Victoria Park holdouts see gold in their homes

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Victoria Park holdouts see gold in their homes
Right deal will make them millionaires
' ~6 }0 n. ^" j7 ?8 U& E$ Y7 |Mario Toneguzzi, Calgary Herald
  I* f7 f* a) P0 ^+ `8 m% uPublished: Monday, June 16, 2008
Five homes on one residential block all have For Sale signs on their lawns.

$ W6 `, f$ @0 j5 gThe homes -- within walking distance of the Calgary Tower -- are listed on the MLS real estate market at prices ranging from $810,000 to $2.45 million -- figures you wouldn't bat an eye at if they were in the affluent Mount Royal neighbourhood.

But these homes are along 11th Avenue S.E. in the old Victoria Park area where prostitutes and drug dealers once reigned, and they are among just a handful with people still living in them.
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  Q; v% T% ?; \2 X4 r  YDarlene Watt works outside her home on 11th Avenue S.E. Watt is one of a handful of homeowners waiting for the right price.
$ B$ m1 v9 E' V8 ^Ted Rhodes, Calgary Herald
2 w8 v4 P1 ]' `8 H4 }4 V" Z+ X0 ZThey are also among the last homeowners who haven't sold out to developers wanting to erect condo towers in an area Mayor Dave Bronconnier describes as "like the phoenix . . . risen from the ashes of days gone by."
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; U1 f. G: p, M7 YIf the price is right, these homeowners are willing to part with their choice pieces of land.
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"It's a homestead. My folks were here for 60 years," said Darlene Watt, 60, who owns a home just a stone's throw from the new Arriva condo tower and Cowboys nightclub.

Watt said she is "ready to rock and roll" and sell her property.
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Watt grew up in Victoria Park, moved to Vancouver and has lived in the home for the last seven years.

"My papa was a millwright by trade and he was in construction all his life as a journeyman welder. He helped build this city up quite a bit, as well as the rest of Alberta, and he always used to say, 'it's all in the name of progress.' So this is exactly how I feel."

Watt said the neighbourhood never stopped changing over the years.
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3 P9 g! K' G% P8 P, ["This area has changed over. It has changed in all the years I have been here and my folks have been here because it's always been home base. It's always been constantly changing through the years. If you went to the Glenbow Museum, you'll see that 11th Avenue here used to be a cattle drive many years ago . . . . The houses haven't changed other than the ones that have went down. These are just little war houses."
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And most of them were built at the turn of the century -- 20th century, that is.

Louis Lovaszi, 68, also has a home for sale on 11th Avenue S.E., with a list price of $350 per square foot -- or a cool $1.7 million. He has lived there since 1977, when he bought it for $55,000.
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"There's only six houses left on the block. So eventually we've got to go," he said.
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* Z# T; t+ X+ ~, j"The neighbourhood was really bad with all those prostitutes and everything around. It was really bad. You can't leave nothing outside because they were stealing it. Now you don't see any bums around."
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  X+ D1 d9 }! d  Y/ l: oAsked what his old neighbourhood will look like when all the new development is completed, Lovaszi said: "I'm pretty sure you can't even recognize this area."
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There are actually six properties for sale along the strip -- one of the homes does not have a For Sale sign outside, said Amanda Priolo, a realtor with Re/Max Real Estate Central, who is selling the properties with colleague Dino DiDiodoro.

"The prices are based on a square footage basis, so depending on how many square feet the lot is and then they're listed at $350 a square foot," she said. The biggest lot is almost 7,000 square feet.
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. G) F( T0 Q3 q! I* e: `All are separate owners.
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) j, _! V* S. R$ ]% g' ~"And they all actually live there. They're not even rentals. They're pretty much the last six individual homeowners that live in their houses in Vic Park," said Priolo.
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"Ideally, we'd like to sell them as a parcel . . . Ideally, somebody would build a high-end highrise condo there. So, they'd like to sell them all as a group to a developer because that's eventually where it's going to go, but if somebody did want to purchase them individually, we can't stop somebody from offering or them from selling them. But they're priced as a parcel, for sure.

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0 \4 b* K% M6 b, x' @9 f"What's happened down there over the years is -- and what these people want to avoid -- developers, these bigwigs in Calgary, who have come in and purchased all these lots individually for next to nothing and kind of picked these owners off one by one and then built these massive highrises on them. And the money they're making on them is just ridiculous. I mean, they're not paying what they should be for the land. So these guys are basically the last six down there and they're saying they don't want the same fate as all their neighbours got and so they want to sell it as a parcel for what the land should be worth."
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mtoneguzzi@theherald.canwest.com

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