One day, I thought I would buy a house. It would be a nice house, in a nice neighborhood in a city with a mix of rich and poor places with some cultural attractions nearby. I would get a "deal" after learning about which neighborhoods and even specific blocks I wanted to live on, then leaping at the right property, the one that came on the market in just the right way, perhaps after someone had died and the heirs needed to sell quickly. I dreamed of saving for fixing the roof and putting in fruit trees and having an annual barbecue with the next door neighbors. I was waiting for the right moment in the real estate market and perhaps in my life, its stability and the assurance of a long steady next phase.
I wandered into open houses. I went to estate sales and looked at the bones of the houses they were held in. I learned about Zillow, then Trulia and Redfin and the Multiple Listing Service and looked at prices again and again. I watched the housing market explode, then implode, and started thinking about foreclosure sales, or showing up at an auction with a $400,000 bank check in hand. I went to an open house of an 1880s two family mansion on a hill above Union Square, Somerville, that hadn't had any work done to it in at least the last fifty years with peeling lead paint and broken windows and 10 tenants stuffed into tiny apartments being offered for half of what the building could be worth in good shape and sat down and saw a vision of my life for the next 30 years swallowed up into this beautiful, terrible, importantly historic building, repairing it one room at a time, living without electricity when the new system went in, freezing in the winter, ripping out the work I did in the first couple years, going deeper into debt to remediate and repaint, learning about woodworking and electrical and plumbing and loving working with my hands, ripping up the asphalt of the too big driveway and putting in shrubs then watching them grow and as I left I needed to sit down outside looking out at the street facing down the hill and just breath for a minute and try to get that beautiful, terrible future out of my head, to make sure that it wasn't going to be my own.
I look up rent vs. own calculations, the complicated ones that include taxes and repairs and the opportunity cost of not putting a down payment into the stock market for 30 years. I think about closing costs. I scoff at friends and friends of friends who are underwater on their houses. I work hard, and seek out and find a wide array of supportive literature, in believing that I don't need to own a home to be a true blue Amurrican.
I covet my friends' and friends' of friends houses, with their space and their yards and their strongly signaled dedication to particular place and community. I look up how much their houses are worth as soon as I get home from wine and cheese and wonder if I could swing the payments. I dream about buying our four unit building and living in one unit and hoping the rent covers the mortgage and maybe it's not a triple decker but it could be something a little more familiar to my Boston trained eyes than giant property management companies on the one hand and million dollar starter homes on the other. It's cheap to dream.
Yesterday's run destination: Metro Calvary Church
Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: currant scones
lunch: quesadillas
dinner: ziti with capers, cherry tomatoes, and parmesan
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