How high is up?
Even as we see skidding home prices in some markets, others seem to defy it. How high is up? What are the buyers smoking?
It’s all right, I am a doctor. Well, I’ve had basic medical training.
Perhaps, as reported in the Treasure Coast Palm, it’s not what the buyers are smoking, it’s what they’re growing;
How many leaves in that plant?
PORT ST. LUCIE — It was the promise of the American dream — homeownership on the cheap — that brought them to
Sun, sand, and lush vegetation
The pitch went something like this:
· Relocate to Port St. Lucie
· Get free financing on a home in your name, and
· Have most of your expenses paid for two years.
The catch?
Will this hurt, doctor?
You have to agree to spend that time growing, harvesting and packaging marijuana for sale.
Ask the man who married Mary Jane
What initially started in May as a call to police about a man chasing someone with a machete on Southwest Glenwood Drive has unraveled a highly-organized, multi-state marijuana ring that recruited potential candidates with the promise of one day owning the grow houses they ran.
Now that’s something you don’t see every day, Fred.
Now, the local investigation has branched off into a large-scale federal prosecution that has charged 35 owners and tenants with various drug crimes.
Hey, Rico, you think this farmer-impersonation is working?
“Today, we have effectively dismantled a well-organized and well financed marijuana grow house operation with tentacles that stretched from South Florida to
You need a lot of suckers
At one level, one must offer wry admiration for the way in which American enterprise created a work-at-home business that, with an innovation worth of UHF infomercials, obviously boosted
Under the agreement, owners had to harvest marijuana crops two to four times a year and would receive $1,000 for each plant they reaped, while the organizers kept the rest of the profit.
Throughout
The homes produced between 30 to 300 plants in each harvest and some homes cultivated up to 1,200 plants in a year.
Time out for math.
Since police raided the first home in early May, there have been 82 search warrants executed, leading to 59 alleged grow houses and 62 arrests, said Police Chief John Skinner. Investigators have seized 4,000 pounds of marijuana and roughly $167,000 in cash.
I loved that ‘alleged.’ What’s alleged? “Oh, Officer, you mean those marijuana plants! How’d they ever get there, I wonder? I thought it was Billy’s science project.”
Moreover, the residents had, in addition to their business royalties, a vested residual interest in the home:
After two years, they could decide to continue growing marijuana or could sell the house.
In effect, this was a rent-to-own arrangement, with the tenant building up equity through performance — exactly as we would wish in more normal homeownership-counseling programs.
The homeowners would get 50% of the profits from the home sale at that point, he said.
Equity sharing comes to
In pure economic terms, the scheme is brilliant:
My ideas crackle with electricity!
easily replicable, practically franchisable, low-tech, low-risk, and with the incentives aligned. No wonder it proliferated:
Many of the homes were set up identically and paperwork in one house often led investigators to other grow houses within the ring.
There’s always a catch:
The city has filed paperwork to seize 14 homes through forfeiture and Acosta said forfeiture proceedings would continue at the federal level. Most of the charges carry maximum sentences between 20 and 40 years in prison and one of the charges, possession of 100 or more marijuana plants, carries a five-year mandatory prison sentence, according to prosecutors.
Aside from the only-in-America chuckles, there is a larger policy implication.
Policy implications are larger than they appear
Homes are more valuable if people can work in them, and as business migrates into the home — agriculture or information, it really makes little difference what brings in the revenue, so long as it’s green.
How many mortgagte payments is that?
In other words, migrating business into the home makes homes more valuable, for two things:
· Raises household income
· Increases the percentage of activity done in the home (ergo, reduces other costs like transportation)
The increasing prevalence of home-based business (legal or illegal!) thus is a long-wave structural shift in housing demand.
While Skinner said he felt police had made a dent in local operations and that grow house discoveries have “peaked,” he said there still could be more out there. The city’s enormous growth may have been a factor in why Port St. Lucie was chosen as a home base.
“It’s a new community,” Skinner said. “It’s an easy place to blend in … any community can have grow houses. It’s not just a Port St. Lucie problem.”
Skinner said many of those arrested were friendly and cooperated with detectives.
Pot will do that to you, won’t it? J
“Don’t worry, be happy.”
“They know they were wrong,” he said. “They were looking for part of the American dream, but they took a shortcut.”
Bummer, dude.
