My wife and I live in a Bradenton house that we bought in 2004 for a lot less than the $168,000 that is currently considered the maximum price for ‘affordable housing’ around here. I’ll admit that we’ve spent a fair amount of money fixing up the place, but even if we include our remodeling expenses, our home’s total cost is well below the official ‘workforce housing’ top price limit of $201,600. It’s a nice place, too.

Our home is also where we work. My wife runs Debbie’s Art Garage, a small gallery we built in our two-car garage, which is a separate building, not part of our main house. And I have a large, very nice home office in a converted lanai behind the garage.

We’re proud of our home, but it is far from unique. As I write this, Realtor.com has 404 homes listed in or near Bradenton that have asking prices of $200,000 or less. Are they all in great neighborhoods? No. Are they all updated with the latest appliances? Not a chance. But most of them are pefectly decent houses that would make nice homes for families that don’t demand ‘affordable homes’ that are as big and fancy as a typical Lakewood Ranch snoothouse. You need to be realistic about what you can afford in a house instead of dreaming beyond your means, and I worry that a lot of people who are trying to buy ‘affordable homes’ around here have their sights set too high — and that this is our biggest local ‘affordable housing’ problem.

Case in point: There’s a house for sale across the street from us that is tagged at just over $100,000, and it’s been on the market for many months so I suspect that the owner might look at lower offers. It’s an old house in poor condition, but if you poured $50,000 or $60,000 into it, you’d have one heck of a place — and like our house, it’s zoned commercial (part of the Village of the Arts), so you could run a business out of it in addition to living there.

Not all of your neighbors would be white, which — even though no one admits it — drags down the neighborhood’s desirability in a lot of homebuyers’ eyes. There is also a bit of gang graffitti scattered around and too many “real estate investors” (the phrase city officials here use instead of the more accurate word “slumlords“) who prefer cash rent from uncomplaining druggies and illegal aliens to well-screened, legitimate tenants who expect a landlord to provide a well-maintained place in return for their rent money.

On the other hand, the local schools are decent, 90% of the neighbors (including most of the illegal aliens) are friendly and watch out for one another, and the area is gradually getting nicer, a little at a time. Besides, where else can you both live and work in a place that’ll cost you less than the price of a ‘workforce housing’ property all by itself?

There are plenty of other areas in Bradenton and surrounding Manatee County that offer similar — perhaps even better — housing values, especially for people who aren’t attracted by the Village of the Arts “work at home” factor. Note that hardly any sub-$200,000 properties around here are brand-new, expansive 3000+ square foot houses. Most are older, built back when 1000 or 1200 square feet was considered plenty for a family with two or three children. Not all have central air conditioning (which can be added to most older houses for around $5000), either, and others may need other updates, but hey! “Affordable” and “deluxe” may not necessarily belong in the same sentence.

But don’t forget that house updates and upgrades are not the same as a mortgage obligation, which you must pay even in rough times (like if you lose your job), but can be done a little at a time whenever you have a bit of spare cash.

Bottom Line:

Bradenton has plenty of affordable housing if you look for it. Since real estate prices have gone way down over the last year, and may even drop a bit more as overextended real estate investors bail out, this year is a good time to look at low-cost “fixup” property around here, especially in the less-developed south section of the Village of the Arts between 13th Ave. W and 17th Ave. W, where new arts-related businesses are finally starting to sprout up and slumlords are slowly being driven out.

As far as waiting for shiny-new ‘affordable housing’ developments to be built, if this Bradenton Herald story is at all accurate (and I assure you it is), it could be a l-o-n-g wait. If you seriously want to own a home in this area , and you live on a regular working person’s salary (or even if your household has two typical salaries coming in), you might as well come to grips with the fact that you need to look at existing houses in older neighborhoods, and find one you can turn into your dream house on your own instead of expecting someone to sell you — or expecting the government to subsidize you into — a place that already has all the features you’d like your home to have.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 18th, 2007 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Bradenton/local, Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.