Artist Buy House for $100, Try to Fix It Up
Today, CNN had this interesting article about several artists who bought a home for $100 and are trying to remake the house in using creative methods:
[[CNN) -- If an e-mail popped up in your inbox promising a house for $100, you'd expect to see it sent from guy in Nigeria asking you to wire him several thousand dollars first.
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/US...use1.smith.jpg
Zeb Smith lies on his front lawn and spends a quiet afternoon with his neighbors.
But this depressed housing market dream is real. And Detroit, Michigan, artist Jon Brumit and his wife Sarah are living it.
The couple never counted on owning a home.
"It's not that we have a little money," Jon Brumit said, laughing. "I'm saying we have no money."
But the couple began entertaining the idea of a permanent nest when their friends Mitch Cope and Gina Reichert, also artists, started taking advantage of foreclosures in the city, where the average home price dipped to $11,533 in April, according to the Detroit Association of Realtors.
Dragging down the average are homes are long abandoned or foreclosed on that are selling for pennies on the dollar. Detroit already had the lowest market value houses in Michigan before the latest rounds of job losses at GM and other huge employers, market analysts say.
"Those artists are doing a good thing; they are at least helping to stabilize neighborhoods that would be all but lost," said Mike Shedlock, an investment adviser who blogs frequently about Detroit's economy.
For less than a few thousand dollars, Cope and Reichert snapped up a dilapidated bungalow in a north Detroit neighborhood called "BanglaTown," for its unexpected mix of Bangladeshis, African-Americans, Polish and Ukrainians and the occasional shady character.
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Click link for the rest of the story
EDIT: Link fixed
