FAQ means frequently asked questions. On websites, they are a set of questions and answers.
FAQs signal poor products. They obfuscate.
FAQs are not helpful.
Not frequently asked
FAQs aren’t responsive to frequently-asked questions. FAQs are the questions someone wished people asked.
But for the sake of argument, let’s suppose your FAQ is real: it’s responsive to questions are frequently asked.
Congratulations, you’ve found a unicorn. But again, for the sake of argument, let’s pretend this unicorn is real. Why are people are frequently asking questions? Here’s why:
Your product sucks
A FAQ’s main point is papering over failure.
Good products and good documentation minimize questions.
Improve your product! Invest in eliminating user questions.
FAQs obfuscate
FAQ-style documentation obfuscates. By bloating heading length, they make it harder to find information.
Simple heading
FAQ-bloat heading
Data types
Which data types may I choose? (300% bloat)
Log in
How do I log in to AwesomeApp? (350% bloat)
Scholarships offered
What types of scholarships does State University offer? (400% bloat)
One-on-one contact always disallowed
“The Barriers to Abuse states ‘One-on-one contact between adult leaders and youth members is prohibited both inside and outside of Scouting.’ What does ‘inside and outside of Scouting’ mean?” (source) (725% bloat)
FAQs are bad habits
Sometimes good documentation is harmed by conveying it as a FAQ. This comes from a baseless belief that friendly, approachable formats are wordy or busy.
Never do this! Construct your documentation in a straightforward way.
FAQs are a last resort
If you feel you need a FAQ, do these first:
Improve your product to eliminate questions.
Improve your documentation to eliminate questions.
Do anything other than a FAQ.
If after following these steps, you still need a FAQ, then fine, do it. But only do it with a plan to eliminate it. And only do it if it’s answering questions customers are frequently asking.
The FAQ is a last resort. It makes you look bad. It needs to disappear at the earliest opportunity.
Carter Banks (BigBankz) generally conveyed truthful information on a home he walked through:
Silent Hills Explorations entered this property a few days later:
I found it! The main clues were the light-colored circle drive, that the house has two 90-degree halves that rest on the circle drive, the position of a pool in the back, and a large lot.
A major clue that limited where it could be was this:
After spending a little time scanning neighborhoods that seem to fit the bill, peek-a-boo:
The home is indeed intended to be a teardown. It was purchased by owners who want to replace it with a different house. They applied for a demolition permit. After deliberation, the Scarsdale Committee for Historic Preservation in 2020 denied a demolition permit. Among the factors in denying demolition were that the home was designed by Julius Gregory, a noted architect for the Scarsdale, NY area.
The story about the owner’s daughter committing suicide is true on its face, but it is not relevant to today. Also, the way Carter described it suggested that she mysteriously vanished. Rather, the New York Timesconveys that she left the family’s New Hampshire vacation home one day at 10:30 AM, purchased a shotgun at 12:30 PM, and was found dead just inside the Maine border at 3 PM. Her father, the stockbroker, died of a heart attack at 54 the following year. Why this lacks much relevance: It happened over 80 years ago. The daughter died in 1941, and the father died in 1942.
Surprisingly, Carter understated the house’s value a bit! Zillow says it’s worth $8,385,600. (Check out that page! It has 2019 listing photos, showing when the house was occupied.)
What you just watched is a video of an intentionally neglected home that an owner wishes to tear down.
In this video, Carter Banks (BigBankz) walks through an empty house:
Yup, I found it. In various points in the video, you can see the street number, 3290:
3290 street number
Minimal Google searching uncovered it:
The back story is simple: Raymond H. Zimmerman lived here, and he died in 2021 at age 96. It appears he had a successful career with a defense contractor and then as an entrepreneur, was active in his church, married a person of good character, and had 4 children, 9 grandchildren, and 19 great grandchildren. Astoundingly, Carter characterizes this as a “crime family”!
A pervasive theme of Carter’s videos is to build intrigue by alleging a mysterious abandonment. This house is not abandoned. It was listed as a teardown in 2021, and it was sold just a few months after Raymond’s death. Its current owner likely hasn’t gotten around to doing the teardown.
While a company named Barbara’s Rescues and Boarding is associated with the property, this company may be fictitious. A Georgia corporation search does not turn up anything, there are scant references to it online, and Carter’s walkthrough video reveals no evidence of an animal-related operation.
Digging a little more deeply on the raid, we uncover the address of this walkthrough (note: while the house’s legal street number appears to be 350, 208 also shows up in some places, and Google Maps puts both addresses on the same property) :
Now for the back story, it’s considerably different than what Carter claims.
This house was occupied by John and Marie Furiato. Marie is whose medical records you see at one point:
As Marie died in 2015, John continued occupying the house as a widower in 2018.
John and Marie got use of the house thanks to the trust of Marion Huber, who died in 2001. The trust donated the property to the New Jersey Conservation Foundation in 2006 under stipulation that a 2000 agreement be honored that allows John and Marie to occupy the house indefinitely, under certain conditions, like paying taxes, keeping it up, it being their primary residence, and more.
However, an August 2018 lawsuit filed by the foundation against John dished out some dirt (MON-C-000118-18). The suit alleges multiple violations of the 2000 agreement:
John stopped paying property taxes in 2017.
In the July 2018 police altercation, James had a “mental breakdown”. “[N]umerous canister [sic] of tear gas” were used to get James out, causing damage that went unrepaired.
John was hospitalized on the day of the police incident. It defined James as a “squatter”, which suggests John’s hospitalization is associated with a condition that would make him unable to return to the property. (Recall that John’s wife, the other party to the agreement, had already died by 2018.)
The home is “dilapidated and is otherwise in complete disrepair”.
It is also apparent that by August 2018, the month after the incident, boards appeared on the second-floor windows:
In September 2018, the judge terminated John’s interest in the property, and the court gave James specific dates to retrieve property.
Per a Monmouth County press release, the foundation reached an agreement with Monmouth County in 2019 to donate the property for the purpose of building a park; this transfer was transacted in 2020.
The transfer stipulates that the house will be torn down.
Carter uses false information or wild theories to concoct the video title and to craft his narrative:
“Abandoned”: Nope. The occupants were ejected from the property due to violations of a longstanding agreement, then it was intentionally kept vacant while it is being prepared for a new property use.
“Drug Dealers”: No evidence of drug dealing or addiction was presented. Yes, an addictive pain killer was shown in one area, and many pill bottles were on top of a dresser in John’s bedroom. But if you look closely, you can see a variety of dates on the labels, and they generally seem to go back to before Marie’s death. Those two facts, plus the nerve stimulator, plus the medical records suggest that Marie may have been suffering from a painful condition, such as cancer. If so, these drugs would have been cancer treatments or palliative care. John probably just held on to the bottles.
“Mansion”: While a large house, it is far too small to be called a mansion.
“arrested for felonies … aggravated assault”: Between the court case and news article cited above, we had a mental-health breakdown, police characterized the surrender as “peaceful”, and no charges were filed as of the arrest. (I don’t know how to reconcile “peaceful” with the use of tear gas, but that’s what the cops said, per the news article.)
Carter’s habit of conveying false information did him a disservice. This was an unusual walkthrough: It had a legitimately interesting backstory! That could have stood on its own. Instead, Carter once again crafts a distorted narrative to sell a walkthrough of left-behind junk in a house about to be ripped down.
In this video, Carter Banks walks through a mostly empty house:
This one wasn’t too hard to spot. He correctly conveyed it was in north Florida.
The main useful hints were in exterior images. At 0:19, you see that a row of fairly consistent houses is right across a striped, two-lane road:
At 0:06, we can see it’s on a long beach with three-story, multi-tenancy buildings just a few lots down, and in the very end of the view, a distance down a long and every-so-slightly-curved beach, are some taller structures:
At 0:15, we see that to the left and right of the home are a red and white roofs:
And at multiple points in the video, you can construct that the the roof will have a center section where it’s front-to-back depth is not as lenghty as the side sections.
It didn’t take much time to find it:
As usual, Carter gets his facts wrong. Let’s review his claims:
The property is worth $6.6 million dollars: FAKE. The Walton County Appraiser’s market value for the house and land is $4.7 million, which seems generous given that it had a $3.7 million sale in 2017 and is in poor shape.
Damaged in a 2014 storm: FAKE. He mentioned it was a tropical storm, so that implies a warm season storm with a deluge of rain and wind. The only major 2014 storm for this area was completely different, a January 2014 ice storm.
Two lawyers lived there: TRUE. Yes, a lawyer couple from Birmingham resided there previously.
The lawyer couple abandoned the house after the (phony) 2014 storm: FAKE. They sold it in 2017, and it was likely an ordinary sale. In a closet, you see a hanger with a cleaners name on it. It is not coincidental that this hanger is from a company in Birmingham. Also, a former owner’s name is on a mug. Finally, Google Maps Street View historic imagery suggests the house fell into disuse after 2017. The confluence of these facts suggests the home has not been used since its 2017 sale. The new (as of 2017) owners live in Kansas. I suspect that the new owners purchased the property mainly as an investment or for future use; they own two other properties in the same county under the same name.
The lawyer couple died shortly after the (phony) 2014 storm: FAKE. The husband’s obituary says he died in October 2023. The wife appears to be enjoying a quiet life.
The house is a mansion: FAKE. It’s only 3,764 square feet. That’s thousands of square feet less than a mansion.
The house will be ripped down: POSSIBLY TRUE. It is true that signs in front of the house, which date back to at least August 2023, suggest major work will commence. Supporting the teardown hypothesis is the mold and interior damage, that a door facing the gulf was left open, that the house is in poor repair, and that the house is 40 years old.
Once again, Carter misrepresents the truth, dressing up what is simply a walkthrough of something super ordinary: a couple sold a house, moved out all the belongings they cared about, and an investor sat on it for a few years.
