House prices go up, the neighbourhood goes down

[Alex K]

Just out leafletting -- up and down the streets off Lordship Lane, dropping flyers into post-boxes, shoving them (with a worried moment every time -- dogs! teeth! fingers!) behind furry cache-sexe "draught excluders" inside doors' mail slots.

I came home disheartened by how poor my neighbourhood seems, how run-down, how badly maintained; or are we British simply not house-proud? Front garden paths a tangle of broken tile and crisps bags, fences in gaping need of picket-denture after picket-denture, gates off their hinges, wood rotten... If one can't afford to re-paint, then at least one might find the time and self-respect to wash down the grimy encasements of windows, enjambments of doors. But -- not. And the dank stench that wafted outward through some of those mail slots! ...Wherever humans den is, I suppose, Arkham.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer has freed up pension pots: Take the money, he beckons those about to retire, and do with it what you will. Stocks? Bonds? Ah! Real estate! Another boost for house prices, then.

But the higher those prices go, the greater the monthly mortgage payment, the fewer the monies available for improvements. For re-tiling the garden paths, re-hanging the re-made gates. For plasterwork and paint. To re-lay, to re-set the stoop stairs rather than to trowel-patch the tar swilled over tread and riser decades ago when first they cracked and chipped.

And for want of those monies, I fear that East Dulwich will stay a slum, albeit a more expensive one.

[edcam]

Unwanted flyers and leafleting won't help the situation.

[aquarius moon]

It's not just lack of funds, it's lack of time.

People are too busy working trying to make ends meet.

[monkeylite]

Oh so sorry, please excuse my grim looking house if it offends you. Was meaning to put on a new lick of paint on the front wall, but you know, wet winter and all. Maybe during summer?

But apart from a couple of unwanted offline spams lying inside of my front door, the inside is pretty fabulous.

[*Bob*]

I descended the stair this morning, disheartened by how dishevelled my hallway looked, how littered with rubbish. Front gardens and pathways endlessly tramped all day and night by unwanted visitors with nothing better to do than shove unwanted shite through my letterbox..

Etc

[drewd]

.

[drewd]

.

[aquarius moon]

drewd Wrote:

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> If

> you've got time to wash yourself then you have got

> time to keep your home and the path leading up to

> your home clean and tidy.

How long does it take you to wash yourself drewd?

I can do a pretty thorough job in 5 minutes.

It would take me longer than that just to find the dustpan & brush!

[healey]

Mostly shared rental properties I'd bet.

Still I'll happily admit that our front garden's a bit of a mess, but we've not yet had the time or money yet to fix it. We're a couple with fulltime jobs, a toddler to look after and an entire house interior that needs decorating first.

Would be nice to have more spare time do these jobs. Alternatively I could walk around the neighbourhood passing judgement whilst shoving unwanted junk mail through letterboxes.

[drewd]

Aquarius moon, Point taken. I was of course making the point that we should have as much pride in the spaces we are responsible for as our own selves.

[DaveR]

"And for want of those monies, I fear that East Dulwich will stay a slum, albeit a more expensive one"

Alex K, I'll make this as polite as I can. If you had a firmer grasp of economics I suspect you wouldn't be out leafleting on a Saturday afternoon.

[Alex K]

Thanks, all. I came home determined to give my own front garden a tidy. Weeded and rosemary trimmed back -- it looks better. -- Political leaflets, DaveR. So yes; if I had a firmer grasp of economics I wouldn't be volunteering! -- My point exactly, healey: If your house had cost less, you'd have more "spare" income, more "spare" time... when every mortgage payment is a stretch (and the stretch seems likely to get longer and harder), money goes only for the essentials. So the walk tiles stay broken, the fence gaptoothed. No judgement passed; regret expressed, sympathy offered.

[kittysailing]

Dave R - that's pretty low - people deliver leaflets for all sorts of reasons. I dropped flyers for a kids Easter Egg hunt. I have a pretty good grasp of eggonomics.

[Burbage]

It's not always money or spare time...

The point of prettifying a house in this are has, for the last two or three decades, being so you can flog it as quickly as possible at a decent profit, and move on to the next house you fancy painting. To an extent, the graspery of estate agents and the credulous compliance of their victims has conspired to put the cost of second-hand house-paint up by a thousand percent, and force the occupants to apply it.

But the market is stagnating a little now. There are sales, of course, but they're mostly sales of convenience and the tax-efficient shuffling of portfolios. So there's much less need to paint things.

This is as it should be. All painting ever does is bring closer the time it'll need painting next. The same goes for dusting or cutting back rosemary. It'll grow again, and you'll have to cut it again, and eventually you'll get bored, or dead, and then it'll be as if you never bothered at all. So what, unless you've got the avarice of a moonstruck puppet in a nasty suit to pleasure, is the point?

Go to France, and you'll see people living without any of the pretentious fantasies of whatever ICI has become. They paint their shutters to celebrate the end of every world war, and even more rarely bother with the walls. Yet, despite their reputation for shruggish misery, they're happier than Britons, who have to put up not just with the assumed snobbery of pretentious neighbours on the make but also, it seems, the snottiness of the leaflet-stuffing familiars of our lowest political pawns.

So, Alex K, if you don't like it, do yourself a favour and keep off other people's land.

[alice]

fight! fight!

[maxxi]

I always assumed such places were employing a deliberate disguise strategy - playing possum in a domiciliary sense.

"A place that looks like shit on the outside aint worth burglaring" - though I may have misremembered this from an episode of Scooby Doo.

[Alex K]

@alice -- No fight; instead, surprise that someone would stir himself / herself to comment whose attitude is "In the long run, we're all dead, so why bother"; a bit self-contradictory that?; and pleasure, that -- East Dulwich being a large patch, and burbage possibly not being a near neighbour -- I likely don't have to avert my eyes regularly from what I can now imagine as the orderliness and beauty of what burbage calls home. **grin**

In the interests of full disclosure: In East Dulwich for 13 years; owner-occupier and not looking to move; just finished having the back garden fences mended (thank you, windstorms of early 2014!) and putting arrangements in place to have the house painted and the gutters seen to this spring, the first time during my occupancy. Not for "prettification" only, although the place will look crisper when the work is done, but also as prophylaxis against weather damage (paint protects as well as decorates!), and as part of making sure that the house, as a machine-for-living, continues to work for me.

The housing stock in this area is, much of it, more than a century old. It's falling into disrepair, and funds are not being ploughed into mending and replacing. Whether rentier eagerness to make the most of an investment, or, as burbage points out, short-term thinking ("I'm off to the next rung on the property ladder!") by owner-occupiers, or lack of cash because too much money each month goes out on mortgage payments for landlord or owner-occupier to spend on "prettifying", underlies the failure to maintain many properties -- who can tell?

But I don't see the neighbourhood as likely soon to become more spick-and-span, because what burbage wrote about house-buying and -selling in East Dulwich may be in large part true.

[healey]

"The housing stock in this area is, much of it, more than a century old. It's falling into disrepair....."

Hardly, have you actually seen how much building work goes on around here? Lots of money being spent.

Prettifying the front garden and masonry is the last thing you do as any work to the rest of the house can make a mess of it (building refuse etc).

[KidKruger]

Also people just put jobs off don't they ?

[nxjen]

I find the original post very peculiar, its whimsy and exaggeration seem more appropriate for a creative writing assignment than as an accurate description of the houses in East Dulwich. To describe ED as a slum reflects a very sheltered life!

[Robert Poste's Child]

I think Alex K has a point though it may be that standards in this area have shifted culturally in the last fifty years and people channel that attention into other areas of life. If you compare ED to Dulwich Village, for example, you can see what he (?) means, perhaps due partly to the work of the Dulwich Estate.

[eberg]

Sometimes there is a revolting tone to some of these posts. 'If you've got time to wash yourself then you have got time to keep your home and the path leading up to your home clean and tidy'. Do you have any idea how that sounds? It would be interesting to know which party AlexK was leafleting for. Mind you I know plenty of smug SOB's sitting in their million pound houses who still describe themselves as old lefties, so what does it matter. And to my mind there's sod all difference between a leaflet from the Tories or Labour and one from a pizza shop. They both go into the recycling without being looked at.

[nxjen]

Robert Poste's Child Wrote:

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> I think Alex K has a point though it may be that

> standards in this area have shifted culturally in

> the last fifty years and people channel that

> attention into other areas of life. If you compare

> ED to Dulwich Village, for example, you can see

> what he (?) means, perhaps due partly to the work

> of the Dulwich Estate.

Houses in East Dulwich are much better maintained now than when I moved here 30 years ago. There has been a cultural shift in that time, houseowners are more aware of their homes as a capital asset, and invest in them more. Comparing ED to DV is a bit of a red herring.

[Penguin68]

We have had an appallingly wet winter - had I planned exterior work (i.e. painting, re-pointing etc.) I would have been putting it off from about mid October! (And anyone booked in to do it would have postponed, particularly any first floor or above work in the almost constant winds) The early spring (mid-March) is often the worst time to look at house exteriors - they are just coming out of a time when weather damage occurs most frequently, and when remedy is least advised.

Having said that, even during this winter there has been quite a lot of activity going on around me in the odd gaps between storms.

[Giacomelli]

It is a shame when you see a lot unsightly front gardens but I don't think the huge amount of bins help. I prefer big containers in the street as in italy france or spain. I am getting my front garden redone, new path etc. Unfortunately the cost of retiling the victorian path is extortionate so laying sandstone instead. Quite sad about this but as it is not my forever home (small garden flat) I feel after several quotes it's not worth restoring the original.

Most people don't sit out in their front gardens (maybe due to bins?) So are less likely to furnish them with pretty flowers. Also as other posters have mentioned we are just exiting winter and when many commuters return it is already dark.