There are a few visible cosmetic items that could be dealt with on this house, but so what? As a whole, it’s cute. If you look at the tax assessor site, you can see the “before” photo. Either the latest owner put in a lot of work or that image was taken from the house’s “bad angle.”
As a sidenote, some of the other houses in the neighborhood are in far worse decay. An example of this is a two family historical house at 64 Babcock, which is owned by the Southern New England Conference Association of Seventh Day Adventists, who want to destroy the blighted house to build an addition to their church on Russ Street, which abuts the property. Despite being an historical structure (built approximately 1880 according to tax records), the house has been allowed to actually deterioriate more since the church purchased it. Of course, blighted properties are everywhere and it seems none of the owners are ever forced to improve their buildings.
Damian
Since you didn’t mention the address of this week’s Casa Linda I won’t either, but between the assessor site and zillow I think I found it. It looks like it sold at a real bargain price. The Recent Sales pdf on the assessor’s site lists the type of sale as “other reason.” Foreclosure and family sale are a couple of other types that account for a low sale price. Do you know what “other reason” might be?
Kerri Provost
I don’t know, but this property has been discussed at NRZ meetings within the last year: http://fhnrz.com/
There might be some clues in the minutes.
Kerri Provost
Oops! By “this property” I meant the blighted property down the street.
I don’t know anything about the house in the photo. If you check out the assessor site, you can see that whoever owns it now has done a bit of work to spruce it up.
Damian
It’s spruced up. The house in the photo looks way nicer with green window frames. And the door, too, maybe? It’s hard to tell because the assessor picture is small and blurry.
The recent sale information is there on the assessor site as a pdf. That’s where it lists the vague descriptor “other reason” in the ‘Valid Sale’ column for many other properties, not just that one. I wondered what ‘other reasons’ might be given in general to merit a relatively low sale price.
Speaking of a low sale price, the blighted house sold for 3,000 in ’98. There ought to be Seventh Day Adventists living in it. What I mean is, it’s sad to see an old house like that molder away.