Free Paint Job

About two weeks ago, the entire apartment complex (just three big buildings) was painted anew. The original color was typical of the period when these buildings were constructed: pink and mint green. To say that they were ugly is an insult to truly ugly buildings everywhere. They were hideous from the outside and didn't compare well with the merely ugly surroundings. The painters completed the job in five days! To do this, the painters would tie a rope to the top of the building, and then swing like a spider building a web back and forth from top to bottom with a huge pressure-paint gun blasting paint onto the walls. They sat on a small wooden board, and a tube ran from their gun to the walkway of the floor they were on (or near), to what looked like a 10-gallon square metal can of paint. More like this can were stored in the elevator in the building, and when they ran out, they would just swing over the walkway wall, call the elevator, and hook up another can. For the few days they were here, there were 2 or 3 cans in the elevator at all times. They were the perfect size for little kids to climb on to allow then to push the button for their floor, and that's exactly the function they served while on deck with the painter. It was interesting, once you got past the initial shock, to watch a painter swing back and forth and blast away with the paint gun. They used no safety line - it was just one long rope somehow tied to the top of the building supporting a board as a seat with a long power cord and the paint tube trailing off to a nearby walkway. Other workers in the parking lot covered any cars that hadn't been moved with large sheets of plastic (they made an announcement beforehand on the voice-of-God speaker installed in every apartment - we heard it even though ours is disconnected).

The apartment also had the underground parking garage repainted, again moving away from the pastel theme to standard parking-lot green.

What did all this cost? Nothing! Apparently, the management fee accumulates and these funds are used to spruce up the area when it needs it. There is also money coming in from the weekly market that is allowed to set up here on Thursdays (they turn part of the upper parking lot into a regular Asian market) as well as the Friday morning recycling drive, in which a mountain of plastic appears in the parking lot before 9AM and is hoisted away by 10. The effects have been immediate. The units like ours (they come in three sizes in this complex) that are for sale (and there aren't many) jumped to about $160,000 and a crucial thing happened: one got sold for that price at the same 'realtor' (she's on-site) we used earlier this year. Once that happens, no one will sell for less, so the three for sale are all that price in the local version of the 'pennysaver' now.

We looked at a lot of places before buying this one. We looked at one place that was a little bigger (a 3 X 2 vs. ours which is a 2 X 1) but it was well north of $400,000 and had one disturbing feature: the entire walls were glass on two sides of this corner unit on the 10th floor, and if you opened the blinds during the week, you found yourself no more than 10 feet away from the guy in the next building (an office building) on the 10th floor there. This is a common problem here: a building is built and the next one is built inches away. We were looking into some office and the office workers were looking back. If they needed Grey Poupon, it would have been only a short stretch.

We also looked at cheaper places for around $100,000 that were built on crudely laid concrete foundations. These were typically 4 - 5 story buildings with about 16 or so units in them. On what may have been someone's vegetable patch, some 'developer' bought what patches they could during the housing run up here and then plopped the biggest building possible on the land - typically inches away from the next plot, and sold the units individually. One problem was the lack of parking, but the real turn-off with these places, despite the fact that the interiors were often quite passable, was the judicious use of concrete all around the building, and all around all others like it nearby. What did they have against green grass? Or even weeds? Every little corner and niche of land free from a building or roadway was concreted over - and it often looked as if it was simply poured and allowed to dry as it fell.

We bought our place because it couldn't possibly fall in price. People will always need a place to live and there will always be a bottom price that will always be paid to secure a decent and actual livable place. Ours, when we bought it, was relatively cheap as it was in an area of this city that hasn't been made over or in the news after a big announcement by developers (more on how this works here in a future post). We bought this place exactly at the right time, in my opinion: when no one else wanted to live in this area. Since then, aside from the new paint (which is a neutral tan and brown scheme - much better), a subway stop is coming in 2 blocks away that connects this neighborhood with the nation's capitol. That will only improve the outlook for this old area of this old city.