House cohesion

I missed out this afternoon. I had to swing by the bank, and hey, while I'm at it, look for pickled asparagus at Trader Joe's (they were out, dammit!) and since I'm there, Lucy loves their chocolate chai, and Lori was talking about a fondue pot...

But I missed the pinning of the Notice to our door: Our landlord is now four months behind on his mortgage payments.

I'm not surprised at all. Not after he didn't pay utilities for three months and nearly managed to get them shut off on us. Not after the article in yesterday's paper, or the cavalier treatment he shows in never showing up to fix things that have been on our list for eight months now.

I called Mom immediately (would have talked to Dad too, if he'd been in the country.)

I don't think that we, as tenants, are in any position to really worry. Seattle's landlord-tenant laws tend to favor the tenants, and while I can't find provisions covering foreclosure, we can't get kicked out of the house without some serious lead-time. If the landlord persists on being an idiot, and the bank forecloses on him, the whole process takes two to three months before it happens, and our lease is up in four.

John's let us know he wasn't going to be renewing, and I'd been thinking about starting to nose around slash fandom and try to find another slashy roommate.

So, worst case scenario: the bank forecloses, lists the house (and I think they have to give us 60 days notice, or until the end of our lease before they can actually list the house.) They won't likely keep the house - they're bankers, not landlords.

I've found a house before, I can do it again. I'll bitch and whine like kennel full of yappy mongrels, but eh - such is life.

Still, that's the absolute worst case scenario (well, maybe the house burning down is worst, but let's dwell on probabilities, not possibilities) For months now, I've been batting around the idea of finding some way of buying the house. Singly, none of us could get approval on a loan for something the size of this thing. But in a situation where the bank is looking to get a big house off their hands in a market that's frozen solid (at least for the price range this thing'll go for), a co-op of tenants might be ablt to make them a reasonable offer.

Assuming we rent out the basement, making the mortgage payments each month should be no problem. The two biggest stumbling blocks I can forsee are the maintenance costs (the roof is in seriously bad shape) and how to handle the situation if a house member decides to move out.

Beside the obvious relief of getting out from under the thumb of the Idio Landlord (tm), the big advantage to owning the house is building equity. And I'm not sure how to handle that fairly if, say, in five years Ali decides she wants to shack up with some pretty little redhead up on Cap Hill. How much equity has she earned, and how does she get that out of the House? How do we bring in another roommate? I think I need to take a serious look at co-op agreements and business partnerships.

I love this house, and I truly enjoy the wonderful, considerate, beautiful roommates I have. And I'm greedy enough to want to have it all.