Spectrum staff writer
This is the final story in Spectrum's series on the Bryant family of Citrus Heights.
CITRUS HEIGHTS -- The nightmare of a mass eviction and searching for new living quarters is over for Troy Bryant and his family, just as the time on their 90-day notice extension was about to expire.
On June 1, the Bryants finalized a deal for a home in Citrus Heights. The ranch-style three-bedroom, two-bath home doesn't have quite the space they were used to, but this time, the displaced family isn't renting. This house is theirs.
"It's over, it's done," Troy Bryant, a 62-year-old construction contractor, said. "It's quite a different feeling when you have your own place. It's a feeling of permanency rather than going one month to the next."
Like 420 other families who were renting properties owned by Japanese billionaire Gensiro Kawamoto, the Bryants received a 30-day eviction notice at 11 a.m. on Sunday, Feb. 11, at their rental home in the Summerhill subdivision of Citrus Heights. Successful legal action extended the notice to 90 days.
Despite the efforts of area real estate agents, attorneys, consumer rights organizations and the non-profit Nehemiah Corp. to work out a deal with Kawamoto, the evicted renters in Citrus Heights, Rocklin, Orangevale and Antelope found themselves with little choice but to start packing and look for new housing in a tight market.
"We looked a lot, almost every day for several weeks," Bryant said. "Originally, we thought about and tried to buy a house two years ago. By the time we looked at several houses, we gave up because even with the rent at $1,100 a month, it was still better than spending $1,800 a month on a house that was 500 square feet less."
Bryant said time after time, they would find a suitable home, only to see it disappear from the market.
"One time we found a house that wasn't sold and my wife [Barbara] said she wanted me to look at it," Bryant said. "I went to look at it and it was sold in between the time she looked at it and the time I looked at it."
Persistence, and a little bit of luck, finally paid off.
"Barbara looked at the house we have now," Bryant said. "It needed some work and she didn't care for the way it looked, so she went out and left it. We looked some more for a couple of weeks and came back to this one.
"I didn't look at it before," he continued. "When we came back, I saw the potential with it, and with all the others we'd seen, this was, in my opinion, according to what was available, the best house on the market at that time."
The Bryants then hooked up with a real estate broker whose wife is a mortgage officer. Together, they came up with a plan to assist the Bryants with a comfortable financing plan.
"Next year, I'm going to refinance and get my payments down, take an equity loan, and move a couple of walls out and totally redo the kitchen," he said.
Bryant said the biggest problem his wife had with the house was the kitchen. Before moving in June 6, Bryant retextured the walls and repainted the interior.
"I knew we were going to move in a matter of weeks when escrow closed," Bryant said. "My wife wanted to move in on the 1st, but I talked her into waiting until the 6th. I told her, 'I've got to go in there and do some things. I can't live with it that way.' So I went in and did some major things that had to be done before we put all the furniture in."
"Waiting until the 6th pushed everything to the limit as far as our stay [at the rental home], but I managed to do it," he continued. "Escrow didn't close until the last part of May. That gave me about a week to come here and do some work."
This was the third time Bryant had been evicted from a rental property because of a pending sale. He admits, though, that this was the most stressful.
"The other times, I don't know if it was because I was younger or what, but it was not as bad," he said. "For one thing, with this move, we knew we were going to have to get a smaller house, we're getting older and we just didn't want to move. It's just too much trouble, worse than we thought it would be!"
Bryant added, however, that being older helped cope with the dilemma.
"I think the older you get, the wiser you get," he said. "My wife kind of stressed over the situation, but I didn't. It wasn't that I wasn't stressed, with me it was always like a constant nag, something on my mind all the time, something I had to deal with. I did it."
The Bryants' 12-year-old daughter, Crystal, is slowly adapting to the new neighborhood.
"She was a little insecure to begin with and wanted to go back to the other place, but she's OK with it," Bryant said.
Another downside to the eviction was the breaking up of a cohesive neighborhood. Even with many of them now scattered throughout the region, Bryant said there's "a chance" they'll stay in touch with some of their old neighbors from the Summerhill area.
"One of our neighbor families was pretty congenial. We were on the same wavelength on a lot of things and they're only a few blocks from us now," Bryant said. "As soon as we get a little more settled, we'll probably get in contact with them."
In the meantime, Bryant waits for a foot ailment to subside enough to allow him to get back to work. And, despite the initial misgivings, Barbara Bryant is slowly adapting to the new surroundings.
"I'm glad this whole thing is over with. It was kind of traumatic on the family," she said. "The new house had to kind of grow on us. We're used to it now."
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