Dirty tricks of the townhouse development game

[Jim K.]

Reaching out to the experts here in tony tract-built townhouses, but this may be of interest to anyone with kids. This is part of the real estate game I know very little about.

So I have a good friend who is an anesthesiologist in Brazil, and he may be going to Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University in Providence, RI to do another residency for the next few years. Now, his brother is already there, teaching oncology. His brother lives in a 2-million-dollar McMansion in a small, affluent suburb of Providence, East Greenwich. East Greenwich is next to Warwick, a much bigger and less affluent suburb.

My friend therefore knows that the East Greenwich School District runs a very nice school district with highly rated schools, and he wants to also live in East Greenwich, to send his kid there. Accordingly, he found a (pricey) townhouse apartment development in East Greenwich and BY THE GRACE OF GOD ALMIGHTY told me about it before he committed. I know a bit about the Providence area because I used to live there, and I started investigating.

The development, in Google Maps, states that they are in East Greenwich. All their online info states that they are in East Greenwich. But once you get to the website and do a search on the address you will discover that the border between municipalities lies right on the road that the development is on. The little office of the development IS in East Greenwich. The townhouse apartments are actually in Warwick.

And the kids therefore go to a much-lower-rated elementary school in the Warwick school district. I called about this. I had to speak to two papershufflers in the development's offices before I got an administrator who grudgingly confirmed that the children who live in the development are, indeed, are sent to the Warwick school district.

The more I look at it, the more it looks like all this was intentional misdirection, to hoodwink the sort of out-of-state and foreign transplants who rent townhouses. Is this kind of address chicanery about school districts and municipalities common in the tony little townhouse game?