The initial plan was to add on a second story to the original one story house. This would turn a seven hundred square foot house into a fourteen hundred square foot place and bring the building up to the same height as the existing homes on either side. I intended to hold the property for many years while renting to high quality tenants. The most likely demographic was the post-college/pre-children group and older singles and couples. The greatest market demand in the area was for good quality studio and one-bedroom apartments which rent for between $700 and $1,000. I asked the designer to draw up a traditional mother/daughter duplex which are common throughout the old neighborhood. One year and a few thousand dollars worth of billable hours later the designer was still arm wrestling the city for permission to move forward.

First, a duplex was forbidden. Zoning stipulated single family homes only. Full stop. The city was very clear that multi-family buildings with transient populations were a major contributor to blight and a threat to the social fabric and stability of the neighborhood. Okay… So I asked the designer to submit new plans for a single family home knowing that the most likely tenants would be young professionals who would share the place as room mates. Shrug. Whatever. The numbers would be about the same.

In the process of submitting the revised drawings the city informed us that we were not permitted to add a second story. End of conversation. Why? Well… the lot was too small to legally contain a home. Back in the 1950’s a suburban style zoning code was laid over the old 1890’s neighborhood. The existing shack was grandfathered in, but any addition would have to conform to the new code, set back requirements, et cetera, and none of that would be physically possible on a tiny city lot.

There were a million other bumps in the road, variance hearings, waiting, waiting, waiting, review boards, waiting, waiting, waiting, blah, blah, blah that I won’t go into here.

The only legal option was to renovate the existing shack within the original envelope. But the cost of bringing this sad little one bedroom, one bath shotgun up to code – forget about making it the kind of place that middle class tenants would want to live in – far exceeded the likely low rental income. The only way the numbers would add up is if we did a half-assed patch job. Get the lights to come on. See that the toilet flushes property. Make sure the furnace works. Replace the broken windows with cheap vinyl units. Slap some paint on the walls. Cover the floors with bargain carpeting and linoleum. In the end, I’d be a slum lord taking Section 8 vouchers. Meh.

By the one year anniversary of this endeavor exactly nothing had been done to the property. Zero progress of any kind. Bubkas. Squat. By that point, I had had enough with the city and pulled the plug. I sold and walked away.