Home Aspirations
The most recent episode of “Saturday Night Live” (6/2/21) featured a skit on what, for want of a better word, I can only call “Zillow addiction.” Now the New Yorker has joined in the fun and issued a handy list of techniques for overcoming real estate dependency syndrome (REDS). We checked them out and invite you all to do the same – in comments!
Here are their tips:
NY: What are your triggers? (They’re pretty funny).
DSO:
- gazing around my apartment, where there are already way too many books, and recalling there are a few thousand more in that rental place we’ve had for 15 years
- seeing the interiors and exteriors of old classmates’ homes on FB (reminder to self: bypass all FB home interior posts henceforth)
- happening upon “Million Dollar Listings New York City” when I’m channel-surfing at odd hours of the day and night (reminder to self: don’t channel-surf)
- remembering my paternal home, starting to fantasize about renovating and enlarging it, which always leads me to Zillow.com searching out similar houses in the same or nearby neighborhoods (note: stop this, it’s o-v-e-r)
- letting my mind wander while drinking coffee (Do Not Let Your Mind Wander)
NY: Start small (their example is spot-on)
DSO: Hmm. OK, we’ll try not to channel-surf and accidentally-on-purpose click over to “Million Dollar Listings”. Next, when we gaze around the apartment, we’ll try to forget the thousands of books in That Other Apartment. Will that make the problem go away, do you think?
NY: Don’t go through it alone. (Just look at all your fellow-addicts out there; did you see how many other people saved the listing for a 5-bedroom, 6-bathroom 4,000-square-foot Hudson Valley mini-estate?) (note to self: research why some houses have more bathrooms than bedrooms)
DSO: Oh wow, hadn’t thought of that. I’d always feared I was the only person ever who browsed Zillow listings on a pointless but regular basis. Now I can feel comforted by noting how many other people saved a listing. Oops.
NY: Practice mindfulness (Not sure what the NY is suggesting here – imagining you’re there in Rockport, Maine [note to self: always remember to keep Google Maps open since you have no idea where most of the houses you’re looking at actually are] and asking yourself all sorts of questions about Life in Rockport gets you to a state of mindfulness)
DSO: Can’t we just focus on the pros and cons of knocking out a wall or two?
NY: Leave yourself reminders (The NY advises the use of sticky notes here, and we’re huge fans of sticky notes. They’re intended to discourage opening yet another browser window but they’ve never had that effect on us.)
DSO: Too similar to the previous tip, NY. Try harder.
NY: Replace your Zillow habit with a different one. (Bad suggestion ensues)
DSO: You mean, like, zipping through three non-fiction books a week? Or taking up running or the triathlon? Or going vegan? Or starting up an NGO? Or sorting the books in That Other Apartment? Or cleaning the kitchen cabinets?
There is a certain comfort in learning that millions (yes, millions) of others engage in the same secret pastime as you, touring Other People’s Homes virtually and then day-dreaming that they’re the proud occupier (and owner, together with the bank) of some or another little real estate find.
There are also millions who like to dream about renovating places that are falling apart. In fact, a Facebook page I follow rather obsessively (Illinois Abandoned Images) along with 182,000 other lost souls often features old farm houses that clearly haven’t been occupied for decades; nearly every such image garners a comment or two of the “Gorgeous! / Would love to fix that old girl up! / Wish I could afford to renovate it!” ilk. And we’re talking about big houses whose roofs have collapsed, whose foundations have sunk and taken root deep in the soil, and which are now in the middle of nowhere with nary a general store in commuting distance.
For more dedicated fixer-uppers, there is of course the long-running (since 1979) PBS series “This Old House,” which in recent years has gone “green” – energy-conservationist, insulation-and-cladding conscious – and features high-tech approaches to converting 3,000 square-foot houses built in 1920 or 1830 into something other than money pits for heating and cooling bills. The program also features a home-improvement segment for do-it-yourself (DIY) types, among whom I do not count myself.
And then there are all those spin-off series on the various cable channels – around 100 or so, roughly – that feature homes that need a little TLC (+ $$ or $$$ or $$$$). I’ve gotten very fond of Texas Flip N Move (available sporadically in Greece), Fixer Upper (starring the Gaines family), Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, and Rehab Addict, which has a young woman host with superior hammer and crowbar skills. I watch the latter programs whenever I’m visiting close friends in the U.S.; they kindly switch their very complicated system to HGTV the second I arrive to accommodate my binge-watching.
All the recent hubbub over REDS (see above, acronym explained) and millions who have recently discovered the joy of Zillow is a little unsettling, since I’m a long-time sufferer who can recall wanting to fix up every old (and frequently, decrepit) house I’ve entered since childhood. None of my fantasies came to fruition, but that’s not to say I’ve abandoned them. I can still recall the layout of my grandparents’ tiny (approx. 700 square feet) home out in “Illinois Abandoned Images” country and continue to dream up ways to make it more comfortable, cozy and of course, energy-efficient, even though it was torn down to make way for a grain elevator in 1964. I was very young when that happened, but I remember begging my Mother to keep the house in the family – well, to no one’s surprise but mine, she didn’t listen. So I continued imagining re-does of the rickety and even-smaller house of one of my Grandmother’s closest friends, who lived a good while longer and whom my Mother and I continued to visit until I went to university.
Americans – well, Americans who aspire to home ownership someday (76% white, 40% Black home ownership in mid-2020) – are a nation of individuals who in the 20th century enthusiastically embraced moving – while moving up, if at all possible. The pandemic generated a rash of buying and selling by those who already owned property, especially in the wealthiest enclaves of our largest cities. This was perhaps foreseeable in retrospect: those with a lot of liquidity (think: top 1%) purchased expansive properties outside New York on Long Island or along the Hudson River, for example; those with less (say, $1-$2 million) sold apartments in the city and purchased homes with more space – and yards – in Connecticut or New Jersey so they could work remotely in greater comfort than they could in a cramped Manhattan or Brooklyn apartment.
In the final years before the pandemic, though, mobility slowed down, at least by American standards; around 10% of Americans moved in 2019, and 85% of those moves were within the same state (the majority, within the same city). There are several reasons suggested for this slowing-down: the U.S. population is aging, and the elderly don’t move as often as the young (if you discount downsizing and moving to Florida, Arizona or Texas, of course); declining social mobility among the young (25-35), many of whom are burdened by student debt (now nearly $2 trillion) and may never own a home (both the New Yorker piece and the SNL skit refer to this explicitly or implicitly); the fact that the housing crash of 2008-2009 left millions of homeowners (those who managed to hold onto their homes at all) underwater on their mortgages; the fact that with new opportunities made possible by remote work (which have increased dramatically in the past year), many people see no reason to leave a place with affordable housing and reasonable cost of living and move to a city which is far more expensive.
One of the most interesting reasons, however, is that nearly half (47%) of Americans who chose not to move made that choice because they feel “rooted” in their communities – which seems odd, given Americans’ long-standing reputation as “rootless” and willing to pull up stakes again and again throughout their lives. But this non-mobile group has specific demographic characteristics:
“A significant reason for the decline in mobility is that many of us are highly attached to our towns. Nearly half of those in the survey (47 percent) identify as rooted. The rooted are disproportionately white, older, married, homeowners, and rural. Their reasons for not moving are more psychological than economic: proximity to family and friends, and their involvement in the local community or church.”
Europeans – Greeks included – move far less often than Americans unless for purposes of immigration (hundreds of thousands of such cases in the past decade as a consequence of the general financial crisis, which affected Greeks far more than its northern EU peer countries). I have a good many friends who continue to live in the apartments they received as part of their dowry (yes) upon marriage. The rage to move out and up isn’t nearly as pronounced here.
This is probably a good thing for me. On the other hand, I admit to having gone through an acute phase of “Let’s move” last fall, when I abandoned Zillow to follow the equivalent Greek site, which for some inexplicable reason is called “House Cat” (a “house cat” in Greek = somebody who’s a homebody)
And alas, while writing this post, I was inspired to browse Netflix for “Home Improvement,” just in case. At the moment, “Dream Home Makeover” and “Interior Design Masters” are both available. Uh-oh.
Perhaps more to the point, there’s a program called “Get Organized – The Home Edit”. Maybe that will quell my all-too-American urge to pick up and move again and instead stay put – and do something about those books.