Casey Abby Blog's: October 2020

Friday 30 October 2020

Minimalist Masterpiece! Cube House Quickly Finds a Buyer in Upstate New York

A concrete cube on the top of a hill, designed by a famous architect, has just attracted plenty of attention in upstate New York.

The Cube House measures only 771 square feet and sits on 8.57 acres in Ithaca, NY. It came on the market just two weeks ago, for $289,000, and is now under contract after a flurry of offers came in.

“A lot of what makes the property very exciting and really collectible is the fact that it was designed and the construction was overseen by Simon Ungers,” says the listing agent, Carol Bushberg.

Ungers was the son of the architect Oswald Mathias Ungers—who was known for the use of cube forms in his designs. His son, who was also an artist, adopted a similar style.

Simon studied architecture and later taught at Cornell University. He built the Cube for himself in 2000, with two bedrooms and one bathroom.

He died in 2006, and his widow owned the Cube House until she sold it to the current owner in 2014.

Exterior of Cube House in Ithaca, NY
James Graham/ Riverview Media

Living space
James Graham/ Riverview Media

“He had a concept of building basically an urban loft in a country setting, and his family was a joint owner of this magnificent hilltop,” Bushberg explains.

“The house is two finished floors, and there’s an exterior metal stairwell. It’s very dramatic and leads up to a roof garden. The view from up there is absolutely spectacular.”

Windows in the concrete cube take full advantage of the bucolic setting.

“Sometimes in other homes, you’re pining for a window or a place where there should be an opening or a window, but there isn’t,” Bushberg says.

“That’s just the opposite of this little house, which has these incredibly placed openings and windows and lots of jaw-dropping views.”

Minimalist and utilitarian by design, the concrete structure may at first appear imposing and grim. However, that’s not the final impression.

“The place has a very European sensibility. The lines are very clean, and the materials are very simple. It has a simple open kitchen, dining, living room. There’s a lot of white, and the ceilings are high. There are a lot of built-ins,” Bushberg says.

On the main level, the floors are concrete, with hardwood floors upstairs.

“It’s pretty stark, there’s no doubt about that, especially on the exterior,” Bushberg admits. “It’s unembellished.”

On the second floor, the color of the floors and the windows warm things up.

“When you go upstairs, there’s more light filtering through the spaces,” she says.

Bushberg tells us there’s been a lot of interest in the petite property, especially from people who live downstate. New York City is about three hours away from this concrete retreat.

“For them, a 771-square-foot house feels pretty ample, and the price point seems very reasonable—and 8.5 acres seems like an unbelievable luxury,” she says.

“We’ve had a lot of inquiries from people who are looking for a house that they feel they can comfortably take care of, but who are also eager to leave more populous areas right now and get to places that are simply less dense.”

Aerial view
James Graham/ Riverview Media

The post Minimalist Masterpiece! Cube House Quickly Finds a Buyer in Upstate New York appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.

source https://www.realtor.com/news/unique-homes/cube-house-minimalist-masterpiece-ithaca/

Frank Lloyd Wright-Designed Home With Only 2 Owners for Sale in Illinois

Frank Lloyd Wright Carr Home — realtor.com

Back in 1950, John Carr, an architect, commissioned a home from the legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Carr initially planned for his home to be built in Park Ridge, IL.

However, plans shifted just a bit, and the home was built a few years later in nearby Glenview, IL—because the Carrs were charmed by the rural status of the town at the time.

It remains the only Wright-designed home in the Chicago suburb of around 50,000 residents, and it was featured in House Beautiful magazine in the 1980s.

For a Wright-loving house hunter, it’s now on the market, listed with Erica Goldman of Jameson Sotheby’s International Realty for $1,695,000.

Goldman tells us, “We look at this home as much as a piece of art as a home to purchase. The family’s hope is that it goes to someone who’s preservation-minded.”

The Carrs sold the four-bedroom, 3.5-bath Usonian-style home to the Busche family in 1965. After Carol Ann Busche passed away earlier this year, her heirs are ready to let go of the unique property.

“The family has been there on a daily basis, and used it as a COVID retreat,” says Goldman.

Exterior of home in Glenview, IL
realtor.com

Edward Busche’s architectural background came in handy for three seamless additions to the original Wright design.

He added a master suite, an extended dining room and a family room at the back of the house, overlooking the pool. He also added a shed, since the property does not have a garage (true to Wright’s designs, residents park under a carport).

In 1958, an in-ground heated pool was added, and a new roof was installed in 2005.

Iconic elements of Wright’s designs include the pierced-block windows, mitered-glass angled windows, over 30 sets of French doors opening to the outdoors, and Honduran mahogany throughout. The floors boast radiant heat, a desirable amenity in the chilly winters.

Privacy and seclusion are also plentiful.

“This is a complete, wooded oasis,” says Goldman. “You can’t see the neighbors.”

The home backs up to a nature preserve and sits on a 3-acre parcel. The Busche family also owns the adjacent 3-acre parcel.

“While it’s not listed,” says Goldman of the adjacent lot, “it could be incorporated into the sale in some way. The thought is that the buyer could build on that site and maintain this home for entertaining, or as a guesthouse.”

She also adds that it’s an “as is” sale but that “The new owner will get to put their own spin on it.”

Who will put in an offer and move in?

“Clearly, Frank Lloyd Wright enthusiasts and collectors,” says Goldman, adding, “Not necessarily a local buyer. This could be a country retreat for a city person. Or a second home.”

She notes that the proximity of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport and Chicago Executive Airport (for charter flights or private planes) is a potential lure for out-of-area buyers.

And if you’re not one of the lucky few to see this Wright-designed gem in person, peep the video below.

The post Frank Lloyd Wright-Designed Home With Only 2 Owners for Sale in Illinois appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.

source https://www.realtor.com/news/unique-homes/frank-lloyd-wright-designed-home-glenview-illinois/

Dearth of Credit Starves Detroit’s Housing Market

Looking south on Alter Road with Detroit, pocked with vacant lots, on the right and suburban Grosse Pointe Park on the left. — Brian Day for The Wall Street Journal

DETROIT—Alter Road runs northwest along this city’s border. To the east is Grosse Pointe Park, an upscale suburb dotted with grand old mansions built in the auto industry’s heyday. To the west is the city of Detroit, lined with abandoned houses and empty lots.

On the east side of the street, getting a mortgage to buy a home is a breeze. On the west side, it is hardly worth trying.

Detroit is making a comeback after years of decline that led to a bankruptcy filing in 2013. But large swaths of the city are left behind, starved of the housing credit needed to revive them. No purchase mortgages were made last year in almost a third of Detroit’s census tracts, and fewer than five each in another third, according to data from LendingPatterns.com, a mortgage-data analysis tool.

The impact runs disproportionately along racial lines in the majority Black city. Detroit’s Black residents are largely shut out of access to financing, making it tougher to attain homeownership, the key to building wealth for most Americans.

Nonprofits, governments and corporations are trying to channel money back into the city’s neighborhoods. But making mortgages in Detroit is a convoluted task. The dearth of credit is largely a consequence of battered property values plus a commercial reality that depresses them further: Lenders can’t earn money on tiny mortgages, so they don’t make them.

Vacant properties in Detroit.
Brian Day for The Wall Street Journal

Unfinanceable houses then go unsold, and their value sags still more. In Detroit, entire neighborhoods are trapped in this cycle of languishing property values and decay, their residents unable to access the tools needed to break it. The average home is worth roughly $400,000 in Grosse Pointe Park. Across Alter Road in Detroit, entire blocks could sell for less.

“Detroit is a hyperbolic example of the ways that systems can fail in terms of housing,” said Laura Grannemann, who oversees philanthropic work at the parent company of Quicken Loans Inc., which is the nation’s largest mortgage lender by dollar amount lent and is based in Detroit.

Less than a quarter of Detroit home sales were financed by mortgage loans last year, the smallest share in the 50 biggest U.S. cities, according to an analysis by Attom Data Solutions, a property-information provider.

For the city’s residents, it is a familiar story, now with a new dynamic. In neighborhoods where racist redlining policies once made it nearly impossible for Black Americans to get a mortgage, access to affordable credit and the wealth-building potential of homeownership remain elusive.

The mortgages that are made inside Detroit’s borders go disproportionately to white borrowers. Whites, who make up less than 10% of the city’s population but often are concentrated in areas like downtown where investment in reviving property values, obtained 39% of mortgages last year. Black people make up roughly 80% of the population and got 51% of the city’s mortgages.

A failure to revitalize the city beyond its center is an obstacle to Detroit’s ambitious comeback plans. The money flowing toward reviving Detroit misses many of its neighborhoods, residents say. As a result, the city is home to fancy condo developments in some places and dilapidated houses in others.

“You can go down one block and it’s nice. You can go down the second block and they’re all vacant,” said Linda Smith, executive director of U-Snap-Bac, a nonprofit promoting economic growth on Detroit’s east side.

The problem is worsened by lenders tightening credit to deal with the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic, which has hit Black Americans especially hard. The dearth of mortgage credit pushes the city’s Black residents into a parallel universe of financing options that offer fewer protections than a traditional home loan.

Alicia Lurry didn’t apply for a mortgage when she was ready to buy in 2018. Instead, she signed a seller-financed deal to purchase a three-bedroom brick house with a brown-and-yellow awning on the west side of Detroit for $35,000.

It wasn’t until she fell behind on payments that she learned she wasn’t actually buying the home. The contract she signed left her responsible for upkeep and property taxes, but she won’t get the deed until the final payment is made.

Alicia Lurry in front of her home on the west side of Detroit.
Brian Day for The Wall Street Journal

Black Americans have always struggled to access affordable credit in Detroit. Starting in the Depression era, maps of Detroit were awash in red lines singling out Black neighborhoods as risky places for lenders to make home loans.

By 1968, when the Fair Housing Act outlawed redlining, the city was highly segregated, and much of the region’s wealth had been pushed outside Detroit borders, according to Thomas Sugrue, a historian at New York University and author of “The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit.”

All the while, the auto industry, hoping to expand its business and lower costs, shifted production out of Detroit. By the time General Motors and Chrysler filed for bankruptcy reorganization during the financial crisis, many of Detroit’s blue-collar jobs were long gone. A city population once as high as 1.8 million had fallen to around 700,000.

The housing collapse in the financial crisis hit Detroit especially hard. In the years leading up to it, lenders had made subprime loans to many Detroit residents previously shut out of the mortgage market. That briefly narrowed the homeownership gap between Black and white residents in metropolitan Detroit, before a wave of foreclosures drove down property values and tore up neighborhoods.

The Black homeownership rate across metro Detroit, including suburbs, was 31 percentage points lower than the white rate in 2007, the year before the financial crisis. By 2018 it had grown to 37 percentage points, according to data from the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan policy-research group. Detroit has the second biggest such gap after St. Louis among U.S. metro areas with at least half a million Black residents.

The subprime-lending debacle left many residents hesitant to take on debt to buy property.

Vincent Orr ’s grandmother lost her home to foreclosure in 2007, when he was a teenager. Mr. Orr, a production supervisor at Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV, has bought two houses in northwest Detroit for cash at auctions run by the Detroit Land Bank Authority, a public repository of properties that are vacant or seized through tax foreclosure.

The agency has been unloading hundreds of houses a month to the highest bidder. Prices start at $1,000, but buyers must agree to fix them up.

Mr. Orr paid $2,100 in 2017 for a house for his mother. The roof was caved in, but he liked the brick work on the outside. He spent months redoing the electrical and plumbing, replacing windows and doors and putting up drywall.

Then he did it again, buying the house next door for himself last year for $1,200. He is nearly finished fixing it up, too. He has used about $100,000 of savings, plus a good bit of elbow grease, to complete the renovations.

“Cash is king because nobody can deny you,” said Mr. Orr, who is 30. “The houses that require a mortgage, a lot of people are reluctant.”

Vincent Orr at the home he bought for his mother in Detroit.
Brian Day for The Wall Street Journal

A lot of lenders are reluctant, too. Fewer than 1,700 mortgages were extended last year in the city of 670,000 people, according to a LendingPatterns.com analysis of first-lien purchase mortgages for single-family, primary residences using Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data. That is about a sixth as many as in Oklahoma City and Las Vegas, cities with smaller populations.

The low property values are the primary culprit. Lenders can earn so little profit on small mortgages—those of around $70,000 or less—that they often find it not worth the trouble to make them. Small-dollar home lending has been on the decline across the country, a shift that housing analysts say disproportionately affects people of color.

“This is a big issue of our time,” said Alanna McCargo, co-director of the Urban Institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center. Increasing the volume of smaller mortgages “would go a long way to reducing the racial homeownership gap,” she said.

What’s more, in neighborhoods where few mortgages exist, there is a greater risk a home won’t appraise for as much as the purchase price, which typically causes a loan application to fall through.

Low or nonexistent credit scores are another hurdle. LaKesha Hancock, a housing counselor and program manager at U-Snap-Bac, said many of her clients aren’t able to develop the banking relationships needed for a qualifying credit score because there are too few financial institutions in much of the city.

In Wayne County, which includes Detroit, census tracts where more than half of the people are minorities contain 26% of the county’s bank branches while housing 45% of the county population, according to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a nonprofit focused on community wealth-building.

When Kelly Brown bought a fixer-upper several years ago for roughly $5,000, she went to a bank where she had an account seeking a personal loan for about $15,000. The banker told her he couldn’t approve it because of her subprime credit score, Ms. Brown said. She said she thinks it was low because she didn’t have many financial accounts in her name and hadn’t attempted to build her credit.

Instead of borrowing, she used her savings to rehabilitate the house, which she bought in an annual Wayne County auction of foreclosed homes.

She went on to buy more. Though her credit score improved, she paid with cash, completing renovations as she saved, which took as long as a year. Ms. Brown, who is 36, now owns four properties, living in one and renting out three.

“I’m not looking for the system to help, because I know it’s not going to,” she said.

Residents unable to access the mortgage market miss out on federal benefits designed to spur homeownership. Through the government-sponsored mortgage entities Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae, the U.S. ensures that lenders are made whole on most mortgages, a policy that enables lenders to spread payments over 30 years at low interest rates. Mortgages also erect obstacles to quickly kicking out home purchasers who fall behind on payments.

Some groups are working to fix the issues that keep lenders from making more mortgages.

Quicken Loans founded a program with the Detroit Land Bank Authority to renovate some properties the Land Bank takes over. Quicken fronts money for repairs and then provides financing to interested buyers. Having one mortgaged property in a neighborhood will lead to more, the reasoning goes.

“If we were to just write more mortgages in Detroit, I think we would be setting people up for failure,” Quicken’s Ms. Grannemann said.

The project isn’t self-supporting. Mortgage lenders say revitalizing neighborhoods this way typically means putting more money into fixing up those first homes than they can eventually be sold for.

Vacant lots are common in Detroit just a block from the border between the city and Grosse Pointe Park.
Brian Day for The Wall Street Journal

Quicken has found that 87% of homeowners in the city who are tax-delinquent self-identify as qualifying for exemption from property taxes because their income is below a poverty threshold. It is trying to teach them how to take advantage of the exemption and avoid tax foreclosure, a common pitfall in Detroit. More than a third of city properties have gone through tax foreclosure in the past 15 years, some more than once, according to Loveland Technologies, a data firm that tracks land parcels.

United Community Housing Coalition, a nonprofit, works with the city to buy some homes headed for the foreclosure auction and sells them back to their occupants, often for the few thousand dollars or so of back taxes, payable over about a year.

Real-estate investors also frequent the auction. Among them is Detroit Property Exchange, the company Ms. Lurry turned to when she was ready to buy in 2018.

It finances purchases itself, offering residents one of the less-desirable options for Detroit properties that can’t be mortgaged.

Ms. Lurry put $2,000 down on the $35,000 house and agreed to pay $700 a month for 90 months, which included 10% interest, much higher than the prevailing mortgage rate. She moved in at night, changed the locks, then shared a celebratory moment with her daughter.

She subsequently missed some payments and the company started the eviction process. Detroit Property Exchange said she was renting the house with an option to buy. Ms. Lurry thought she already owned it. “Congratulations on your recent purchase,” her paperwork from the company said. “You are now the OWNER.”

The company said in a statement provided by an attorney that Detroit Property Exchange helps customers become homeowners in a city that traditional lenders avoid.

Ms. Lurry, 52, lost her job as a pastry cook when the coronavirus shut down the casino where she worked. Her lawyer, Steve Knox at nonprofit Michigan Legal Services, spent months negotiating a new arrangement. She expects to enter into a new contract that will make it more difficult for the company to remove her from her home and will lower her interest rate. It will now be 8.5%, still roughly three times the rate of a standard 30-year mortgage.

The post Dearth of Credit Starves Detroit’s Housing Market appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.

source https://www.realtor.com/news/real-estate-news/dearth-of-credit-starves-detroits-housing-market/

Designed for Dread: Why Are Victorian Houses So Spooky?

When it comes to horror flicks, there’s nothing Hollywood loves more than a towering Victorian manse that’s a bit past its prime. After all, there’s a reason Ryan Murphy set the inaugural (and scariest) “Murder House” season of “American Horror Story” in a sprawling (and spectacularly haunted) Victorian home. Alfred Hitchcock situated Norman Bates and his irascible mom in one for “Psycho.” Even Walt Disney understood the Victorian’s freaky allure—that’s why Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion is built in the same inescapable and inescapably unnerving style.

So why do Victorians make our flesh crawl quite the way they do? How did this highly ornate style—dubbed the “McMansion” of the antebellum period by one scholar—become so feared?

“It has a lot to do with the proportions,” says Jonathan Moore, an architect in Tampa, FL. “Many of the details—like doors, windows, and trim—are long and vertical.” Remind you of anything?

“There’s a direct relationship to an open mouth and wide eyes.” A screaming mouth, that is.

Terrifying visuals aside, there are a few nuanced reasons—firmly grounded in architectural history—why Victorians turned into the pop culture stuff of nightmares.

Victorians were inherently ‘dark’

So let’s start at the beginning: The Victorian era is typically defined as beginning in 1837—when Queen Victoria of England ascended the throne. But the period’s influence on American architecture focuses on the years between 1860 and 1900.

Homes built during this period typically drew their influences from Gothic Revival, Romanesque, Queen Anne, and Second Empire styles. For example: false fronts, false chimneys, tall towers, dormer windows, and gables. Victorians were typically situated on hilltops, where their usually wealthy owners could, quite literally, look down on their neighbors.

Victorians often feature tall turrets or rectangular towers topped by ornate cast-iron railings and prominent weather vanes—features that rusted and sometimes slipped out of place over time.

“These are the house styles Hollywood depicts high on a hilltop with bright lightning strikes in the background, causing the descriptor building to be outlined in dark silhouette against the sudden light,” says archaeologist and architectural historian Ronald V. May of Legacy 106 Historic Preservation in California.

In other words: creepy.

The era was also notable for its overwrought furniture, dark interiors, and heavy draperies, says Charles Robertson, a board member of the Victorian Society of America (who himself lives in a meticulously maintained Victorian home in Washington, DC’s Dupont Circle neighborhood).

During their heyday, “these houses were indeed dark and cluttered,” he says. “They had bric-a-brac everywhere, and they were just elaborate and ornate.”

Move toward modern architecture left Victorians empty and decrepit

Interest in the genre waned dramatically over the years, leaving more and more Victorian homes empty and decrepit. Some historians claim the downfall of the Victorian aesthetic really began with the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago—the site of which became known as “White City” for its clean, mostly white neoclassical buildings.

It was the beginning of the end for Victorian homes’ heyday, according to Robertson. The style fell out of favor in the 1930s as tastes began to skew toward modern design.

As time wore on, “the elderly owners passed away, and their children let the houses fall into serious disrepair with little or no paint, causing shingles to slough off, ornamental metal roof edges to rust and break down, pieces of siding drop off, and windows break and not be replaced,” May says.

A Victorian revival?

But here’s the thing: What goes around indeed comes around. Look no further than San Francisco, which has enjoyed a historic home preservation blitz over the past several decades—and where a Painted Lady will now run you at least $3 million.

And if the headache of a large-scale renovation isn’t your bag, there are a handful of builders committed to building “new Victorian” homes—although the intricacies involved in this kind of construction make it more expensive than your usual run-of-the-mill new build.

But in the end, Americans love a good horror story—and classic Victorians provide the perfect backdrop.

“The aging population of historic homes makes everyone familiar with that one neighborhood house that has deteriorated, and everyone talks about the crazy old man that used to live there,” Moore says.

Throw in peeling wallpaper and paint, decades-old dusty draperies, and more gables and turrets than could possibly be prudent, and you’ve got the stuff of nightmares (and more than a few urban legends).

———

Watch: We Dare to Peek Inside the Winchester Mystery House

The post Designed for Dread: Why Are Victorian Houses So Spooky? appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.

source https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/victorian-houses-spooky-reputation/

Horror Movie Maven Eli Roth Looks To Scare Up a Sale on His Favorite Haunt

Eli Roth Hollywood home — The Agency, Anthony Harvey/AFP/Getty

The horror movie maven Eli Roth has put his Hollywood Hills Tudor on the market for $3,475,000.

The director of “Hostel” has enjoyed the three-bedroom, four-bathroom home built in 1926 for a lucky 13 years, after purchasing it in 2007 for $2.54 million.

“Eli has loved living in the house over the past 13 years. He was drawn to the home’s 1920s character and design,” says the listing agent, Darian Robin of The Agency.

“Over the years, Eli added an expansive home gym and sauna that, together with the theater, pool, private outdoor spaces, incredible views, and overall privacy, have made it the perfect place for him to live, work, and entertain.”

The “creative compound” hovers over Hollywood Boulevard on a double-wide lot. While the attractions of Hollywood are within easy reach, the privacy landscaping and a gated entrance protect the home from any creepy unwanted guests.

Living room with custom crafted fireplace
The Agency

The multilevel spread measures 3,497 square feet. The exterior gives off classic Hollywood glamour vibes, but inside, the home is sleek and SoCal modern.

The grounds offer glittering views of the hills, the canyons, and Los Angeles from almost all the rooms, patios, and balconies. Even the pool offers sublime views, and the flagstone terraces and pathways were built specifically to take full advantage of those one-of-a-kind vistas.

The interior is surprisingly light, white, and bright—especially jarring when you consider Roth’s dark cinematic creations. Expansive windows, some of them arched, allow plenty of light to stream in, and dark wood floors solidly ground the rooms.

Architectural accents like custom-framed fireplaces, brightly colored Mediterranean tile, and specialty moldings can be found throughout.

Other elegant features include a spacious chef’s kitchen with a breakfast nook, and a master suite with an adjacent office, spacious walk-in closet, and a modern, spalike bathroom with a large soaking tub.

Robin says Roth has transformed the place into his own private paradise, but alas, it’s time for him to make an exit.

“Eli’s next project will be shooting in Europe for an entire year,” she explains, “and then he has two other films lined up that will keep him away. Since he won’t be in L.A. to enjoy it, he feels the time is right to part with the house.”

Although he’s known for directing nearly a dozen films, Roth, 48, has worn many hats, including those of producer, editor, writer, and actor. His most recent release was “The House With a Clock in Its Walls” in 2018—a PG-rated departure for the man associated with all types of horror.

The post Horror Movie Maven Eli Roth Looks To Scare Up a Sale on His Favorite Haunt appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.

source https://www.realtor.com/news/celebrity-real-estate/eli-roth-out-to-scare-up-sale-hollywood-home/