Zillow Rots my Brain

You all know the feeling; it's late at night, you're not ready to go to sleep, you need something mindless for your mind. YouTube air disaster videos are no longer exciting. Plane has malfunction, explodes. Lather, rinse repeat. So sorry.

May i suggest an alternative; a combination of Zillow and Google Earth. Now that i have blazing fast unlimited net access, this keeps me mesmerised for hours on end, looking at land and houses, imagining how i would interact with the place. I am old enough to know better now; i can't fix up shit, and my ability to encourage others to do it for me is limited by lack of capital. I am an easily sidetracked visionary.

So many of the grand old houses available to buy in my time/price range (pre-1900, under 50K) have been happily gutted and had a little rehab started, then abandoned. Photos of lath walls stripped bare, dangling wires, piles of debris,"ready for your vision"..... hehe. The last person who had vision was broken by it. They ripped up and wrecked all the good old stuff and left the mess half-done. Pile of kindling. The final fate of wood houses is to burn. Always. Some places, like western Oregon, rain-fueled dryrot is the slow fire. Wood is not durable. Wood houses are on loan from Time.

There is a certain kind of romantic soul who gets caught up in dreams and broken by the reality of a 100+ year old wooden house. The hard reality; you don't get to paint and sew curtains, and pick out your backyard chickens until you fix the foundation, the roof, the walls, the lead paint, the asbestos ducting, the frayed wiring, the stolen copper pipes, the dry rotted, rat-infested, leaking hulk of a dream that just wants to melt back into the earth already.....

OK so what if i DID have several million disposable dollars? Would i buy the 1873 Italianate doctor's mansion on the Erie Canal Bikeway in upstate New York and open a wonderful hostel/B&B for cyclists? Organic, acoustic, historic, folkloric - i have so many ideas and no way to make them go. Because even if i DID do the above, i have no ability to maintain and run such a thing without a dedicated staff. I want to see all the places, live in all the houses, hear all the stories, learn all the history. But my restless mind can't settle into a project and have that be the career track for life. I think too fast, too far, too often. Living in an RV with the ability to move is finally an acknowledgement of this reality.

OK then, which brings us back to Zillow and Google Earth!
The West has very few truly old houses west of Omaha, but the West IS full of cheap little plots of desert for a few thousand bucks, and the ads exhort you to bring "The kids, the dogs, the toys - cut loose!", this sort of advert on a quarter-acre property. Probably can't fit all the kids, dogs and toys, etc on the lot to start with. But some take the bait, scrape together a few thousand bucks to go live for "free" on their "own land" and go "off grid".




So many real-estate scams of the 50s and 60s preyed on the dreams of working class people who wanted "out." California City in the Mojave Desert is the classic example. So is Christmas Valley in Oregon, Rio Ranchos in New Mexico, The jackrabbit cabins of the Mojave near Joshua Tree, Rio Rico in Arizona, many many more. Most famous scam, the whole Salton Sea. 

Most of these were "Sagebrush subdivisions" - buy an old ranch, scrape a street grid into it, maybe even a lodge and some landscaping, sell dreams to the city-folk for $50 down, $50 a month, outrageous interest. No infrastructure. No city, no industry, nothing but a bulldozed grid and a dream and fear of missing out on an opportunity. None of that land appreciated in value without a lot of "improvements".

I bought a bare .33 acre lot in Christmas Valley for $3000, which is far less than it sold for (in adjusted dollars) back in 1961. I'm the third owner. Nothing has ever been done on the land. The survey pins were still in, the dirt road had sagebrush in the median but was passable. Slapdash little homesteads are scattered across the prehistoric lakebed. Dead cars, trailers, cabins built of scrap lumber and tin; dogs, kids, toys. Foodbank day is Tuesday, they all line up.

Why did i buy it? I have my dreams too, and in a moment of mania, i wrote a check. We've had a driveway scraped in, we've cleared a lot of dead brush, we've hosted family campouts in RVs on a tiny lot in the middle of a grid for a city that never happened. What dreams sent me to the high desert?

Space. Darkness. Quiet. Sky. Emptiness. No wreck of a house to maintain, no utilities to go wrong. But certainly not going to try and live there year-round in a trailer, like so many think they'll do. Drag in an old singlewide, and then find that there is no way to keep it warm when the temperature goes below 0F regularly in the winter. Not enough firewood, propane is expensive, and no way can you run electric heat off a solar system. Someday, i may actually get a 12x12 stone cabin on that lot. But for now, we can go there and park the RV and watch the stars and birds. It costs $52 a year in taxes.There's a store and an RV dump and propane available in town. For now, it's a stop on our seasonal round. No drain, no pain, no house.

Zillowing about the countryside - set the filters to "pre-1900" and the price to $50,000 or less and look at all the fantastic old wrecks that come up. Mostly just broken farmhouses, but occasionally an old mansion or grange hall or something that could BE SOMETHING, if vision and money collided just so. I'm enamoured of the whole upstate NY area. Can i move to Ithaca and be a caretaker at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology or something?

No. But you CAN travel. And be here now, wherever here is. I can enjoy those old wrecks from afar, stay in the rehabbed ones for a price, a different one every night. I am not a person who can pick a huge project and stick with it. One song at a time is good. One week at a special camping place is good. Small places to live are good. Small amounts of money, i can keep track of. Big dreams, small realities.

And after a few hours of intense Zillowing, i feel like i really HAVE travelled. Last night i spent time mostly intently contemplating tiny places in both New York and Nevada, states about as opposite as can be in this country, politically and ecologically. And i found appealing things about both places. And like my partner, i could live anywhere. And everywhere.

We'll keep RVing and gradually finding our way around the country with no particular place to go, and in that mindset, we will manage to go a lot of cool places. I really want to ride that New York bike trail along the Erie Canal!