joel/is/blogging/now

Hello all.

I thought this might be a good day to start my new blog. Lots of people are calling me looking for information about what's going on with me, my company, my property in the French Quarter, etc. I'm busy dealing with the affairs of the day, and I thought this might be an efficient and interesting way to keep everyone updated.

For this first posting, I will offer some background information and stories, and then in my second posting I'll address the latest news. Then I'll let people know about the blog, and those who are just interested in the latest news will see that first, and peruse the backstory at their leisure if that's of interest.

In early 2003, life was interesting. I was living here in Los Angeles, but I had recently hired a CEO to help run my company, so I was free to travel a lot. I was taking advantage of that.

I had an apartment in the French Quarter in New Orleans that I kept as a getaway. New Orleans had become a home away from home for me, and I always had friends to visit there. There was business to do there too, with the company that hosted my website, http://www.stockroom.com. The host company was Icorp.net, which was located in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans. I had worked closely with them ever since I discoveredtheir leading-edge shopping cart software in 1996.

I had a small, charming rear apartment in a large old house on Chartes Street, with a private entrance. The rent was $300/month, less than what a lot of nicer hotels will charge for one night, so it was a nice and inexpensive retreat. But then the elderly woman who owned the house passed away, and her heirs decided to sell it. After it sold that summer, I was put on notice that I needed to clear out.

I had the idea that maybe I would just buy a property there, and then no one could make me clear out. So I started looking at properties around New Orleans.

I found an interesting property in the French Quarter, an old "row house" built by the Ursulines nuns in 1833, right near the riverfront. There were two buildings; The one in the front was 3 stories plus a converted attic. The ground floor was a storefront on Decatur Street, the second floor was a residential rental, and the third floor and converted attic were a larger residential unit which I claimed for my new apartment.

The smaller back building was originally built as a slave quarters. It was two stories, plus a converted attic, structurally sound but otherwise in very poor condition, with no windows, doors, or operative plumbing or wiring. I thought it would someday make two nice residential units, but at the time I bought the property, the only tenants were pigeons, and the rear building needed a lot of work.

But I thought, since I had my CEO in place, I could split my time between Los Angeles and New Orleans, giving this property some of the attention it deserved, and make a creative, fun and entrepreneurial project out of this property.

The previous owner was an older woman who was in poor health. She had owned the property since the 1960s, and said she had many interesting stories to tell about it which she promised to tell me someday. We agreed on a price of $700,000 and went into escrow.

By the time escrow closed, an unexpected situation had come up with my CEO, and he had resigned his position for personal reasons. I went ahead with the purchase, but in the nearly two years that I have now owned that property, I have been quite busy being back at the helm of my company, and I haven't had the time to visit New Orleans as much as I had originally hoped. I did have a lovely, expensive and much-needed new roof put on the buildings, but the rest of the planned renovations were left undone.

In March of this year, I was embroiled in other real estate dealings in Los Angeles, and feeling stretched too thin. While meditating on how I'd bitten off more than I could chew with my New Orleans property, the lines from an old song came to mind: "Go on, take the money and run." I made a decision to put the property back on the market. I still liked staying there when I could get away, but the place was underutilized, and costly to own without it being fully renovated and occupied. But meanwhile, real estate prices in New Orleans had risen, and my real estate agents felt that a nice return on my original investment was likely.

Also, I knew that New Orleans was in a precarious position with respect to hurricanes and flooding. The city had been slowly sinking for years, until it was surrounded on all sides by water that was sitting at a higher level than the city itself. I had studied the so-called doomsday scenarios for New Orleans, and concluded that it was a significant risk. I talked to my New Orleans friends about these concerns, but most of them were dismissive of the worst-case scenarios.

In discussions with my real estate agents, we decided at the outset to be patient and wait for a decent return on the property. I was concerned about the dangers, but I also liked the property a lot, and was still willing to keep it rather than let it go cheap. I had a few offers on the property that were above the original purchase price, but not reflective of what I or my agents thought the property would most likely sell for if we stayed patient.

My father, Lloyd (affectionately known to me, my friends, and my employees as "Pop"), went on a hike on the Appalachian Trail this year. Pop was diligent and creative in his preparations, reading accounts of other hikers and studying their experiences. He noted that most serious hikers became obsessed with the weight of their packs, since when hiking over long distances, every extra ounce is felt in a magnified way in terms of added fatigue and aches and pains. So he spent a great deal of time considering exactly what to bring, and inventing and perfecting his own pack design, which consisted of a series of pouches he could wear around his waist rather than the usual backpack.

Lloyd got his entire carrying weight down under 20 pounds, a feat most veteran long-distance hikers found really remarkable. On the trail, Lloyd said his packing system worked extremely well, leaving everything accessible. I told him he should consider mass-producing and marketing his eccentric pack design. He agreed that might be a good idea. But he and I are always cooking up new ideas for million-dollar companies, which we share with each other the way a lot of families tell jokes. They're just fun ideas, and we both tend to be quite busy with our already-existing projects.

Pop made it about 200 miles along the trail, which was far enough for him to have a few interesting adventures, and to conclude that he'd seen enough of long-distance hiking for his first time out. He then retired to my cousin Philip's spacious and well-appointed home in the New Jersey countryside (or as close to countryside as one can find within a 20-mile radius of Bell Labs) to rest up and regroup.

Pop and I met up at the Tucker family reunion at a state park in Indiana about a month ago. We discussed his next move, and he decided to go and hold down the fort at my place in New Orleans, since it was vacant anyway. I dropped him off at the bus station in Indiana on my way to the airport. He bussed to New Orleans and I flew home to L.A.

Two weeks later, I made a quick weekend trip to New Orleans to visit Pop. That was less than two weeks ago. On that trip, I discussed the New-Orleans-doomsday scenarios with some of my friends there. Most of them waved away my concerns, though all agreed it was a theoretical possibility.

There were a few who shared my views. One was my cousin Frank, who was living across the Mississippi river in Gretna, Louisiana. Another was Pop. It seems that there is a streak of rational/stoical realism that runs on that side of the family.

Also in agreement with my worst-case concerns was my old friend Elayne. She and I are old friends who met in the late 1980s in Los Angeles, and then, oddly enough, ended up owning properties facing each other on either side of Decatur Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans.

To Be Continued....