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30 August 2021

We were done for the day, our camera holstered, when we walked by this scene. It would normally have struck us as plain old urban blight, the consequence of rising costs and limited income, not an uncommmon story.

Back Street. Nikon D200 with 18-200mm f3.5-5.6 Nikkor at 42mm (63mm equivalent) and f8, 1/500 second and ISO 200. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw.

But we had just come from an open house of the place across the street from us, which itself had been decaying for several years, more clapboards falling off after every storm with not one hair of a paint brush touching its exterior in the 18 years we've been looking across at it.

After a sale a few months ago, though, the place has been thoroughly renovated. Exterior repairs, drywall, new doors (including the garage door), all new light fixtures, new countertops, new bathroom tile, new floors, the works.

A couple of years ago it had been on the market for $1.4M. No takers. A smaller house up the street sold last year for $1.4M, over double what similar places had been going for. So when the place across the street went back on the market for $1.4M, it sold.

After the renovations, the new owner (who, we assume, was the contractor) is asking just a bit under $2.4M, a new high for the neighborhood. With four bedrooms and three and a half baths plus a double car garage, it's much larger than the $1.4M two-bedroom up the street. And the price compares favorably to other large homes in the city. The open house attracted dozens of interested parties.

So the blight we had been used to looking at for years was really just an opportunity in disguise. Opportunities are like that.

And consequently when we looked at this building, we wondered just what our contractor might make of it, given the chance.

We featured the other side of the building, if we're not mistaken, in A Chain Link Fence in 2014. "Urban life at its most dismal, you might think," we wrote then.

But we discovered then -- as perhaps now -- just the opposite was true.


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