so I went diving in in Reader View, and here's the gist (I may embellish a little, but not much).
It's all about how the house has been neglected in various ways over the last eight years, nothing to do with it being a "suburban nightmare" while he was living there (until age 4) with his mother and father and four siblings, as the headline might have suggested. Indeed, the article refers to the place as "once-idyllic".
Having been unoccupied after a series of short-lived sales since 2016, when it changed hands for $1.4 million, the front yard's a total trash-littered mess, and the locality's been overrun with feral cats, shitting all over neighbours' gardens when they're not procreating noisily in their back yards (the cats, not the neighbours).
In 2017, the buyer in the 2016 sale, real estate developer Michael Davis, sold it to "a company named Trump Birth House, LLC for $2.14 million", then leased it back from the company for $4,000 a month and rented it out (presumably to MAGAts and other assorted idiots) for $725 a night as an Airbnb for five months. Its listing claimed Trump had been conceived in the house, and it featured a life-size cardboard cutout in the living room depicting said act (that last bit may be the slight embellishment, but you'll never know for sure unless you click through in Reader View).
The renters included parties of students and Trump supporters, who enjoyed "late night booze-fueled parties", and who wouldn't at $725 a night? On top of (or indeed, underneath) this, the basement was rented out for a while, until a "sewage problem" drove the tenant out.
In 2018, an electrical fault in the house wiped out the supply to the whole neighbourhood.
By 2019, an increasingly desperate Trump Birth House, LLC tried to auction the house to Paramount Realty USA for $2.9 million, but for some unfathomable reason, the sale didn't go ahead.
In 2021, a water pipe burst in the house's attic bathroom and flooded neighbouring dwellings, leaving the house with a tasteful addition of "hazardous mold ... from floor to ceiling".
Last year, an attempted break-in was foiled when would-be burglars couldn't get though a window and the front door. The miracle was that they could find it as the front lawn was so overgrown.
An aggrieved neighbour set up a Twitter account named "Why This 24.7?" on which they posted photos and videos of the neglected property in a probably misguided attempt to lure a more attentive buyer. One photo showed "a series of notices and citations ... posted on the door from the Department of Sanitation, Con Edison and other city offices".
Things got so bad, some of the neighbours chipped in to hire a landscaper to try to clean the outside up a bit.
The last owner allegedly never paid its property taxes, and one neighbour has an email concerning a $30,000 tax bill for them, heaven knows how.
In 2021, the same auction company started a GoFundMe campaign, "Thank You President Trump", to raise $3 million to buy the house, by now "gutted all the way down to the studs", and give it to a no doubt overjoyed Trump. They raised $8,000 toward it.
The house, seemingly now sold on again, is currently being cleared of vast amounts (11 dumpstersful so far) of debris. One neighbour, presumably not a Trump fan, said "President Trump's former house is being gutted the way he is gutting America." She then lamented the alleged sale price, as it was so low she feared it had caused her own home's value to plummet.
This whole story may be an elaborate allegory.
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