"Green" pools:  foreclosure factoid or new urban legend?

Or, who needs tickets to the Theatre of the Absurd when it plays daily in your living room?

If you ever wonder how urban legends are born, just ask me.  I was present at the birth of a strapping bawling whopper.  And from what I saw, birthing an urban legend is a team effort that calls for equal parts credulity, self-interest and wishful thinking.

I guess I'd heard somewhere, somehow, in early November 2007 that the neglected ("green") pools of foreclosed Silicon Valley homeowners supposedly were contributing to the West Nile Virus problem.  A record number of green pools was potential breeding grounds for the mosquitoes that carry that sometimes fatal virus. 

I also guess I hadn't given much thought to this green pool/foreclosure media-driven crisis du jure.  But when a client casually mentioned it, I wasn't surprised.  I did, however, probably surprise her with my response.  Because something clicked—call it a built-in BS detector, finely calibrated from years of reading real estate reporting—and mild-mannered me barked, "You can't believe everything you read in the newspaper".

Because none of it made sense. 

Yes, foreclosures had hit some Silicon Valley neighborhoods hard.  But I knew from seeing thousands of homes in hundreds of neighborhoods over the years that the neighborhoods most impacted by foreclosure were least likely to have pools.  These neighborhoods were ultra-affordable and always had been, with inexpensive homes on postage-stamp sized lots.  They'd been cheap in 2005 and they'd been cheap in 1955.  So as prime territory for a pool salesman to door-knock, these entry-level neighborhoods had always had two strikes against them:  small lot size and small homeowner income.  Not only was there little or no place to put a pool, but the installation and maintenance of a pool hadn't been cheap either in 1955 or in 2005.

No, I knew from experience that pools are mainly a vanishing fetish of the upper-middle class, and the Greatest Generation upper-middle class at that.  Pool appreciation is largely generational:  anyone over 65 thinks pools are just swell, and anyone under 65 can't wait to take out (or fill in) the pool in the back yard of the house they just bought.  And Silicon Valley's upper-middle class neighborhoods, with their large pool-sized lots, have been virtually untouched by foreclosure. 

I also doubted that the mostly young and middle-aged, mostly financially-strapped homebuyers of 2005 and 2006 who'd been forced into risky loans to achieve homeownership had been installing pools en masse as soon as they were handed the house keys.  And I doubted that many of these mostly entry-level homebuyers had bought in neighborhoods where homes were likely to have a pool.

So the green pool/foreclosure angle just didn't make sense.  But I was busy and didn't pursue it.

Then the November/December issue of California Real Estate, the magazine of the California Association of Realtors®, had a brief article informing its readers that "one unexpected consequence of recent foreclosures in some regions of California is the increase in neglected or 'green' swimming pools".  Okay, when the state Realtor association's official organ gives credence to this story, it's time to investigate. 

I went to the Web site mentioned in the article, www.westnilevirus.ca.gov, to get the green pool epidemic straight from the horse's mouth.  That site directed me to the site of my local mosquito abatement district, the County of Santa Clara Vector Control.  Santa Clara County is, of course, where that alleged green pool hotspot, Silicon Valley, is located.  So you'd think that the County of Santa Clara Vector Control would have a helpful warning about this burning issue right on its homepage.

And you'd be wrong.  Not only was there no mention on its home page of any upsurge in green pools, but fifteen or twenty minutes of poking around far into the dusty recesses of the site found no mention of green pools at all.  No green pool warning.  No green pool advisory.  Not even a green pool press release buried somewhere on one of their servers. 

Nothing.  Nada.  Zip.  Apparently Silicon Valley's plague of green pools was a burning non-issue, at least to the people who should know.

Well, gosh, maybe Vector Control just didn't know how to communicate to the public about potentially deadly epidemics, which is part of their job.  So I Googled a little more and found the November 8, 2007 San Jose Mercury-News article that had started this uproar.  But since I'm not a Merc subscriber, I couldn't access their story online.  I made a mental note to look it up at the library. 

Googling did give me access to a November 21 AP news story that reported a green pool "epidemic" in the Central Valley.  According to the story, "statewide data on green pools aren't available, but 'we certainly recognize that the high number of foreclosures contributed to virus transmission in urban areas this year', said Vicki Kramer, chief of the California Department of Public Health's vector borne disease section".  But before you call this proof positive that a green pool problem exists, note the phrase "data on green pools aren't available".  In other words, the Department of Public Health has no hard scientific evidence confirming a surge in green pool sightings.  It has only what's called "anecdotal evidence".  "Anecdotal evidence", sometimes also known as "gut feel", can eventually lead, through careful and diligent application of the scientific method, to the discovery of hard scientific evidence.  That's why hard scientific evidence is so hard to come by.  Anecdote and gut feel, on the other hand, are easily acquired but meaningless unless you have a newspaper to sell, an axe to grind or a need to look like an alert public servant.  Also note that there is  hard scientific evidence that reported cases of West Nile Virus statewide are down, from about 800 each in 2004 and 2005 to just 375 through November 2007.  So even though foreclosures supposedly "contributed to virus transmission" in 2007, reported cases of virus transmission in 2007 are down by more than half.  In a truly scientific mind, this might just plant a small seed of doubt about that wave of festering green pools.

By now I burned with the pure spirit of scientific inquiry, so I randomly sampled the Multiple Listing Service to see if a flood of homes with pools had hit areas of high foreclosure activity.  I chose MLS Area 4, often called East San Jose, as an area likely to have been hit hard and, sure enough, it had.  Of the whopping 714 listings active in East San Jose on November 25, 2007, an astounding 35 percent were either "REOs" (bank-owned property) or "short sales" (distressed homeowners seeking bank approval to sell for less than the loan balance).  Yikes!   

And sure enough—alert the media!—the number of short-sale and bank-owned homes with pools on the market in East San Jose had skyrocketed by as much as 150 percent  year-over-year from October 2006 to October 2007!  It's sometimes hard to spot a short sale—right now there's no handy box for the listing agent to check—but by reading between the lines it looked like only one of the 548 homes on the market in East San Jose in October 2006 had definitely been a short sale with pool, and there may have been two.  But by October 2007, three of the 895 homes on the market were definitely short sales with pools, and there may have been five. 

But before you get Vector Control on the line, bear in mind that this was an increase of just two or perhaps three short sales with pools year over year.  Even if every one of those short-sale pools was fluorescent green with algae, that's not exactly an epidemic of green pools in East San Jose.  And when we're talking about 895 homes on the market in Area 4, we're talking about a sizeable percentage of all homes on the market in San Jose.  And when we're talking about the number of homes on the market in San Jose, we're talking about a sizeable percentage of all homes on the market in Silicon Valley.  And a sizeable percentage of all homes on the market in Silicon Valley likely to be in or near foreclosure.

Still impelled by the spirit of Science, I decided to see how likely it is for an East San Jose home to have a pool.  According to RealQuest, an information aggregator using county records, Area 4 aka East San Jose has 19,879 single-family homes.  Of those 19,879 single-family homes, just 810, or 4.1 percent, have pools.  Now let's compare this to the upper-middle class enclave of Los Altos, also in Silicon Valley and just a half hour drive from East San Jose, where large lots are far more accommodating of pools.  Of the 10,707 single-family homes in Los Altos, 2886 or 27 percent have pools.  Obviously a wave of foreclosures in Los Altos could generate a multitude of green pools.  Fortunately, of the 31 active listings in that affluent community on November 25, 2007, none were bank-owned and only one was a short sale, and it didn't have a pool.

So this green pool/foreclosure angle still didn't seem likely.  But I was still busy, so I still didn't pursue it.

Then I open the Fall 2007 issue of Real Estate Bulletin, the official publication of the California Department of Real Estate, and what do I see but, yes, a huge ad asking licensees to "help prevent the spread of West Nile Virus".  According to the ad, "depressed housing markets and foreclosures have led to many neglected or 'green' pools in California".  You're directed to the same www.westnilevirus.ca.gov site the CAR article mentioned—the site that directs you to the County of Santa Clara Vector Control site.  The site that doesn't mention green pools.

This was getting—had gone way past the point of—absurd.  More Googling finally gave me online access to the November 8 Merc article that had launched this farce.

"West Nile virus linked to housing woes" blared the headline.  "As more homeowners abandon their houses, neglected swimming pools draw mosquitoes."  "In Santa Clara County, about 200 pools, green and black with algae, were identified this summer through aerial surveillance, at least three times as many as in 2006, Kriss Costa, spokeswoman for the county's vector control district (said).  'A lot of people are just walking away from their homes', Costa said."

Well, that seemed to settle it.  "At least three times as many" green pools as last year, according to "officials".  What more proof could I want?

But wait.  What's this?  "The flyovers were more frequent than last year, so it's difficult to confirm that the neglected pools were because of foreclosed or abandoned houses."  Read that sentence again, and again and yet again, because therein lies the fallacy in the green pool/foreclosure connection.

It's like this, folks.  Let's say that you're in the habit of picking up a penny whenever you see one lying on the ground.  You don't go out of your way to find that penny, but when you do, you glance around quickly to see if anyone's looking and, if the coast is clear, you pick it up.  Usually this casual looking gets you about thirty pennies a year, but now let's say you lost your job this year.  This year you have the time and inclination to spend lots more time looking for pennies, and you know what?  This year you found not just thirty but ninety pennies.  So what does this mean?  If you're an official spokesperson or a newspaper reporter, it means that more people than usual are dropping pennies.  In fact, there's an epidemic of penny dropping, which officials think may be due to an increase in the number of people suffering from neurological disorders, which in turn may be linked to global warming.  Citizens are urged to do their civic duty and report anyone seen dropping a penny.  But if you're a statistician, you say that this 300 percent increase in dropped pennies just means that anyone who spends more time looking for dropped pennies will find more dropped pennies.

Now you see why statistics professors make a cottage industry out of writing books warning us to take statistics with a large grain of salt.  I have a slim volume on my bookshelf entitled How To Lie With Statistics  that's left over from the Statistics class I took and thank you, Professor Black, for making me a slightly more informed consumer of statistics.  My local library also has at least one book on how to spot the fallacies in statistics, and yours probably does too.  Check it out.  If more people do, we may start getting news, and not just thrills and chills, from our news outlets. 

So how do you birth an urban legend?  Take a person who jumps to plausible ("data don't lie!") and vaguely statistical ("three times as many!") yet scientifically unsupported conclusions and is highly placed enough to have the ear of the media.  Take a media (please) that knows only enough about any story to know how to sell it.  Take a whole bunch of people—hurried newspaper readers, the penny-a-gross pundits who populate the blogosphere—who either aren't critical consumers of news or who willingly believe the plausible conclusion because it gives them something to pin their hopes to.  Get a few more media outlets to climb on board, either because they believe the plausible conclusion or because they'd look bad if they didn't act like they did. 

Get the snowball rolling and—voila!—another urban legend is added to the lore.  And mark my words, this one has legs.  This one will be mentioned reverently on blogs for years to come.

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