When the first McCastle went up down the block, one neighbor at an impromptu block party observed:

"Who would pay $600,000 to live around us?"

Good question. The builder, however, is having no problem finding buyers, even though his houses cost three to four times the ones he's replaced. They're falling like dominoes and going up like weeds in spring. One walk down my block and you'd think the place was sponsored by Tyvek.

So we must be pretty good neighbors, even gritching as we do about the transition we find ourselves in the midst of.

We should be thankful. Some areas are downwardly mobile, a few upwardly, but most are neutral. This one sat dormant for 50 years, one of those clichéd "best-kept secrets" in Dallas that was neither exorbitantly priced nor undervalued to the point that riffraff found their way in. Let's be honest, as I have in another post: Everyone wants to live in a relatively safe neighborhood among people like themselves. This is one of those places, if you're a middle-class family that doesn't want to live more than 10 miles from downtown.

The Rittenhouses squeaked into this enclave a few years ago, just before it shrugged off the telecom bust and resumed its climb beyond one-earner affordability. This particular plot was the subject of a years-long legal battle after which the inheritor said "whatever" to our concession demands and gave us one-sixth of the asking price back.

We needed every penny, too. Yet, for all the sweat equity we have in this place, there are moments when I wonder if I should put a bulldozer through it, stash the wife-and-kids in a hotel, and build a McCastle for a $200,000 profit. Which I would probably lose in code violations.

Then I look at the trees. They're why people pay more than half a million to live near us. Mr. McCastle knows that, and it's why he leaves every one of them standing, if he can, and builds around them. There is no substitute for a 50-year-old royal oak arching over your front walkway. I try not to envy my neighbors, but one of them has six or seven full-grown sycamores towering over his house. They whisper to each other at the slightest breeze and drop huge, easy-to-rake leaves in the autumn. Cottonwoods, magnolias, red oaks, lace-bark elms, live oaks, and crape myrtles make this place easy to parse on Google Maps. You just look for the big, green blotches you know, then pick out fragments of rooftops between them.

Still, I don't quite know how people make what they need to buy a home here. I would have to acquire a second, wage-earning spouse to get into Rittenhouse Estates now. And that's not legal, at least not yet.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 06:58 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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