Wright Chat

https://www.oakpark.com/News/Articles/1 ... e-dead%3F/

please also read the three comments.

Not really a house, is it. Does anyone have a second-floor plan---or is there no second floor ? Basement ? Bathroom ?








Committee rooms at right, stage and dressing rooms at left:

I don't have a floor plan, but it was on Wright Plus several years ago. The main space doesn't have an upstairs. The balcony at the back of the auditorium, over the front entrance, is a master bedroom. The rooms marked "Committee" in the third of SDR's photos above are bedrooms or studies.

It may have smaller upstairs rooms behind the stage; can't remember.

Under the stage was an institutional kitchen / pantry which is now a kitchen, dining room and family room.

That was a very poor building to force into a residence. FLW's Coonley Playhouse and Coonley Stable were difficult enough to turn into credible residences, but Drummond's building was an impossibility from the start.

If commenter Gregg Kuenster is correct ($5,000/mo = $60,000/yr) property taxes in that area are punitive enough to dissuade prospective buyers.
Not for Beverly Hills, perhaps, but for River Forest, definitely.

If, as was suggested in the linked article, River Forest has committed itself to expenses which make the present punitive tax
rate(s) necessary, shouldn't the resulting difficulty in finding buyers for properties be laid at the door of city managers ?

S

Yes, SDR, but you know what Himself said about bureaucrats.

Has anyone ever done a serious empirical study of what easements and the like do to the value of a property? Economic intuition says they should bring it down, as a commenter to the original article said, but that isn't quite enough to show that it's true.

It doesn't matter what a well-known wag said about bureaucrats; if we are to have a representative democracy---both national and local---we are going to
be stuck with bureaucrats, both elected and unelected (the elected officials' hired assistants). The challenge is to make that system work, by not electing
dishonest officials, removing them if they fail in their work---and accepting that compromise will always be necessary.

S

Oh my, I think you have gone off the plantation.

I'm sorry, did I not sketch the prevailing condition accurately ?

S

You presented the basic necessity and ideal functioning of bureaucracy, while FLW commented on the reality of bureaucrats. The ideal and the real are too often at odds.

Yup. Joseph Campbell admonishes us to "Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy."

S

We all know what happened to California after prop 13 froze property taxes. The public schools went from #1 in the nation to near bottom. And prices of houses went through the roof. But why should overburdened property owners pay for someone else’s kids whose parents only rent and earn subsistence wages, right?

In Illinois, it’s the opposite, prices are low, and taxes are based on the value and the neighborhood, not fixed at the purchase price.

I don't know that much about Illinois politics, but I have never before heard anyone praise them.

Prop. 13 was overreach, no doubt about that, but it was passed as an amendment to the state constitution by an overwhelming majority in response to out-of-control property tax rate hikes. The freeze on tax rates per property is eliminated when the property changes ownership, which is why including commercial properties was a very bad idea. Houses sell at such a rate that a majority of homes initially covered have already changed hands, while commercial property owners have less reason to sell.

The spectacular rise of prices for houses in CA is in part due to the very high property taxes for new construction, and partly in response to the 2008 recession, which stalled construction of new houses for middle class buyers.

In 1984, Prop. 37, The California State Lottery, was passed by 58% to mitigate the loss of revenue to schools, which receive 34% of lottery revenues. In addition, CA has very high income tax rates, which also benefit the school system, or at least could, if the legislature allowed for it. But the high standards of the school system started to slip before Prop. 13. In the 60s, a student could get a degree from UCLA in macramé.

That cantilevered porte cochere is pretty special.