Life Situation Status Update

[sparr]

Here's an update on the state of various major situations affecting my life.

The Estate of Mind intentional community coliving project ended late last year. I tried to find a way for some subset of the community members to stick together in the dorm and pine house, operating on a smaller scale after the loss of the manor. Unfortunately all the ideas we pursued didn't pan out and almost everyone moved on to the next part of their life in the months after the fire.

There are two tenants still living in the dorm, Lisa Pepin and Matthew Carr. I am 9-11 months into the processes of evicting them, with 75% confidence I'll have them out 2-8 months from now. For context, the average length of an eviction in MA is 4-6 months without an appeal or delaying tactics. There are also up to half a dozen 2-6 week delays available, and an appeal automatically adds an additional 2+ months, both regardless of merit. They have declined offers including $5-30k in cash, moving expenses, and/or vehicles, from myself and from interested buyers of the property. They are collectively about $17k behind on what they owe me, about $8k of which they are already under court order to repay. I am currently legally required to provide utilities including heat to a 15 bedroom building for the two of them, as well as to continue maintaining the whole building including vacant bedrooms and private bathrooms. I am far behind on those costs, and they far exceed my income. Matthew's eviction has gotten to a judgment and past the reconsideration delays, and now we're going into the appeal process. With Lisa, I got a default judgment when she didn't show up for trial after giving the court short notice of a doctor's appointment, then she got another judge to undo that decision, and then when we finally got to trial a second time the judge noted that I didn't put her bedroom number (the one effectively destroyed by the fire) on the eviction notice so he was dismissing the case and I had to start all over. That second attempt is currently at the early stage where she gets ~45 days to prepare for a mandatory mediation session.

My attempts to sell the property have been stymied a few different ways. First by the manor fire and nature of the property. I was able to resolve that somewhat effectively by subdividing the property so the value proposition of each piece is much more straightforward, and this attracted multiple offers in a very short span once the new listings went up. Second, the presence of non-paying tenants who refuse to leave. I'm working on that in housing court as described above. Third…

A man named Lee Jundanian has brought a civil suit against me to force me to sell him the property and prevent me from selling it to anyone else. He's also demanding what might be hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages. We had a contract for him to buy the property, a sale that was due to close in August of 2024. He has refused to close ever since then, only responding with new attempts to renegotiate the contract. In the fall of 2024, his outstanding contract scared my agent away from accepting new offers or re-listing the property. Now his lawsuit means that no title insurance company will insure a sale, so no mortgage company will lend on it. While a pure cash buyer with a tolerance for legal risk could still buy part or all of the property, that is unlikely. I was a week from closing one sale and two months from closing another when he locked the property up, and those deals are now falling through. I am pursuing a few legal strategies that have some chance of unlocking the property in ~1 or ~9 months, but more likely I will need to endure 18+ months to the end of that trial before I can get a judge to terminate that contract. The faint bright spot at the end of that long tunnel is that I am counterclaiming against him for my own hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages, which increase every month the trial goes on. I may have to doubly break the corporate veil to effectively collect on a judgement of that size, which would take additional years.

The second time I found that one of the tenants (Lisa) had moved into someone else's bedroom without permission or even telling anyone, and with the local police declining to "get involved in a civil matter", I physically removed her from the room. This allowed her to get a restraining order against me. This has made it difficult for me to manage the property; now I'm having to hire people to do simple things in the dormitory, and next week I'm going to have to spend $400 to hire a cop to escort me in so I can meet a health inspector. I'm pretty sure the part of the domestic violence law that led to the order is a violation of the MA constitution; there's no way I have less right to defend my property from trespass just because I live there. I'm appealing that order, but the courts are letting her delay that process by months as well. There's a chance the order will expire before the whole appeal process finishes, but I'll still see it through regardless.

If you're local and want me out of town, the fastest way to make that happen would be to help resolve one of the problems described above so that I can leave sooner. If you just want excuses to keep complaining, feel free to sit back and enjoy the show.

I lost my job in September of last year. I was spending too much time dealing with problems at home, and when the sale failed to close in August I wasn't able to keep my commitments to put more time into work. It took about two months to get approved for unemployment benefits, during which time I also couldn't get approved for other public benefits, so that was a really tough time. I have about 10 weeks of unemployment benefits left now, so those tough times are on the horizon again. The effort and stress for everything going on has made it infeasible for me to take on new full time work, so I've mostly been pursuing gigs that haven't panned out. Fortunately I'm finally making some headway on interviews for a "real job", and there's a decent chance I'll find work in the next couple of months. It's going to take a very rapid transition to turn money from a new job into an ability to stop spending all my time on the problems here at home; fortunately just a couple of paychecks will be enough to retain an attorney for the civil lawsuit, and less than that would hire one for the evictions.

I've also been working on re-launching my CoDwell project, which was one of my efforts to acquire property for a large coliving intentional community before I succeeded with the est8. There's a lot more details on that on the project website at http://CoDwell.org. The short version is that I want to buy an old boarding school near Portland OR and have 5-10 intentional community groups with different focuses (permaculture, maker, coparent/homeschool, etc) all share the property and use its amenities. I'm going to be spending the next 6-12 months finding people and money to try that project idea again.

As soon as I can disentangle myself even partially from the property in MA, I'll be headed west. Maybe a short or long road trip. Maybe aiming for Portland or SF initially or for a while. Lots of variables there. Get in touch if you want updates on more personal matters like health, family, relationships, work, etc. Especially if have novel ideas related to anything above. Otherwise, I hope to have more time in the coming year to visit and catch up with friends and acquaintances.