Does it give anyone else the creeps that the woman was actively killing any life that appeared in that neighborhood - squirting the weeds in the rock gardens at every house? I've never lived in the desert, but I thought people tried to get a little green spot in their yards there. Weird.
Sorry - I see that Mal and others have pretty much covered "Weed Woman" in the comments at the end of the previous thread. Glad to see I'm not the only one creeped out by her obsessive behavior.
"Ghost town" will describe a large portion of Las Vegas by 2010. Tourism (i.e., gaming) & construction are the two dominant industries; the former is weakening and the second is living on borrowed time.
Despite the obvious devastation in FL, CA & AZ, Las Vegas is still my choice for ground zero of the housing bust.
Well God bless her for attempting to protect her investment when the bankrupt HOA gave up!
She only overpaid by almost half a million dollars but money isn't everything! She has her 'dream house' in her 'dream community' and she and her husband are locked together until death do them part with a crushing debt load!
BAWAHHahah haha hhahh hah hahahah!
Better them than me!
Thanks for the look at the Vegas meltdown. Yes, I'm enjoying it because I want to buy here.
i don't understand what happens to HO dues in such instances. if a bank forecloses on a property, then they become the owners and have to pay the dues, right? and if a home in a community is never sold by the builder, doesn't the builder then have to keep paying them until he sells the home?
so how can it happen that a home exists but nobody pays the dues? in this cnn example the HOA is broke. is it because the homeowners aren't paying the dues, but haven't yet been foreclosed on?
OT but should be of great interest to thehttp:
//www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=355 CR Nation:
Listened to it in the car today, and did a great job for a radio program on the housing crisis. Far more intellegent than most of what you get from the MSM, and also very entertaining.
BTW, I used to have dreams of being something, then I became a stripper, started flipping houses, and, now, I am a stripper flipping tricks, and am nobody. Let this be a lesson to anyone who wants to be a stripper/flipper.
Jackk - fwiw, the HOA documents are drawn up by the developer's lawyers and cut the developer just about every bit of slack possible during the "startup" phase, while homes are still be sold for the first time. Once all the homes are sold the bulk of the HOA agreements kick in. I'm pretty sure the developer pays no fees. In our neighborhood, REO homes owe assn dues, but the banks don't pay them till the house sells, at closing. I'm pretty sure these homes are so underwater that the HOA, riding at last 2nd on the train of paybacks, will never collect a dime.
Well, that's an example of how the idea that everyone will walk is off. They were at least 40% down, but
Weed Whacker is still giving it the old determined try.
Down 300k? Is that value derived from mark to matrix? I don't see anyone offering 500k for one of those homes.
Although I do see $500 water bills in the future when they lose access to the Colorado River.
Good thing this wasn't an asset mania! Good thing it was only imprudent lending standards! Nope, no asset mania during the last decade in Vegas! You typically find people lining up over night to bid up an asset , then revolting and discrediting the asset upon deflation during normal times!
Pardon the sarcasm, I just tire of not reading the word psychology mentioned more in the housing analysis, bears included. We cannot control mass psychology once it's turned spiraling downward; we can only help tend to the dead. Let people rent the damn houses at market rates once foreclosed upon, as Dr. Dean Baker suggests. Eliminate the Bankruptcy Reform Act passed a few years ago. Encourage people to make the lenders eat their losses by ruthless default, and give those lenders nothing.
Funny thing about the water. Nevada's allocation from the Colorado was set in stone years ago, back when the Flamingo was still the shiznit and even the Vegas Hilton hadn't been built yet.
The entire state only gets 300,000 acre-feet per year, or enough for about a million homes. No hotels, no casinos, no fountains. California and Arizona get about 95% of the river flow.
All that water you see? For most of it, the city and the casinos buy up irrigation rights way up north and pump the water all the way down. Then once it's there, they recycle and reuse the hell out of it until most of it evaporates.
Nouriel Roubini's speech in Hong Kong was covered by the South China Morning Post:
And with the stock of unsold new houses still rising, Professor Roubini argued that prices may not bottom out until they have fallen 30 per cent from their high. A fall of such magnitude would wipe US$6.6 trillion off household wealth, plunging 40 per cent of all mortgage borrowers into negative equity.
Even if home prices only fall 20 per cent, with half the underwater households defaulting and lenders recovering 50 cents on the US dollar, the losses inflicted on the financial system will be an enormous US$1 trillion, equivalent to 75 per cent of US banks' capital. "The potential risk for the financial system would be huge," warned Professor Roubini. "A significant number of institutions could go belly up."
That's not all. The 2001 recession was centred on company investment, which makes up only 10 per cent of the economy. This time around, it is individual spenders who are in trouble, and they make up a whopping 70 per cent of GDP.
With consumers already up to their eyeballs in debt and unable to raise any more cash by remortgaging their homes, private sector employment stalling, and credit card and car loan defaults rising, consumer spending looks sure to contract nastily.
That, in turn, will hit the commercial real estate market hard, especially in the retail sector. And although US corporations are by and large in good shape, Professor Roubini points out that following the private equity buyout boom, there is a significant "fat tail" of highly leveraged companies which will soon begin to look very exposed.
Over the past two years, the default rate on corporate bonds has been just 0.6 per cent. That now looks set to rise towards the historical average of 3.8 per cent, and possibly towards the 10 per cent rate seen in typical recessions. At the same time, recovery rates will drop from 70 cents on the dollar now to a typical recession rate of about 35 cents.
That threatens to punch a gaping hole in the US$62 trillion market for credit derivatives. A number of protection-sellers - investment banks and hedge funds - will go to the wall, leaving buyers who thought they were hedged bearing losses of another US$200 billion to US$250 billion.
Meanwhile, municipal governments will see their revenues from property and sales taxes evaporate and they too will start to default, inflicting yet more losses on hapless lenders.
Of course, faced with such a grim scenario, the US government would be forced to act, possibly by buying up mortgages or simply by printing money.
Even so, says Professor Roubini, the resulting recession will last a painful 12 to 18 months, twice as long as either of the two previous downturns.
Inevitably, such a long and deep slump would have a grievous effect on economies in Asia, but more of that another day...
tom.holland@scmp.com
Kinda sums it up, for anyone who hasn't been paying attention.
"All that water you see? For most of it, the city and the casinos buy up irrigation rights way up north and pump the water all the way down. Then once it's there, they recycle and reuse the hell out of it until most of it evaporates."
Worse that that, as I understand it. They're buying rights to water tables. Pumping out groundwater elsewhere in Nevada just to keep Vegas going. Who wants to be those tables aren't being recharged as fast as they're drained?
I watched the video and see a lady who may not have made the best financial decision but at least she is willing to go out and try to do something to keep her neighborhood looking good.
Desert plants like that typically have deep taproots and spines. If you try to pull them the stem breaks and the plant grows new leaves in a couple of days. So, unless you want to pull them over and over, you use spray.
Obviously the camera person was bored by all the talk and the weed spraying was his only chance for an "action" shot.
All that open space in southern Nevada and developers built gated communities? Just a few minutes out of town and you could have 10 acres and an adobe style house. Why coop yourself into a few square feet?
And did you see the interior of that house? It must have been a nightmare to insulate and sheetrock!
Nice touch, painting all those houses out of the same paint can. Isn't there more than one shade of tan in this world?
Beat me to it, Paul. She didn't seem like she was asking anyone for sympathy. As MOM noted, she isn't walking. She didn't once refer to herself as a victim.
She may not be that far underwater. In higher end houses, a lot of people sold their prior houses for nice profits and sunk it into the next. Not everyone was buying with exotic mortgages and no money down.
I can see getting all judgmental about people that were involved in fraud or cutting corners, or not paying their bills - but it seems a little harsh since she seems as if she can afford it.
I wouldn't choose that lifestyle, but this is America, right?
As owners developers would be obligated to pay HOA dues, but in most cases during the early phase they choose to pay the costs of operating the HOA (maintenance, landscapers, guards, etc.) instead, since it's good marketing to do that well during the sales period and most of that they can write off as a cost of sales. Banks on the other hand are obligate to pay HOA dues but they don't (I expect mostly because of logistical reasons, perhaps Tanta can do an ubernerd for us on Foreclosure Servicing in an HOA World). In my building (200 apartment condos) we had a foreclosed unit vacant for over a year because the bank priced it unrealistically high and they never paid their dues. It wasn't until we sued them (and threatened to foreclose the unit ourselves) that they capitulated on price and got the thing sold, but the new buyer was the one who actually had to pay the back dues (he got a pretty good deal from the bank, so not overall a bad thing for him).
I watched the video and see a lady who may not have made the best financial decision but at least she is willing to go out and try to do something to keep her neighborhood looking good.
Sure... if you think that neighborhood "looks good." {gag}
I think someone like that would probably be happiest living in a moon colony.
"Nice touch, painting all those houses out of the same paint can. Isn't there more than one shade of tan in this world?"
I just got back from my 1st visit to Vegas. I stayed at a resort in Hendersen and driving around the area I was struck by the tremendous amount of sameness - the architecture, the color of the houses, the landscaping - and where there wasn't moonscape. I couldn't imagine wanting to live there. The houses (from 1 story ranchers to 4,000 sq ft McMansions) along the golf courses were check to jowl - each nicely delineated from the other with fencing - what are they worried about - hey you stole my desert rock and sand??
I saw some empty building lots along the Rio Secca golf course and someone mentioned they were $1 million asking price - I sprayed my corona all over I laughed so hard.
I like how that bleached blonde relitter was cluck-clucking with more than faint disapproval about all those desperate people sleeping in line just for a chance to bid. I'm sure when the frenzy was on she was not doing anything to encourage the mania.
I hope Mrs. Boyd-Jones doesn't have a large stake in MBIA:
MBIA posts huge loss on credit derivatives
May 12, 2008 7:51 AM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters) - MBIA Inc said on Monday unrealized losses on insured derivatives skyrocketed in the first quarter, pushing the world's largest bond insurer into a sharp quarterly loss.
"Does it give anyone else the creeps that the woman was actively killing any life that appeared in that neighborhood - squirting the weeds in the rock gardens at every house? I've never lived in the desert, but I thought people tried to get a little green spot in their yards there. Weird."
Yes, I can see you don't live in a desert. Those little green plants grow up into nasty prickly thistly weeds feet high and shedding fluffy pollen-laden seeds. That's all that can live out there without watering. Round-up (TM) is a desert denizen's best friend.
Dryfly,
Let me make a stab at what makes the place special. It is mostly the coastal climate. The Sierras are not bad also. Last weekend we were at the cabin at Donner. Wonderful weather with the snow melting fast. Day time temperatures were almost in the 70's. We had the area to ourselves. The summertime boaters were absent as well as the summertime owners and renters. We used the Kayaks everyday during the morning calm to spy on the god awful big cabins the rich folks built down near the Donner Memorial.
In the winter we have the option of skiing in the Sierras or boating, riding the horses, hiking, bike riding or just enjoying the weather at home. We don't have 4 seasons. We have spring and summer (mild mild mild). And by the way we have a high end job market that keeps the money flowing into the region.
You are correct that most of California is desert. However we have a narrow band of rain forest from the Oregon border to almost Monterey. Any land east of our coastal mountains is desert. The Sierra rain/snow catcher makes California possible.
Hey you won't have any nosey neighbors to fend off, or barking dogs, etc. Think of three people having a whole gated community just to themselves. Marvie.
The neighborhood is called "La Morada" and is located near the intersection of Robindale and Arville in the 89139 zip code. The principal street in the neighborhood is Noche Oscura Circle.
Southern California is irrigated desert mostly, but it's a very big state (two days driving time from north end to the south end), so no stereotype works.
Ouch!
Nice new look CR
Does it give anyone else the creeps that the woman was actively killing any life that appeared in that neighborhood - squirting the weeds in the rock gardens at every house? I've never lived in the desert, but I thought people tried to get a little green spot in their yards there. Weird.
Imagine if she lived in a rainy climate. She'd have given up already.
In 6 months, she'll be squirting her death juice at the tumbleweeds.
Sorry - I see that Mal and others have pretty much covered "Weed Woman" in the comments at the end of the previous thread. Glad to see I'm not the only one creeped out by her obsessive behavior.
"Ghost town" will describe a large portion of Las Vegas by 2010. Tourism (i.e., gaming) & construction are the two dominant industries; the former is weakening and the second is living on borrowed time.
Despite the obvious devastation in FL, CA & AZ, Las Vegas is still my choice for ground zero of the housing bust.
Well God bless her for attempting to protect her investment when the bankrupt HOA gave up!
She only overpaid by almost half a million dollars but money isn't everything! She has her 'dream house' in her 'dream community' and she and her husband are locked together until death do them part with a crushing debt load!
BAWAHHahah haha hhahh hah hahahah!
Better them than me!
Thanks for the look at the Vegas meltdown. Yes, I'm enjoying it because I want to buy here.
My ground zero for the housing bust is Bob Toll.
i don't understand what happens to HO dues in such instances. if a bank forecloses on a property, then they become the owners and have to pay the dues, right? and if a home in a community is never sold by the builder, doesn't the builder then have to keep paying them until he sells the home?
so how can it happen that a home exists but nobody pays the dues? in this cnn example the HOA is broke. is it because the homeowners aren't paying the dues, but haven't yet been foreclosed on?
OT but should be of great interest to thehttp:
//www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=355 CR Nation:
Listened to it in the car today, and did a great job for a radio program on the housing crisis. Far more intellegent than most of what you get from the MSM, and also very entertaining.
Leave Vegas alone. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Just like the dreams of being something.
BTW, I used to have dreams of being something, then I became a stripper, started flipping houses, and, now, I am a stripper flipping tricks, and am nobody. Let this be a lesson to anyone who wants to be a stripper/flipper.
Jackk - fwiw, the HOA documents are drawn up by the developer's lawyers and cut the developer just about every bit of slack possible during the "startup" phase, while homes are still be sold for the first time. Once all the homes are sold the bulk of the HOA agreements kick in. I'm pretty sure the developer pays no fees. In our neighborhood, REO homes owe assn dues, but the banks don't pay them till the house sells, at closing. I'm pretty sure these homes are so underwater that the HOA, riding at last 2nd on the train of paybacks, will never collect a dime.
Sorry, should proofread. That's "still being sold" and "riding at least 2nd"
Well, that's an example of how the idea that everyone will walk is off. They were at least 40% down, but
Weed Whacker is still giving it the old determined try.
4000 sqft. I wonder how many children they have. Fu**ing idiots.
Her "dream home":
- 4000 sqft for 2 people
- Overpay by hundreds of thousands
- Live in a freaking desert
Down 300k? Is that value derived from mark to matrix? I don't see anyone offering 500k for one of those homes.
Although I do see $500 water bills in the future when they lose access to the Colorado River.
A fool and their money are soon parted.
I don't know... the inside of the house looked pretty sterile too. I doubt they have any school age children.
Maybe we should have a new euphemism for the opposite of the mythical jinglemailers... the weedwhackers. At least we know they exist.
Good thing this wasn't an asset mania! Good thing it was only imprudent lending standards! Nope, no asset mania during the last decade in Vegas! You typically find people lining up over night to bid up an asset , then revolting and discrediting the asset upon deflation during normal times!
Pardon the sarcasm, I just tire of not reading the word psychology mentioned more in the housing analysis, bears included. We cannot control mass psychology once it's turned spiraling downward; we can only help tend to the dead. Let people rent the damn houses at market rates once foreclosed upon, as Dr. Dean Baker suggests. Eliminate the Bankruptcy Reform Act passed a few years ago. Encourage people to make the lenders eat their losses by ruthless default, and give those lenders nothing.
Pathetic. . . . sorry, the only word that came to mind.
Psychology is about mothers and stuff. Kind of inappropriate on Mother's Day, Mouse.
Link to mp3 for This American Life
Quincy,
I like Oscar Wilde's variant on your quote, particularly these days . . .
"A fool and his money are soon invited everywhere."
Quincy:
Funny thing about the water. Nevada's allocation from the Colorado was set in stone years ago, back when the Flamingo was still the shiznit and even the Vegas Hilton hadn't been built yet.
The entire state only gets 300,000 acre-feet per year, or enough for about a million homes. No hotels, no casinos, no fountains. California and Arizona get about 95% of the river flow.
All that water you see? For most of it, the city and the casinos buy up irrigation rights way up north and pump the water all the way down. Then once it's there, they recycle and reuse the hell out of it until most of it evaporates.
"A fool and his money are soon invited everywhere."
Leave Ben out of this.
How will weed woman react when the pot growers move in?
OT:
Nouriel Roubini's speech in Hong Kong was covered by the South China Morning Post:
And with the stock of unsold new houses still rising, Professor Roubini argued that prices may not bottom out until they have fallen 30 per cent from their high. A fall of such magnitude would wipe US$6.6 trillion off household wealth, plunging 40 per cent of all mortgage borrowers into negative equity.
Even if home prices only fall 20 per cent, with half the underwater households defaulting and lenders recovering 50 cents on the US dollar, the losses inflicted on the financial system will be an enormous US$1 trillion, equivalent to 75 per cent of US banks' capital. "The potential risk for the financial system would be huge," warned Professor Roubini. "A significant number of institutions could go belly up."
That's not all. The 2001 recession was centred on company investment, which makes up only 10 per cent of the economy. This time around, it is individual spenders who are in trouble, and they make up a whopping 70 per cent of GDP.
With consumers already up to their eyeballs in debt and unable to raise any more cash by remortgaging their homes, private sector employment stalling, and credit card and car loan defaults rising, consumer spending looks sure to contract nastily.
That, in turn, will hit the commercial real estate market hard, especially in the retail sector. And although US corporations are by and large in good shape, Professor Roubini points out that following the private equity buyout boom, there is a significant "fat tail" of highly leveraged companies which will soon begin to look very exposed.
Over the past two years, the default rate on corporate bonds has been just 0.6 per cent. That now looks set to rise towards the historical average of 3.8 per cent, and possibly towards the 10 per cent rate seen in typical recessions. At the same time, recovery rates will drop from 70 cents on the dollar now to a typical recession rate of about 35 cents.
That threatens to punch a gaping hole in the US$62 trillion market for credit derivatives. A number of protection-sellers - investment banks and hedge funds - will go to the wall, leaving buyers who thought they were hedged bearing losses of another US$200 billion to US$250 billion.
Meanwhile, municipal governments will see their revenues from property and sales taxes evaporate and they too will start to default, inflicting yet more losses on hapless lenders.
Of course, faced with such a grim scenario, the US government would be forced to act, possibly by buying up mortgages or simply by printing money.
Even so, says Professor Roubini, the resulting recession will last a painful 12 to 18 months, twice as long as either of the two previous downturns.
Inevitably, such a long and deep slump would have a grievous effect on economies in Asia, but more of that another day...
tom.holland@scmp.com
Kinda sums it up, for anyone who hasn't been paying attention.
I'll jump in for the absolute last time and pitch the This American Life podcast recommended by Dirk and Anon.
For Simpsons fans:
Monorail? There ain't no monorail and there never was, ya hear me!?!
Methinks this place will soon be joining the ranks of Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook.
And the new haircut looks great CR! Or Tanta's new bunnyslippers, however you want to describe your new look.
Tyrone writes:
4000 sqft. I wonder how many children they have. Fu**ing idiots.
Her "dream home":
- 4000 sqft for 2 people
- Overpay by hundreds of thousands
- Live in a freaking desert
Agreed.
The money helicopter flew over Las Vegas, greed set in, and now it's gone. I have no sympathy for them.
CR, your new format looks great.
"All that water you see? For most of it, the city and the casinos buy up irrigation rights way up north and pump the water all the way down. Then once it's there, they recycle and reuse the hell out of it until most of it evaporates."
Worse that that, as I understand it. They're buying rights to water tables. Pumping out groundwater elsewhere in Nevada just to keep Vegas going. Who wants to be those tables aren't being recharged as fast as they're drained?
I watched the video and see a lady who may not have made the best financial decision but at least she is willing to go out and try to do something to keep her neighborhood looking good.
Desert plants like that typically have deep taproots and spines. If you try to pull them the stem breaks and the plant grows new leaves in a couple of days. So, unless you want to pull them over and over, you use spray.
Obviously the camera person was bored by all the talk and the weed spraying was his only chance for an "action" shot.
All that open space in southern Nevada and developers built gated communities? Just a few minutes out of town and you could have 10 acres and an adobe style house. Why coop yourself into a few square feet?
And did you see the interior of that house? It must have been a nightmare to insulate and sheetrock!
Nice touch, painting all those houses out of the same paint can. Isn't there more than one shade of tan in this world?
Beat me to it, Paul. She didn't seem like she was asking anyone for sympathy. As MOM noted, she isn't walking. She didn't once refer to herself as a victim.
She may not be that far underwater. In higher end houses, a lot of people sold their prior houses for nice profits and sunk it into the next. Not everyone was buying with exotic mortgages and no money down.
I can see getting all judgmental about people that were involved in fraud or cutting corners, or not paying their bills - but it seems a little harsh since she seems as if she can afford it.
I wouldn't choose that lifestyle, but this is America, right?
Oh I see the prices of pot plummeting really soon with all those houses just perfect for setting up grow-ops.
Oh I see the prices of pot plummeting really soon with all those houses just perfect for setting up grow-ops.
That's bush. For the real deal.....
Tiny URL - create a shorter link
Tyrone writes:
4000 sqft. I wonder how many children they have. Fu**ing idiots.
Her "dream home":
- 4000 sqft for 2 people
- Overpay by hundreds of thousands
- Live in a freaking desert
Tyrone | Homepage | 05.11.08 - 10:18 pm | #
Doesn't everyone living west of the Missouri River and south of the Columbia live in a freaking desert?
So what makes them so special?
As owners developers would be obligated to pay HOA dues, but in most cases during the early phase they choose to pay the costs of operating the HOA (maintenance, landscapers, guards, etc.) instead, since it's good marketing to do that well during the sales period and most of that they can write off as a cost of sales. Banks on the other hand are obligate to pay HOA dues but they don't (I expect mostly because of logistical reasons, perhaps Tanta can do an ubernerd for us on Foreclosure Servicing in an HOA World). In my building (200 apartment condos) we had a foreclosed unit vacant for over a year because the bank priced it unrealistically high and they never paid their dues. It wasn't until we sued them (and threatened to foreclose the unit ourselves) that they capitulated on price and got the thing sold, but the new buyer was the one who actually had to pay the back dues (he got a pretty good deal from the bank, so not overall a bad thing for him).
Ministry,
Say it ain't so, just got some new lights and carbon filter
Is it just me or is that awesome to see their greed turned against them?
To quote my dearly departed father-in-law "A fool and his money is some party".
Doesn't everyone living west of the Missouri River and south of the Columbia live in a freaking desert?
So what makes them so special?
The fact that we do live in a desert. The low humidity and high temps alters our brain structure in a special way, making us, you know, special...:
$800K, a gated community, and you still live in a house with bars on the front door?
I watched the video and see a lady who may not have made the best financial decision but at least she is willing to go out and try to do something to keep her neighborhood looking good.
Sure... if you think that neighborhood "looks good." {gag}
I think someone like that would probably be happiest living in a moon colony.
"Nice touch, painting all those houses out of the same paint can. Isn't there more than one shade of tan in this world?"
I just got back from my 1st visit to Vegas. I stayed at a resort in Hendersen and driving around the area I was struck by the tremendous amount of sameness - the architecture, the color of the houses, the landscaping - and where there wasn't moonscape. I couldn't imagine wanting to live there. The houses (from 1 story ranchers to 4,000 sq ft McMansions) along the golf courses were check to jowl - each nicely delineated from the other with fencing - what are they worried about - hey you stole my desert rock and sand??
I saw some empty building lots along the Rio Secca golf course and someone mentioned they were $1 million asking price - I sprayed my corona all over I laughed so hard.
cheek not check
DCRogers writes: $800K, a gated community, and you still live in a house with bars on the front door?
My thoughts exactly.
That, and Kathleen Boyd-Jones needs to get herself a tank sprayer for her weed duty.
I like how that bleached blonde relitter was cluck-clucking with more than faint disapproval about all those desperate people sleeping in line just for a chance to bid. I'm sure when the frenzy was on she was not doing anything to encourage the mania.
I hope Mrs. Boyd-Jones doesn't have a large stake in MBIA:
MBIA posts huge loss on credit derivatives
May 12, 2008 7:51 AM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters) - MBIA Inc said on Monday unrealized losses on insured derivatives skyrocketed in the first quarter, pushing the world's largest bond insurer into a sharp quarterly loss.
Could anybody tell what community that was from the video?
"Does it give anyone else the creeps that the woman was actively killing any life that appeared in that neighborhood - squirting the weeds in the rock gardens at every house? I've never lived in the desert, but I thought people tried to get a little green spot in their yards there. Weird."
Yes, I can see you don't live in a desert. Those little green plants grow up into nasty prickly thistly weeds feet high and shedding fluffy pollen-laden seeds. That's all that can live out there without watering. Round-up (TM) is a desert denizen's best friend.
I think Ms. Boyd-Jones is actually the weed in this environment.
Dryfly,
Let me make a stab at what makes the place special. It is mostly the coastal climate. The Sierras are not bad also. Last weekend we were at the cabin at Donner. Wonderful weather with the snow melting fast. Day time temperatures were almost in the 70's. We had the area to ourselves. The summertime boaters were absent as well as the summertime owners and renters. We used the Kayaks everyday during the morning calm to spy on the god awful big cabins the rich folks built down near the Donner Memorial.
In the winter we have the option of skiing in the Sierras or boating, riding the horses, hiking, bike riding or just enjoying the weather at home. We don't have 4 seasons. We have spring and summer (mild mild mild). And by the way we have a high end job market that keeps the money flowing into the region.
You are correct that most of California is desert. However we have a narrow band of rain forest from the Oregon border to almost Monterey. Any land east of our coastal mountains is desert. The Sierra rain/snow catcher makes California possible.
Could anybody tell what community that was from the video?
It could be any of 9,000 such developments put up the last 10 years.
Hey you won't have any nosey neighbors to fend off, or barking dogs, etc. Think of three people having a whole gated community just to themselves. Marvie.
The neighborhood is called "La Morada" and is located near the intersection of Robindale and Arville in the 89139 zip code. The principal street in the neighborhood is Noche Oscura Circle.
Dry Fly - deserts don't grow these monsters:
Calaveras Big Trees SP
Southern California is irrigated desert mostly, but it's a very big state (two days driving time from north end to the south end), so no stereotype works.