Envy Apartment

Duval Mobile Home Park in southeast Houston has 182 lots." />EXPAND The Duval Mobile Home Park in southeast Houston has 182 lots. Stephen Paulsen Elizabeth Perez loves her trailer park . But if she's ever forced to move, at least she has a back-up plan. A chatty 45-year-old with a wide smile, Perez has lived at and managed the Trinity Duval Mobile Home Park in southeast Houston since 2008. Used mobile homes here typically sell for $12,000 to $38,000, depending on their size and condition, she says. She remembers one woman buying a home for just $2,000, using her IRS refund. The Duval Mobile Home Park first opened in the 1950s. It was purchased last year by Trinity Community Group , a trailer park management company — and Perez worried about the future of the park. “I kept thinking, ‘Shoot, they're going to want to tear it down,’” Perez said. “I was kind of scared.” The company promised it would keep the park operational , according to Perez. Still, Perez accepts...

Budget- friendly fall home decorating ideas that will easily transition your home from summer to fall. *affiliate links used* Now that August is nearing the end… Ready or Not…Here Comes Fall and fall home decorating ideas . It doesn’t feel at all like fall yet around the lake, in fact as anyone who lives in the south knows…. the heat will stick around well through October, but my mailbox tells a different story as the first signs of fall have begun to arrive in the way of home decorating and fashion catalogs. :-) The end of summer is always a bittersweet time for me. I love the summer and don’t want to see it end, but the warm and cozy feeling of the fall season will draw me in soon and I want to be ready. I feel a teeny bit more of a pull towards it now that the house is empty of family and friends who stayed with us over the Total Eclipse weekend. We were right in the sweet spot and saw 100%. It was very cool to witness first hand – quite awe-inspiring and something I will never f...

Mark Painter (Photo: (c)Pamela Ebel) Mark Painter served as a judge for 30 years. He is the author of six books and a member of the Enquirer’s Board of Contributors. In 1965, I lived in a basement apartment in Corryville. It was a vibrant neighborhood – a doctor’s office, two delis, an actual mom-and- pop dry cleaner , and perhaps the best bar and restaurant ever – the original Lakewood Tavern at Jefferson and Lakewood. What’s there now? The entire tax-paying environment was destroyed to build the Environment Protection Agency . Not that it couldn’t have been built on empty land nearby – UC and the Feds just wanted it as close to the university as possible. It’s sterile and ugly to boot. The small businesses were gone. The homeowners gone. Tax- paying property replaced by non-taxpaying property. Population lost. When you destroy a neighborhood, you tear the fabric of the community. Connections lost. Roots lost. And so it goes. Buy Photo Several dozen houses in Avondale -- abandoned ...

House-flipping hit its highest levels last year since before the recession as investors seek to capitalize on rising home prices and a seller’s market with tight inventory. But the process is nothing like what you see on TV, where it looks like a home can be bought, gutted, renovated and resold in less than an hour – not including commercial breaks . The truth is often much messier, real estate professionals in Charlotte said. “It’s a lot easier to lose money in this business than it is to make it,” said Jeff Johnson, owner of NewPath Properties , which specializes in buying and rehabbing distressed properties . Still, that’s not deterring people from giving it a try in Charlotte. First-quarter figures from Attom Data Solutions show flips – defined as the same property selling twice in a 12-month period same year – made up more than 6 percent of sales in the Charlotte region, or 540 sales. House-flipping increased almost 4 percent from a year ago, though it remains well below the cit...

Chris Kraus remembers the late writer, in life and in death. Kaucyila Brooke, Untitled #94 from Kathy Acker’s Clothes , 1998/2005, color photograph. From the cover of After Kathy Acker . Like everything in the past, everyone remembers it differently, and some of the people involved hardly remember at all. We’re talking about something that happened more than seventeen years ago . But on January 23, 1998, which was a Friday, friends of the late writer Kathy Acker drove from San Francisco to Fort Funston, about twenty-five minutes away, to scatter her ashes. She’d died two months earlier at an alternative clinic in Tijuana, where she received palliative care for late-stage, metastasized cancer. The ash scattering—like the wake at Bob Glück’s house on December 13 and the memorial reading at Slim’s Bar where Michelle Handelman was booed off the stage for no reason she can recall—devolved into a kind of black comedy, the way these things often do. I remember Cookie Mueller at Jackie Cur...

Just a couple of miles from the Mexican border, where approximately 200, 000 immigrants illegally cross every year, 14-year-old Guatemalan Byron Raxcaco came face-to-face with reality of life on this nearly 2,000 mile border. A local drug lord demanded that Raxcaco and his chaperone pay $800 for safe passage across the border, where criminal gangs ferry humans and drugs across daily, and where police presence is almost non-existent, he said in an interview with AL.com. Poor and desperate to reach the U.S., Raxcaco was detained in a hotel in the Mexican region of Senora for a day until his aunt in Semmes, Alabama, gathered the money for the drug lord. After paying up, Raxcaco was released and free to start a new life in the United States.  He approached a border patrol post , told them he was an unaccompanied minor and asked for political asylum. In the four years since crossing the border, he has moved in with his aunt, enrolled in school, learned English, and got himself a girlfri...

Axl Rose (Photo: File photo) Pressed onto the record this week about the surge in calls across the nation to take down statues of Confederate leaders, Vice President Mike Pence played it sufficiently vague in the name of more is better. Pence, saying he was uneasy about any effort to “erase parts of our history just in the name of some contemporary political cause,” made his case Tuesday morning on “Fox & Friends” that “we ought to have been building more monuments.” The rationale, via Indiana’s former governor: “We ought to be celebrating the men and women who've helped our nation move toward a more perfect union and tell the whole story of America.” Given the context, with Jefferson Davis and Gen. Robert E. Lee as the baseline of a nation moving toward a more perfect union, Pence offers some awfully broad parameters here. THROWBACK: The day Axl Rose came to town BANGERT: Monument to Confederates remains in Lafayette's Greenbush Cemetery BANGERT: If only there was a way...