Hello and thank you for being a DL contributor. We are changing the login scheme for contributors for simpler login and to better support using multiple devices. Please click here to update your account with a username and password.

Hello. Some features on this site require registration. Please click here to register for free.

Hello and thank you for registering. Please complete the process by verifying your email address. If you can't find the email you can resend it here.

Hello. Some features on this site require a subscription. Please click here to get full access and no ads for $1.99 or less per month.

Tasteful Friends: A Victorian 98K Bargain (or Barn?) in Swinging Sharon, PA, (not really near Pittsburgh or Cleveland)

Retire in This upper middleclass Victorian Shingle style painted in dreary earth tones, but featuring built-ins, A GRAND STAIR CASE, pocket doors, “vintage” kitchen and garage. At only 98K could this sturdy home be your retirement project?

Offsite Link
by Anonymousreply 12October 19, 2021 1:26 AM

Yes I think it would be a great project if you're in your 50s. Pretty plain canvas to work with. I wouldn't want to over capitalise as I don't know the area.

by Anonymousreply 1October 18, 2021 8:35 PM

Love all the woodwork... that's all

Since it cost about the same as a nice SUV it could be an interesting project

by Anonymousreply 2October 18, 2021 8:39 PM

[quote]not really near Pittsburgh or Cleveland)

Win-win.

by Anonymousreply 3October 18, 2021 8:41 PM

It's near Youngstown, the Trumpiest town in Ohio. Not a chance you're not surrounded by deplorables.

by Anonymousreply 4October 18, 2021 8:53 PM

A link to a listing at a less distracting website...

It's a very nice house, intact and unmessed with, and features a good plan of four rooms and a kitchen (with accessory spaces) downstairs and four bedrooms upstairs. It's not at all a huge house: rooms top put at 13' x 15' or so, excepting the great attic space, but it has a good upright and sturdy feel to the place and a few well-placed features of interest.

Nothing really horrible has happened to the house other than some wall-to-wall carpet that presumably protected the wood floors, and some tatty plywood paneling added in the laundry/ancillary spaces of the kitchen. There's a small but nice pantry, still; otherwise the kitchen cabinetry has no antiquity or features worth preserving: it's a blank slate and a decent size, with those small rooms useful as a rear entry hall, pantry, laundry room, etc. It doesn't look like there's a rear stair. The window above the stair (seen on the facade) was a sleeping porch, with the exterior siding continuing on the interior; the tripartite facade window needs replacing and that once more exterior than interior space needs some work to make something pleasant. Most everything else looks in quite good shape. Electrical outlets suggest the service could be upgraded, but the construction and plan make that easy. There are 1.5 baths — not enough for some people, so a bedroom could be split into another and additional storage or a small office maybe. Refinishing the floors would make a world of difference; though it is fairly expensive relative the cost of the house (a couple thousand a room at least) it is worth it. There's a basement it says, but no details: primitive I'm sure. The large iron radiators would be great in winter. It would be nice to make that great space of the third floor into an art studio or something other than storage. The rear garden is quite small and built up, but could be made into a nice private courtyard. A fence in front, better plantings, some modest repairs and a better paint job (something less Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup) would be good.

Taxes are nothing, $2700 a year. Sharon PA has better crime stats than I would have expected. It's 1.25 hours to Pittsburgh, 1.5 hours drive to Cleveland, so not the end of the earth. The worst part for me is the Google Streetview: it just has that look of grimness that so many Pennsylvania towns have, a particular kind of sad and run-down, the trees let to die and then taken away, aluminum and vinyl siding salesmen the only callers at too many of the houses. It's more grim than ugly, but it's not a beautiful street, though there are some very nice buildings in the town.

But it's $98,000. There are 74 houses for sale, ten at higher prices but none over $200K, and a lot of houses in the $30Ks and $50Ks -- that's the problem with Sharon PA. You can almost smell the Dollar Stores ringing the city.

Offsite Link
by Anonymousreply 5October 18, 2021 9:17 PM

High crime area 2018 the latest year available at this link, with a population less than 13,000, it had 3 murders, 14 rapes, 14 robberies, 34 assaults, 117 burglaries, 279 thefts, 18 auto thefts, and a 27.3% poverty rate.

Offsite Link
by Anonymousreply 6October 18, 2021 10:57 PM

What time during each day do they have The Munster Family come out the front door and down the steps reenacting their old show's opening sequence?

by Anonymousreply 7October 18, 2021 11:26 PM

I love it! Too bad it's basically in Youngstown, OH.

by Anonymousreply 8October 18, 2021 11:36 PM

Money pit!

by Anonymousreply 9October 18, 2021 11:40 PM

You're going to be driving to Warren & Youngstown a lot to go shopping. Sharon-Hermitage has "the essentials" (Walmart, Home Depot, Kroger), but stores like Target & Best Buy are going to require a trip to Eastwood Mall (which is, in fact, a shockingly good mall) about 20-30 minutes away in traffic. Ikea is 2-3 hours away.

Retail-wise, I'd say it falls in the middle... you could do far worse retail-wise, but if you're used to living somewhere like Fort Lauderdale, suburban DC, Bergen County (NJ), etc, it's going to be a major, huge step down. The biggest downside compared to a bigger metro area is that if you drive to the store and the thing you want is out of stock... you're just fucked, because the next-nearest store is likely to be at LEAST another hour or two away.

Your likelihood of landing a well-paying local job there is close to nil. If you're self-employed (with clients who aren't local to you), or can work remotely, you'll be fine... but the LOCAL job market there really, truly is royally fucked and nonexistent unless your job possibly involves something like being a cop/paramedic/teacher/doctor.

Gay life in Sharon/Hermitage is likely to be completely nonexistent... but I know Warren USED to have 2 or 3 gay bars 10 years ago. Whether they survived covid (or the area's economy, before that) is anyone's guess.

If you've never lived someplace where just getting to the nearest real airport with direct flights to real cities is 2+ hours away, that might be kind of a shock. Youngstown airport occasionally ends up with an airline offering occasional scheduled flights to some real city, but don't count on any such service ever existing for more than a year or two at a time. Pretty much every time the national economy goes to shit, Youngstown Airport is the first to end up mothballed for a few years.

Basically, if you have an income source that isn't coupled to the local economy or job market, you don't mind driving 20-30 minutes a few times per week to go shopping, and your happiness doesn't depend upon being able to go on Scruff and find 140 guys within 15 miles looking for sex at 8pm on a random Tuesday night, I suppose you could do far worse. It doesn't really feel like an uncivilized backwater, because "civilization" DOES exist up there... it's just thinly-spread across a very large area spanning from Cleveland to Pittsburgh, with somewhat of a clump around Warren-Youngstown-Sharon/Hermitage. You'll end up driving around a lot, but you won't feel the same sense of daily deprivation you'd experience somewhere like rural Georgia or Iowa.

Actually, the whole Warren area feels kind of surreal compared to Orlando. It's basically what Orlando was like pre-Mouse, when cities like Winter Garden, Maitland, and Kissimmee were all separate small towns with miles of countryside between them. It's like they started building the infrastructure for a future city of 3-4 million... then just ran out of steam before reaching critical mass. I suppose that someday, if they ever build HSR from Cleveland to Pittsburgh (unlikely, since that would require getting two states that have historically never cooperated to cooperate... just look at I-80 and I-76, their original names, and notice where they end up relative to each other at the border), the area could blossom as the halfway-point between the two (kind of like how Lakeland, Florida has experienced explosive growth thanks to couples who live between the two and commute in opposite directions daily). But I wouldn't hold my breath.

by Anonymousreply 10October 19, 2021 12:32 AM

The photos in these ads need to show family portraits of everyone on the block.

by Anonymousreply 11October 19, 2021 1:11 AM

Looks like it was a richy area (coal? oil?) then declined to a black area. Then a gay couple bought it for nothing and tried to rehab it, but they ran out of money and kept getting robbed. Then they split-up.

by Anonymousreply 12October 19, 2021 1:26 AM
Loading
Need more help? Click Here.

Yes indeed, we too use "cookies." Take a look at our privacy/terms or if you just want to see the damn site without all this bureaucratic nonsense, click ACCEPT. Otherwise, you'll just have to find some other site for your pointless bitchery needs.

×

Become a contributor - post when you want with no ads!