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Section 1 - Chapter 1
Our Own Story
In 2002 my wife Ana and I were on a seven-week drive around the country. It was a vacation, but we looked at houses too. We discovered that home prices vary greatly from town to town. No big surprise there. What was surprising, though, was how many towns had affordable housing. How affordable?
We fell in love with Anaconda, Montana when we drove into it on a Sunday morning. Monday morning we made an offer of $16,000 on a beautiful little pink house. It had two bedrooms, a full carpeted basement, a garage with automatic opener, nice hardwood floors, a large kitchen and a sun room. The seller was asking $18,900, and we settled at $17,500.
No mortgage! It was nice to be able to pay cash for a home. The heating system did need to be repaired, and the bathroom needed a little work. We spent almost $2,000 to get the house how we wanted it. We lived there for several months before selling it for $28,000.
We loved Anaconda. Where else can you fly fish, go to a three-dollar movie in a beautiful old art-deco theater (the 5th most beautiful in the country, according to the Smithsonian), drop some nickels in a slot machine, eat at a fine restaurant, stop by the bar for a dollar beer, and buy a house for under $30,000 - all within a four block area! There are good schools and churches, a library with fast internet service, and wildlife (including bears) a few hundred yards from downtown.
There are cheap houses in Anaconda, and nearby Butte because there aren't many good jobs. The mines around Butte were mostly closed, and the copper smelter in Anaconda closed without warning in 1980, putting more than half the town out of work. A quick trip to the little employment office in Anaconda shows that there are jobs now - just not good ones.
In addition, the area to the east of town is a "Superfund" clean-up site. This worries potential residents, but unnecessarily, in my view. The water in town is pure, coming from higher up in the mountains. The ground in some areas has heavy metals that can only hurt you if you eat the dirt (a concern for parents with young children). The smelter is gone, much of it replaced with a Jack Nicklaus golf course, and most of the area is already cleaned up.
Still, the population continued to slide for twenty years, and may not have bottomed yet. Thirteen percent of the "housing units" in Anaconda are vacant, according to the 2000 U.S. census. This has driven down the home prices dramatically. Since it still has all the basic amenities, is cleaner now, and is slowly recovering, it's a great place to retire to or to move to if you have an internet or other non-location-based business.
The town still has the basics. In fact, we loved the fact that we had both an Albertsons and Safeway grocery store within walking distance of the house. The library, four blocks away, had a decent collection of books and good internet access. Restaurants ranging from McDonalds to fine dining were within blocks of us too.
We check on the prices of homes regularly, and there are still many homes under $40,000. We have considered retiring there, but the winters are very cold. To see a photo of me and my wife and my parents sitting on the front steps of our Anaconda home, visit the homepage using the link below.
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