By Eric Valentine
I’ll spare you the gory details, the stuff you can gossip about at the local bar. But to get to the good news, the stuff—as Thanksgiving Day approaches—I’m thankful about, I need to provide some background.
I’m a native Californian. I moved to Boise in 2004. And while the nation’s housing market crashed in the late 2000s, I—by mere and good fortune—had my still most lucrative writing position of my career. So I bought a condo, in Boise’s North End … It’s more like I stole it, for pennies on the dollar, one of many foreclosed properties available during that collapse.
Cut to: 2018. Idaho real estate is booming and my career is transitioning, morphing, evolving, going nowhere, going places … It’s all in the eye of the beholder, but I knew leaving the Treasure Valley for the Wood River Valley made a lot of sense. I sold the Boise condo and bought a commercial residential property in Bellevue at the corner of South 2nd Street and Oak Street, the site of the former Green Antelope Gallery. It had a converted garage that could house art workshops and band practices. It was historic—not a registered landmark, per se—but it had:
- Been built in the 1890s
- Housed a century-old (at least) 100-foot (at least) fruit-bearing apple tree
- Served as a medical clinic in the early days of Bellevue
Cutting out a lot of gory details, I had to sell the property after nearly losing it to a business partner gone awry who also trashed the place inside and out. A good deed never goes unpunished. I felt relieved to gain some investment back and guilty that I put a scar on Bellevue history, too.
So, here’s the part I’m thankful about:
- I sold the property to my neighbors, who had plans to restore the property, the same way they did their own.
- After the sale was complete, I learned the new owners had plans to donate the property back to the city along with their own, and to make it part of Bellevue’s living history.
- And although the owners could not reveal or confirm details at this point, let’s just say a recent text conversation with them indicates they may be working on a solution for people like my dog Ember’s original owner—a woman who let me adopt her lovely blue heeler when she had to take a more lucrative job elsewhere that would have wreaked havoc on the dog’s quality of life.
And here’s the part I’m beyond thankful about: “Housing Essentials”—an article in this issue of Wood River Weekly that talks about the current plans my old neighbors have for the property. Their hope, if everything works out, is to make it temporary housing for traveling nurses, a little like the original plan for 116 S. 2nd Street.
“They lack housing and we lack nurses,” my neighbor told me in a text conversation last week.
It was a little circular hole in our property adjoining fence that led to the conversation with my neighbors about selling the property to them. Their plans filled the hole in mine, and lea me back to that condominium complex in Boise—at least for now—and a new lifestyle that brought Ember into my circle of love—hopefully for years.
Full circle.