About 20 years ago, in the San Francisco Bay Area, my then-husband and I decided the time was right to try to buy a house. Real estate values were soaring 2-3% per month. We knew if we waited too long, we'd be priced out of the market.
After a lot of searching, we found something we could afford. I say without shame, it was a piece of shit. Less than 1000 sq. ft. Three different wallpaper designs in the kitchen. Five styles of owner-installed carpet, including red shag, brown sculptured, and pink plush. Pink marbleized plastic toilet seat. The exterior paint job on the front of the house had a completely different color scheme than the one on the back. Rotting bathroom walls. The landscaping consisted of rocks and dirt.
But it had potential, and we had imagination. We signed a contract.
Eight weeks later, when the sellers were still refusing to vacate the single bathroom for 24 hrs to allow repairs so our loan could be approved, we considered walking out on the contract. But by then, interest rates and housing prices had increased so much there was no other affordable option for us anywhere in the area. So we waited, and our agent negotiated with their agent. Two months after the scheduled closing date, we moved into our new home.
When I heard Sen. Harkin say, a few minutes ago,
What we are buying here is a modest home, not a mansion. What we are getting here is a starter home.
that really clicked for me. My experience with purchasing a starter home had so many parallels with the history of this HCR legislation:
The initial signs seemed so positive. My husband and I were newly married. Life was all about hopes and possibilities. We started out very optimistic about the kind of house we would get. Something cute, charming, in a convenient location. With so many thousands of houses to choose from, we should have no trouble finding something exactly right.
The external realities that changed the nature of the quest. In our price range, we found that the reality was . . . houses in neighborhoods where we wouldn't feel safe living. Houses that had been built or modified by self-contracting owners who clearly had no knowledge of architecture or engineering -- NOT a good idea in the earthquake-prone area in which we resided. Houses in areas where just getting to the highway during commute hours would be a grueling half-hour trek, and there was no nearby public transit.
The gradual recognition that what we needed to do was just get into SOME house, SOMEWHERE, so we could be on the winning end of the skyrocketing values as homeowners, rather than on the losing end as people trying to afford a house. We knew that in order to achieve that goal, we might end up living for a couple years in a home that we didn't like. But we compared that with the prospect of apartment-dwelling for the foreseeable future, and decided it was worth it, and besides -- once we owned the property, we could start improving it.
The extended, unpleasant, twilight-zone-like interactions with our "opponents" in the transaction -- the sellers. I really don't want to go into detail trashing them here, but some of the crap they pulled during the time we were in escrow was truly unbelievable. Even their real-estate agent admitted that they were behaving in ridiculous ways.
And yes, the justice-seeker in me wanted to walk out, wanted to scream at them, wanted to nuke the transaction and the jerks who were making it such a nightmare. But I knew that if I did that, I got no house. I could scream till I was blue in the face and everywhere else about what they OUGHT to be doing, but the difficult reality was that they weren't going to do what I wanted. Period. I had to swallow a lot of bile that I really (really, really) wanted to spew at them. But I wanted a house more.
The first night we slept in our new home (after spending a few hundred bucks to get it professionally cleaned before we could even begin moving in), we both had trouble sleeping -- wondering if we had just made the biggest mistake of our lives. We were homeowners, sure, but what did we really own? One of the ugliest pieces of real estate ever to assault human eyes. A boatload of repair and remodeling work to make it even remotely respectable.
But bit by bit, task by task, we re-made it. We landscaped. We wallpapered. We scraped until our hands were cramping, and we painted. We got a great deal on some really luxurious carpeting. We replaced the pink marbleized plastic toilet seat with wood. We put in a gorgeous front door to give it curb appeal.
By the time we had to sell it two years later because we were moving out of state, it was the charming, cozy, attractive home we had dreamed of owning. We sold it for a 35% profit.
There's a difference, I think, between people like me, who like to buy real estate that needs work, and those who want to buy something that has been completely updated and prettied up for sale. Money and time are factors in the calculaiton, of course, but fundamentally I think the difference really boils down to how much imagination a person has. When you look at a rundown house that is stylistically out-of-date and needs multiple repairs, do you see it as it is, or do you see what you can turn it into?