Saving Places, Inc.?

Since we are certifiable crackheads and clearly don’t have enough to do with our time, I’ll just go ahead and throw this one out there; we’ve been thinking about starting a non-profit. Not now, but sometime in the near future.

This idea has been with us awhile, and, so far, we’ve succeeded in keeping ourselves out of this mess. However, last weekend my wife read this post of over at 1902 Victorian.

Scarlet: “They condemned this house? It doesn’t look any worse than ours did.”

Me: “Are you sure? There are plants growing inside.”

Scarlet: “Hmm. That doesn’t look too bad. Ours had trees growing on the roof. I mean, it’s not like they have to move it.”

Me: “The bathroom sub-floor is completely rotten.”

Scarlet: “The one with all the tiles? Those are so pretty. Repairing the sub-floor wouldn’t be that hard, we’ve done stuff like that before.”

Me: “Well, yeah. That is true.”

Scarlet: “Does she want to buy it? Maybe we could give them some money for it?”

Now, I’m not adverse to helping people, but I have no idea where we’d get the money for another house considering how much we need for the Queen and a new car.

Scarlet: “We should start Saving Places (our name for our imaginary non-profit). You should post about it and see what all the Housebloggers think about it.”

So, here it is.

My wife and I had this idea several years ago when we were first starting this project. The problem we had was everyone hates old houses, particularly banks and insurance companies.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that banks and insurance companies are one of the major reasons why more people do not undertake the kinds of projects Housebloggers seems to. We seem to represent the lunatic fringe that is okay with doing things the Hard Way.

As far as I can tell as homeowner and former real estate appraiser:

1) If loans were ice cream, the bank wants vanilla every time. There are no exceptions to this, this is their favorite flavor. If you tell a bank you want to move an old home and renovate it, they’ll tell you no way in hell. However, if you asked for the exact same amount of money to build a small development of ranch houses or French Provincials, they’d ask when you could start.
2) Bankers, on the whole, have no imagination. They don’t or can’t see the finished project. They will only loan on what they can see, not what you can imagine.
3) Banks & insurance companies are risk adverse. This is why they really don’t want to loan money or insure and old home.

Now, I don’t mean to pick on them too much. Banks are there to make money, and they will tell you this on the front end. Insurance companies are a bit harder to pin down, but, if they will insure you they actual will provide a service (in theory).

If the banks won’t help you, who do you turn to for assistance? In our case, there were two choices: Main Street Russellville and the Nation Register of Historic Places.

Main Street Russellville has done an excellent job in reviving Historic Downtown Russellville. They still have a long way to go, but they have been making steady progress over the last ten years or so. However, since the Devil Queen wasn’t in the historic Main Street District (she was one block outside the boundary), nor is it now, there isn’t anything that they could do for us.

We tried to get the Devil Queen on the National Registry of Historic Places. We hoped that if we pulled this off we could qualify for some grant money to help restore the Queen’s gingerbread & period details. That didn’t work either. Our application was turned down at the state level. Basically, they weren’t interested since the Devil Queen had been moved from her original location and because it was only local significance.

So, who do you have to turn to at that point? Around here there is no one, nothing.

Saving Place would hopefully fill that vast chasm between a hard to obtain bank loans and the scant public and private resources available for old homes. Ideally, Saving Places would offer grants or loans for historic homes or buy & restore old homes itself to resale.

Of course, I don’t have any idea how to set up something like this, but that has never stopped us before. So, what do you think?