The Man in the Housing Bubble

The Man in the Housing Bubble

Did he die? Or just abandon his house to the “Ugly” people?

Ug bought my next-door neighbor’s house. I didn’t think it was dilapidated enough to be purchased by the “We Buy Ugly Houses” people, but apparently it was. When I moved in, my landlady warned me that the guy next door was weird, but I figured that was just because she was from the Home Depot school of property maintenance (vinyl siding and lots of pavement), while he preferred a more lived-in look that included randomly planted shrubs and ankle-length grass. The house’s peeling siding was an amalgam of different colors, with holes artfully covered in plywood. More power to him, I thought. My perfectly manicured South Minneapolis block needed some excitement.

He walked his dog wearing brightly colored hot pants and erected a limp chain-link fence that bisected his front yard, the way one might surround a trailer to protect it from rabid dogs. He hung his birdfeeder so that it leaned into my front yard, which soon became an unwelcome haven for a riot of birds and squirrels. He rarely appeared outdoors. I saw him so infrequently that when I picture him I see a sixty-year-old Andy Warhol, with shaggy grey-blond hair.

Last fall, his unmowed grass became a vast grass forest, with unraked leaves padding it in wet clumps. The bird feeder sat empty and all signs of life, already infrequent, ceased completely. For weeks I waited for an indication that he was alive, but there was nothing.

Then one day a few weeks ago, I heard a series of crashes coming from the house. Rushing to the window, I saw two men in blue uniforms throwing the contents of the house into a miniature dump truck marked 1-800-GOT-JUNK? HomeVestors had purchased the house, the dudes in blue told me. “You know, the ‘We Buy Ugly Houses’ people.” These guys would clean the place out, and then HomeVestors would fix it up and put it back on the market.

HomeVestors is a national franchise with headquarters in Dallas. They pay cash for neglected homes and rental properties, close within a few days, and then fix them up and turn them around at a higher price. The twelve franchises in the Twin Cities combined buy about three hundred properties a year. To HomeVestors, ugly isn’t just multi-colored siding and unmowed grass; it’s more often messy situations. Many houses come into Ug’s possession because of the three D’s: debt, death, and divorce. Others are sold as a way to get rid of a burdensome rental property, which was why my neighbor’s house was sold. It turned out he was a tenant who just wasn’t wanted any longer.

By the time I got outside, the truck had been stuffed with two refrigerators, a stove, and a dishwasher, and the workers were in the process of rolling another stove down the steps, not on a dolly, but by rolling it end over end. From my side of the house, I could still see the only adornments that had ever been there: a crooked air conditioner and a small American flag, the kind you might see at a small-town Veterans Day parade.

On the overgrown front lawn there was a mournful display: an old metal kitchen cabinet, a fold-up metal bed, innumerable broken floor lamps, a set of floral TV trays, and a perfectly good basketball. These items looked like a pack of kids waiting for a late parent to pick them up from school. And still more stuff kept coming out of the house. As a second dishwasher was tossed into the truck, a left-behind spoon tumbled out of it onto the street.

The inside of the house was a scene of bare ruin. The whole place was freezing cold and, without the carpets, overwhelmingly brown. It felt as if I were exploring a house that had been abandoned for years, as if the floorboards would give way at any moment. An empty Xbox box sat in the middle of what was meant to be a dining room. In the threshold between that room and the bedroom lay discarded Herbal Essences shampoo and conditioner bottles and a dirty glass ashtray. What would make my dog-walking, anti-yard-mowing guy leave all of this behind?

On the wall of the living room was a solemn portrait of a Hispanic family, circa 1992, that had never lived in the house. The father wore a Girbaud T-shirt and a steady expression. His wife and three children were equally stoic. The family stared straight ahead at a spot across the room, where an entire section of the wall had been torn out, revealing the guts of the house, water pipes, and wiring.

From the porch where neighbor dude had once smoked, the men in blue now heaved the contents of the second floor out onto the lawn. They threw oven racks, stiff sheets of carpet, flattened boxes, and blocks of wood. The American flag was one of the last things to go. Like an autumn leaf floating slowly to the ground, over and over it tumbled, finally landing with a little click on top of the pile of a forgotten life. —Alexandra Kerl

 


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