Home sweet meth house home

Property prices in a lot of places are totally out of whack. I live in one of those places; another one is California, where a house in San Jose just went on the market for $1.55 million.

Of course, by California standards, a little bit over a buck-and-a-half for a 2,700 SQFT, 6BR, 4B house sounds almost like a bargain starter home for some lucky couple with one kid and the need for a couple of home offices. It almost sounds too good to be true.

Because, of course, it is.

 As prospective buyers (and lookie-lous) learned from Zillow:

“Home has inactive Meth lab and meth contamination, see County docs. noting Garage location, remediation process and subsequent costs associated,” the Zillow listing said. “Home has not been cleared of contamination and will be transferred to the new buyer in its current state. No access prior to property being cleared by Santa Clara County's Health Dept.” (Source: MSN)

Oh.

Turns out the previous owner, Peter Karasev had a few work-from-home businesses going. There was the meth lab. And then there was the bombmaking set up. I don't know how lucrative bombmaking is, but Karasev has been charged with blowing up a number of sites in the San Jose area, including several PG&E transformers.

Anyway, in addition to the base price for the house - which some predict will grow higher - the cost of remediation will have to be borne by the buyer. This can run anywhere from a few thousand bucks to over $100K. So the new buyer - who, remember, will be buying the place sight-unseen - may have to forget about pulling up the wall-to-wall and laying down hardwoods. 

Although I see plenty of drug users in the course of my volunteering, not to mention in the course of my walking around Boston, I don't know a ton about meth houses/meth labs. 

Oh, every once in a while, one blows up around here. But it's mostly something I associate with states like Arkansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma where, in fact, there are more meth labs per capita than in places like Massachusetts. 

And once I may have heard one blow up, from a distance, over the phone. 

On behalf of a client, I was interviewing one of their customers, a techie using their products while working from home before most of us had heard of working from home. 

The fellow lived out in the wilds of Missouri, and while we were talking there was an explosion in the background. 

"Probably just a meth lab," he said. And we continued our convo. Just a meth lab.

What I have never given any thought to was the real estate implication of having a meth lab in the house, even if it doesn't blow up in your face. 

But it turns out that there are plenty of houses out there that were used for meth manufacture, and a by product of that manufacture is a ton of toxic chemicals embedded throughout the house. One ratio I saw was one pound of cooked up meth to five-to-six pounds of toxicity. 

So there's plenty of advice and debate out there about what to do if you're in a meth house. (Where would we be without Reddit?)

And you would, of course, have to remediate it into livability if you at all valued your life and happiness. 

Of course, sometimes you have to decontaminate for other reasons.

A billion years ago, my husband and I would sometimes pop in at open houses in the neighborhood, just to see what was up.

One in particular we were very much interested in seeing.

It was a one-family townhouse on the corner of one of the few alleyways on Beacon Hill. We had nicknamed the corner "Cat Piss Alley," because, well, the smell when you got near it was incredibly intense. 

Sometimes we'd see the owner - a doddering old geezer who would sometimes be strolling in the alley in his ratty old slippers, always with a cat or two tucked into his shirt.

After the doddering old geezer passed on to the Great Cat Reservation in the Sky, his house went up for sale. 

The open house was, indeed, an open house. 

Although it was winter, every window in the place had been thrown wide open. Still, the place was completely redolent of pungent cat urine. 

We wandered around the house, covering our noses, breathing into our gloves, stumbling through quasi-dark rooms and passageways, eyes watering. The house was larger than we had thought from the outside - almost a double house in how far back in went - and the lighting was a vintage, pre-appliance proliferation circa 1910 standard. It could support one 20 watt light per room, and that was about it. 1910 - which I'm guessing was the vintage, plus or minus a decade (probably on the plus side) of the doddering old geezer - was likely when the last reno had taken place, as the bathrooms and kitchen were similarly vintage. We were more than happy when we got back out into the fresh air. (A developer bought the place and reno'd it into pricey condos, in what must have been the gut reno to end all gut renos. I'm guessing they couldn't salvage any of those beautiful 1860 floorboards...)

I can only imagine what sorts of renovation this spot in San Jose will require 

You'd think that $1.55 million would be move-in ready, wouldn't you? Guess not when the property in question is a home sweet meth house home. And you want to buy into a biggish house in a nice-ish neighborhood in California