House Hunting With Hard Choices

Last Halloween, my wife, Milbre Burch, and I first visited the Pasadena neighborhood where we would eventually live.

That evening, we faced questions and feelings we never thought we would face. We were buying our first house in Southern California, where we had lived for barely nine months.

We had to ask ourselves: How close do we want to live near streets of poverty and anguish? What about graffiti, gangs, drugs, crime and homelessness? Do we want a two-bedroom house in a nice neighborhood or a three-bedroom one in a not-so-nice neighborhood?

Area Near Rose Bowl

The real estate agent told us we really should see the three-bedroom, smoky-blue stucco house on Eldora Road. This was a gentrifying street, she said, one that had been declared so by the local newspaper. The street is on the eastern edge of Northwest Pasadena, an area east of the Rose Bowl, north of the 210 Freeway, west of Lake Avenue and south of Altadena.

“The other side of the tracks.” That’s how another real estate agent, eight months earlier, had described Northwest Pasadena. He advised us not to even look in the area, which the local newspaper also calls “economically depressed.” As whites, he seemed to suggest, we might not feel comfortable in what he said--not entirely accurately--was a predominately black area.

It is an area, I would later discover, where blacks, whites and new immigrants from Latin America are living in dirt-poor conditions on some streets, where gang shootings do occur and where cocaine and heroin arrests are made routinely. But I also found it is a place where rising real estate values are engulfing street after street, even the meanest of them.

When we first moved to Pasadena and were renting, the median resale price of single-family houses in Los Angeles County was $155,600. We were among the 25% of the county’s residents who could afford that price.

At the time, we could afford better than Northwest Pasadena. We lived in a luxury apartment in the opposite end of town, where Dodgers team members were neighbors. So we looked elsewhere in Pasadena, and in Glendale, Burbank and La Crescenta.

And we looked to the east. Much to our amazement, we found affordable, large houses with swimming pools, fruit trees and mountain views on “Leave It to Beaver” streets in Claremont, a community that residents like to say resembles an East Coast college town.

But we also found a sign that said: Los Angeles 48 miles. For us, that meant commuting too far, for too long, with no prospects of improvements in traffic congestion or mass transit.

One Sunday afternoon, as we were walking in our neighborhood in south Pasadena, we saw a $239,000 house that my wife said would have to be gutted to be livable. Nearby, we saw where an investor had done just that and was asking $389,000 for the house of my wife’s dreams.

But we couldn’t afford it. Nor did we believe that we, a “thirtysomething” couple, could legitimately solicit help from my wife’s generous parents. They had offered financial assistance but live in Atlanta, where $375,000 can get you a mansion.

“Maybe I should go to law school,” Milbre said.

Six months later, after we had decided that Pasadena was our kind of town, we found ourselves looking at houses on streets where roofs needed fixing, yards needed mowing and graffiti needed painting over.

By this time, the spiraling real estate market had overtaken us. The average resale price of a house in the county had jumped to $191,400, up 23%. But our incomes and down-payment nest egg had stayed essentially the same.

Now Out of Sight

We spent hours on weekends looking at houses on the “hot sheets” from our real estate agent’s computer listings. But houses like the Tudor-style one we saw near the Altadena Country Club were now out of sight. Frustrated, we both felt that we needed to buy as soon as possible.

The house on Eldora Road was in much better condition than some we had found in nicer neighborhoods in Altadena and Pasadena. Investors had bought it at foreclosure and spent months repairing it.

As the agent showed us the house, it was clear that even at what seemed an inflated price of $225,000, this was the best we had seen, although we had not yet recovered from what my friends call the “California real estate lobotomy.”

With no children, we lead busy work lives. We knew it would take months just to put up curtains instead of draping sheets and towels over windows. We didn’t want to have to watch “This Old House” on PBS to learn restoration techniques. The Eldora house was built in 1923 but needed little work.

Mountain Views

The living room was huge and had a fireplace and hardwood flooring. The casement windows of the living and dining rooms provided clear views of the San Gabriel Mountains. The kitchen had been redone with new appliances, sparkling tile and glass cabinets. A palm tree hovered over the side yard.

Transplanted Easterners who were born in the South, we were suckers for that, along with the tree we thought was a lime but turned out to be lemon. And the sweet gums were actually turning the golden colors of autumn. They were like the trees we had left behind in New England.

We said goodby to the agent and took a walk. Tall cedars and amber lights on old-style, concrete street lamps lined the sidewalks.

This was a street of big yards and handsome single-family houses, many which had been restored, though others needed work.

We met a couple out for trick or treat with their young boys; one child was dressed as a tortoise, the other as a hare. The father wore a skeleton tie.

Felt Safe on Street

They had lived there for four years, they said, and really liked it. They felt safe on the street, where we were surprised to see Peugeots and Mercedes. It was clear that if we moved there, we would not be in the first wave of gentrification--if that was the word for what was happening.

Continuing to walk, we saw graffiti spray-painted on the wonderful, arched front door of a house with a red-tiled roof.

As dusk turned to darkness, we knocked on the door of another house where, through French porch doors, we could see a woman. What better night than Halloween to expect someone to open the door to strangers?

She invited us in and told us her story. She had bought her house in June. Circumstances had brought her there from the better side of town. The house needed plumbing, wiring, painting and landscaping, she said, but it was a treasure, like the ones in the booklet on her coffee table.

Houses Described

The booklet, an architectural and historical survey, had been published by the city and gave a description and photograph of each house in what we learned was called the Orange Heights neighborhood.

“An unusual hip-roofed, one-story stucco house with flat-roofed porch and porte-corche vaguely reminiscent of Prairie School architecture,” the description said of the house we were considering. “Colored Spanish-tile inset in porch pillars place it firmly in Southern California. Formally clipped camellia trees accent the simple design.”

As we leafed through the book, the woman spoke of crime. She found the neighborhood safe but had installed a burglar alarm to guard against the criminals the police told her preyed on it: drug addicts looking for VCRs, televisions and stereos.

Neighbors, she said, had been burglarized recently. And sometimes, she said, homeless people got off the bus at nearby Los Robles Avenue and ended up asleep on the lawns.

She described a neighborhood of professionals, interracial couples, Asians, Latinos and blacks as well as whites like herself.

Contrasts Seen

We bade her goodby and made a loop onto nearby streets. We passed a beat-up car. Slumped in the front seat, a man smoked marijuana. As we walked, though, we discovered sweet Spanish-style houses and huge Craftsman-style bungalows with deep eaves and expansive porches.

There were blocks upon blocks of these single-family houses--royalty, I am now learning, in the realm of the L.A. residential real estate market.

We didn’t need to live in San Marino or even South Pasadena. But we did want a safe, stable neighborhood.

As we ended that Halloween walk, we decided to bid on this nice house on a nice street in a not-so-nice neighborhood that gave us some cause for worry.

And we had a sobering realization.

“Boy, have we got more choices than some people,” Milbre said.

Yet, in just nine months of house hunting, the economics of a crazy real estate market had dramatically narrowed even our options.