You, too, can be the owner of your very own home in Silicon Valley, worth $500,000, complete with an Italian designed dining room set, leather couches, a 1990 Honda Accord and $10,000 cash -- for free, the San Jose Mercury News reports.
"Where do I sign up," you ask?
Before you agree to this deal, here's the catch -- there's no land on which to put the 40-year-old, 2,200-square-foot house.
Ali Moghaddam, the 44-year-old owner of Mountain View, Calif.-based Compuwise, is giving the house to charity because he wants to build a bigger house, but doesn't want to tear down a house when he could give it to someone. He'd like a charity to come take it away -- he'd pitch in $15,000 of the moving costs -- and convert the home into a haven for homeless children, the Mercury News reports.
The problem is moving the house is costly and difficult. The complex procedure often requires removing power lines and trees, and transporting the house in the dead of night, something few charities are willing to take on.
Giving away houses has become fashionable in wealthy Silicon Valley. Successful residents knock down perfectly good houses to create space for larger homes, while thousands of other families in the region can't afford their first home, the newspaper reports.
The donation also allows the wealthy to get rid of their houses without paying demolition costs, and they get tax breaks. Moghaddam admits those breaks are a motivation, but it is also a matter of compassion.
He told the newspaper he knows what it is like to be poor. Moghaddam grew up impoverished in Iran, raised by his aunt. She took care of him and paid his way through college, but Moghaddam never felt like he had a home of his own.
"When I was in college, I had one pair of pants, one shirt -- that's it," he said.
Giving away a home without land isn't much help to local nonprofits, which are already bogged down by the vast number of people without permanent addresses. Having to stop and find a way and the money to move a house is a distraction, the newspaper reports.
To contact Ali Moghaddam about his house, call Compuwise at (408) 437-0304. To contact the San Jose Redevelopment Agency about its homes, call (408) 277-4744.
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