#10 / 2003 Peace Tour: Connecticut Real Estate

CONNECTICUT REAL ESTATE

#10

Seeing a lot of different areas has taught me something about real estate. I never thought much about real estate until I inherited a house. I consider mine extremely humble, on the bottom end at 750 square feet.

In Pennsylvania, I was shocked to learn I could get two three-story brick homes, four stories if you count the basement, for the same price as my own modest little home back in Tennessee. I could pack up and become a slumlord in Pittsburgh.

Even my deceased uncle’s two-story, double-lot house in downtown Columbus, Indiana, a beautiful place twice the size of mine, is worth less than my aluminum-sided house in Nashville. How can this be? Well, the answer is the heating bills and the taxes - staggering. Tax would quadruple or more and the heating bills could be as high as the mortgage payments.

I also have the disadvantage of being a poor girl, and sometimes that makes me show my ignorance. Visiting my friend in northwestern Connecticut, I was puzzled by all the unmolested mountainsides, hills and dales, valleys and streams perfectly preserved as if time stood still one hundred years ago. These sweeping vistas of golden hills washed with a rosy red sunset held no trailer parks, billboards, slipshod bedroom communities, or storage buildings.

Surely, I thought, there must be some resources up here to be exploited. Why is it all so empty?

My friend had to explain to me that all this lovely country is still in private hands, still held by wealthy families who want to keep developers out and have the wherewithal to do it.

My own frame of reference is downtrodden Southern farmers who were forced to sell vast tracts of farms and wilderness below the Mason-Dixon Line generations ago, when the hard times hit. The investors moved in, the factories came, the bedroom communities and strip malls sprang up, and there’s the urban sprawl with which I am so familiar.

My friend in Connecticut lives in a tony neighborhood that includes Merryl Streep, Michael J. Fox, and Kevin Bacon. The upscale restaurants and inns are teeming with wealthy, vastly wealthy, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. No sign of hard times around here.