The Homeowners: Part I

Divorcing Yourself from Dignity and Good Financial Sense

My wife Rachel and I decided we wanted to buy a house. We relocated back to the east coast and began renting in an area of New Jersey we had grown to love. Several thousand years ago when our parents bought their first homes, they would select from one of the many available homes on a quiet street, near good schools, in a nice area. Then they would—I don’t know—have a home cooked meal at the seller's dining room table and discuss child rearing and playfully compete to find out who was more proud to be an American. After a freshly baked pie was served, our parents would submit their offer of a one hundred and fifty dollar savings bond and a promise to work off the rest at a local soda shop over the summer. The seller would immediately accept with a vigorous handshake and both parties would make plans to help each other move.

We found buying a home in the present day requires a switchblade, a duffle bag filled with unmarked bills, and a willingness to sign away custody of your first born. Divorcing yourself from dignity and good financial sense, you enter the flaming pirate orgy of real estate. The location of the home and the quality of the school district are distant luxuries for buyers, who gratefully settle for a roof and a decent proximity to Target. Sellers are unseen, amorphous beings, only spoken of in hushed tones as if they are hiding behind the horrific back splashes they installed themselves. They wield the incredible power of offer-acceptance and providing the certainty of shelter. Collective standards get kneecapped, so when the real estate agent tells you the first floor bathroom is actually a hole in the floor that drops down to a bucket in the basement, your only question is whether or not the sellers are open to leaving the bucket behind.

In the great wheel of life, Rachel and I had arrived at homeownership. We’d worked hard, got married, and had a daughter. The next box to check was acquiring a home. It’s one of the last hopeful milestones before colonoscopies and writing a will. But there was no evidence this was a good idea. We were told repeatedly by family, friends, acquaintances, well meaning strangers, podcasts, google alerts, and roving gangs of financial advisors, that it was a terrible time to buy a home. We’d often hear references to a mythical time in the future when “rates would drop”—still not sure what that means, but it sounds fun.

Once The Great Dropping of Rates occurred, people other than the children of oil barons would be able to buy houses. Rachel and I could snap up the perfect three bedroom/two bath in the neighborhood of our choice. At night, snuggled in bed before our ceremonial opening of Kindles, we’d share how grateful we were to have waited to buy a home and laugh at the rubes who pulled the trigger too early and lost their shirts.

Now, I have as much financial sense as a dog tied to a parking meter outside a bank, but I’m not familiar with the price of anything of value going down. The only time I’ve seen such a thing happen was with VHS tapes. As a child at our local video rental Hits n’ Hoagies (they made big sweaty sandwiches as well) I requested my mother special order a VHS copy of the film Men At Work starring Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen. It was a comedy about two garbage men solving a murder mystery. She asked the video store clerk how much it would be, the clerk took out what looked like a phone book which listed all the titles they could special order for purchase. He told my mother it would cost $73.65. My mother and I gasped in unison and I had to steady myself against the counter. Adjusting for inflation, that would be almost $180 today.

My mother looked at me and said, “Thomas, there is no way on God’s green earth that’s happening.”

I was in way over my head.

On the ride home, with the car smelling of meatball hoagies, I was, frankly, a bit insulted. How could she believe I’d ever expect her to spend such an amount on a VHS? No matter how much I loved Emilio Estevez, it was an immoral amount of money.

Ten years later in 2001, Hits n’ Hoagies was long gone, and the entire town got their rentals from Blockbuster. Upon entering, Blockbuster had bins of VHS tapes that looked as if they’d been poured in. There was no organization and the titles were not of long forgotten films, they were all fairly recent and cost only a dollar or two. The price of VHS tapes dropped considerably because no one wanted them anymore—excluding myself, I mean, a VHS copy of the Russell Crowe and Megan Ryan film Proof of Life costing only a dollar? I’ll take it!

But unlike the VHS, I can’t foresee the cost of homes going down in any meaningful way. No one needs a VHS copy of the film Wonder Boys starring Michael Douglas and Katie Holmes, but they will always need a place to sleep and raise a family. And once that place is deemed a good place to live, barring a catastrophic event, the price rarely goes anywhere but up. Speaking of catastrophic events, when looking to buy a home, it is amazing how often you ruminate about a catastrophe lowering prices or, during more existential moments, rendering the need for a home obsolete.

As renters for the past twenty years, we had no idea how to buy a home. If a house cost two hundred thousand dollars, I assumed the buyer provided a check for two hundred thousand dollars and signed a single sheet of paper that said, This house is mine now. Since we did not have access to six figure sums, Rachel and I had grown accustomed to the drifter lifestyle of the renter. With a month’s notice, our little circus could leave town for greener pastures. Hole in the wall? Not our problem, man. Garbage disposal on the fritz? Who cares, we’ll scrape our dishes into the trash, dude. Putting down roots and developing a meaningful connection with one’s community? Go eat a fart sandwich, hippy!

When we relocated from California to New Jersey, we moved into the rowhome of old family friends. Esther and Erick had known me since I was a little boy and this was a house they had lived in for several years, done many improvements on, and were now renting. We were their first tenants. Our experience with landlords in the past was adversarial. If you had limited financial means and rented in a major city, you are no stranger to extortion, scams, theft, fraud, and criminal negligence. Due to my fear of eviction and miscreant lifestyle, I always accepted such treatment, assuming if you live in a shithole you’ll be treated like shit. So when some Russian guy decided I needed to pay him twenty bucks a month to keep my parking space, I paid him. Hell, I even made small talk with the guy because I was worried he didn’t like me.

Rachel on the other hand accepted no such treatment. She once lived in a rent controlled basement apartment in Manhattan. Her landlords wanted her to move out so they could raise the rent. One day a pipe mysteriously burst and her apartment began to fill with water. When the landlord tried to get her to leave before the fire department arrived, Rachel sat at her little Ikea kitchen table and told them, “I don’t mind the water.”

When we moved in together in California, she had the landlords on speed dial and tenants rights as an open tab on her phone. By some miracle, she had them replace all the carpets in our apartment free of charge, via a loophole she had found on a pdf downloaded from the city hall website. When they tried to increase our security deposit, she told them “That’s Illegal.” She really said it to them over the phone, she said, “That’s illegal.” And you know what? They backed down and apologized. It was like moving in with Che Guevara. While I didn’t want to rock the boat, Rachel hopped into the boat and did an Irish jig to a chorus of bucket drummers. Before we left that apartment to move back east, they hand delivered our security deposit directly to Rachel, as if to say, “Ma’am, we’re not lookin’ for any trouble.”

We were like chimps rescued from a medical testing facility when we moved into our rental in New Jersey. All we’d known was pain when it came to landlords, and Esther and Erick treated us like their own children. They would call us to see how we were doing and if we needed anything, they gave us a gift card to a local restaurant, they practically tucked us in at night and whispered “you’re safe now” before giving us a gentle kiss on the forehead. At one point, there was a minor plumbing issue and I called Erick. He arrived at our door within a half-hour—a plumber at his side—and the issue was resolved by that night. To put this into context, I had a sink begin to uncontrollably flood the kitchen of an apartment in Queens. I called the landlord and he arrived two hours later and handed me a fistful of adult diapers and suggested I use them to clean up the mess.

It didn’t take us long to fall in love with the small town in southern New Jersey we were renting in. After a year or so, we wanted to become permanent residents. The process of buying a home was theoretical to me, like time travel or parallel universes. I knew it could maybe be done in theory, but the fundamentals sounded very complicated and annoying. After some googling and texting with homeowner friends, I was given the name of a mortgage broker in the area that came highly recommended. His name was Henrik and he had an accent that oscillated between sounding like one of my cousins from Staten Island and the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard. He was very kind and knowledgeable about mortgages.

He suggested we start the pre-approval process to find out the size of the loan we’d be eligible for. This required answering dozens of questions about our finances. When you don’t have a lot of money, you rarely find yourself having to discuss finances with, well, anyone. There’s just not much to discuss. The same way when I pull up in my Honda Civic, no one is asking what kind of muscle is under the hood. The assumption is, you know, we’re all doing our best. But there I was getting financially down and dirty with Henrik, wildly uncomfortable and sweating profusely. I’d have been more comfortable having an open forum about masturbation habits with my extended family than diving into my debt to income ratios with a stranger. But we got through it, I asked for a cigarette, and he was able to give us an estimate on what we could afford.

“So no one actually has the money to buy a house, right?” I asked my friend Ryan as our kids ran around the playground a few days later. He had bought a house the year before.

“No, nobody has the money. It's all mortgages.” He answered like a grizzled veteran. “It’s all imaginary.”

Fortified with our estimated loan amount, Rachel and I glued ourselves to the Zillow app. If you are unfamiliar, Zillow is a real estate app that facilitates the judgment of yourself and the homes of strangers across the country. From the comfort of your couch, you can ruthlessly judge the kitchen of some yahoo trying to sell their home in another state. From the waiting room of your dentist’s office, you can experience the profound regret of not having the forethought to buy a house when you were twelve years old. From an extended seating on the toilet, you can take a virtual tour of the house you grew up in, only to find the people trying to sell it have a couch…in the kitchen. Frankly, I’d rather see a fully functioning meth lab in my childhood kitchen than a couch.

Hillbillys.

As we first got on the app, inventory was limited and out of reach. As if the app was saying, “You know the area you wanna live in? Keep dreaming, doofus! No room at the inn for hobos like you! You know the area that you and your wife considered moving to if you couldn’t find anything where you really wanted to live, kinda like a safety school? * fart noise * Nice try, asshole! You can’t afford to live there either! You know the area you’d be scared to live in that doesn't even have schools or a Target? You could maybe afford a one bedroom/no bath located on a traffic island.

Our discouragement turned philosophical as we considered if we really needed to own a house. I mean, does anyone really own anything? Can you own a sunset? Can you own the wind? I began to google things like “benefits of being a renter for life” and “better to rent and not own right?” and “how to convince my wife we never need to own a house”. During this period, Rachel and I decided to just set the whole search aside, maybe it wasn’t time for us to buy a house, maybe it never would be. We loved the house we were renting, and Ester and Erick weren’t going to be kicking us out anytime soon, so we put it out of our minds. But children have the tendency to grow, and although the house was still the perfect size for our family, as our daughter turned three years old, it was becoming obvious we would need a little more space soon.

Spring lumbered its way through winter, and we began to get more and more alerts of houses going up for sale in our area. Most of them were outside of our price range, but there were a few that with a little sacrifice, like, what if everyone in our family chose one or maybe two days a week when they didn’t eat but could drink all the water they wanted, we could maybe make an offer.

Most of the houses for sale on Zillow have photos taken by professional photographers. They can make any home look spacious and filled with natural light. Since it’s a sellers’ market, many of the homes in our price range had photos taken by the sellers themselves, who preferred the crime scene style of photography. I’m all for saving money and doing things yourself, but if you're trying to sell your home, maybe photos of the kitchen shouldn’t have dishes in the sink and loose food on the counters. Photos of the living room should help me imagine Christmas morning there, and should probably exclude an oversized man watching television. Bedrooms are very important to buyers, so if you absolutely can’t make your bed for the photo, at least remove the funeral pyre of clothing heaped on it. And I know bathrooms have mirrors, but you don’t have to be Annie Leibovitz to photograph a bathroom so we don’t see your reflection in the mirror, it really draws the eye.

The hastily taken photos gave the impression the seller decided to put their home on the market in the same way someone might decide to order a pizza rather than make dinner.

But at the very least, you could see the inside of the house. There were other homes that only provided a single poorly lit photo of the front of the house. The realtor’s caption may as well have read, “Eleven bodies found in the basement. Needs a little TLC ;-)”.

After our daughter went to bed, Rachel and I would sit on our phones sending each other links to different houses. Some were just to make each other laugh, but others we actually liked and wanted to see in person. There was hope in the air as it came time for our first showing.

(To be continued in The Homeowners: Part II)