Massive home addition causes confusion in Fairfax County neighborhood
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Anonymous
+1, I've lived in diverse areas and also lived in overwhelmingly white areas and people just don't like neighbors who drag down the neighborhood with ugly and sometimes burdensome choices. And white people do stuff like this ALL THE TIME. I think what the PP is sensing is more a general classism that is unrelated to race. There may also be some anti-immigrant sentiment but I don't think it's Asian specific. If the neighbors where Italian or Russian and doing the same thing, I think there would still be an air of "why don't these foreigners get why this sucks?" but it wouldn't be racist. Immigrants often don't understand nuances like the idea that a neighbor is going to be pissed off if you build an extension that blocks all the light from their yard, because they may come from a place where no one feels entitled to light in their yard, and that's always going to cause a cultural conflict regardless of the race of the people involved. I guarantee that white Americans who immigrate to other countries are often greeted with this same exasperation when they don't "get" things about the local culture. It's just a very common immigrant experience and actually much more common in more homogenous cultures than it is in the US, but of course it still happens here too. |
Anonymous
| +1 to PP above..we have a neighbor family on our block who is white American but more "country" and they have a ramshackle chicken house, junk all over their yard, no fence, broken vehicles cluttering their driveway. It's their property and they're not doing anything illegal but it's just ugly and a cultural difference. |
Anonymous
Pure fact the owners of house are parents. Not son. |
Anonymous
Yes, a great grandfather of mine immigrated to a different European country. Reading the census, I see that he had four or five lodgers living with him: all from his home country, all in the same line of work, all with different last names. Clearly, he was helping other immigrants get a start in a new country. Eventually, his son and wife immigrated from that country to the US, and they did the same thing for several years. They all lived in urban areas where everyone could walk to their jobs. This is very common when people immigrate to a different place, no matter what their race or background. It’s probably more noticeable in a suburban area of single family houses than in a walkable urban area of rowhouses or apartment buildings, especially when you add in a lot of adults who all have cars. |
Anonymous
Earlier in the thread, someone posted that it was the husband and wife switching off ownership, not the son or son in law. Also, it’s not a good move to include adult kids on a deed. It’s much better to pass a property on after death because then they will get a stepped up basis. That way they won’t have to pay capital gains if they sell right away. |
Anonymous
In this area, I will speculate that any pop-up will require some foundation work. The marine soils that we have weren't as well understood 50 years ago, and IMHO all of foundations were underbuilt. |
Anonymous
Earlier in the thread, someone posted that it was the husband and wife switching off ownership, not the son or son in law. Also, it’s not a good move to include adult kids on a deed. It’s much better to pass a property on after death because then they will get a stepped up basis. That way they won’t have to pay capital gains if they sell right away. Heres a link to a separate thread about changing names on titles: https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1305929.page |
Anonymous
They seem to have mixed finances, which isn't surprising given they're a single household. I'm not sure what point you're getting at. It certainly isn't indicative of elder abuse or fraud. |
Anonymous
So are you saying that if Mike will have to have foundation work done if he adds a floor to the main house after the tower is finished, as he suggested in one of the news interviews that he might do? How difficult, or easy, is that to do when you factor in the new addition already in place? |
Anonymous
Randy's family seemed to entertain themselves by driving their various ATVs in circles around the property. |
Anonymous
Sometimes elderly people don’t understand decisions that an adult child is making for them. If an elderly person owns a house and their adult children come in and start making changes that are not necessarily in the best interest of the elderly owner, that could be seen as elder abuse, especially if there is any evidence of cognitive decline on the part of the owner. It really depends a lot on the ages of the elderly people involved and how much cognitive decline they are experiencing, among other factors. |
Anonymous
My expectation is that you'd be able to add dormers without foundation work, but not pop up the roof. That makes expansions here hard. You could add dormers to make the two rooms upstairs more functional, but adding another bedroom gets tricky. Adding a two level addition behind the house would require significant foundation work even to the existing structure- you'd have to pop-up the roof to connect them. Adding another bedroom above the garage requires finding room for a hallway, which causes you to a lose a lot of usable space if you can't pop-up the roof. |
Anonymous
Inheritance is after someone has died, not before. |
Anonymous
DP. The fact that other people haven't done it to their Ashley homes suggests it would be expensive. The addition probably doesn't help or hurt that much. |
Anonymous
The reality is, this is the sort of change that seems to help the elderly parents more than Mike. It addresses the immediate needs of the family, including housing and caregiving for the elderly parents, at the cost of an addition that may provide a lower return in the future when the next owner goes to sell. Elder abuse isn't a credible claim here. |