Suicide Bomber Real Estate
What may be an extreme case of how burdensome tenancy laws help condo developers.
A hilarious meme expressing Beltway schadenfreude - that would have been definitely too soon if anyone other than the culprit had been killed - appeared today after Arlington, Virginia resident James Yoo may have blown himself up in his own house.
Tony Brenda constructed a meme contrasting DC suburb Arlington, Virginia with the DC savagery currently even being denounced by the city’s incompetent Mayor, Muriel Bowser. In the meme it is noted that DC has achieved a record number of carjackings (over 920 in 2023), but Arlington says “Hold my beer!”
ZeroHedge this week published a variety of local Arlingtonian social media commentators, who reported on Yoo’s many left-wing conspiracy theory posts. Yoo was apparently a Russia hoax believing, Trump hating, Hamas supporting fellow. This is pretty standard conventional opinion for northern Virginia, though his neighbors also report that he was a recluse and that he covered his windows inside with tin foil, so that no one could see into his house. Having fired flares over neighboring houses and schools, the police were knocking on his door with a warrant to search his home, when the property exploded. You was a lifelong alcoholic who had been in recovery programs and had developed a belief that neighbors were spies surveilling him. When police showed up with a warrant after the flare firings, Yoo responded with gunfire and then the house blew up.
The closest elementary school, the Escuela Key bilingual magnet school located two blocks away, offered students counseling if they wanted it in the days after the event.
Something no one thought to look at was the real estate activity of the property, which is near the Orange and Silver lines of the region’s Metro (subway), that heads out west to Dulles Airport and wealthy areas like McLean, Vienna, and Tyson’s Corner. The property (844 North Burlington Street) is near the Ballston Metro stop, an area where smaller properties are being torn down and replaced with 20 story luxury condos and apartment buildings. (To the west is a middle and upper middle class neighborhood, Dominion Hills, where Warren Beatty and Shirley McLean lived as teens.)
Yoo’s two unit property was for sale for the odd price of $546,691 for 161 days the last half of 2021, according to the Bright multiple listing system used by realtors to market their listings to each other. Yoo was court ordered to sell the property to comply with a distribution of assets ordered in his divorce in 2018. (Odd pricing is often the result of tax sales, short sales, foreclosures, or other court ordered sales.) The listing agent at the time included this information online: “*Sold As Is. No property access available due to tenant conflict and potential confrontational situation. This Property and all contracts will be subject to a tenant and/or owner in possession and Purchaser agrees to undertake all post-closing actions necessary to obtain possession from tenant and/or owner in possession. All contract terms to the contrary will be struck." I contacted the listing agent who did not seem to want to add more, but confirmed that the multiple listing blurb was accurate. Note that it includes a new owner having to evict the current owner, not just tenants, who may be selling because of a court order.
The other half of the duplex had rented between 2011 and 2017 for between $2,000 and $2,500. The same year the neighboring duplex, with an identical exterior, at 846 N. Burlington sold for $890,000. And a few months later in early 2022 the new 3 story townhouse built at the end of Yoo’s block, on a smaller lot, sold for over $1.1 million (and two others were rented for $4,000 and $5,000 a month).
If this is a case of tenancy laws making it difficult for small landlords (Virginia’s laws are nowhere near as anti-landlord as those in DC), it may also be a case that shows how tenancy laws encourage people to sell out to developers. Yoo’s neighborhood of inexpensive looking duplex homes already has a few torn down to make way for much more expensive looking townhouses.
Reports are that the gas to the property had been turned off (perhaps due to failure to pay the bill). So besides whatever other problems Yoo may have had, bad tenants and the financial stresses they can cause may have added to them.
A version of this was published yesterday at SpliceToday.