Five years ago, Donald Strayer thought he'd bought a dream home for his extended family. It was on a pretty spot in Ohio's Appalachian mountain foothills, with room for him and his wife, his daughter's family, plus their horses and goats. And he could actually afford it.
Strayer had been turned down for a bank loan because of bad credit — he says it's because of hospital bills years ago. The 58-year-old former forklift driver has a chronic lung disease and lives off disability. Instead of a regular mortgage, he signed what's known as a land contract directly with the seller.
The price was $39,900. For a down payment he sold his childhood home, which he inherited when his dad died, "the only thing I had in the whole world."
For years he made monthly payments of $350 on his new home. And then "one day the sheriff just showed up," he says. "It was foreclosed and they wanted to take my property."
Tucked inside a residential neighborhood in Madison, Wis., and surrounded by a wooden fence and greenery, are nine little houses. With multicolored siding and roofs, they look like people-sized birdhouses. And they fit right in.
So does Gene Cox, 48. He hasn't been homeless in more than seven years. That's the point of this little development.
"This is the longest time I've stayed in one place," said Cox, nursing coffee and a cigarette outside his tiny home after working second shift as a benefits administrator. "I'm very nomadic. I've moved around Wisconsin a lot over the last 22 years."
I can understand the lore of protectionism, but it's generally a bad idea -- if a country is able to do something cheaper, then it should do it. It seems silly to be protecting obsolete industries, forcing everybody to pay more.
Behind much of the skepticism of the condo system were tensions between private rights in property and community obligations. Between the 1880s and World War I, co-owned buildings in the United States were mostly sponsored directly by future tenants (foreshadowing the recent wave of baugruppen in Berlin). By the 1920s, though, speculative developers came to dominate. To sell apartments, they learned to emphasize lifestyle, including ease of physical maintenance (“no lawn to mow,” read many an ad), while downplaying responsibilities.
But owning an apartment, like any other property, comes with its own burdens—just ones less tangible than a lawn. No matter the system, ownership turns tenants, ready or not, into landlords: Members of a condominium automatically become co-owners of a corporate entity responsible for common elements. As nearly everyone who has ever owned an apartment in a large building knows, however, rare is the condo owner who’s attuned to this duty, and rarer still is the one who attends association meetings, let alone serves on the board of directors.
And yet developers and sales agents recognized this gap early on. While honing their marketing strategies, they began to encourage buildings to hire “professional” management, leaving associations with few direct responsibilities. Governance could still be challenging. In co-ops in New York and D.C., where associations typically screen new buyers (ostensibly for reasons of financial security), battles erupted over whether to allow resales to Jewish people and, later, single women, Black people, and gay men. In more recent decades, residents of condo buildings have feuded over everything from cosmetic upgrades (redecorating lobbies) to the installation of EV charging stations. These disputes hint at why some early critics believed that condos would inevitably result in huge problems, including premature physical decay.