Isn't it a beauty?
As many of you know we recently bought a Duplex in the
It all started 2 years ago when James and I used to ride the light rail downtown and we would pass by the “10th and Osage” station. We could tell just by looking out the window of the train that the neighborhood was definitely a lower income neighborhood. However, all the Denver Light Rail lines ran through this one small station. It got us thinking what a great investment a house in this neighborhood would be since it was less than a mile from downtown and a main thoroughfare of the Light Rail. We did some more research and noticed that the average home price in the neighborhood was well below the average
We looked at several houses for over a year. The original plan was to buy a place and immediately rent it out. We wanted to take advantage of the low cost of houses before the neighborhood started transforming/improving. We found several places that we liked but none that seemed “perfect” or what we thought would be perfect at the time. On one house-hunting trip we visited a 2 story duplex built in 1890 with an asking price of $290,000. We thought it was a great place and would be a great investment especially since it’s hard to find a whole duplex for sale – generally it’s just half of a duplex for sale at a time. However, we didn’t think much of it because it was well over our price range and too big of a project to take on ourselves not to mention we didn’t have the cash to fix it and make it livable. We jokingly mentioned it to our friends, Chris and Sara who have a few other investment properties of their own, as to how fun it would be to go in on a deal like this together. Much to our surprise, Chris and Sara approached us the next day and said they might actually be interested. We put an offer in on the house for $270,000. To make a long story short, a YEAR after we put the initial offer on the house we finally closed for $200,000. There are a LOT of details involved with how we got from $270k to $200k and MANY miracles that happened along the way (and we mean miracles – there are just certain things that DON’T happen in the mortgage industry or the real estate market that miraculously worked in our favor). We really feel that after all that happened, this was truly a gift from God that he has entrusted into our care.
Now, I want to back up a little. In that year that we were trying to close on the duplex, our hearts changed a lot in the purpose of buying in this neighborhood than we originally anticipated. It was originally going to be used as “a good investment”. However, our faith community had been talking a lot about living in community with one another. A few families in our faith community had even moved into a low income neighborhood to live communally and missionally together and be the salt and light in their immediate neighborhoods. This got James, Chris, Sara, and me thinking. We had already thought about it before but didn’t really see the means of getting into this kind of situation – I mean, we both had houses that we already lived in so even if we got this Duplex we would have to do something with our current houses – either sell or rent and we didn’t know what the current market would be like if we did either of these things. Our plan was to get the duplex in livable shape and rent out as soon as possible and maybe one day we could both live there together in community. As we continued to take one step after the other in getting this duplex, we came to the conclusion that we didn’t want to wait to live in this neighborhood – we wanted to get started and change the direction of our lives now.
Yesterday James and I sold our current house (it was on the market for a week and a half before it went under contract) and have officially moved into the duplex. It’s been somewhat of an adjustment and is definitely not the residence I’m used to but I think it’s good to never get too comfortable. And anytime I feel like life is too hard and uncomfortable, I try to think of the how the majority of the rest of the people in the world live and about the poverty stricken places that we’ve visited like Africa and
Michael Hidalgo teaches at our faith community and has a blog that I love to read. Here are some of his comments I took from his blog that I feel puts words to what we’re striving towards:
“What would it be like if we were a faith community who said that we were about the
What would it be like if we were a faith community who lived within the darkest places in our city? The whorehouses, the porn shops, the crack neighborhoods, and were seen as a city that was shining on a hill that cannot be hidden? What if we engrossed ourselves in the lives of the unlovely? What if we believed that the hungry, the homeless, the imprisoned, the sick, the thirsty, and the outcasts were Jesus in disguise? What if we were known as a place who loved these people and pointed them toward Jesus?”
And so we move forward with the purpose of being salt and light in a neighborhood that my suburban friends can’t imagine why I would want to move into.
We have a general idea of how we want to live among our neighbors in Lincoln Park but other than that we have no clue what that’s going to eventually look like. However, I know that God will continue to lead this journey and we will continue to move forward and follow him one step at a time.
Our friends Chris and Sara have recently put their house on the market so please pray for a quick sale so they can join us as soon as possible in
I will be posting pictures as time goes on so check back for more updates.
A few interesting statistics about the neighborhood:
- 52.09% of children live with single parents. All neighborhoods in Denver average 28.01%.
- 53.76% of births are to unwed mothers. All neighborhoods in Denver average 33.24%.
- 63.99% of single mothers with children live in poverty. All neighborhoods in Denver average 32.58%.
- Crime rate per 1,000 Persons 235. All neighborhoods in Denver 78.
- Median household income is $24,624. Denver median household income is $51,492
