Self Help

Many cities have neighborhoods of valuable older houses that have been snapped up. Prices in these neighborhoods are high. Often nearby are houses of a similar era, but the neighborhood is not as prestigious. These transitional neighborhoods have older families who have been there for years if not generations, houses owned by absentee landlords who are not particularly picky about their renters, and people who want an old house but don’t have the money for the prestigious neighborhood.

Living in a transitional neighborhood is a great option if you are willing to develop a couple of new skills. After all, you get a large house, built when craftsmanship was routinely high quality, and with features you no longer see in houses (e.g., stained glass windows), in short, a lot of house for relatively little money.

First of all, old houses have a few quirks that new houses don’t have. Often this means tiny closets and few electrical outlets as well as lathe and plaster instead of drywall. Houses in transitional neighborhoods are often “fixer-uppers” so you will have to get an electrician to update the wiring and you will need to either change rooms around so you get some storage space or develop a taste in armoires for clothing storage.

Secondly, transitional neighborhoods vary from block to block in terms of safety and crime level. If the block has a lot of abandoned houses and/or houses owned by people who do not live in the neighborhood, this block is going to be a lot more chancy than one where some people have been there for a long time and most or all the houses are lived in by their owners. The best real estate value in a transitional neighborhood would be the worst house on a nice block rather than the best house on a not so nice block. Further, if you buy the worst house on a block and fix it up, all your neighbors will be very happy because you will be helping them out in terms of property value.

Finally, transitional neighborhoods require people to develop a sense of civic duty. Crack houses and other centers for crime can be closer than is really comfortable. To deal with this, it is a good idea to work together with other neighbors, to join neighborhood associations, to develop a good relationship with any police officer assigned to the area, and to find out how to contact the city when there is a problem. Any notes you take of activity you have witnessed can help the police deal with the problem; if you get on county property websites, you can get information on absentee landlords; police sometimes contact landlords when illegal activities are going on in a rental property.

Transitional neighborhoods offer unique benefits. Often they are only walking distance from shopping or downtown destinations and they are more likely to be on a frequently-running bus line than a suburb. The houses are typically well-built and you have to figure that if a house has stood up to everything weather can throw at it for eighty-some years, it is probably going to do so for another eighty years. If you buy into a transitional neighborhood thoughtfully, aware of the challenges, you will be amply rewarded with property that tends to go up in value even when other properties are going down.