposals and so many were receiving a recommendation for rejection.  I would say at least four out of five proposals did not make it.  Ours was one of the few that did.  When the board called our names to review our proposal we introduced ourselves and asked if there were any outstanding questions they had of our plans.  We were approved without a single question.

So this morning the Peacemakers are waking up the proud homeowners of a little part of the American dream.  All we have to do now is come up with sixty five thousand dollars over the next four or five years and about five thousand sweat equity hours and we will have our perfect new home.

It’s going to be a colossal challenge.  It’s a far larger project than the bungalow I did back in Texas.  But that’s okay because time is on our side.  And at the end of a few years in the future we will own our house free and clear. No debt!   If that isn’t the sweetest of any American dream then I really don’t have a clue what is.