We went to the Sustainable Living Fair north of Old Town Saturday, and spent about five hours looking around and chatting with various exhibitors. It was a beautiful day here on the Front Range of the Rockies.
A 50X130 foot lot, suitable for perhaps a 1200sf house.
On our way back out of the pasture area where the event was staged, we passed by a vacant lot with a realtor's sign, in an old small neighborhood called Alta Vista. We played our usual guessing game about what the price might be - I guessed around $40K and Pat guessed a little higher.
The lot was interesting because at the rear, there was a nice unobstructed Western view of the foothills and landscape with no development in sight.
I didn't think much more about it until the next morning when I searched online and found the property with the listed price of only $25K. Hmmm... As I rode the the gym Sunday morning and while working out, I thought about the possibilities of building on this small lot. We really never see anything we like here in the housing stock to provide a good alternative to where we are, and have concluded that we will need to build or move to another state where there is an architectural style more in line with our preferences (like the pueblo style 'adobe' houses of New Mexico, and maybe a better climate as well). But if we were to build here, and make it a place where we could easily leave it behind for the winter (unlike this place, which offers some challenges), that might work out well.
There are some new developments and interesting home construction going in North of Old Town, but the prices are quite high, and there is something cold and hard-edged about these contrived projects.
A few new homes in the Old Town North project.
The lot is in an area just a mile and a half or so from the center of Old Town that provides housing for a lot of poor and ethnic (mostly Latino) folks, and some gentrifying urban pioneers. We would be among the latter group if we built there. As I told our realtor, we would rather have poor Mexican neighbors around us than the folks where we are now who planted McCain/Palin signs on their lawns last fall.
The back (West) of the lot looking inward.
The Alta Vista neighborhood was once known as the Spanish Colony, and was home to migrant and immigrant labor from Mexico. There are a number of old adobe structures there, some about a hundred years old. The neighborhood has a Mexican village feel, and Spanish is heard more often than English as you walk around the narrow streets
.
An old tienda or perhaps a laundry, in the nearby Buckingham neighborhood.
At this point, we are just looking onto the various issues surrounding the lot purchase, and design and construction possibilities and costs. Hard to say where this might lead, or what the chances are for anything happening up there beyond considering the opportunity.
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