This kind of thing isn’t limited to Taos, by any means, and I know I’ve been harping on this incessantly, but just look at this place: it’s described as a “beautiful, new, green home.”
In the current Internet usage, WTF? I just don’t get it. What kind of a person builds a house in a land where the sun shines over 310 days a year and doesn’t put in any more windows than this on the side with the main entrance? Is glass that much more expensive than concrete? Who would want to live there? I also don’t see a stick of vegetation or landscaping. Help me out here, smart people.
Someone paid tens of thousands of dollars (and probably more) to build this, and now they want to rent it out for over a thousand per month. It’s a new house in a market flooded with inventory and places to rent. Did they seek no advice, stylistic or otherwise, before embarking on this journey? Besides, no way is this “beautiful.” Even the interior pictures are scary.
Either the world has gone mad, or I’ve awakened in the dimension of the strange.
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{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Wow. Where the hell is that house? And what were they thinking? That’s not even a good excuse for a house, never mind a “beautiful, new, green home”. OK, well, it may be new. But that’s about it.
I know it’s hard here John, I feel your pain. We got lucky on our first house in town, and now on our new house on the way to the Gorge. But your house is out there…but probably not listed in Craigslist.
It’s fairly close by, actually. Hard to believe they actually posted a picture, isn’t it?
I dunno, it’s just hard for us, for some reason. Attitude, probably, as I’ve hinted before. Hard to stay open and positive with stuff like this raining down on us all the time. Anyway, where we live now IS beautiful. Not the house (an old adobe), but the setting…
man, that thing looks like a goddamn bomb shelter, not a house! maybe it’d be a good place to live if the government went back to above-ground nuke testing in the desert, but that’s about it. and as far as being “green”, it may have some kind of half-assed “practical” energy-efficiency in its design but jesus, you gotta have aesthetics too! the two are not at all mutually exclusive. (and as for the lack of windows, there is such a thing as energy-efficient double-paned glass available. didn’t that occur to them?)
the person who built that must’ve been high (and not in the good way).
Well, there are windows on the other sides. It’s just that this place presents such an awful face to the world. The north side of our house now only has two windows, but they’re lots bigger than the teeny one in the picture.
Re: WTF
Been around for a while in surf lingo, and doubtless other vernacular useages. My first noting of it on the internet was in 2000, when a surf website was launched named Swell.com.
The internationally-known Australian surf writer, Nick Carroll, used the acronym in a help column he wrote for the site, named, funnily enough, WTF.
Swell.com morphed into Surfline.com, a surf forecasting site which it had acquired, and subsequently Surfline became one of the premiere surfsites on the internoddle-thingy.
There was an interesting article on the culture of bodysurfing at the Surfline site in 2001, entitled “Body Art”.
http://www.surfline.com/mag/pulse/2001/june/06_14_bodysurfers.cfm
Cheers
Michael Zed
Adelaide AUSTRALIA
PS: Like the way you’ve implemented the Preview/Edit function, ta.
No kidding! I honestly never heard of it until I started reading blogs. It would seem that the “analog” surfer culture has had more of an influence than I give it credit for.
That could be the worst house I’ve ever seen.
Well, for $1,050 a month, it can be yours….
It AMAZES me when I check Taos Real Estate sites….places most people would consider a TOTAL SHACK….SERIOUSLY, are asking up to $200,000 for the opportunity to buy in paradise…..How do they get away with that? Are there that many idiots willing to fork over that kind of money for a dilapidated building just to live in TAOS???
WOW is all I can say……and if you don’t believe me – just Google Taos Real Estate and see for yourself….I feel for you John….Hope you find some local willing to give you a deal on a DECENT place to live!
Steve
Steve – most of the people buying the pricey stuff don’t even live here. It artificially increases our real estate costs, pushing “regular” houses out of reach of the everyday resident. It’s a shame. Really, you don’t get much for your money here. The views are great, but it’s not exactly a hotbed of activity!
That’s pretty much it, I’d say, although a nice wrenching economic depression would put a stop to most of that. It’s probably already winding down, too, although don’t bother to ask a realtor: even the hipper ones have drunk the kool-aid and are quite hopeless.
When I first came here nine and half years ago, Bill Whaley, publisher of Horse Fly, told me that the rich folks come in, build or buy their extravagant homes, and then discover Taos isn’t really where it’s at. What he meant is that there isn’t a wealthy scene in Taos. This place has always been poor and isolated, and nobody really gives a shit about the rich. There’s even a tradition of “dealing” with them when they get too obnoxious (the dark side of the Code of the West)…
According to Whaley (nine years ago!), the wealthy newcomers take about six months to learn all this and then sell out, decamping for Santa Fe or some other place where they can read about themselves in the paper. Taos just isn’t that sort of town, thank God. Anyway, for the last however many years, this activity has contributed to the real estate market “churning” that maybe a hundred people think is really cool. Add the bubble economy to the mix, and you have what Steve has noticed.
This too shall pass, I reckon.
Meanwhile, don’t do what I did the other day and check out real estate in nice safe places like my honey’s Iowa homeland: solid, pretty, shiny-clean and mostly boring homes to satisfy the shell-shocked! “Wow, we could buy all THAT for only $400 – $600 a month!”
The great unwinding has only begun, though. And there are many wonderful places here, as I keep telling myself.
What’s the old saying….”Patience is a virgin” …..or something like that….Hold on….”Good things come to those who wait….or not”
But I am keeping positive thoughts you find JUST what you are looking for and/or NEED….whichever comes first!
Steve
Thanks. I have no doubt we will find a way…