In article >,
"W. Baker" > wrote:

> When you live in the NYC area, as Susan and I do, you have to function
> with very high real estate prices. This also applies to many urban area
> in the US.
>
> Wendy

Boston isn't quite as bad as New York or San Francisco, but I was
shocked when my mother was selling the family house in Vermont. It's a
150 year old farmhouse, winterized, with both wood and oil furnaces:
living room, dining room, half bath, and huge farmer's kitchen & pantry
downstairs, four bedrooms and full bath upstairs, attached woodshed,
workshop, barn, front and kitchen porches. Nothing modernized except
for the heating and the slate roof, plus between 75 and 100 acres of
land (fields and wooded hills) on all four sides. She was able to get
$160K for it. My tiny (1200 sq. ft. max) two bedroom 1920s house with
minor upgrades on 7,000 sq. ft. lot, one block behind a public housing
complex in an outer neighborhood of Boston was worth more than twice
that! I'd paid only $119,500 in 1998, but the neighborhood was on the
way up at the time and didn't top out until a couple of years ago.

Now, she did want to sell to someone she knew, but I did a bunch of
comps, and she couldn't have gotten much more for it than that. The
folks who bought the place had 3 kids, I think. They were
home-schooled, and each kid had an animal of choice -- not just the
usual dog or cat, but I can't remember what they all were. Sheep?
Goat? The place had been a goat farm 70 years ago, so that would have
been an appropriate choice. Apparently they love the place, and I think
they're a good fit. Part of the deal was having it written in that we
may come and scatter Mother's ashes on the hill up behind the house when
the time comes.

That reminds me, I haven't gotten an update from my mother on how the
family was affected by the floods. The road washes out regularly, and
I've seen pictures of what Irene did to it a little further on, but not
by the house.

Priscilla
--
"What you fail to understand is that criticising established authority by means
of argument and evidence is a crucial aspect of how science works."
- Chris Malcolm