The Rewards From Real Estate: Once a Given, Now a Gamble
Michael Olmos and Joseph Mazur are living proof that despite the dismal state of the real estate market the desire to own a home in Southern California is still strong enough to cause one to go temporarily deaf and at least partly blind.
The two friends, with the help of Olmos’ parents, just paid $180,000 for a 1,900-square-foot, 3-bedroom, 2 1/2-bath duplex with off-white carpet on Terra Bella Street in Lake View Terrace and they’re flush with the idea that they’ve just metamorphosed from wage slaves to masters of the manor.
They are drinking champagne by the still-unused fireplace, the tire music of the Foothill Freeway humming just outside the 18-foot-high arched window in their living room, and talking about what it took to be the first to move in at a new “garden home” development around the corner from where motorist Rodney G. King took center stage in Los Angeles’ urban drama.
Like Job, the friends’ faith was tested by an unusually hellish escrow. Nerve-racking delays. The fire sprinklers that doused them as they moved in. The broken thumb and foot that Olmos suffered while moving Mazur’s piano. And hanging over it all, the deepening recession and indications that it will be years before real estate once again becomes a source of manna denominated in dollars.
But Olmos and his parents and Mazur stuck it out, demonstrating that the lure of owning one’s home--despite the headaches and responsibilities--is as powerful as ever. Powerful enough to allow them to virtually shut out the noise and the sight of the highway atop an embankment just across the pool from their front window.
Olmos says that several times he wanted to walk away from the deal. Such as when the loan broker lost papers for the seventh time and insisted they had not been sent. Or the numerous times promises were broken. Or the 16-day delay in the close of escrow while living out of already-packed boxes.
“The American Dream can be the American nightmare,” Olmos says, the set of his jaw a manifestation of the adrenaline left over from the recently completed escrow battle.
The process left him numb. “Buying a home should be like buying a car. If you have the money, and you qualify, you should be able to get it. You shouldn’t be tested like that.
“The thing that kept us going is we had this picture of the house and all the things we wanted to do with it.”
Olmos, 31, has worked in procurement for the Department of Water and Power for 11 years. Mazur, 27, is a computer graphic artist for a television station and works on the side helping clients envision a room with new furniture or a yard with new landscaping.
He and Olmos used the computer to figure out what furniture from their two apartments they would keep and where it would go.
The planning shows. Two weeks after moving in, they have the place House Beautiful perfect.
The rooms are large enough to accommodate Mazur’s bulky but elegant American Empire antiques from the early 1900s and his baby grand piano. And they are stylish enough to showcase Olmos’ more modern tastes, which run to drawings on glass of cartoon characters and fluorescent light sculptures. The dramatic window in the living room is already hung with off-white drapes and a burgundy valence that Mazur designed.
Mazur and Olmos looked at more than 100 houses between Palmdale and West Covina before selecting this one and even the in-your-face freeway could not dissuade them.
Olmos says the dual-glazed windows and heavy doors shut out most of the noise, bringing it down to the level of a busy surface street. “When the doors are closed you rarely hear it.”
He says he finds the consistent hum soothing somehow and less intrusive than the roar of a single car with a bad muffler. “The only place it’s truly silent is in the back woods,” Mazur rationalizes.
Besides the freeway noises, there’s the neighborhood’s reputation. Although other new housing projects have attracted middle-class professionals, Olmos says he has heard rumors about drug dealing in the nearby Hansen Dam Recreation Area. Federal officials have for years been promising to restore a boating and swimming lake there, but even if it eventually happens there will be no lake view from Lake View Homes.
And the police were videotaped beating King nearby, on Osborne Street.
“Every time we said we are moving to Lake View Terrace someone would mention the Rodney King beating and ask us if we were scared,” Olmos says. “I would tell them . . . we’re moving to the nice Yuppie part, not the ass-kicking part.”
Besides, he says, once inside the gated project “it’s almost like resort living. We picked the one across from the pool so we can look at the pool and the Jacuzzi and we don’t have to see someone working on their car in their garage.”
Olmos and Mazur figure they got in cheap, paying $45,000 less than the price advertised in July. Olmos has a Chamber of Commerce executive’s confidence that Southern California will soon be growing wealth from real estate again, the way it once grew oranges. “We got 1,900 square feet for less than $200,000,” Mazur says. “This has to be the best buy on the market.”
As they tour the home, talking about the hard work, the plans, the hopes they have invested along with the down payment, it’s almost possible to shut out freeway noise and believe in the dream.
“A dream is not something given, it’s something you have to work for,” Olmos says.
“If people spent half the time working at their dreams as they do wishing, they’d get them,” Mazur agrees.
After putting on the last touches, Olmos allows the experience to sink in. “I was, like, ‘The house is done. This is our house. Wow.’ ”
