Searching for a new home

One thing that this housing market and terrible economy has provided is a pretty decent buyer’s market in terms of housing. There are lots of homes on the market right now, and interest rates are ridiculously low.

Here in Cascadia, there seems to be a gluttony of mobile and modular homes up for sale. I have nothing against a modular or mobile home. My mother lived in one (as did I when I stayed there) for 20 years or so, and most modern modulars aren’t that bad. They do however, loose value with rates similar to a used Yugo and don’t qualify for certain types of loans.

Because of our current situation, we’re in the market as first time home buyers, and are finding that we’re looking at a very narrow market in terms of homes. Some of these parameters are external due to our choice in using a USDA loan. We’re fine with the rural nature of the loan, but the houses we’re looking at sometimes only need a very little amount of work but USDA won’t go near them. Some of the parameters are self-inflicted. We’d like at least 3 bedrooms, over 1100 sq feet, and at minimum a 1/4 acre lot. In many places in this country that wouldn’t be too hard, but around here it is. What’s left after the mobiles and modulars are some nice, small homes. The bigger the lot, the smaller the home in our price range, and the bigger the home, the smaller the lot. Some of the yards here are about as big as our kitchen table. We need a bit more room for our kids to run and burn off energy, and for our plans to garden, compost, and raise chickens.

What we’re often left with are some nice little houses that we get outbid on or are already snatched up by someone else. What’s left after that are the foreclosures and short sales. We’ve found a nice place with a half acre lot, and a good sized home that is a little farther out than we had liked, but it seems to be a good house so distance might have to be a sacrifice. However, it is a short sale. These can go easy, or they can be like slowly pulling a band-aid that has been adhered with Gorilla Glue. The current residents in this house don’t answer their phone, and don’t return the calls of our or their real estate agents. Why not? Because until the bank sells the house, they’re basically there rent-free. So any delay they can create is a benefit for them. This is frustrating for us to be sure.

Yet I also can’t help but sympathize with those people. They live in a small rural area that has had some very tough economic times as the main employer there, a lumber mill, has laid off several workers over the past few years. Tourism hasn’t been that great there either. So, it is understandable that this mother and daughter have hit some hard economic times. They likely became unable to pay their mortgage for any number of reasons. They have every reason to fear a knock at the door and the phone ring. They probably want nothing more than to be able to stay in their home, to provide themselves with some type of stability in what may be some rather chaotic times in their life. I feel bad for them. I really, really do.

I do have some issues with looking at this house because of all of this. I don’t want to see a family forcibly uprooted because of something I do. But it is going to happen regardless. And, the longer the house sits on the market, the less money they will be able to get for the house and the less likely the bank will end up going forward with the short sale, which will hurt the owner if it ends up in foreclosure. It is a tricky situation, but I’m also thinking of my family’s needs (we’re currently 2 adults, a 3 year old and a 1 year old in a 2 bedroom apt) for now and in the near future.

The home buying process thus far has been much more frustrating than I would have hoped, but we’re making baby step progress.

Making a dent

For the past year or so, I’ve been volunteering with a local non-profit, Sound Salmon Solutions. It’s an organization that works on salmon habitat restoration in the river basin where I live here in Snohomish County, WA.They work with local volunteers, land owners, local municipalities, Dept. of Fish and Wildlife and the tribes to accomplish all of this. A lot of what they do is removing invasive species like Himalayan Blackberry and Japanese Knotweed, and then planting native plants to restore habitat. They also do lots of educational outreach with schools and at public events. When I go to help out, it’s mostly been planting, but I’ve also volunteered my services as a photographer to snap some photos for their website.

Yesterday I went out to a private landowner’s property, and 25 or so of use planted 750 native plants like cedar, ash, alder, pine, willow, and some bushes like salmon berry and rose. It was all along the side of a creek that runs into the Stilly river (pictured below, the spot we were at is by the red star) that had previously been overgrown and choked out with invasive blackberry bushes. This was just part of the process that started a year ago and will continue with more maintenance over the next few years.

The yellow star denotes the area where I live, and it’s also right next to a confluence where the North and South forks of the Stillaguamish River meet before the river winds its way out into the Puget Sound. As you can see, the river feeds quite a bit of local agriculture (including the CSA we subsrcibe to, the Klesikc Family Farm). The river is also home to a large population of bald eagles, which feed upon the coho, chinook, steelhead, and other salmon.

The reason I included this in a post here is because part of adopting a more ecocentric world-view involves a focus on bioregions, and bioregional governance/stewardship. Rather than putting effort into say, protesting the Keystone XL pipeline, it would be more prudent and productive to put real work into improving the river where I live, and protecting the wilderness in the mountains I’m surrounded by. This is deep conservatism in action, because it relies heavily upon the people that live here in these watersheds and have a vested interest in seeing them thrive, as opposed to some far away, centralized entity with no real connection to this land.

It is important to note that much of the work has no direct human benefit. The work done this weekend will create forest to border the landowner’s property on the creek-side. Previous plantings have been for the sole benefit of salmon themselves. Will fishermen benefit? Sure, eventually they will. But at stake here is the reintroduction of the wild into parts of this land that have been manicured, distorted and destroyed for over a century.When planting, I was speaking with the landowner Leon, I believe. He was telling about how the land had been homesteaded as 160 acres in the 1870′s or 1880′s by his great-great grandfather. He talked about how much the land had changed in his 70+ years there due to some of the major floods and logging that takes place across the road from where he is. But he often recalled those childhood memories of running in the streams and creeks on the property and wading with the juvenile salmon by the dozens. That is it right there, the contact with the wild that fills us up and connects us to the world we live in. But, he said he hadn’t but a couple of salmon in the past decade or so swimming in those creeks and streams. Our work there will hopefully change that. I was planting side-by-side with some of his grandsons that were talking about how cool it would be to see the trees all grown up and to have a forest there in a few years. Hopefully the family stewardship of the land there will be a lasting legacy.

Later this year (I believe), in a river not too far south, they will be breaching a levy in order to restore an expanse of estuary that was taken over by agriculture and housing developments decades ago. I’ll post more on that when it happens.