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Posted by Ballpark Frank (69.178.8.75) on 22:19:08 06/08/16
In Reply to: Last one out of posted by Geri
Geri,
I arrived in May of 1972. The subdivision I bought a house in was developed with the help of the feds, because Boeing complained there was not enough low cost housing for the influx of employees needed to build the SST. When Congress killed the funding for the project, somewhere between 60 and 80% of the homes in that subdivision wound up repo'd. There were HUD signs everywhere. We had these little six house cul-de-sacs, just dead end lanes with 3 houses on each side of the street. Our street had 3 occupied houses, which made it one of the more occupied streets. There were some with zero or one occupied house. Most of the repos were FHA, but there was a sprinkling of VA's as well. Eventually, FHA had such a large inventory of repos, they would auction them off every Friday, in blocks of five. I met a Vietnam vet at Green River Community College that bought one of those 5 house blocks, and had them rented out. He owned 7 or 8 houses in total, lived in one, and rented out the rest. He was attending college on the G.I. bill, and was making enough off his rentals so he didn't have to work (beyond managing his properties).
I moved back to Colorado in 1979. By then, Boeing had largely recovered, and my old neighborhood didn't have any repo inventory beyond the occasional one you would have seen anywhere in the U.S. Locals were complaining that Washingtonians who had fled to Southern California to find work in the aircraft manufacturing industry (General Dynamics, Grumman, Hughes, McDonnell Douglas, etc.) were all moving back to the Seattle area, and they were bringing two of their SoCal neighbors with them!
Ahhhh, Seattle before Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, etc.
Ballpark
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