We started looking before our landlord kicked us out, but it was tentatively. To buy a house, in those days, still seemed an adult absurdity and we felt the pressure of our previous movement pushing against the idea. When I looked at houses, stuck into their lawns, tightly pushed up against the other homes on the street, their doorways and hearths spilling age and insignificance, I continually balked. Besides, I thought. These places are terrible. They were all build in the 60s and have been steadily cultivating mold in the walls ever since. The days are long past when I would move into an apartment in such terrible condition. And If I’m figuring right, we’d never be able to do anything but pay the mortgage. No “projects” neither big nor small. It would be nothing but work and live in a place more like an old garage than a home.
And so our attempts were half-hearted, but something nagged at me and Zillow made it easy to feel like there was some of a game to the effort. Neighborhoods waxed and waned in terms of desirability. One night, I stood outside a new listing in Sunnybrae and a curious neighbor told me—for good or ill—that they were nearly blighted by bears. After that, I was caught on the idea of living there until there was a rash of cash-only teardowns that seemed almost within reach in Greenview. If we bought one for 300K, we might spare enough savings to prop it up against the wind; perhaps such a place, too could serve as a place to grow up for our daughter. Modest, damp, square backyards with stunted trees: in short, a place already mature with nostalgia enough for several children to remember bare feet on the cold spring earth, Christmas mornings in a fairy light living room, the sound of someone doing the dishes as you fall asleep, dust motes floating around neglected windows, streaked with nose oil from rainy day watchings.
But, again, these places were always beyond our commitment level. We may have sabotaged ourselves with a realtor—which I kept embarrassingly pronouncing as “realAtor”—who wasn’t very committed to our cause. “Put in your highest possible price” being her only token of advice, which, given the market, was about the only thing about the whole process which was obvious to me already. And everyone else kept telling us it was all about the letter. I wrote a real tearjeaker, but I don’t anyone ever read it. When they sat down to review offers the first question must have been, “what’s our highest cash offer?” And the second question must’ve been, “Are they ready to close now?” I’m sure my great letter, along with so many others, settled in the bottom of many a waste basket; there was a picture of our family at the bottom of it. We were hugging and smiling.
To buy one of these mold-fraught rattletraps, stuck in the mud, needing new roofs, which all sold for 100K over asking in cash seemed a very desperate action until our landlord, upon learning my wife and I intended to have another kid in 7 months—I had waited to tell him until I was sure—gave us the boot. The bastard. Not that it was any of his goddamn business what we did anyway, but, well, one tries to be sociable when living in one’s landlord’s backyard.
A note of advice I will give to my kids: never, ever, live in in anyone’s backyard. It is surely the worse kind of trap for assertiveness if one has a kind disposition. I forfeited all my rights because I wanted to be friendly with someone I thought was doing us a favor.
Not that I don’t understand his logic now. He wanted to help out. When we moved in, we were a starry-eyed couple just looking for a place to live. But when we kept reproducing and, in his eyes, taking advantage of his kindness by doing things such as putting a coat rack on the wall without his permission, we became volatile agents in his property; the problem was, he never told us this. It must’ve weighed on his mind day and night. Watching us. Wondering when in god’s name we’d leave. And what sort of godawful damage the rugrats would inflict on this tidy backyard cabin before they had reached 18. What he didn’t understand, was that we had been trying to buy a house, trying to move out, but, dammit, we were being careful, in today’s housing market, being careful meant the total forfeiture of time. And, in the meantime, don’t forget, we were saving money. The place was only $950. Why would we move to another rental for at least a $500 increase when the goal was to save money for the house?
Well, we had to do it anyway, a rainy February, mostly at night, almost furtively. A packed our boxes into our Honda and drove them across town, each night taking a few loads until we were out. And, a couple of months later, we brought our son home to the new apartment; my daughter, two years old, held him on the couch and beamed at him. She’s been beaming at him since. And, no matter what happens, the place in my memory where that happens will be my home. The nicest apartment I’d ever had, but an apartment nonetheless, subject to rent increases, and the noise of neighbors.
Still property taxes increase, don’t they? In a house, you can still have noisy neighbors. And there is no getting away from them when you own something next to each other. With the apartment, flight is always a possibility. And a possibility that was worth a lot of money to me. Especially after I was passed over for the full-time, tenure-track position and the topic of moving became, if not more acceptable, at least more necessary to my wife.
But when the interviews came from Seattle, Portland, Santa Rosa, the situation was everywhere the same. The only place where we could buy a house was Portland, but despite the relatively astounding number of listings, who knew what that market was like. Luckily, the town was plagued with very bad PR in 2021 when the nation was convinced anarchists had taken over, booted out all the cops, and condemned themselves to being prey for earnest criminals who almost lie in wait for such situations.
Ah, what crap, but it probably brought the cost of homes down, speculators, who don’t go to places but watch the news, would be wary.
I didn’t get the job, though. When the feedback came from the interview they told me I knew my subject very well, both theoretically and in practice, and yet, I needed to check my privilege. How the hell one checks one privilege in an interview when the point is to sell your ability was beyond me. They must’ve hired someone who told the search committee all about reaching but apologized constantly for doing so. I find myself unable to feel anything but incredible admiration for someone capable of doing this. They must be thoroughly modern.
Another job, not in instruction, but still interesting, still relevant to my skills, came up and, at the suggestion of a friend and colleague, I applied and, in a bit of a whirlwind, got the job and became a full-time benefitted employee, not in instruction, but in something close to it.
While all this had been happening, I’d also become addicted to Zillow. Not only had I been tacking back and forth between listings in Portland; Santa Rosa; and Everett, Washington, I’d been checking listings in Arcata (where all this happened) about three-five times a day, thinking, quite stupidly, that if I caught something just as it came on the market, I’d have more of a chance.
All told, we probably made about six or seven offers, the bulk of them when things were really hot and these falling-down dumps were popping up like mushrooms on the market. We kept going to look at such places, feeling kind of icky in them, like when you open a refrigerator someone’s dumped on the street and, when you find rotting condiments and such inside, wonder what possessed you to do such a thing. But when the price was low enough, we bit. The logic was, “what the hell, we’ll never get it anyway?”
And of course we never did. We didn’t even hear back from our realtor until I’d called a few times a few days after the closing. It was like she expected us to know we didn’t get anything, but then she told us to keep trying. A few times, when she was showing us places, I noticed she smelled like she’d been drinking. Not that I’d blame her, I’d drink to if my job was to sell homes to people like us in a market as crazy as this. “I’d offer your highest possible price,” she’d intone as we did the thing where we stepped out of the house and looked back at it, the equivalent of kicking the tires of a new car. We’d nod and then she’d ask “that hasn’t increased at all has it?”
I was dismayed to answer that it had not. Even with the new full-time job, I discovered that I lost so much to taxes working year-round that I was pretty much in the same place, financially I’d been as a full-time instructor. At least now I was benefitted and had a retirement plan, I guess. Not that I’d be able to retire when I’d be paying rent for the remainder of my days.
But thank god we hadn’t been able to slap down our entire savings and commit ourselves to very high monthly payments. If we’d gotten one of the places we’d so haphazardly put an offer on—the falling-down-dumps, I mentioned earlier—we would’ve been house poor with a place almost literally falling down around us, around our babies. But the force of “what’s next in life” is strong.
Especially strong with a way to peer into each new place that pops up on the market like magic. There you have over 40 pictures, video walkthrough, etc. etc. I swore off Zillow over and over, but, then, I’d find myself standing in the doorway, singing my daughter to sleep, and I’d take out my phone, and find myself just “checking”. My wife and I did this so often between us, we’d usually know about a new place within a couple of hours of it going up.
And each one, well you live in it for a few days don’t you? At least in your imagination. The places I’d liked on Buttermilk, Villa, Blakeslee, etc. I’d ride by them over and over on my bike, often going up to the porch and standing there, pretending I was waking up in the morning, coming out for my coffee and a breath of air. And then, in a week, someone else would be moving in. It was almost like being kicked out over and over. And it got really discouraging.
So much so, that I gave up, or said I did, but quietly, I was hanging on for some kind of miracle.
That’s how you know things are meant to be, when there’s a miracle.
You see, in the back of my mind, I’ve always been a little afraid of this town. Probably quite irrationally I can trace this back to the first time I ever came up here.
I’d applied to a few grad. programs and one of them was up in Arcata. It was five hours north of San Francisco where I was living at the time and I’d never been there. So, I borrowed my roommate’s car and drove all the way up.
I arrived to a quiet, foggy, and just preternaturally lonely place. I parked the car and walked the foggy evening streets, just feeling heartsick, and this was before I’d made any kind of commitment to move.
What was very likely just a chance melancholy resulting from the long and lonely drive, the weather, the lack of any vivacity to the sleeping town, I have long taken for a premonition. And, secretly, I’ve always wanted to escape this feeling which, I have long since ceased to feel, but remains an association.
I’m also just restless, and the idea of living in a new place is exciting to me. So, I balanced my perusing of Zillow with job searches and frequently brought all kinds of ideas like New Orleans, New Jersey, New Mexico and other “new” places to my wife as potential places to live. Pittsburgh was my personal favorite when I saw how cheap and beautiful the homes were and, I think I’ll always be a little homesick for the empty factory, and the grey, snowy sky lit with flashing red lights on smoke stacks. The prices of northern California seemed like a great excuse to leave and start again elsewhere.
But, like buying the expensive dump, that too had snares. I might not really have any connections, but my wife had been connecting, making friends, a mom network, a place she knew, my daughter’s playmates, my wife’s parents, they were all here. Leaving wouldn’t be hard on me, but, it wasn’t something she had any interest in doing. And to escape some imagined melancholia from 15 years ago, it didn’t seem worth it.
What finally happened was ridiculous. We’d once before investigated a low-income housing program which gave a land-lease, so the houses were about half-price. They were nice places, but they shared a wall with another, uh, house. I mean really they were just one huge house with a fire wall in the middle of it. No. To me, buying a house was buying a piece of the world, not another “unit”. I wanted to fence off my space and step back from my neighbors to build up my “castle”.
No matter how much we feel immune to social constructs, they invade our thinking. They are the often the only ways to conceive of things. I had one notion of “home” and I was loathe to relinquish it.
I also didn’t think we’d qualify for the program. We may have been under the income threshold (four-person family with a single income), but, our savings would probably cancel this out. If it couldn’t get us a house, but it disqualified us from low-income programs, what good was it? I was on the verge of just giving it away.
Ok, I’ll be quick about the rest. There’s so many facets to this, It’d take forever. You’ve been kind to come so far with me anyway. It’s been such a fiasco, but there’s a happy ending.
One of my former students send me a link about a house, unit, whatever, on this low-income program. The link was for some kind of social media posting and had the wrong phone number, but the pictures of the place looked alright. We had to look up the right number, and find the person in charge and then badger her with phone calls until we heard back.
There was a lot of documentation to complete, but we went through the process; thinking the whole time our savings would disqualify us. And then my wife went to look at the place and came away quite underwhelmed. Even at 195K, it was a bit disordered and the person living next door was a bit of a hoarder.
However, the program had another place available, I went over and did my thing where I brought my year-old son and peeked through all the windows (with him, I looked an unlikely burglar). Surprisingly, the place looked alright, but, again, when my wife went to look at it, she was underwhelmed. But later she owed that dirty carpets, heavy dog smell, and chewed walls will do this to one, a bit like the way the fog and the silence weighed on me when I first came to Arcata, I guess.
It took about four months, and at many times in the process we had no idea what was happening, but, we eventually were able to secure a loan (we’d gotten and lost one) and, finally, the house, not a unit at all as it turns out, especially because, as of yet, no one lives next door.
I’m still finding things that the dog chewed, and every day, there’s something that gets added to the improvement list, but we’ve already paid half of the place off and we still have money to spare. At night, I can lie in bed and listen to the ocean and the soughing of the eucalyptus trees and, best of all, I can go into the room where my kids are sleeping and see the place where they will grow up. The rooms that will eventually become papered with poster, will become sites of great emotions, dreams, plans; my kids now have a place to fill with memories, and, with any luck, a place to return to examine these memories later on. And this thought, in all its intensity, spills out of the present, reaches into the past, and arrests a 24 year-old visiting the town for his first time who, not knowing what it is, associates it with the strongest feeling he is familiar with: melancholy, not realizing that it is actually the joy of things to come.
