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I got 20 tickets and I want to sell them to you.
5 dollahs.
We’ve got a date (August 13th), time (3-5pm) and I know I nominated my yard and B & IT’s backyard so we’ve got gardens for the garden tour.
This will be the 2nd Flower Power I have known. This year it will be a garden tour where you can see what we’ve done to some of the ghetto looking yards we got and turned them into pleasant backyard retreats or frontyard beauties. Also as many of us are doomed with tiny yards or almost no yard, and so we’ve been forced to be creative. Come, see us be creative! Face it you’re dying to see my container garden where I used old DC recycle bins as pots. Short of peeking over my fence the only way random strangers will see my garden is to get on the Flower Power tour.
At $5 you gotta admit it is cheaper than other neighborhood garden tours. Smaller gardens, smaller price. As it will be a walking tour, you’d also get a tour of the neighborhood, great for those of you who are curious about buying in the area.
Scott and Matt over at TruxtonCircle.Org are selling tickets as well. But I’ll take PayPal you can e-mail me at inshaw at att dot net and I can take your payment. If you live within the borders of the 1200 to 1700 blocks of New Jersey, Florida til it hits R Street, the 1600-1400 blocks of 3rd Street, everthing in between and the 400-700 blocks of S and R Sts, I can hand deliver your tickets.

Okay if you email me at inshaw at att net I can get you tickets for $5 and walk them over to you after work if you live in or very close to the northwestern part of Truxton Circle or on the 400-700 blocks of R or S streets. Otherwise you can use the button below and pay $.37 more to counter the charges Paypal put on. I think you can use a credit card using this option. Click and find out.

 

This is a later than usual post as I was at the first day of the District of Columbia’s Tax Sale, which attracts the financially and reality savvy and idiots. I missed the initial reading of the rules around 8:30AM as I arrived a little late because I wanted to add a little something to my initial deposit. No matter, the auctioneer wound up repeating several times the main rules.

Rule #1- Turn off your cell phone and pagers. You are not that important.
Rule #2- You must have 20% of your bid already deposited with the cashier’s office.
Rule #3- No children and don’t leave your children out in the hallway.

Yes, people did leave their children in the hallways. At least two kids. One kid was brought up where the auctioneer was and asked to find mommy or daddy.
Rule #2 was also constantly broken, and what would happen was the property tax lien would come back on the auction block. That’s what happened when I bid against the King of the Idiots. He got the bid about $1,000 more than what I was willing to go for and apparently he didn’t have the 20% of the $3,000 needed so the property went up again and I was outbid by $6,000.
As I said the savvy and idiots, lots of idiots.
Idiots come because they are betting on getting a property for cheap. Nope. There is a 5% chance that the property would go into foreclosure and that the pre-existing bank loan and other debts, that would need to be paid, are not burdensome.
The savvy are betting on the 95% who will pay off their taxes and the 18% interest property owners would have to pay on the back taxes. I sat near two folks who had their charts and research out. One guy had the figure of how much he could bid on top of taxes owed (which gains interest) and the surplus (the bid amount that does not gain interest) to get back at least 2% interest on the whole bid. Another person had property descriptions and I guess bid limits to get a decent return. It helps to do research on the property.
Most bids for tax liens on properties in the Truxton area were about $5,000 to $20,000 over the amount of back taxes owed. Very few were at the amount of the taxes owed with only one person bidding. Like 0521-0807 1533 4th St, which I think is part of the parking lot of the mosque.
Once all the Truxton properties were bid on I left as I learned from my last time at auction not to bid angry. So I choose not to bid. Well at least on properties I have not done a little research on.

As a Washington Post subscriber I don’t read the Express so I missed my Thursday 15 seconds of fame in the blog section of the tabloid. Thanks Libby and Jim for pointing it out.