They’re baaaack!  A plague of those creepy crawly Mormon crickets are chewing their way through Nevada and are headed our way.  Native Americans long valued these ugly bugs for their nutritional value, herding them to gather to roast and grind into a flour of sorts making edible cakes of sorts that pioneers called “desert fruitcakes”.

If you’re not a native Utahn you may not have heard the famous tale of the 1848 cricket invasion. The newly arrived Mormons had barely been in the Salt Lake Valley for a year and had worked hard and fast to plant and raise crops. The late harvest that first year was bleak and spring the following year had late frosts that destroyed the second planting season. Sometime during their second summer here black clouds of these kinda scary looking bugs landed and crawled and chewed their way to the gardens of the saints, threatening to wipe out major food sources. This creature is known to travel in huge swarms and will eat all plant material in their path. The story goes that the settlers prayed for a miracle and sure enough a huge flock of seagulls came and ate all the bugs, saving crops. What is now known as the “Miracle of the Gulls” is mostly factual and it is why the seagull (actually the California Gull) is the state bird of Utah. These kinds of gulls are a desert bird and have been in Utah for centuries. They certainly didn’t eat all the crickets and damage to the crops also happened because there was a drought going on in the state those years.

White folk aren’t known to eat bugs. I’ve never seen any historical records that Utah pioneers ate these crickets, but frankly, they should have!  Sun dried and ground up, crickets have 60% protein, 10% carbs and around 3,000 calories per kilogram. Nowadays you can buy ‘3 Cricketeers’ dark chocolate candy bars, Cricket Crunch Bars, Chocolate Chip Cricket Cookie Mix with Cricket Flour, dried edible bugs “Crick-ettes’ flavored with salt and vinegar, sour cream and onion or bacon and cheese flavor and Entolife brand dried crickets form Maine flavored with chocolate and coffee or sriracha. Silly pioneers! We could have had our famous Utah funeral potatoes with dried bugs mixed in or even our office state snack (Green Jello) with crickets suspended in Jello. As an aside, Bill Cosby came to our Utah state Senate in 2001 to encourage legislators to make Jello our official snack.

Elko, Nevada is under siege with millions of bugs and they are headed here. Twenty years ago, almost 2.5 million acres were infested with them in Utah, and Tooele County was one of the worst-hit areas. They may be part of the food chain but they are smelly and BUG-ly!

The National Assn. of REALTORS published data last month showing that SLC homeowners gained an average of $238,240 in equity in the past decade. The report added that almost 72% of Salt Lake’s citizens own their own home. This is GREAT if you actually own, rather than rent because it’s like having a savings account that you can draw on or build upon over the years. This is a national trend for homeowner equity and it’s why we as REALTORS try daily to encourage people to buy rather than rent if possible. Besides building equity owning a home has tax advantages as mortgage interest is one of the few write offs the IRS allows for a single or couple without children. That write off can save tens of thousands of dollars each year in taxes! I always suggest for folks who don’t currently own and who file an easy return to take it out and make a copy so you can scrawl on the copy. Then, look for the ‘mortgage deduction’ section of the easy form and add in, say $2500 X12, which might be interest you pay on your loan for a year = $30,000. That alone is quite a deduction and look how it changes what you may get back from the IRS!

Utah has a nonprofit called the Perpetual Housing Fund that wants to turn renters into owners. Federal subsidies (in the form of IRS mortgage interest deductions) have long been used as a vehicle to encourage homeownership for Americans because they’re effective. As the opportunity for homeownership disappears, the majority of the population is being left behind—more specifically, the portion of the population that didn’t get into a home before 2020. Their idea is simply to build apartments and then share in the equity with the renters to save to purchase later. PHF says, “75% of the annual cashflow, asset appreciation, and debt reduction generated by our projects will be distributed into the hands of our tenants. There are no commitments and no time limits. The longer they stay the more they earn—these funds can be used to fund a small business, go back to school, or put a down payment on a property of their own.”

Basically you rent, get a share of the profits of the apartment building and then can use your new found wealth to put as a down payment to buy a condo or home. You could also use the profits in case of a medical emergency or even start a small business. Some of the buildings proposed would be condos and so renters, if they liked the place they lived in might be able to purchase that unit or another in the building. For more information go to perpetualhousingfund.org. If you’re interested in leasing a PHF property, check for more information or sign up to be among the first to know when thier projects begin accepting applications.