Charlestown real estate market continues to decline

Zillow.com shows a one month drop of almost 1%, down 5.8% over the past 12 months

By Will Collette

The only way you wouldn’t know that Charlestown homeowners aren’t having trouble is if you only pay attention to the Charlestown Citizens Alliance and its elected town officials. In their world – or maybe it’s just the circles they frequent – there are no struggling families, just tranquil well-to-do people.

They are more concerned about making sure to give half a million dollars of town tax money to the Charlestown Land Trust and the Westerly YMCA than they are about middle-class tax relief. They are more concerned about lights and about upsetting the US Department of Interior by having kids playing in Ninigret Park after dark than they are about the disappearance of people’s home values.

But in the real world where the rest of us live, money is tight, the economy is scary and our homeowner equity has been boiling away. According to Zillow.com, the average Charlestown home price has declined to $302,900, down almost 25% from our peak average of almost $400,000 in November 2007.

If you're trying to sell your house, here is your competition

The trend line is not good. After a brief up-tick in sales prices, Charlestown home prices have headed steadily downward. The most recent 0.9% monthly decline takes us very close to our recent low point of less than $300,000 which we hit in the first quarter of 2009.

There are 345 Charlestown residential, two-bedroom or more properties listed for sale in the “affordable” range (less than $225,000). Nearly all of them are condos or trailer homes.

However, it is hard for people who need affordable housing to actually buy these homes because of the tight mortgage market. So despite the availability of some homes for as little as $50,000, buyers can’t put the money together to buy.

Sellers are competing with bank-owned properties. Realtytrac.com listed 16 bank-owned properties in Charlestown and another five that may be coming up for auction.

The market is different at the CCA end of the price scale however. Though sales were slow in February (only 19 sold), two were big ticket – 125 King Tom Road at $1,675,000 and 10 Lagoon Avenue at $985,000. That $1.7 million King Tom Road property is owned by CCA President Bernice Krantz and fellow CCA officer Dr. Milton Krantz. Zillow.com places the likely sale price at closer to $1.25 million.

There are still NO RENTAL properties listed on Zillow.com at any price. In fact, there are very few year-round rentals in Charlestown despite the desperate need for them. In summer, rental units go to our influx of vacationers and tourists. But if you can’t finance a home purchase but want to live in Charlestown, you’re out of luck.

If the CCA had its way, it would abolish the state’s affordable housing law, as they attempted to do last year through the Platner-Gentz Affordable Housing Deconstruction Act.

The CCA, through its elected town officials (Town Council Boss Gentz, Council Vice-President Deputy Dan Slattery and Planning Commissar Ruth Platner) fight to block any housing that might attract children. Indeed, the CCA has all but openly declared war on families with children and have effectively put anti-child policies into place in Charlestown.

Charlestown is one of the only towns in South County to lose population. We also lost a disproportionate number of children. We have more deaths than births. We have a rapidly aging population.

The gap between Charlestown’s South of One elite and its North of One working families keeps growing. And to a great extent, these changes are driven by Charlestown’s anti-family, regressive housing policies.

Charlestown needs to bring more housing under the affordable housing umbrella – it is not enough to merely watch housing prices fall and say “see, we have SO much affordable housing out there that the problem has gone away.”

But we need more affordable rental property in town. And we need more affordable housing that qualifies for buyer assistance. Just because the price of housing has been beaten down by the market doesn’t make it affordable if you can’t get a mortgage.

And we need tax relief for beleaguered middle-class homeowners who are struggling to hang on. Rather than say they are “the victims of poor choices,” as Deputy Dan Slattery has said, we need to come back to the idea proposed by Charlestown Democrats for a Homestead Tax Credit for town residents.

If we do nothing, nothing will get better.