04/12/2023
I like Pueblo. It's an intriguing and historic town with a unique personality. From its dueling downtown areas to its cocked orientation that laughs in the face of the ordered grid of the federal government surveyors. From its start as a border town before Colorado was a state, to the home of the Government Printing Office(growing up in the 70s and 80s Pueblo Colorado was the place to write to when you wanted information on just about anything. You didn't even need a full address. Just write to the GPO, Pueblo CO.). From its birth in steel and fire, its desolation by water, and its subsequent refusal to go down in the flood.
Pueblo is the home of heroes and the butt of Colorado. It has been beaten down by flood, fire, mafia influence, economic upheavals, crime, recession depression, slander, and ignorance, yet people come with hope and optimism for building something here. It refuses to die. It refuses to give up. It still holds its head up with pride and defiance.
Its neighborhoods are a living record of the last 150 years of growth, prosperity, recession, and comebacks. One can walk along almost any residential street in almost any neighborhood and see Pueblo's growth in the design and architecture of her houses. Not only those of the city of Pueblo, but also of the country that birthed her. No two houses are the same. Pueblo's soul is in her neighborhoods.
Unfortunately, the upheavals and troubles Pueblo has endured over the last century have left their marks on her. She is beaten up and scared. Her soul is tired and ragged, and while no two houses in a neighborhood are the same and each is unique to itself and its period, few streets are absent an abandoned shell. Every neighborhood contains its collection of deteriorating and rotting homes and the remnants of lost hope. Where her citizens once opened shops and commercial interests amongst the clusters of structures sprouting up all around them into homes to house the dreams of her increasing residents, there is now only proof of the cities suffering and the evidence that a dream died.
Now. Pueblo is tired, depressed, and falling apart one beautiful and historic house at a time.
Between residents who have been just as beaten up by the same financial difficulties as their city and can't afford to maintain these 100 plus year old homes, opportunistic real estate investors who wouldn't live in the city of it paid them to, and unscrupulous contractors and "the cousins of brothers of family friends who know how to fix that cheaper", Pueblo is in danger of losing her soul. Whether in the bleached and sanitized gentrification that does wonders for property values and tax roles at the expense of the residents who make the city a community. Or in the slow cancerous decline of a community that traps its residents in crumbling houses and the unrelenting slide of value and desirability from neglect and apathy.
Pueblo needs help. I'd like to be a part of that. To that end. If you are a home owner living in a house built between 1895 and 1946, that has not been well cared for over the years, has been neglected, forgotten, abused, or has suffered the ravages of many years, little money, and shoddy repairs. Please reach out. I'm a handyman. I want to help Pueblo by helping her residents rehab their own community and restore the soul of the city. To reap the rewards of owning a home in a city that the community members themselves worked to improve. Increased property values, curb appeal, desirability, and pride of ownership should be enjoyed by the people who makeup the community, not distant investors who could care less about the lives of the people paying for the privilege to live in crumbling houses they refuse to improve, much less the prosperity of the community at large.
I want to help Pueblo, by helping her neighborhoods, by rehabilitating the houses of the people who have a stake in her prosperity.
Give me a call. Reach out. Look for SqFoote Remodel llc on nextdoor and Facebook. I can help. Let's look at what we can do to bring your home back into its glory. Let's do this. We can do this, Pueblo.
