Tough Old Lady Wouldn’t Move Despite Encroaching Development

All Edith Macefield wanted was to live - and die - in peace in her tiny cottage in Ballard, just outside Seattle, Washington. Edith saw her residential neighborhood turn into an industrial area around her over the decades, and refused to move when developers tried to buy her out. She had been offered nearly a million dollars to move and allow her home to be bulldozed, but she didn’t want it. In her mid-eighties, Edith didn’t want to be forced out of her home to live out her remaining days in a foreign place.

When an area reporter wrote about her story in the paper in 2006, Edith received letters and flowers from all over the world.

From The Seattle Times:

“I’m no hero,” she said. “I meant it. I just want to be left alone.”

Edith died Sunday, at 86. She died in the tiny cottage she had refused to leave, not for a million bucks.

“She got what she wanted,” said Charlie Peck, a longtime friend. “She wanted to die at home, in the same house, on the same couch, where her mother had died. That’s what she was so stubborn about.”

He said she was never trying to stick it to The Man. Or to make any larger statement against development or money or anything else.

Yet to look at her house today, it’s hard not to be impressed by her iron will, no matter her motivation.

Today it sits walled in on three sides by what will be a five-story health club and a Trader Joe’s.

Edith has no known relatives, and it’s believed that she left the property to the senior construction superintendent for Ledcor, the company that’s been building up around her house. He had been taking care of her. It’s unknown what will happen to the house now – friends would like to see it preserved as a reminder of Edith and ‘Old Ballard’, the way it was when the home was surrounded by other homes and not 5-story concrete complexes.

What a cool story. That is definitely some iron will – to stay in the house despite construction going on literally right outside your windows.

Link [The Seattle Times]
Photo credit: ALAN BERNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Buy One House, Get One Free

Top sign the housing market is still going downhill: when you purchase one McMansion, you get a smaller yet still ‘luxurious’ row home free. No kidding. One San Diego real estate developer has clearly gotten very, very desperate to sell homes.

From the LA Times:

We thought, ‘Why does it just have to be on Pop Tarts and restaurants? Why not buy one home, get one free,’” Dawn Berry of Michael Crews Development told 10 News in San Diego.

More: “Michael Crews Development is offering new, 2000-square foot cityscape row-homes worth $400,000 in Escondido for free — if you buy one Royal View Estate home in San Pasqual Valley starting at $1.6 million. ‘You know it’s a straight-up legit deal; no prices have been increased, there are no hidden costs. Michael is just giving away a free home for people that buy at Royal View,’ said Berry.”

“Adam Rossman of Michael Crews Development added, ‘People have been coming in saying, ‘How can you do this?’ Well, it’s our way of dealing with current market conditions to move some inventory.’ “

Another real estate development company, Toll Brothers, posted a $93.7 million dollar loss last quarter, so clearly things aren’t going so well, even in previously booming areas like Southern California. In previous years, when the real estate market in such areas was so hot that it was incredibly difficult to find an affordable home, developers like these saw their bank accounts growing distended as they built more and more subdivisions, condos and retail space with the assumption that all units would easily be sold.

Considering the greed in the development industry, I think it’s poetic justice that they’re finding the rug pulled out from under them – how many times did they find loopholes in laws and ignore the public’s wishes so they could build a mini mall on natural, untouched land?

Link [LA Times] + [Huffington Post]

Green Bonus! Bad Real Estate Market Means More Parks and Nature Preserves

Just a couple short years ago, real estate developers were spending money like Lindsay Lohan in a liquor store. They would snatch up nearly any property, with no particular plans in mind, but confident that they’d be able to build McMansions, strip malls or ubiquitous corner drugstores without a problem. Once the market crashed, developers were left sitting on tons of property they couldn’t unload and no longer had the cash to build on. Luckily for us, that means they’ve resorted to selling it for use as public parks, nature preserves and other low-cost uses.

From the Wall Street Journal:

One of the big beneficiaries is Trust for Public Land, a San Francisco nonprofit group that specializes in buying land for conservation. The Trust often struggled during property-boom years to find sellers among land owners near urban centers. Now, U.S. property owners from Massachusetts to Hawaii are flocking to it.

In addition to the Trust, the Nature Conservancy, Arlington, Va., is among the national groups working on similar deals. Their purchases tend to be larger — involving thousands of acres. “Two to three years ago, local farmers and ranchers were eager to sell off their land and cash out,” says the Nature Conservancy’s Cristina Mestre. “Now, we’re being approached en masse” to buy development rights.

In rural Minnesota, thousands of former Camp Fire girls rallied to stop a 71-acre camp from being turned over for development. The property had operated as a Camp Fire camp for 77 years until being closed two years ago. But last August the developer failed to secure $5 million in financing, say officials of Camp Fire USA’s Minnesota Council. They have since begun negotiations to sell the property for $3.8 million to the Trust, which proposes to convert it into a regional park, says Andrea Platt Dwyer, chief executive officer of the Minnesota Council. She expects a deal to close by December.

So, not only do we get more untouched natural land out of the deal, we also have less crappy hastily built condo developments going up all over the U.S. Sweet. Huzzah for bad subprime mortgages!

Link [Wall Street Journal]
Photo credit: Flickr user Drylcon