Housing Bubble Casualties: Professionals 'Suckered' into Oak Park

The Sacramento Bee examines the demographic shifts that have accompanied the housing boom.

On a pleasant evening in mid-March, about two dozen people gathered in the driveway of a high-water bungalow on Third Avenue in Oak Park to chat and eat birthday cake. It could have been any neighborhood get-together. But this party had a serious edge. It was a monthly vigil held to show solidarity for Beth Kivel and Kirsten Tripplett, whose house in the 3600 block of Third Avenue was firebombed Jan. 15...

During the past five years, as real estate prices soared in the region, Oak Park saw an influx of professionals such as Tripplett, a biologist, and Kivel, 45, a professor of leisure studies at California State University, Sacramento. Drawn by relatively low prices and a supply of potentially charming old homes near Sacramento's downtown, these new arrivals have brought energy and political clout to a neighborhood that has been downtrodden for decades.

About half the 11 board members of the Oak Park Neighborhood Association have lived in Oak Park less than three years, said board member Nate Solov, who moved from midtown a year and a half ago.

Real estate values have more than quadrupled in the past six years, from a median of $53,500 in 2000 to $238,500 in 2006. It's an eye-popping increase, but the neighborhood remains a bargain by Sacramento standards.

Now, brightly painted bungalows sit beside rundown homes circled with chain-link fences. New houses are rising from empty lots on nearly every street.

But drug dealing and prostitution persist, and Oak Park's violent crime rate is about twice as high as the city average. Activists complain about slumlords who do little to screen tenants and a proliferation of problem liquor stores...

By the time Bud Aungst bought his house on Y Street 13 years ago, he said, he could hear so many gunshots at night he "learned to tell the difference between a rifle and a pistol." The atmosphere has improved since then, he said.

Ron Emslie, 58, who has lived in Oak Park on and off all his life, agreed and thinks the newcomers have helped. "Before, there wasn't any money here, and if there's no money, people don't have an interest," Emslie said. "Now, even if the (newcomers) got suckered in here, which quite a few did, they have an investment - and it's not peanuts. It's a substantial amount."

For some who moved to Oak Park in the rush of the early 2000s, the reality proved worse than expected. Celeste Brown and her husband sold their 1920s bungalow on Eighth Avenue in 2003 after living there less than three years. "I'm a little jaded now," Brown said. "I put a lot of my time and effort into that neighborhood for two and a half years, and I saw very little return." "Just getting the drug dealers and prostitutes out of there is a major hurdle," she added.