Somebody stop me

[barbarienne]

Dear F'list:

Please remind me why it is a bad idea to think about buying a gigantic mansion in a bad neighborhood.

The badness of the neighborhood should be evident by the idea that I can afford the asking price of the giant mansion.

(And no, I'm not looking in earnest. I'm just looking so I keep remembering to save money.)

ETA: maradydd, it's a bad

Comments

[shadefell]

What you need to do is persuade all your friends to also buy buildings in the bad neighborhood, turning it into a good neighborhood full of awesome people.

Sadly, there are neighborhoods in Chicago where my friends and I could, in theory, do just that.

Or buy the mansion and then move it. BECAUSE MOVING A HOUSE IS TOTALLY CHEAP AND EASY, YOU KNOW.

[maradydd]

See, I don't see what's necessarily wrong about moving into a "bad" neighborhood -- it depends on what about the neighborhood makes it bad. Is there a lot of crime, or is it just run-down? If there's a lot of crime, what kind of crime? I've lived in a neighborhood that was considered "high-crime" because it was frequented by a lot of streetwalkers, and most people thought of it as a "bad neighborhood" because you really couldn't drive through it late at night without being solicited, but it was actually a really quiet place to live and convenient to a lot of nice things

[hominysnark]

The drug dealer who lived next door to me for a time was the neatest, quietest neighbor I've ever had.

[shadefell]

The one who lived next door to me was incredibly loud and threatened to kill people, outside, at the top of his lungs, at 3am. Constantly. In great detail. I keep hearing about tidy, quiet drug dealing neighbors and frankly I'm a bit jealous. My drug dealing neighbors have all been borderline retarded.

[shadefell]

I'm guessing that if you have to ask what's wrong with purchasing a house in a bad neighborhood that you haven't spent much time in bad neighborhoods

[maradydd]

I lived in hooker-neighborhood for about two years, and spent just about every evening of last year (from around 4pm to 2 or 3 am, often on into morning) in a place that literally opened onto a crackhead alley about a block and a half away from 16th and Mission BART (probably the nastiest station on the BART circuit, in terms of neighborhood). I've been propositioned, offered drugs, and been talked to by a lot of crazy homeless people, which a lot of people consider hallmarks of a "bad neighborhood." I wouldn't mind living there; I basically did

[dorianegray]

It's a question of defining "bad neighbourhood", I think. I wouldn't necessarily define "red-light district" as "bad neighbourhood" - like you, I lived in one and found it a very good place to live.

On the other hand, I currently live in an area where the local yobs practice handbrake turns outside our house at 3am, and consider setting random cars on fire to be appropriate weekend evening entertainment.

[maradydd]

The town I live in now doesn't have any seriously bad parts of town, as it's a university town and fairly small, but enochsmiles and I did decide to move out of the part of town we were in because we hated the architecture (it was all horrid '60s Bauhaus-style tower blocks), and our building was full of crazy people. (One morning we had to talk one of them down from trying to jump from the 6th floor, which was quite a challenge since neither of us speaks much Dutch.)

Now we've got the upper half of a duplex and our downstairs neighbors are a Middle Eastern couple, and it's much nicer.