Shaker Heights, Ohio, reeks of old money. The city hall (left) and public library (right) look like the former homes of 19th century railroad barons.
They’re not, but the town was founded and developed by the Van Sweringen brothers, who controlled several railroads until bankrupted by the 1929 crash (read about them here).
Shaker Heights is also home to stately mansions and homes.
For example, the 1928 Tudor castle below is listed on Realtor.com (as of February 12, 2021) for $589,000. That’s not a misprint.
For that dough, you can get a small fixer-upper in a lowbrow Seattle neighborhood, or 6 bedrooms and 3 ½ baths in 4,514 square feet of living space on a 36,500 square foot lot in Shaker Heights. While you may want to renovate parts of it, such as bringing in your own choice of Glass Shower Direct bathroom design, there wouldn’t be a lot more to do. It’s nice inside, too:
So what’s the catch?
The taxes are murder, that’s what. Over $21,000 a year. With 20% down, the monthly payments are $3,876 a month, and nearly half of that is taxes.
Probably the devil to heat in Ohio winters, too. (Maybe that’s why it has 5 fireplaces and its own forest.) Not to mention the upkeep. Still, it seems like nice digs if you can afford it.
A lot of these huge manses were built in the 1920s, and many of them were donated to universities, nonprofits, or public entities by the descendants of the original owners, or turned into tourist attractions, because living in them became unaffordable. Those mansions were free to almost any tax-exempt organization that would take them. For example, the one below, now a fixture of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus, was built in the Roaring Twenties by one of Milwaukee’s then-prosperous brewery families.
There’s one in Florida, originally built for Marjorie Merriweather Post of the cereal family, and wife of stockbroker E. F. Hutton, at the time America’s richest woman, that fell into disrepair and was picked up by a real estate developer. Now, it’s a tourist attraction, in a manner of speaking, although admission tickets are out of range for most folks and you wouldn’t want to cross the proprietor, who reportedly has a nasty temper and thinks everybody is out to get him.