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My horrible house story v2.0

As the title implies, this is the second time I’ve written out my horrible house story. I wrote the original one in 2017 but the story keeps evolving and I also lost the original version when I migrated my blog – womp womp.

I will try to be a little more concise with this attempt, since the previous version was over 8,000 words, IIRC. But I will also give some new updates *spoiler alert – my home was flooded this week by Hurricane Ian*

I thought I was doing everything right – first in my family to go to college, graduated on time in 4 years and with a moderate amount of student loans ($15k) thanks to several local and university scholarships. I’d moved from my home state of Indiana to Florida, where I’d impressed as an intern during my required college internship and they’d created a position for me when I graduated. Before my first-year apartment lease was up, I was looking to buy my first home.

Josh's house
Photo of my house from 2018 – a 2-story, 2 bedroom townhouse

I initially bought my 2 bedroom, 2.5 bathroom townhouse in a golf course community in North Fort Myers, FL in April 2006. If that timing doesn’t seem familiar, it was the peak of the market in my local area, right before the Great Recession would change us from the fastest-growing county in the US to the scarier #1 in the nation in foreclosures. According to my (I’m assuming bogus) appraisal, I walked away from the closing table with $10,000 in equity above and beyond my purchase price of $175,000.

Because of the housing market crash, and the resulting downtrend in the whole economy, my home lost a considerable amount of value. My neighborhood was hit especially hard, since the golf course had been purchased by a developer trying to turn it into a destination resort, but they lost the property in a $94 million foreclosure. I didn’t get an appraisal, but my assessed valuation dropped so much that my property tax bill from 2007 of around $1,500 dropped to as low as $129.15 in 2010, and that’s for the whole year! I was working for the local county government as a city planner at the time, and when our tax revenue dried up and permitting of new homes ground to a halt, so did my employment with the county.

My property tax history from 2008-2017, showing a low of $129.15.

But the economy had been struggling for over a year before I was let go from the County. There were reports of residential burglaries, thieves stealing copper from homes and businesses under construction, and eventually they struck my house, as well. On a random Tuesday morning in August 2008, they jimmied the sliding glass door at the back of my house, removed everything of value (tv, laptop, Playstation 2 and all of the games, cash, and whatever they could toss in my gym bags quickly). The took liquor bottles, and Gatorades and sodas out of my fridge. It was a 90+ degree day, I don’t blame them for that part!

To add insult to injury, I had only recently before the break-in upped the deductible on my home insurance. If the burglary had happened a month earlier, I would have had $1,000 in uncovered losses, but I lost $2,500 because of the deductible.

I do give credit to the burglary with helping me tend towards minimalism in the years since 2008. I never replaced some of the missing items, because in the time I waited for the insurance settlement, I learned I didn’t need all of those things. (This will be a critical development when a hurricane struck in September 2022.)

And older photo of my living room, with minimal decoration or “stuff”

During the Great Recession in 2009, I was a jobless city planner in an area with no growth, but I still had a mortgage to pay. I wound up moving back home to Indiana and lived with my parents in my childhood bedroom from ages 26-28 (2009-2011). I eventually found a job as a Grant Administrator to help small communities around Indiana to get their share of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA, better known as Stimulus) money. But I was making $11 per hour, which was barely enough to cover my mortgage. Fortunately, my parents were letting me live there rent-free and I lucked out with other expenses like car/health expenses in those few years. But eventually the stimulus money dried up, and I was jobless again.

I kept looking for a job in Indiana, but that wasn’t yielding any results. My parents suggested a vacation down to Florida to go check on my house, and since lodging was free, it would be a pretty cheap trip. I reached out to some of my old coworkers, and they invited me to lunch one day. After hitting one of our old favorite lunch stops, they invited me back to the office to see any of the other coworkers who were still left (2+ years later, there weren’t a whole lot). But one person who was still there was the Community Development Director, who came running out of her office with a printout of a job description that was pretty darn similar to what I’d done for 4.5 years for the county. It was for a small town in the area (Fort Myers Beach), as the Planning Coordinator and Floodplain Administrator. When I worked for the County, we were still the contract planning and zoning staff for the Town, since it was newly-formed in 1995 and they wanted to keep their staffing “lite.” But by the time of this job posting, they had taken over their own community development staffing, and I would fulfill that similar role, in addition to floodplain management – which I knew almost NOTHING about. I went and visited the office during the last few days of my stay and filled out an application. One of the planners in the office was from my university, just 1 year ahead of me in school, so I feel like that helped me stand out with the hiring decision. After a phone interview and a couple month delay, I decided to drive down there with a carload of stuff and a week-worth of clothing for a second interview, hoping to get the job and figure out the logistics of getting the rest of my stuff from Indiana another time. I lucked out, and flew back over Christmas to grab some of the things I’d left behind.

Learning about floodplain management in Fort Myers Beach was an interesting experience. If you’ve seen the news lately, this area is splashed all across the TV because of its low-lying situation on the Gulf of Mexico. The whole Town is an island, and is 100% in the “Special Flood Hazard Area” aka the high-risk flood zone. All new construction had to be elevated between 10 and 22 feet above sea level, but there was a lot of existing development on the island that was anywhere from 3-8 feet above sea level, which is to say that most of that was pretty much sitting on the ground. Communities that participate in FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program are required to regulate development in their high-risk flood zones, and that’s true even for the older homes that may be renovated, remodeled or repaired over time. There’s a “FEMA 50% rule” that limits the amount of improvements to 50% of the structure’s value, and if the homeowner wishes to exceed 50% of the value, they have to elevate the existing home up to current elevation requirements. Of course, this usually means homeowners scale back their projects and stay at the same low elevation/high risk of flooding.

Southwest Florida is a beautiful place to live, but it only takes 1 really bad day like September 28, 2022 to ruin it. Hurricane Ian slammed into the coasts of Sanibel, Fort Myers Beach, and surrounding areas with a 15 foot storm surge and 155 MPH winds. Just so you know, that’s 2 MPH less than the threshold for a Category 5 storm, so it was one of the 5 strongest hurricanes to EVER hit the US. Those homes that were 3-8 feet above sea level have been completely wiped out. Nothing standing except debris piles sitting on concrete foundations. The new construction from the past couple decades are still standing, most likely habitable, and stand as a testament to the work that floodplain managers do to protect property.

Fortunately my house is inland, but only about a half mile off of the large Caloosahatchee River. Storm surge stacked up in the river and came ashore many miles inland, including my neighborhood. I haven’t been back to see it yet, but a couple neighbors have confirmed that we flooded on the ground floor. The only depth mentioned was “more than 2 inches” which made me let out a huge sigh of relief, because as a floodplain manager, I knew my (older) home was a few feet below the current elevation required. It could have easily been 3-4 feet of flooding, so 2+ inches was way less than I had feared.

Trees down, roof damage, and storm debris everywhere.

FEMA has a “cost of flooding” tool on their website, which shows that for a house my size, 2-3 inches should be around $12,000 in damage, versus the $40,000-44,000 in damage that 3-4 feet would have caused. You can take a look at the tool here: https://www.floodsmart.gov/cost-flooding

I still have a mortgage, and my house is in one of those high-risk flood zones, so Flood Insurance is required. That’s going to be a huge benefit for me and my recovery from the storm. I recommend everyone purchase flood insurance, because it can flood anywhere it rains and over 25% of all flood claims come from outside the high risk zones.

Routine “nuisance flooding” on my street in summer of 2017.

Speaking of mortgage, I initially purchased the home with a 30-year, 3/1 Adjustable Rate Mortgage (ARM) that started with a 4.75% interest rate. After that initial lock-up period of 3 years, the interest rate fell to the floor of 4% for over a decade. Eventually in 2019, I refinanced to a 15-year fixed mortgage at 3.125% interest. I was able to trim off about 2.5 years of payments, took out a little bit of extra cash, and locked in a low rate. This mortgage is one of the reasons I’m reluctant to sell my place, since I can’t get financing at anything near this attractive rate anytime soon.

The one bright spot during the past 16.5 years was that I parlayed my Grant Administrator training into a $50,000 grant to help pay down my underwater mortgage. I bought the place with a fancy 3% down payment mortgage from a local credit union that they created for first-time home buyers. Unfortunately that meant I never really had much equity in the house, and then when prices plummeted, I was underwater on the mortgage for about 12.5 years. All of the assistance to homeowner from several federal bailouts were only for people with conventional, bank financing. Unfortunately my credit union mortgage didn’t qualify. But eventually, the Florida Department of Housing took some of the money from fines levied against the big banks and created a grant program for homeowners like me who’d been underwater, never missed a payment, and were considered low-to-moderate income for the area. I wound up writing that grant and getting funded for the maximum-allowed $50,000 to pay down my mortgage balance. The credit union then re-cast my loan, lowering my monthly mortgage payment by over $400 per month! This was actually a 5-year forgivable grant, with $10,000 forgiven each year I stayed in the home after the grant award in 2014. By 2019, the whole amount was forgiven and I was no longer underwater on my mortgage.