Our previous house in Pennsylvania, photo during winter of 2015-16.

Though I have published pictures of our previous home, of which I was very proud, I usually cropped them on the right, because it was a duplex. When we bought it, in 2002, it was pained entirely white, and the doors were a faded lemon yellow, with a single, brass doorknob on the right-hand door. I added the antique brass door set, deadbolt, and kickplates, and painted it red.

The stained glass in the transom was a Christmas present to my darling bride — of 45 years, 11 months, and 24 days — and the columns are now PVC, purchased from Home Despot Depot, because one of the old wooden ones was getting to be in poor shape. The three-color paint job I left to the professionals. I redecked the porch, but rather than painting it grey, as it had been before, I used Cabot’s Australian Oil in red mahogany on mahogany flooring, and had the porch deck looking like it could have been an interior floor!

Nevertheless, it was a duplex, and that meant a common wall, and a family on the other side of the building. It wasn’t bad, at first; they were decent neighbors. But, alas! they broke up, and the now single guy living on the other side couldn’t afford to keep up the mortgage, and moved out, just walking away, and leaving the other side empty. A young realtor bought it out, did a little bit of work on the inside, and then sold it for an inflated price. OK, fine, that could only increase the value of our side!

The trouble for us is that it was sold to an unmarried couple of Philadelphia cops, who were planning on using it as a vacation home. Less than a year after they bought it, they had an apparently nasty breakup, and stopped paying the mortgage. This was 2010, in the depths of the prime rate mortgage recession, and the house went for over a year in arrears. As winter was approaching, and the house remained vacant, I went and opened the exterior hose bib, to try to drain the water out of the lines. Some did come out, but without being able to open a faucet upstairs, inside the house, I don’t know how well it drained.

I was finally able to get some details from the realtor who was trying to sell it, including which bank held the mortgage. I was willing to make a low-ball, cash offer to buy the place, but the banks in 2010, inundated with non-performing mortgages, hadn’t moved to foreclosure, and wouldn’t entertain any offers to buy it from them, and I certainly wasn’t going to go through the realtor and pay off what was owed on the place! But at least I was able to inform them that the property hadn’t been winterized, and would suffer serious damage.

At least the bank sent a crew to go inside and winterize the place! Nevertheless, I still wound up having to cut the grass, for two years, just so my place wouldn’t look like poop.

Which brings me to this, in Tuesday’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

When the abandoned rowhouse next door collapses

The Jackson family had complained to the city about the abandoned North Philly rowhouse next door. It partially collapsed last month, sending debris into their yard and endangering their home.

by Michaelle Bond | Tuesday, May 13, 2025 | 5:00 AM EDT

Thomas Jackson was wearing a headset, immersed in a video game one stormy night in early April when he heard a crash. The 29-year-old was afraid his mother had fallen down the stairs, but Sherrilyn Jackson had slept through the noise and only woke up to his panicked shouts.

They didn‘t see anything out of place in their Sharswood rowhouse, so they assumed Thomas had heard a particularly loud crack of thunder. He returned to his game.

It wasn‘t until the next morning when he stepped into the backyard that he saw what had happened: the back of the abandoned rowhouse next door had partially collapsed. Bricks, glass, and wood had burst free from the plaster, crashed through a chain link fence, and spilled into the Jacksons’ yard.

The rest of reporter Michaelle Bond’s story deals with the problems and worried that the Jackson family has had, from a now collapsed and eventually demolished row home, attached to their own, and the programs the city has to deal with such problems, as well as the reasons so many homes in the City of Brotherly Love get abandoned.

The Jacksons estimate it had been at least eight years since anyone lived in the now demolished rowhouse on North 25th Street.

And for two decades, the property has been racking up unpaid taxes, according to city records. The owner now owes the city about $29,000 in real estate taxes for the property, which has an assessed value of $241,600.

An assessed value of $241,600, for an abandoned house in bad enough shape that it partially collapsed? Houses on the same street, North 25^th, show up on Zillow as being worth the low to mid $100,000 range, though a brand new condo on the same street, within two blocks, is listed for $269,000. The land itself has value, but vacant lots from demolished rowhouses in the neighborhood are shown in the $10,000 to $20,000 range.

But that isn’t what inspired this article. Rather, several people with whom I interact on Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — are pushing more dense, urban housing, and telling their readers how horrible sterile, unwalkable subdivisions, with no corner bodegas or coffee shops or restaurants are. Everyone is entitled to his opinion, of course, but the experience of the Jacksons, living in a rowhouse with attached neighbors on both the left and the right, as well as my own in a duplex, persuades me to defend the single-family home, the land-wasteful, you’ve got to mow your own lawn, and drive to get anywhere single-family home.

The single-family homeowner doesn’t have to worry about his property being damaged if the neighbor’s house collapses, doesn’t have to worry about his home being damaged if the neighbor’s water pipes freeze and burst, doesn’t have to mow the neighbor’s lawn if he refuses, and, in my case, doesn’t have to worry about restricting the color palette if he wants to paint the exterior of his home.

Or at least he doesn’t if he’s smart enough not to buy a home that has officious HOA Karens! 🙂

The single-family home has long been the American dream, complete with driveway, a yard for the kids, and maybe even a white picket fence. Some of our newer subdivisions can be kind of sterile, much of that due to building homes that are larger but still not overly expensive, the McMansion types.^[1]I spent an entire winter, 1978-79, in Dayton, Ohio, pouring and finishing garage and basement slabs for McMansion houses already shelled over by Ryan Homes. But nicer subdivisions can be found, as well as older single-family homes, where the trees are still in the yard, and mature, where there’s shade as well as sunlight, and where the noise of urban rowhouses and apartment buildings isn’t assailing your ears.