With stunning views, abundant trees and manmade lakes, there's hardly a prettier place in North Texas than Lake Ridge. On the southwest edge of Cedar Hill, the development's custom homes on oversized lots make a clear statement of prosperity.
But unexplained house fires, foreclosure postings and empty houses send another message: This is a beautiful place teetering on the edge of decline, an apparent victim of lax lending practices and subprime loans.
The word "subprime" is what financial people use to describe loans made to customers with less than ideal credit. Lake Ridge is where Wall Street words meet real life.
The three story brick-and-stone house at 419 Golden Pond caught fire on December 3. Cedar Hill Fire Marshal Randall Jordan said it was intentionally set.
The house was unoccupied—without gas or electricity—yet somehow fires started in several places on lower floors.
Now the charred ribs of what used to be a peaked roof stick into the sky. It was the most expensive house on the block, listed on tax rolls at $640,000.
Darrell Mosely, who lives across the street, says the house at 419 was not the first to burn. He points to one farther down the block that’s burned twice (That one, according to Fire Marshal Jordan, was caused by faulty wiring). But Mosely is irked that these homes and others with questionable value are jacking up his tax rates.
“[Tax authorities] base the taxes on the highest-valued property on the block,†Mosely said. “And they just sort of govern it down from there.â€
On Mallard Point, about a mile away, a bare foundation is what’s left of another home that burned. It was still under construction. Grand Prairie fire inspector C.J. Griffin said it is impossible to determine the cause.
Up on the ridge which gives Lake Ridge its name is another burned hulk, which had a property tax valuation of $1.2 million before it went up in flames.
The owner did not live there when it caught fire. The owner, in fact, is a trustee, and neighbors Keith and Elaine Thieroff said it had been occupied, off-and-on, by members of a church group.
Although the house was built four years ago (when its tax valuation was listed at $800,000), the official cause of its demise was listed as a faulty water heater.
“We’re very worried,†Elaine Thieroff said of her neighborhood. “We invested in our dream house out here and it’s such a beautiful area that we don’t want our property values to go down.â€
But that’s what’s happening.
Foreclosed
The house across the street from the Thieroff’s blackened neighbor is vacant. It is listed on tax rolls at $580,000.
A look through the front window reveals a soaring living room ceiling and a shoulder-high stone fireplace. But this house has been foreclosed upon by a subprime lender. It’s now on the market for $150,000 less than the tax valuation.
Off the crest of the ridge, about a mile-and-a-half away, is a street called High Valley. Of nineteen houses, four are foreclosures. Half appear to be empty.
In all, 26 properties in Lake Ridge were posted for foreclosure in March.
Steven Nichols has seen all of this before in his 20 years as a real estate appraiser, but he had not seen so much in one place.
“This is phenomenal,†he said while driving around the property. “About every other house appears to be vacant.â€
Statistically, that isn’t the case. Most of the development’s 950 homes are occupied, but the open spaces of the subdivision give the appearance of vacancy.
Nichols checks out homes with no window treatments on the second floor, newspapers stacked up on the porch, and unkempt lawns, and sees properties in trouble. A check of property records often shows that they’ve been taken back by the subprime lenders that loaned the money for them, or that they’re just plain empty, owned by “investors†from other states.
Most alarming to Nichols are a number of houses under construction in Lake Ridge which appear to have been abandoned by builders.
We walked through one that hadn’t seen a worker for weeks. The home’s ornate stonework is finished only halfway up the exterior wall. Inside the kitchen, a granite topped counter gathers dust.
“You’re in a neighborhood of decline,†Nichols said. “It’s not a very optimistic outlook for a neighborhood when you see several homes like this dead in the water.â€
Forlorn
On a recent Saturday morning, Grace Roeber was on her morning walk, iPod in her ear and weights in-hand. Like everyone we talked to in the development, she’s edgy about what she sees: The fires, the foreclosures, and the big empty houses.
She tells of “scammers†her neighbors have spotted who don’t live in houses, but nonetheless appear to be using them on occasion.
All of this doesn’t wash with her property tax bills, which go up every year, propelled by the bloated book values of homes already on tax rolls.
“So you put this all together and what does that tell you?†she asked. “Something’s going on. And our property values are being jacked up, and I’m paying taxes on a value that I’ll never realize if I want to sell.â€
That could be a gut-level definition of “subprime.â€
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