by Meghan Daum
Finally, as though I realized I needed to spend more quality time with my house, I broke up with the tall, light-haired man (he was hardly surprised; in fact, I daresay he was relieved). I did this two days after my thirty-fourth birthday. I came very close to doing it on my thirty-fourth birthday, to simply getting up and walking out of the restaurant he’d insisted on taking me to even though I’d wanted to go elsewhere (I can’t remember the details, though I’m afraid something like “Mars in Capricorn” might have factored into his argument), but I restrained myself out of politeness. I also came close to breaking up with him the next day but did not do so because it was Valentine’s Day and I didn’t want to be vile.
You’d think by age thirty-four a person would have figured out that there’s nothing humane about dumping someone on February 15 rather than on February 14. You’d think that after thirty-four years of having a February 13 birthday, I would have realized that if I’m not particularly enthused about the person I’m dating, it’s best to dispatch with him by Martin Luther King Day. You’d think these things, but somehow for me that year any wisdom I’d acquired over time had taken a sabbatical and sent a tenebrous inertia in its place. If I was apathetic about dumping Tall, Light-Haired, I was equally apathetic in other areas, too. In fact, unless it involved home decor, home improvement, or thinking about and looking at other houses, I wasn’t much up for it.
Preposterously, I had spent the holiday season and early part of the year consumed with the hypothetical notion of renovating the Silver Lake house (surely walls could be knocked down, the kitchen expanded, a bathroom added). I’d rationalized the fixation by making secret plans to buy the property, even though it wasn’t for sale. When the plans became so evolved that I actually called my landlady and asked if she’d entertain an offer, her response—that she wouldn’t consider anything less than $1 million—managed to send me into convulsions. I don’t remember much about this time in my life, but I do remember crying so hard about my inability to buy the Silver Lake house that my jaw ached the next day. Worse, I woke up to what at the time felt like the saddest scene in the world: a beautiful house that suddenly seems unbeautiful because the person living in it doesn’t own it and never will. As though I’d been transported back to the apartment on West 100th Street, which had similarly delighted me until it became clear that I’d never live there without roommates, the Silver Lake house now felt like a way station, the architectural equivalent of a lover you take until you can find someone to actually love. Realizing that my affections for it ran in inverse proportion to my ability to hire a contractor and alter it, I decided it was time to move on. Now, however, the move would be final. I would stop being a house slut. I would stop living in houses and leaving them. I would buy something and stay there. Preferably immediately and preferably forever.
· · ·
It was, by now, 2004. We were not at the apogee of the market, but we were getting there. The way I’ve always imagined it is this: if the real estate bubble were a distended piece of chewing gum in the mouth of a teenage girl, it would have been about the size of a lemon at that point—formidable but not out of control. By early 2005 the bubble would have covered her nose and eyes, and by the end of that year it would have been as big as her head. By 2007 it would have deflated slightly, and by 2008 it would have popped and been all over her face. By 2009 she’d have choked and died on the gum, but let’s not go there now.
Instead, let’s remember 2004. Money was everywhere: talk of it, displays of it, envy of those who had it, and pity for those who didn’t. In the spring of 2004, you could find a thirty-year fixed interest rate of 5 percent. Adjustable-rate loans were, of course, practically falling off trucks—not just shiny, new expensive trucks but old, beat-up trucks, garbage trucks, even. People were paying $600,000 or $700,000 for properties that, four years earlier, would have been worth $200,000. People were taking out low-interest loans for $700,000, buying houses for $550,000, and using the difference to buy Range Rovers and vacations in Anguilla.
As high as the housing prices were, everyone knew they were only going to get higher. People who already owned knew their asset values were only going up, and people who didn’t own but wanted to knew their chances of getting into the market were only going down. Terrified of getting left behind, first-time buyers grabbed on to those prices as though clinging to an aircraft carrying refugees out of the jungle. For my part, I was sure that if I didn’t get in quickly, I wouldn’t get in at all. In Los Angeles, dilapidated hovels in sketchy neighborhoods were garnering multiple offers within hours of being listed. Adjustable mortgages and record-low interest rates aside, “middle class” houses (those with three bedrooms) were now available only to the rich. Moreover, as though the nation’s major religions had coalesced into a single doctrine and formed a cult of real estate, no one seemed able or willing to speak of any other subject. If there were major news events going on, I cannot recall them now. If there was anyone from any walk of life who did not appear to have some kind of stake in this gamble, I didn’t know the person. My hairdresser, various yoga teachers, and of course my dental hygienist: they all seemed engaged in a constant stream of chatter about granite countertops or closing costs, loans or reverse mortgages or termite inspections.
Because of all this—and also because perhaps no one on earth was as predisposed to joining in on this craziness as I was—I developed a brainsickness that would last well into the following year. It’s difficult to talk about this phase without sounding hyperbolic, but the alternative—dullness born of lethargy—is worse. I know this because I had two speeds at the time: urgency and apathy. That is to say, I was either thinking and talking in such exaggerations that I didn’t seem quite sane (“I will literally die if I don’t find a house by June;” “that Craftsman went for $200,000 over the asking price, it’s an apocalypse!”) or sprawled out on the couch unable to face anything that didn’t involve searching the Multiple Listing Service.
And then there were the TV shows. Trading Spaces, Design on a Dime, House Hunters, and Debbie Travis’s Facelift. In the wake of the boom, the Home & Garden TV cable channel, which actually started back in 1994, had exploded in popularity, offering a round-the-clock infusion of house porn for wretches like me. I watched, of course. Like just about anyone with a pulse (any woman with a pulse), I couldn’t get enough HGTV (and the competing shelter smut on Bravo and Lifetime and TLC) in 2004. I watched, even though it ultimately left me cold. Actually, it left me worse than cold. It made me feel emotionally bloated, as though I’d gorged myself on Styrofoam, as though I’d tried to eat insulation.
That’s because many of the houses looked as if they were made of Styrofoam. With rare exceptions, the programs struck me as guided tours of ordinariness, fonts of mediocre ideas disguised as “eclecticism.” Occasionally, something would strike my fancy—a casbah-inspired pergola on a Brooklyn deck, a genuinely innovative window treatment, an episode of the international edition of House Hunters featuring a British couple shopping for an old country manor—but for the most part the whole enterprise felt hollow, desensitizing, like literal porn. It depressed me to think about how many Realtors and contractors and decorators and even carpenters—people whose professions once existed outside the realm of media—now felt compelled to try to make it in show business. It depressed me even more that regular people would sacrifice their privacy, their dignity, and often the (entirely decent) original floor plans of their houses in the hopes that their marriages would be saved or their lives elevated by a bossy, telegenic decorator. The fact that I watched it all anyway, the fact that innocent channel surfing often resulted in three hours lost to the blandishments of wall stencils and beaded throw pillows, only added to the dueling forces of my house obsession and my growing self-disgust with that obsession. If only I’d known it was just the beginning of both.
Within twenty-four hours of being told the Silver Lake house wasn’t for sale, I’d called a Realtor and asked him to show me what was. The
Realtor, a former stand-up comedian named Michael who’d come highly recommended by a Vassar friend, informed me that I was “right on the edge of getting priced out of the market.” What that meant was that most small, two-bedroom “starter homes” in the area were going for around $500,000. I could afford up to about $400,000. If I was going to get in on the action, Michael told me as he zipped me around my desired neighborhoods in his convertible Audi TT, I needed to act fast.
For the record, Michael was not a pushy guy. Despite the fervor of the moment, no one was pressuring me to do anything, except maybe subconsciously my mother, whose hardwired real estate obsession was finding new life in my own (from three thousand miles away, she e-mailed me listings for “affordable” places in neighborhoods she didn’t realize probably had more guns than mailboxes). The mortgage broker I’d retained didn’t steer me toward a “creative financing plan,” nor did anyone try to get me to consider any house I didn’t like. For one thing, they didn’t have to; for every house for sale, there were hundreds of potential buyers. For another, I suspect there was something about my quest that was slightly perplexing and therefore vulnerable to not being taken entirely seriously.
Sure, I wasn’t the only unmarried woman in the market for a house (single women were and still are the nation’s second-largest group of first-time home buyers after married couples). I wasn’t even the only single woman in a so-called creative profession who aspired to property ownership. But in a city where the majority of “creative” people who can afford a house have made their money writing or directing or acting in television shows about psychic police detectives or movies where the romantic leads fall in love during a montage sequence featuring paddleboats and miniature golf, saying, “I’m a freelance print journalist and I’d like a loan for $350,000” is a little bit questionable. It was not lost on me that at the time I began working with a Realtor, my professional projects consisted of a low-paying magazine essay and a novel on which I’d been for five months. When my mortgage broker asked if I had any steady paying work on the horizon, I proudly told him I’d accepted a one-semester guest professorship at an art college in the fall for $2,200. When he asked me what kind of “loan product” for what kind of property I wanted, I said all I was asking for was a plain and simple thirty-year fixed loan and a nice, nondecrepit house in an unhorrendous neighborhood for $400,000 or less.
Apparently, I was asking way too much. For all of Michael’s supposed comic talents (he had, he told me, actually made money as a stand-up), there was really nothing humorous about our excursions. Though he did his best to lighten the mood—“you could stage a production of Noises Off in here,” he said of a begrimed shack that had about six more doors than it should have—the quality of the inventory in my price range was so lacking that levity seemed as out of reach as a decent house. Michael took me to see broken bungalows that were sliding down hills, ranch houses whose kitchens and bathrooms must have been designed by children, and at least one place that suggested Ted Kaczynski had kept a second home near a needle-strewn underpass of the Hollywood Freeway. We looked at houses that would have required me to pay $3,000—an amount that was both annoyingly large and criminally small—to relocate the large Latino families living inside them, which was, for me, a deal breaker. In many cases, when I say “looked,” I mean “drove by,” since, at the time, if a property was occupied by renters, you could not actually go inside until you’d made an offer and had it accepted (in other words, filled out the paperwork and handed over earnest money in the $30,000 range). We were occasionally able to get around this by peeking in the windows or just pushing a decaying door open, like cops on one of those TV dramas created by people who could afford better houses. Often there were no tenants at all, merely doleful evidence of their prior existence—dirty plastic kids’ toys, empty one-liter Pepsi bottles, tubs of Spackle pried open and then abandoned as though the house had looked in the face of whoever thought he could patch up the holes and just laughed.
“This is starting to make me lose my will to live,” I said to Michael one afternoon as we climbed (he in his Italian shoes, me in my flip-flops) over a chicken-wire fence in an “up and coming” neighborhood.
“I’m just respecting your price point,” he said. “If you want, we can see some properties that represent more of a stretch for you, but I don’t want you to end up disappointed.”
This is the classic Realtor trick, of course. At least in a brisk market. They show you crappy stuff that makes you want to blow your brains out, and then, after you’ve lowered your standards to roughly the level of the earth’s crust, they start ratcheting you back up again. In fairness to Michael, whom I’d grown fond of despite the guided tours of hell he called house hunting, I’m sure he was, indeed, respecting my price point. But I don’t think he was surprised when, after touring an open house whose listing agent was legally required to hand out flyers explaining that there was a psychiatric hospital less than two hundred feet away—“maybe you could just live in the hospital,” Michael suggested—I clenched my jaw and said, “Okay, maybe I can go up to $420,000.”
The week we started looking at nicer properties also happened to be a week that my mother came to visit. Naturally, she was elated by our schedule of activities. She’d visited me a handful of times over the course of my various moves, but she’d never had so much fun as now. Clearly, she’d missed her calling as a Realtor, maybe even as a used-car salesman. While touring open houses on a Sunday afternoon, she didn’t hesitate to make decorating and furniture layout suggestions for houses that were $100,000 or $200,000 more than I could afford. “Oh Meghan, this is your house!” she exclaimed as we entered a pristinely restored three-bedroom Craftsman in the neighborhood that had become my first choice, the hills of Echo Park, which lay just east of Silver Lake. “You could put your desk right here! And look at this yard! Rex will love it!” The house was listed at $627,000. It eventually sold for $779,000.
Other houses my mother declared perfect for me were a hillside contemporary for $889,000, another Craftsman with a smaller yard but a built-in breakfast table and benches for $603,999, and a Victorian bungalow with a picket fence and restored woodwork and wainscoting in the kitchen for $527,000. The Victorian really got to me, so much so that I still think about it today. It was a unique, adorable house—not unlike the Silver Lake place, though more logically laid out—in a not altogether safe neighborhood. Low-rent apartment buildings interspersed themselves between small wooden clapboard or Spanish stucco houses, some well kept, some not. The area was a known crime zone, and although you’d think that would have been enough to put me off, the house struck me as a big valentine made of wood and slate and glass. If I closed my eyes, it seemed literally heart shaped. I wanted to hug it.
It needed work. Of course it did; could I have loved it otherwise? The plumbing, evidently, was iffy, and the garage appeared rather corroded. There was no backyard, and the tract of grass inside the picket fence was far too close to the street to represent any kind of sanctuary. Still, I stewed over the place for a week (an eternity in that market), weighing the wainscoting against the plumbing, the restored woodwork against the bad garage, the stained-glass window in the second-floor garret versus the fact that, according to a lengthy article in the alternative weekly newspaper, local hoodlums had been responsible for several drive-by shootings and a car bomb last year. I then remembered that the place was $527,000 and therefore $107,000 beyond my budget. When I broke the news to my mother, the car bomb detail softened the blow considerably.
“When you find the right house you’ll know it,” she said.
She was right. I did always know when I found the right house, but thanks to my new practice of shopping above my means, I could never afford it. I found a two-bedroom Mediterranean with a detached office that was right for me, a storybook cottage in the hills above Silver Lake Reservoir that was right for me, and, most shatteringly, a rustic, bohemian Craftsman–cum–hunter’s cabin with skylights, sleeping lofts
, and a pool that, with about $300,000 worth of foundation work, would have been more right for me than my very own skin. Unfortunately, all of these properties turned out to be right for people with about twice as much money to spend as I had.
True scholarship requires obsession, baseless fixation, an absorption with the kinds of minutiae that, to the average person, holds about as much interest as varieties of chimney soot. Given the consumerist, manic, solipsistic nature of this pursuit, there are of course countless Internet enablers to choose from. Not just Craigslist, but also realtor.com, MLS.com, ziprealty.com, redfin.com, and my own imaginary start-up icantevengetup togotothebathroombecausethenexthousemightbeit.com. I looked at realtor.com so frequently it appeared on my computer browser if I so much as typed the letter r, my old standbys like radiodiaries.com and rollingstone.com fading into the background like a pet forgotten because of a new baby. Quickly exhausting the listings in my immediate vicinity, I eventually became expert on home values elsewhere, taking a curious solace in my discovery that a three-bedroom, two-bathroom Craftsman back in Lincoln was merely $110,000 and, even though I have no connection to the place, a similar house in Portland, Oregon, could be had for $340,000. Maybe I liked knowing that should the Southern California housing market ultimately elude me, I could always go someplace where prices were on a human scale. Maybe I also liked the reminder that as “basic” a right of passage as buying a home was supposed to be, some regions were more basic than others. In most moments, I knew it wasn’t just a house I was after but, rather, proof of my existence. The house was not just a house but also an I.D. badge for adulthood, for personhood even. It was the only thing that would make me desirable, credible, even human.