It’s definitely a buyer’s market out there, and the myth of a home as a financial investment has been thankfully put to rest. As property owners look for tenants in a highly competitive market the last thing they need is to end up renting to people who will decrease the value of the property, much less destroy it completely:

ARCATA, CALIF. — LaVina Collenberg thought she had ideal tenants for her tidy ranch-style home on the outskirts of this university town nestled in the redwoods of the North Coast. Then the 74-year-old widow received an urgent call last September from a neighbor, who said firefighters had descended on the house she had rented to a pleasant young man from Wisconsin.

Collenberg found her charred and sooty rental filled with grow lights and 3-foot-high marijuana plants. Seeds were germinating in the spa. Water from the growing operation had soaked through the carpeting and sub-flooring. Air vents had been cut into the new roof. A fan had fallen over, causing the fire.

“It was the first time I had been in a grow house,” Collenberg said. “I had heard about them but never thought I had one. I was completely shocked.”

Law enforcement officials estimate that as many as 1,000 of the 7,500 homes in this Humboldt County community are being used to cultivate marijuana, slashing into the housing stock, spreading building-safety problems and sowing neighborhood discord.

Indoor pot farms proliferated in recent years as California communities implemented Proposition 215, the statewide medical marijuana measure passed overwhelmingly a dozen years ago. A backlash over the effects and abuses of legally sanctioned marijuana growing has emerged in some of the most liberal parts of the state.

For example, in neighboring Mendocino County, a measure on Tuesday’s election ballot seeks to repeal a local proposition passed eight years ago that decriminalized cultivation of as many as 25 pot plants.

The experience of Arcata, a bastion of cannabis culture, reveals the unintended consequences of the 1996 Compassionate Use Act, designed to provide relief to AIDS patients, cancer victims and others.

“If the average citizen . . . could see what I see, they probably would vote against it now,” Police Chief Randy Mendosa said of Proposition 215. “We are seeing large-scale grow operations where greedy people are taking huge amounts of affordable housing and are using entire houses to grow marijuana. The going rate is $3,000 a pound [wholesale], and they are selling it and making a huge amount of money.”

State officials say such problems exist throughout the state, including Southern California, but are particularly prevalent in northwestern counties that have relatively liberal limits on possession and cultivation of medical marijuana.

“People who clearly are in it for profit see it as a loophole and have flooded into these areas from across California and the U.S.,” said Kent Shaw, assistant chief of the state Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement. “What comes along with it is criminal elements who want to come and steal marijuana,” sometimes through home invasion robberies.

Medical marijuana advocates say problems have been isolated, and they question the validity of attempts to link crime to a medicine. “Law enforcement sensationalizes a lot of the issues around growing and dispensaries,” said Kris Hermes of Americans For Safe Access.

A doctor’s recommendation is required for a medical marijuana patient to use, grow or acquire cannabis. Activists estimate there are more than 200,000 patients statewide.

In Arcata’s leafy neighborhoods, residents and officials say the telltale signs of grow houses are evident: no full-time dwellers, blacked-out windows, scruffy yards, comings and goings at night. Then there’s the skunk-like odor of marijuana and the whirring fans and electricity meters that generate thousand-dollar monthly power bills.

So many houses have been converted into pot farms that the availability of student rentals has been reduced and the community’s aura of marijuana is turning off some prospective students, said Humboldt State University President Rollin Richmond. “My own sense is that people are abusing Prop. 215 to allow them to use marijuana . . . as recreational drugs,” he said.

Arcata Mayor Mark Wheetley said marijuana growing has become a quality-of-life issue in the town of 17,000. “People from all camps say enough is enough,” he said. “It is like this renegade Wild West mentality . . . I think people want to see a greater level of control and oversight.”

Mark Sailors, 37, a medical marijuana patient and caregiver who moved here from Baltimore, said the community was overreacting. “They claim to support 215, and do not want you to have access to medicine,” he said. “It sounds like the older people . . . are afraid of the younger.”

Right Mark. They’re afraid of kids, not the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage to their property. I’d sayput the bong down but why bother?

And those high energy bills for cultivating pot hardly seems, dare I say, green? What’s more important than saving the Earth, man? Getting your weed I guess.

What bothers me is that these people could easily afford their own places to destroy, but they picked a elderly woman who will likely be unable to afford to repair the place and will thus lose what could be her only source of income. Not exactly a victimless crime.