Metro Pulse/Urban Renewal

1828 Woodbine Ave.
1600 sq. ft.
3 bdrm, 2 bath
plus 600 sq. ft. cottage
$69,900
Contact: Jon Brock, 531-2020

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by Matt Edens

Used to be, there was no such thing as "affordable housing"—at least not in the modern, tax-subsidized, rent-controlled, income-restricted sense of the word. Instead, at the risk of sounding like a Limbaugh-listening ditto-head, the market took care of things. Don't believe me? Drive around the center city sometime. Heck, a short loop from Emory Place through Fourth and Gill will do. Notice all the things you don't see anymore—apartments over shops, rowhouses, duplexes, carriage house, and garage apartments.

From the Civil War to the Great Depression, apartments over shops gave clerks and stockboys, cooks and waiters an affordable place to live (convenient to work too). Carriage house and garage apartments provided affordable housing for a wide range of domestic service workers, grown children of the homeowner, or the oldest form of "assisted living"—the "mother-in-law apartment." And, perhaps most importantly, these kinds of traditional housing types gave lower-income folks, many of them immigrants, the chance to own their own home.

From the double-houses of Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati to the venerable Boston triple-decker, these owner-occupied, multi-family dwellings provided low-cost housing in the new world, allowed their owners to build wealth, and ultimately transformed their occupants into assimilated Americans. Sure, there were problems. But they often had more to do with sanitation, fire safety, and ventilation than actual crowding. And, just as modern technology perfected the means to address these issues, single-use zoning and density and lot coverage laws made many of these affordable housing solutions more or less illegal.

Since then we've developed single-use solutions—housing projects, apartment complexes, assisted living facilities. Curiously, none of these—if you take away the parking lots and landscaping and look at the buildings themselves—are really any less crowded than the patterns they replaced. But they did leave us separated by income, age and often even race far more than we were a century ago. But perhaps the saddest of all is that owner-occupied duplexes and triplexes or backyard auxiliary units have simply ceased to be built. And that's robbed many low- and moderate-income Americans of the chance to own their own home without relying on government assistance (and if you think I'm not talking about you, I have three words for you—Mortgage Interest Deduction).

Luckily, in the historic heart of Knoxville, this relatively simple bit of economic magic can still work. Take this relatively modest house on Woodbine Avenue in the Parkridge neighborhood, just around the corner from Park Place Condominiums. It's a great little house—a front porch with a swing, hardwood floors, French doors, three fireplaces with original mantels and tile, and a great old built-in butler's pantry in the original kitchen. Nice yard too—a double corner lot with several big crepe myrtles. Currently, it's split into two one-bedroom apartments, but take out one dividing wall and convert the added kitchenette into a laundry and you've got yourself a nice 1600 sq. ft., three-bedroom, two-bath house. And at $69,900, that's a heck of a deal—$43 a square foot. With a mere $2,000 down and a 7 percent mortgage you'd be looking at $445 a month—less than you'd likely pay for a two-bedroom apartment. Plus, with mortgage rates dropping as much as a point below 7 percent, chances are good you could even shave a few bucks off that.

However, since that price also includes the 600 sq. ft. rental cottage out back, the deal just got even sweeter. Currently, the cottage rents for $400 a month (it's currently leased). Which means that you could essentially own this house for roughly what you're currently spending on cable TV—that's without the premium channels. Or to put it in plain English: $45 a month.

Yes, you heard that right—45 bucks—the cost of a decent dinner for two (not counting the wine). Or, since the main house is still divided into two apartments, if you really want to be frugal you could live free in one half and pocket about $350 each month off the other half. Which sure sounds affordable to me.