There’s a Truxton Circle article I’m sitting on that I need to rewrite.
I’m also a church archivist for a church I don’t belong to. There’s some work that I’ve been putting off. I said I would get to it in Spring. Spring is over, and haven’t done anything. But I have done some preliminary oral history work. This is time consuming and has taken my attention away from this blog.
And I’m not particularly interested anymore in doing property histories. What makes me happy is researching people. The DC Recorder of Deeds is very helpful with looking up people, but I don’t want it to be my main thing. Since I need to clean up my census data, I’m going to see if I can mix blog writing with data clean up.
And there are personal things or life in general. I suspect getting older makes it harder to do as much as I used to. sigh.
Was thinking of you – was reading some financial histories of the 1890s. Houses were financed on a 5 year loan, some fixed, some floating rate. So the foreclosure crisis came when you had to refinance after the 5 years. Canada and the UK have similar systems today.
Would be interesting to know what the financing arrangements were from the 1880s up to the 1930s, when that system collaspsed and we moved to a government backed mortage system (with redlines).
I wonder what is better? 10 year mortgages and no government backed mortgages or 30+ year mortgages that are government backed. Despite how horrid the WSIC houses were, those who managed to pay off the predatory mortgage, did it within 10-11 years. Before that in the 1920s it seemed mortgages were slightly shorter and people did pay them off. Mortgages aren’t the worst, at least you have a house. They aren’t like student loans which can hang around your neck like a flippin albatross and maybe you have a degree to show for it.