Bad News Jump Starts A New Adventure

I should have known something was up when our landlady delayed and delayed getting a new lease to us. We had spent a year in our wonderful Folsom neighborhood and we liked (and seemed to be well-liked by) our neighbors, we took great care of the house and had even made improvements on our own dime. All was status quo until we finally pressed our landlady to send us the new lease but by now my "spider senses" were tingling: I knew something was up and I suspected that it was an increase in rent. I may have sensed it coming but when it did it still hurt.*

With our long, winding trail of money woes, we were already struggling to make ends meet on the current rent. We have dealt with huge legal fees from both both our divorces; with the horrifying news that the escrow company ran off with our money from the sale of the last house and my health problems that rendered me unable to work (with state disability exhausted and Social Security refusing to pay out unless I shelled out big bucks to yet another lawyer). We now relied solely on my husband's income.

We went from living comfortable lives to gasping for air, constantly selling off belongings and downsizing to make my husband's income work for us (meaning him, me, his two sons, my two daughters and our toddler). Needless to say we ended up in bankruptcy which did help take some of the pressure off but still could not make everything work out financially. Not having credit in our society is a blessing (no credit cards to run up) and a curse (who will rent you a house big enough for a family our size when we can't even get a credit card?). When our landlady said she would go by references (which luckily glowed) from previous landlords instead of a credit check (we told her up front about the bankruptcy) we were relieved to say the least. Yet now, we find that we have to move again! With the inability to spare enough money for a savings we are at a loss to find a place that will take a family with no credit and no money saved for security deposit. Where could we go? The only answer we had was frightening, daunting, intriguing and exciting all at once. The answer was on 58th Street.

58th St. house when I lived in it the second time (late 90's early 2000's)

Can You Go Home Again?
When I was seven years old, my family moved to an old farm house (by old I mean it is now almost 80 years old!) on 58th Street in East Sacramento. With usable living space under 1,000 sq. ft. the small two bed, one bath held my older sister, my parents and myself but while the walls may have been a bit cramped the property itself was a lush, palatial garden of wonder and somehow we made it work. Sure the basement flooded but we could store a lot of items off the ground and we spent most of our time outside anyway. My father was a self-proclaimed "hillbilly" who was used to living in a tiny shed as a boy and digging his own sewer trenches, growing his own vegetables and even baked cakes in a wood fired oven before he went off to "luxurious" Navy life. My father was the one that set the tone of family life and he centered it in the garden of our 58th Street home.

My father holding blackberries in our garden.

 I have memories of curing olives from the olive tree in our bathtub (our only bathtub), of making blackberry jam from the brambles lining the back of our property and eating carrots and fresh young red onions straight from the dirt after they were rinsed off with a garden hose. In the summers I would actually nap amongst the watermelon vines (to this day I wonder that I never used to be bothered by the prickly hairs on the leaves) and pick plums and figs from the many fruit trees.

My first friends on the block were an older couple that I named "The Perfect Couple" because they were always so kind and they, like their garden, were always sharply groomed and perfectly maintained. It was an old Italian neighborhood and so there weren't children for me to play with so I grew up playing in the garden, exploring CSUS and the American River Bike Trail or visiting the neighbors who would give me candy bars or fresh lemons from their trees so I could bake lemon meringue pies (one for me, one for them). Little did I know what a magical place East Sacramento was while I lived there.

I grew up, became a young adult and flew from the nest. It was many years later that I returned to the house with a young family of my own, as so many of us do now, in need of help making ends meet. I thought it was the perfect solution, my father had retired from his 30 year career at SMUD and was no longer able to take care of an aging house and a massive yard with his bad back and knees. My family needed a home where children could grow up happy and where rent would be cheap. My parents moved to an apartment in downtown Sacramento and my own family set up house on 58th Street. Things should have been perfect but, as is so often in life, they weren't. After the divorce, I began dating and fell in love with a wonderful man that lived in Roseville. At the time, it made sense to move in with him as our relationship progressed. My parents returned to the house on 58th Street and I again moved away.

As I personally found more happiness and love I have ever known, I found that life balanced the scale by visiting upon my husband and me those drawn out custody battles, theft and illness. I never knew I could feel so rich and so poor at the same time.  It was at this time that my mother fell catastrophically ill and was rushed to the emergency room. Her entire body went septic and shut down; she lay in a coma in the ICU for weeks while I visited whenever I could massaging her and talking to her until she finally awoke. It took a  long time but she did come back to us but very changed by her near-death. She was very weak and spent most of her time in bed or in a wheelchair, barely able to walk a few steps. She tried to return to the 58th Street house but the many steep stairs up to the front door were obviously too much for her. I had re-occurring nightmares of her falling down those old stairs and could not bear the thought of losing her so soon after getting her back. I also worried about my father caring for her and the house on his own. We lived far enough away and with me unable to work and drive any kind of real distances, five kids and split custody schedules it was pretty near impossible to get down to help them much.

At this time we found a need to move and with our bankruptcy fresh we could not find a place on our own, it seemed as if the perfect solution was to join households. I found a home in Fair Oaks that had only two shallow steps up into the house and we moved into the larger house with my parents while my mother tried to recover. On paper it seemed like a good idea but my parents valued their privacy and living in a house with 4 kids and a little one on the way proved to be too much. They found a little apartment not too far from us and we were able to find the perfect house just a few blocks from my husband's work in Folsom.

In the meantime, my father was so busy trying to care for my mother on his own while we were busy trying to care for our family that the property on 58th Street fell into disrepair and was broken into and vandalized. One of the worst incidents was when someone had stopped up all the sinks, the bathtub and the toilet and left all of the faucets running, completely flooding the house. My father, for his own complicated reasons that I may not entirely agree with, never made police reports of the incidents and seemed to emotionally divorce himself from the property. The house and yard became a ruined storage area for hoarded belongings with the only care being a neighborhood teen being paid to water and mow the front lawn. I had not been inside the house or seen the backyard in years. I admit that I had emotionally, and physically, distanced myself from the 58th Street house and seldom thought of it anymore. 

And So What Now?

With no savings, no credit and a shoestring budget we were stricken by the rent increase. Before this had even happened, my husband mentioned what a shame it was that my parent's property was sitting vacant and brought up the idea of someday us buying it and fixing it up. I was a bit dumbfounded by what he proposed and to be honest I pretty much wrote it off as being impossible. I admit to really missing East Sacramento and would jump at the chance to move back there but the thought of trying to take on such an impossible task made me shut down entirely. When my husband told me our landlady had increased our rent his idea went from the realm of far-off future fantasy to an immediate and urgent quest. It really seems as if we have no other viable options.

Usually I am the one that comes up with the crazy ideas but my husband latched onto this idea with an enthusiasm that shocked and sometimes downright intimidated me. How in the heck could this work? It was a much smaller house than even the downsized one we lived in now. It did have a basement but that flooded every time it rained and there was no garage! It was in terrible dis-repair, so much so that my father forbade us to even go there until he could repair it himself enough to be safe. (My parents are on fixed incomes and could never afford to pay someone to do the work for them.) My husband would not be deterred. Despite my father insisting that -although he favored us buying the property because "family had first priority" - he wanted us to wait saying "we had plenty of time". It was when my husband went back to my father and explained our new urgency that some more safety concerns of the property arose. My father suspected more break-ins and more tampering with the property. In an uncharacteristic show of assertiveness my husband refused to be deterred. He felt that my father insisting that he would clean up the property himself made no sense. My husband proclaimed that we would go down that weekend and start cleaning up the property.

We took pictures and video before we started and what you will see may shock you. There were times this weekend when both my husband and I would stop working and stare about us, open-mouthed, not having a clue what to do next because we were so overwhelmed. That story, complete with videos, will be posted tomorrow. For now I must stop writing, get out of my filthy work clothes, take a shower and get to bed.



Olive tree with garden in background, early 1980's.


LEARN MORE ABOUT WHAT WE ARE DOING AND SEE MORE PICTURES OF THE PROJECT AT OUR WEBSITE: WWW.GROVETRIBE.COM

* Update (October 25, 2011) - When we told our landlady we could not afford the rent increase there was not a lot of response at first. Then came a lot of back and forth discussion. It is understandable that when you think you will be getting an increase in income (upped rent) and then you find out you will no longer have tenants it may come as a bit of a surprise. Our landlady already knew we were in financial distress, that is why her announcement of a rent increase came as a shock to us.

We had asked for her kindness in allowing us to stay at the original rent until we moved out January 1st. (Which in reality is only one extra month since her rent increase could only take effect 30 days after initial notice.) There was some additional back and forth on that request and now (several weeks into this) she is making what we think appears to be an offer to keep the rent at the original amount for some indeterminate amount of time.  We appreciate this offer but it unfortunately too little, too late to work for us.

We were already struggling to afford the original rent price so even if it remained the same it was a hardship for us. Now we have made a commitment to my parents (and ourselves!) to rebuild the 58th Street house and get off of the renter roller coaster of rent increases, the inability to do what you want with your home, the slow or complete lack of response by the owner to the needs of the property and so on. We believe that our landlady is a good person that could possibly be in a financial bind herself and perhaps felt forced to increase our rent. We wish her and her home well and we will make sure it is in better shape when we leave it than when we entered.