Word: groving
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...black bus rivals a greyhound in size but has an interior like a limo--and it gets a few curious looks as we wander into the dense neighborhoods of Elk Grove, Calif., a quiet suburb 15 minutes south of Sacramento. Five of us--a mortgage counselor, three investors and I--are looking at 10 recently foreclosed homes dubbed "excellent deals" by the O'Brien Co., the agency that set up the trip...
These "magical misery tours" are real estate agents' attempts to move their ever increasing inventory fast, as the mortgage crisis forces more and more homeowners into foreclosure. The idea originated in nearby Stockton last year and has migrated to other cities in California, Michigan, Florida and Massachusetts. Elk Grove alone has about 2,120 bank-owned houses for sale and 1,280 in pre-foreclosure, according to RealtyTrac, a real-estate-data website. The places we see vary from spotless to foul-smelling. One house, which appears to have been vacated in a hurry, has enormous stuffed animals...
Like many communities across the U.S. that boomed during the housing bubble, Elk Grove is feeling the pain of the housing burst. For the most part, the trauma of eviction is hidden--the suburb has the occasional overgrown yard, although not as many as I'd expected, and FOR SALE signs dot the streets. But a funny thing happened on the way to Elk Grove's demise: it has started to come back. Over the past six months, investors and first-time home buyers have moved in, snapping up homes now priced at less than $250,000. Residents are working...
Home to soccer moms, strip malls and some of the best schools in California, Elk Grove was one of America's fastest-growing cities in 2005. Its population shot up from 75,900 to 130,874 (including a boundary extension) in five years, as families and Bay Area investors flocked in, lured by low prices and no-money-down mortgages. Seven years ago, developers carved a new district, Franklin Reserve, out of hunting grounds and dairy farms, building 7,000 homes in three years to satisfy an insatiable demand for California living. But the slowing market threatened to dismantle...
...hobby and make it the meat of my academic work,” she says.Two years later, Whitaker has successfully made the history of cinema the centerpiece of her academic life at Harvard as a Visual and Environmental Studies concentrator. She just finished writing her senior thesis on the Grove Press, a publishing house and film production company that published such then-controversial works as “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.”“I wanted to use film as a way to consider the historical context of the 60s and the history of independent...