As with the last really bad financial and real estate crash in Dallas, back in the late Eighties/early Nineties, wandering through the area and reading about
crashing real estate prices brings on emotions of schadenfreude and wonder. Naturally, there's a nasty thrill at listening to SMU brats crying about how they bought gigantic McMansions at the height of the boom and now they'll never be able to flip the turkey in their lifetimes. (Which, if they treat their coke dealers with the same contempt they give to the other bill collectors, might not be all that long.) Then, as now, though, you see half-built projects that look and feel like archaeological sites. Back then, these were mostly gigantic retail sites that catered to the recipients of the oil boom spoils, and looking upon their works, ye mighty, made one ask "And who gave loan money to a business dependent upon a never-ending flow of millionaires coming through the doors?" Today, it's the abandoned spaces intended for retail/residential apartment buildings, on the assumption that an eternal spring of young professionals were going to pay twice a good house payment in rent just so they could live over a bad sushi bar and a worse Swedish furniture store.
(Literally down the highway from us is a great example, involving the auto dealership from where I bought my first car of the decade. This venue had been making noises about selling out for decades, including a completely crackheaded idea of building a giant shopping mall right next to the Dallas Galleria, but nothing actually happened until the height of the real estate boom. Now, the whole thing has a fence around it to keep the taggers at bay, and I learned last week that the planned "European living" apartment/condo/retail Xanadu won't happen due to the whole project being buried in about $18 million in debt. I'm actually quite relieved, because once yuppies and hipsters start moving into a neighborhood, the property values go straight to hell, and they breed like rats.)
These days, even Dallas is overrun with
urban archaeology treasures, and all of them make you want to research the area to discover exactly what happened to this once-mighty civilization. Yesterday, while heading out for a quick lunch with a co-worker, I discovered such an abandoned treasure. It was a garden and landscaping nursery, up for sale, and in such good condition that I had to wonder what caused it to shut down. In fact, when I mentioned it to the Czarina, she was so intrigued that she said "Let's go take a look" instead of "You really need to stop freebasing Preparation H," and we drove out to take a look.
One quick inspection of the place after dark taught me a lot. The place had apparently been abandoned in a hurry, and the owners probably figured that the garden supplies and equipment that didn't sell wasn't worth hauling off. Big bags of
corn gluten meal, stacks of front-porch pots, and racks of trellises were visible through the big windows. Even though everything was out in the open, and the place was on the edge of an iffy neighborhood, nobody's figured that there was anything inside worth stealing, so it was all in great shape. The back of the property still had a shadehouse in good condition, a lot of dead plants abandoned in the shutdown (and a few that demonstrated exactly how tough some Texas natives can be), piles of tree growing containers, and all sorts of enigmatic clues as to why the place was vacated in such haste. After viewing the back, I suspected that the nursery emphasized landscaping services over general lawn and garden gear toward the end: a quick Google search on the property confirmed that the son of the original owners had decided to take advantage of the demand for high-end landscaping during the real estate boom, and didn't have enough bread-and-butter business during the downturn to keep things going. Considering that the garden center went to banker's hours, Monday through Friday, instead of being open on the weekends, that bread-and-butter business in roses and lawn fertilizer was pretty much gone by the time it shut down earlier this year.
The price? Well, that's kinda problematic. The current asking price is almost reasonable for the space and for the general area, but it's still way out of our current range. Right now, the option is either to find someone with an extra winning lottery ticket they aren't using, or to sell body parts. (As always, I emphasize that they don't necessarily need to be
my body parts. Maybe Burke and Hare were onto something.) However, I suspect that the price will drop quite a bit in the next year, and then I'll check back. All things considered, it's almost perfect for what I have in mind, the Czarina would have a great space on the property for her own business, and all I need to do to make it happen is to sell a
lot of
T-shirts.
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