Leaving Apartment Living For A House

 

"Side Sectional View of Tenement House, 38 Cherry Street, N.Y. THE TENEMENT HOUSES OF NEW YORK From sketches by Mr. Albert Berghaus; published in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Paper, July 1, 1865" Public domain Wikimedia Commons.

 

The one thing I enjoy about apartment living is the ease of just locking the door and leaving for a month. With a house, it is much harder to drop everything and travel for long periods. Having lived most of my life in apartments with houses beyond affordability, some have been better than others.

 In my rental life, I have had some really good rental situations where the rent was affordable and the terms honest. These situations have always been from "mom and pop" or small scale operations where the owners only had a few buildings and I had a relationship with them. In cases like the one we have lived in for the past few years, we are at the whims of corporate landlords that see us as numbers on a spreadsheet and not people. Our neighbors say the rent is going up, so it is a good time to move. Being at the whims of rents that rise with little notice and variable fees imposed on us by garbage and water use of other residents reminds me of Darth Vader speaking to Lando Calrissian in the Empire Strikes Back. Calrissian has no choice but to accept Vader's terms as the dark lord continues to alter the deal. Moving to a house, we will be at the whims of new dark lords in the form of bankers, the city and others, but at least we will have a place to call home.

 

 Renters need easier options to move into housing, but our classist system that favors the already favored, makes that kind of social mobility as hard as possible. As I have written before, we need more options for smaller, more affordable homes on smaller lots, getting away from what I call the "middle class bias" of big houses on big lots that keeps most people out of home ownership.

Right now, home prices are at an all time high because of a shortage of supply. That is great for property owners....but is it really? Do we risk another 2008 and a crash of the market. I sold my house in 2007 in part because I feared the irrational exuberance of the market at that time  as a person living mortgage payment to mortgage payment in a oversized house that was barely furnished. My fears were founded on a national level where friends in other parts of the country have taken a decade to regain equity, but North Dakota with its colonial economy of raw materials and commodities the market didn't flinch. In retrospect, I should have kept my house. If a new crash is on the way, I hope that North Dakota's economy of colonial commodities will insulate values as in 2008.