On Not Being a Homeowner
In 2014, a decade before my mother died, I helped her sort through the contents of her garage, on Baja Avenue, in Davis, California. It was a gold mine of children’s books and dolls dating to the late seventies. I found a box full of Fisher-Price toys: a barn, a schoolhouse, a castle, an A-frame chalet, and a New York brownstone. This last one was part of a Sesame Street Little People set that included figurines of Ernie, Bert, Big Bird, and Oscar the Grouch, who peeked out from under the lid of a trash can, looking surly.
My mom wanted to throw them out. I balked at this. I had fond memories of playing with the toys on the gold carpet of the living room of my first real childhood home, a white stucco four-bedroom a few minutes away on Lindo Place. I’d sit cross-legged in a patch of sun, acting out dramas among the “little people.” Sometimes a farmer or an animal figurine from the barn showed up at the hospital. Maybe a postman hung out at the circus. But mostly it was Ernie and Bert enjoying a well-rounded dinner of pork chops and peas or a daytime hang on the front stoop.
We’d moved into the house on Lindo in 1979, when I was seven, and stayed there for almost eight years, until my parents split up. My mom, my younger sister, and I moved into the house on Baja, where the bedrooms were a lot smaller and there was a moldy old hot tub in the back yard. I cried when we left Lindo, because I loved my big bedroom, where I had raised my kitten, Downey, and I loved the sunny, south-facing living room, where I had played on the floor and practiced piano. I cried because our two dogs were buried on the property, and I didn’t want to leave them behind. I think I cried more about the house than I did about the failure of my parents’ marriage.
Now my mom was selling Baja. She was getting old and planned to relocate to a rental, about a mile away. I was sad about the move, just as I had been about Lindo Place, and I was scared, too. Baja was my mom’s biggest asset—her one last remaining asset, in fact, save for a white Honda Accord, and she needed the proceeds from the sale to live on. She’d worked as a real-estate agent for close to four decades, and it was time for her to retire, though retirement, in her case, did not mean international travel or theatre tickets but food, rent, car insurance. Pet food, books, and cable TV. My mom always gave me hundred-dollar checks on holidays, but I rarely cashed them. She needed the money more than I did.
Not that I had a lot of money. I didn’t then, and I don’t now. I haven’t lived paycheck to paycheck for many years, since I paid off my college loans. But I don’t have savings, either. Something else I don’t have: property. Yes, plenty of people in New York, where I spent most of my adult life, and Los Angeles, where I live now, rent their residences—these cities have two of the lowest homeownership rates in the country—but, in my milieu, which is mostly made up of middle-income people who work in media, more and more people have bought apartments and, in some cases, entire brownstones. Their own private Sesame Streets.
I have a lot of feelings about this, and few of them are positive. The ubiquity of homeownership among my social and professional set feels bewildering at times, because I know how much money these folks make and how they spend it. (They spend it like I do: on restaurants, travel, and entertainment.) There’s no way my friends—my peers!—have the money for a down payment on, say, a million-dollar apartment. Except: they do. It’s called generational wealth, and the two- to three-bedrooms they’ve bought with their parents’ or grandparents’ help will no doubt appreciate in value, to be sold later for bigger, nicer residences and, perhaps after that, vacation homes. This is where my friends’ futures—their literal fortunes—take a sharp turn from mine.
The first house my parents bought—the house where they lived when my sister and I were born—was half of a duplex on the western outskirts of Davis. They had hopes for it. It was, they believed, an investment that would help determine their financial future, and that of their children. They almost didn’t get the house, though. My father, an honorably discharged Army veteran, applied for a home loan, in 1975, via the Veterans Administration, and got a letter back saying that the V.A. had decided not to grant it. My father, not incidentally, is Black. He and the duplex’s builder drove south to San Francisco to meet with the loan official who had written the letter. The official, my father recalled recently, came up with all kinds of reasons she didn’t feel comfortable granting the loan. Do you understand that you’ll have to buy a refrigerator? What about a washer and dryer? How about window coverings?
My father told this story matter-of-factly, but his voice rose at times. So did mine. Window coverings? The loan official’s interrogation continued, my father said, until he explained that he’d be asking a friend, who worked for a local congressman, for feedback and advice. Her demeanor changed; she started smiling nervously. My dad never had to call his friend. A week later, another letter came in the mail, this one telling him that the loan had been approved.
Homeownership is part of the American Dream, and both of my parents worked to help other people realize it. My father advocated for Davis to adopt land-use policies that would have led to the creation of more affordable housing. The average cost of housing was so high that people who worked blue-collar and service jobs in Davis had to live elsewhere, in small towns nearby, or in neighboring Sacramento County. The leaders of the supposedly liberal city government in the seventies wanted to keep it that way, too, warning of the dangers of uncontrolled residential growth. In 1980, the population of Davis was overwhelmingly white, with few Black, Hispanic, or Asian residents. I was always aware that my family was different. My parents were a mixed-race couple, and, because of our lower-middle-class status, we didn’t have things many other families had: a microwave, a color TV, ski trips to Lake Tahoe.
When I was a teen-ager, my mom, who had taught junior-high-school history and typing for much of my childhood, began working toward a real-estate license. She was interested in houses and architecture and, as a newly single mom in the economic boom of the mid-eighties, she thought there might be an opportunity to make more money. Real estate proved to be somewhat more lucrative than teaching kids to memorize the layout of a typewriter keyboard, but it was, of course, commission-based, and that meant some months were leaner than others. Add to that the fact that my mother was not a born saleswoman—she was neither a natural at socializing nor aggressive or cutthroat—and she rarely got her hands on the half-a-million-dollar-plus listings that were starting to pop up in the Sacramento area. What that meant was that she did O.K. Not well, just O.K.
My mom didn’t talk about her job much, except to express anxiety when she was waiting on a check, or to find out if she’d scored a listing. I also didn’t take much interest in it, probably because I understood that our over-all financial situation was often precarious, and that my mother sometimes took money out of her line of home equity in order to pay bills. I didn’t want to know any more than I already did.
For the first ten years that I was in New York—in college and then on my own—I had roommates. By the time I turned twenty-seven, however, I made enough money to be able to afford my own studio apartment in an up-and-coming neighborhood, Long Island City, Queens. I bought my first couch, my first desk, my first bed that wasn’t a futon. I put art up on the walls. I think I also had a plant. I wrote a book, navigated romantic relationships, sometimes even cooked actual meals there.
In 2008, after eight years in my studio, I got married. My husband had more money than I did, but he wasn’t wealthy, and neither was his family. Still, we made enough to rent a twelve-hundred-square-foot apartment down the street from the studio. We paid thirty-two hundred dollars a month for the nicest apartment either of us had ever lived in, with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a (shared) roof deck, and, as with my studio, southern exposure. Friends and family came to stay with us. I was proud to show off what we had.
We ended up separating, and in 2015 I rented a three-thousand-dollar, one-bedroom, fifth-floor walkup in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. That year, I spent a not insignificant amount of my disposable income on a summer trip to Scotland with friends, one of whom had access to her family’s ancestral hunting lodge, on an island in the Inner Hebrides. There were ten of us on the property. During the day, we hiked above the island’s numerous lochs; at night we enjoyed food and drink—mostly Scotch, as you might imagine—at a large wood dining table.
The Scotch made me sulky. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was cosplaying the role of a financially secure, fully fledged adult. I was newly divorced, for one thing, and didn’t own an apartment, unlike the large majority of the people at the table. One couple, a husband and wife in their early forties, began to bleat about delays on their renovation of an apartment in a high-rise building in downtown Manhattan. Other guests related their own horror stories about remodels taking too long or going over budget because, say, a certain brand of coveted European tile wasn’t available and so they’d had to spend more per piece than they’d expected. At one point, I started rolling my eyes and audibly sighing. This was rude, I admit, but everyone was too busy extolling the delights of heated flooring to notice.
There’s an element of playing pretend about many of my peers’ homeownership that has never sat right with me. It’s part of the reason I’ve often avoided reading the New York Times Sunday Real Estate section, which, sometime in the mid-twenty-tens, began to feel like a cruel provocation. Especially the column “The Hunt,” which followed home buyers—often first-timers—as they considered where to hang their hats, or park their money. These buyers were not wolves of Wall Street, or savvy tech investors but “regular” folk, of liberal-arts educations and middle-class salaries: teachers, directors at nonprofits, editors at book-publishing companies. And yet, there they were, buying co-ops in newly renovated brick buildings in central Brooklyn, or on the northern edges of the Upper East Side.
The reason I resented “The Hunt” wasn’t just jealousy, though it was obviously that. I was frustrated by the column’s refusal to articulate the economic realities of its subjects’ lives. Its evasions reminded me of the paper’s Sunday Styles wedding announcements, with their preponderance of young brides who, “until recently,” worked as private-school teachers or junior publicists, before marrying men who made more money. In recent years, the columns in “The Hunt” have been more forthright about buyers’ receiving outside help. Refreshing? Yes. But it also proved my point about generational wealth and real estate. Surveys have shown that more than half of millennials and more than three-quarters of Gen Z-ers who have purchased homes received family help.
It’s hard to hear people who own property grumble about how little money they have. One friend who regularly moans about money has a four-bedroom home on the West Coast and a vacation house in New England. I’m unmoved by the financial lamentations of another friend, who owns a town house in New York with an apartment for a nanny or an in-law. Stuff like this makes me want to scream. Demonstrate some modicum of self-awareness! Read the fucking room! When a friend told me that her parents were going to help her buy a second home, I made a pointed remark that it must be nice to have access to that sort of capital. She conceded the point, graciously, and we moved on.
My dad, who also doesn’t own property, has a habit of sending my sister and me links to real-estate listings in various parts of Northern California. He finds and shares notices of apartments for sale in San Francisco, where my sister used to live, and in Berkeley, where he’d like to live, and in Davis, where he actually lives. A lot of the residences have Spanish-style architecture, which he likes, or nice details such as crown moldings or terra-cotta floors. Most of the listings are very expensive, and, even though we ask him not to send them to us, he does it anyway. “It’s really frustrating,” my sister says. “I don’t want to look at places we don’t have the money to buy.”
Dreaming about homes we cannot afford is a fool’s errand, I think. It’s part of the reason I don’t walk up to the windows of real-estate offices in towns I visit. Going to open houses “just to see what’s out there” also holds no appeal (except for that one time a woman I know, who is worth many tens of millions, took me and a group of friends on a tour of an enormous property in Sonoma County). Even so, part of me wonders whether my dad is on to something when he peruses real-estate listings. Maybe if I start to imagine owning property—what the kids nowadays call “manifesting”—I might begin to live differently. Maybe if I didn’t go to Maine for a week every summer, or ate only beans and rice for dinner, I could have a couple of rooms of my own.
Right now, I rent a two-bedroom duplex in Los Angeles, on the border of Silver Lake and Los Feliz, neighborhoods known for their great restaurants and winding, hilly streets. It’s hard to imagine that I’ll ever be able to buy here—the houses are millions of dollars—but I adore where I live. I’m close to most of my friends, and to Griffith Park, where I go hiking, and my apartment is full of light. There are hummingbirds that come to a feeder, and hawks that circle the sky.
What’s not to love? One could say the same about all the vital-seeming things I have chosen to spend my money on—the apartment, the vacations, the dinners out once or twice a week. It would be difficult—very difficult—for me to give any of them up.
How might life have been different for my mother—and, by extension, for my sister and me—had she been able to enjoy the privilege of homeownership without constantly borrowing against the one asset she owned? Maybe she wouldn’t have had to move to a smaller place with none of the hard-won appeal of the house on Baja. Maybe she’d have had more money to cover the incredible cost of the assisted-living facility she eventually had to move into, a cost that I also began to bear.
The fact is that, in recent years, the potential for me to buy a home has decreased, even as my career has blossomed. Maybe this is my fault; maybe it’s not. Maybe it is part of a long legacy of my family’s being both cash and property poor: the rate of homeownership among Black Americans is approximately forty-four per cent, some thirty points lower than the rate for white Americans. Generational wealth? The idea of paying it forward means nothing when there wasn’t much there in the first place.
In 2024, my sister texted me that the house on Baja was up for sale. “I wish we could buy it,” she said. I did, too, though I wasn’t entirely sure why. My sister was moving back to Davis to take care of our now elderly father, but I had no plans to return. I considered e-mailing the real-estate agent in charge of the listing to see if I could schedule a viewing the next time I came up north. Would I bristle at the ways the current owners had changed the property? Would I inform the agent that I used to live there? Would I explain that the idea of owning a portion of my past is part of a fantasy of a secure future? Would I tell her, “Hey, listen, a girl can dream”?
With Baja, my mom got a chance to start over, to make a house a home. In the course of three decades, she removed weeds and planted soft ground cover in the front yard, where, during the winter holidays, she would place an animatronic deer that slowly moved its head up and down, as if grazing. She had the exterior of the house repainted and put new windows in two of the small bedrooms, including mine, where I spent much of my adolescence listening to U2 and thinking about boys. A skylight was installed in a bathroom and, eventually, a gas fireplace in the living room. The back yard got landscaped, with a patch of grass and some bushes. I remember my mom sitting outside, reading, in a wicker chair with a padded seat, next to a trellis with climbing vines. What she didn’t get out of Baja financially, she got out of it in the satisfaction of a job well done. ♦