I personally wouldn't move to Arizona, but I also probably wouldn't live in North Dakota. Wind drives me nuts.Flush with cash from an oil boom and plentiful jobs, North Dakotans are snapping up homes 1,500 miles away in balmy Arizona, where prices have plunged since the real estate bubble burst."It boils down to the weather and taking advantage of the market," says real estate agent Rocky Parra of HomeSmart Realty in Gilbert, Ariz., a Phoenix suburb.He and wife Beverly, a native of Minot, N.D., have sold eight homes to North Dakotans in recent months. Parra is heading to North Dakota this month to meet with possible buyers."A lot of people have struck it rich," he says. "Oil companies are coming in and buying businesses and land. They're selling up there at the peak and buying down here at the bottom."Some want second homes. Others move outright.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
North Dakotans Using Oil Money To Buy Arizona Homes
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You got the North Dakota wind story correct! In the mid 1960s, my dad took a church in western North Dakota in an oil town called Tioga in the Williston basin. Our stay was mercifully brief because living there was an UGLY experience. Flash forward to the 1990s. My mother is dying and some dementia has set in. One summer night she awakens to the sounds of a passing thunderstorm. I check up on her and she has a look of real terror and confusion on her face. She says to me, "We aren't back in North Dakota, are we?" Over 30 years after the fact and having lost most of her mind, she still associated a loud wind with the continuous howling in North Dakota.
ReplyDeleteAnd by the way, the wife in "Giants in the Earth" by Ole Rolvaag goes insane from the wind as the try to settle South Dakota. So if you have problems with wind, don't even visit these places.
As for owning a house in Arizona—anyone who could afford it was already wintering down there in the 1960s. This included farmers without animals and those lucky enough to have oil under their land.
Yep, everytime we get high winds, I curse the wind. It does so much damage, and hearing it continuously for hours just kills me. That doesn't even take into account how much heat it robs from my house in the winter. I would go insane out there.
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