A Moving Story
by Reviewer Rob
[I didn’t go to the all-day Mozart free show today at The Athenaeum because I was finishing with moving my extensive library from North Park to the new place in Sunset Cliffs. I’ll have to find out from Kristina Meek how the big party celebrating Amadeus’ birthday went.]
CONDO CONVERSION EPISODE, the final chapter:
I just took a nap after staying up all night to finish cleaning out the North Park place. I was the last tenant to vacate the building since I was out of town last month on the day when the owners finalized the conversion paperwork and coordinated everyone’s final dates and gave the people who would get them the relocation checks mandated by the State of California – 3 months rent paid to each tenant who was being displaced, providing their rent was paid up and in good standing. The construction workers didn’t waste their time and started knocking out walls and pounding nails whenever a person would move out over the past month and a half. The demolition noise got louder and louder and closer to my apartment every morning at 7-o’clock. Most of my neighbors were late rent payers in either November or December so, since the condo-conversion company was not as lenient as the previous owner with looking the other way when rent came late, those people just got 3-day notices to vacate and missed out getting their 3-month relocation payment. I’d been there nearly 9 years (since April of 1997) and was always on time paying my rent, obsessively so, and I sure wasn’t going to be late now. Consequently I was one of only two or three tenants in the building to get paid their relocation money.
For me the 3-month California-mandated condo-conversion relocation payment came out to $2,460. My rent was $515 when I moved in in 1997. That was low San Diego rent even for then. It went up slowly in small increments over time, after actually going down $5 in late ’97 when the market momemtarily sagged, but then in I think it was the summer of 2004 one day I was suprised to get a letter saying it was suddenly increased $150 per month (there’s no “rent control” in this town). The notice cited rising maintenance costs as the reason, but I think of course it was due to the historically unprecedented low interest rates and the accompanying San Diego real estate feeding frenzy driven by rampant speculation and its trickle down effect on housing costs. Also, I suspect the owner at the time was considering selling and wanted all the rents to be near the market rate in order to attract a better buyer, although he had kept it low for so long to preserve the good tenants. He ended up selling for $1.2 mil, which was $150,000 each for the 8 units. But the new owners got into the condo conversion game a bit late. If they had started selling in summer 2004 instead of summer 2006 or whenever these’ll be ready they would have made maybe $75,000 more on each of them. Well, so it goes.
I received the condo conversion paperwork way back in like April, so I’m glad to finally be out of there. I pay loads more here at the beach, but hey, it’s the beach. I enjoy being around mostly naked women. I howled when I got the rent hike in North Park in 2004, but still $820 for a big 2-bedroom was at least $100 under what most people were paying in that neighborhood. And a LOT less than at the beach…
And that’s the whole point of why I moved to the ghetto from PB. A 2-bedroom apartment the size of what I had in the dirty part of town would have went for 60 to 75-percent more near the ocean, double that or more if you’re talking about a really nice place or in La Jolla.
My North Park pad was alright, though I can’t say I’m sorry to leave. I had good times there: partied, shot lots of female nude figure-studies in the living-room on my sectional sofa-with-ottoman, etcetera, etcetera; it was a place where I had space to add shelves and books to my collection, a place to relax, study, read and write, breathe in and out in peace and quiet. All was a welcome change from the transient party-vibe of PB/Mission that I had gotten used to in my mid-twenties. In North Park I learned again to appreciate having a place off the beaten path that was private and secluded, not an animal house with other tenants partying like in PB or loud traffic at all hours just outside my door like when I lived in an upstairs studio on Mission Boulevard. North Park was actually the best place I’d lived in since leaving home again for the last time at age 22. And, other than that house I grew up in, I stayed there the longest.
The apartment’s security deposit was returned to me today as well, right on the spot after I got the last box out of the living room and onto my trailer. It had been waiting for a month and I bet it’s one of the last San Diego $300 returned security deposits for a 2-bedroom apartment ever, or at least for a long time, like until another Great Depression or the Apocalypse or something.
