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Ladd Carriage House (1883)
Image by A.Davey
Ladd Tower condominiums in the background.
Long, long ago, this part of what is now downtown Portland was where the city's leading families built their mansions. Over time they moved on and their mansions were demolished. This structure is the sole survivor of that era.
When I arrived in Portland in the late 70s, this lovely building was painted in two colors of gray. It was used for law offices.
The Ladd Carriage House has been threatened by development as the value of downtown real estate has increased. It had a brush with demolition before it was rehabbed.
A bar and restaurant now occupy part of the building.
Wikipedia says:
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The Ladd Carriage House is a building in downtown Portland, Oregon. It is one of the few surviving pieces of the former grand estates which once existed in the downtown core. It was on the National Register of Historic Places from 1980 until 2008. It was restored to the list in 2010.
The building served as an outbuilding to the William S. Ladd mansion, once located across Broadway on the block now occupied by The Oregonian's headquarters.
Since its decommissioning as a private residential structure, it has been used as offices and retailing space.
An early remodel, circa 1930, converted the open first floor and hayloft into three floors of offices according to architect Van Evera Bailey, who established his office in the carriage house.
The future of the building was cast into doubt when the neighboring First Christian Church announced plans to redevelop the entire block. The congregation had bought the Ladd Carriage House in 1971, and sought to expand parking for its members. As part of the redevelopment, a condo tower, Ladd Tower, would be built above a parking garage. A demolition permit had been secured for the lot, but never used.
Nevertheless, this raised alarm bells in the preservationist community and a grass-roots campaign, the Friends of Ladd Carriage House, sprang into action to either save or move the old building. One proposal was to move the Carriage House to Lair Hill, but this was logistically complex (steep streets, crossing bridges, cutting Portland Streetcar lines).
A compromise was agreed upon where the Ladd Carriage House would be moved temporarily while a new garage would be dug out, then the building would be moved back onto the lot. The plans for the condo tower were scaled back so that the tower's footprint only took up half the block, not three-quarters of it.
On June 16, 2007, after ground was broken on Ladd Tower, the Ladd Carriage House was moved to the parking lot owned by the Church of Christ, Scientist at the corner of 10th and Columbia streets. This meant the house wouldn't need to cross the streetcar lines. It was moved back to its original site on October 25, 2008.
Extensive exterior renovations occurred after the Ladd Carriage House moved back to its original site. In April 2009 the house was repainted, going from shades of blue to shades of brown. The house was restored to the National Register of Historic Places in 2010, and in 2011 the building was sold for million.
Portland, Oregon.
Boston Housing Prices Showing Signs of Life
Image by Matthew Simoneau
I'm planning to buy my first house soon. Since I'm not yet invested in real estate, I've been looking for the right time to enter the market. I know that trying to time the market is a fool's game, but I am that fool.
The most relevant data I've been able to locate is the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices. It is calculated by comparing the selling price of homes in a given metro area in a given month against previous selling prices for the same property. There are lots of other numbers you could track (housing starts, current inventory levels, asking prices, etc.), but this is where the rubber meets the road. It reflects what prices homes are actually fetching in a given area at a given time.
Home prices have a natural seasonality in Boston, rising in the spring and falling in the fall, so I've been focusing on year-on-year changes. I designed this plot to make it easy to compare this change. Each year is a line. If you cut the plot out of the page and glued the left to the right edge, the cylinder would be a continuous line changing color at the start of each year.
The most interesting events for me are when the lines cross. They represent points in time where house prices are the same from one year to the next. That happened in Boston in April 2006, as the market began to cool. For nearly four years after that, the average home in Boston was worth less than it was a year before. This free fall came to an end in December 2009, when finally the lines crossed again and the market held its value.
January's numbers came in today and again the year-on-year values are in the black. The index is down compared to December, though. We're not out of the woods yet, but we may be at the beginning of the recovery.
Crossposted to Matthew J. Simoneau's Weblog, Facebook, and Twitter.
negative equity in the usa
Image by oceandesetoiles
"First American CoreLogic, a real estate data company, has calculated that 7.6 million properties in the country were underwater (valued with negative equity) as of Sept. 30, while another 2.1 million were in striking distance. That is nearly a quarter of all homes with mortgages. The 20 hardest-hit ZIP codes are all in four states: California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona."
