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Originally Posted by Crawford
Raleigh is a hot market, so why would nice homes a few blocks from the state capital be abandoned? The equivalents aren't even abandoned in depressed state capitals like Lansing. And I'm highly skeptical that same block was abandoned in the 80's.
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For reference,
this neighborhood in Asheville, a streetcar suburb --
here's a representative picture -- was in such a state in the 1980's that most every house was for rent, had been chopped up into multiple apartments, or was being used as a whorehouse, flop house, or crack house. Houses were regularly burned down for insurance money. Everyone everywhere fled for the suburbs in the 1970's and 1980's, even in desirable cities like mine.
This neighborhood for example, was considered a dangerous, no-go zone well into the 90's, and
this one was a place you absolutely did not go after dark until about 2010. However, these are the most desirable neighborhoods in town today, so you can be as skeptical as you please, but I can assure you that the central cities of the South were ghost towns by the 1980's. That's why downtown Raleigh had to go through the ordeal of trying to revive its abandoned downtown with the Fayetteville Street Mall, then spend millions of dollars turning Fayetteville Street back into a traffic-carrying thoroughfare decades later when the mall proved to be an abject failure. Back in the 80's, central Raleigh was an ailing place, just like central Asheville, Charlotte, and nearly every other central city. Let me remind you that I am basing my observations on what I have seen living here my entire life, and I am basing them upon what people who have moved here have told me. I am also basing them upon what my husband and I have found when we have looked for houses to buy.
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Why would you assume people buy such homes due to "urbanity" when obviously they're attractive and close to work?
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Because "urbanity" and "attractive and close to work" are pretty much the same thing.
Here's the thing. Across the South, people are flooding into old mill villages, streetcar suburbs, and converted factories. In Greenville, SC, where my husband and I have considered moving, we see it in every neighborhood in town. Formerly deadly slums there and in places like Charlotte and Raleigh are all the rage now, to the point that these cities are running out of houses to renovate. Even in Charlotte, a city that has obliterated its history with near surgical precision, people want to be in what walkable in-town neighborhoods, restored factories, and mill villages remain there -- and they definitely also want to be in all the new housing that Charlotte is cramming into its core. People want to be in town first -- and yet again, I know this from growing up here, talking to people who have moved here, and from looking for houses myself.
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