money and kept renting,” he’d say. “You’ll be a lot happier with money in your pocket. You don’t want that mortgage hanging over your head, young man.”
Ralph was saying the same thing. He was being straight with us. Now wasn’t the time. I was momentarily disappointed, but when I left his office I felt a huge sense of relief. I’d given it a try, and it hadn’t worked out. Now I could stop worrying about it and enjoy the summer. Traci took it in stride. “Oh well,” she said. “We’ve already got a great apartment.” It was a different story when I called Michelle. “He told you what?” she said, clearly annoyed. “I don’t think that’s accurate at all. Let me give you the name of another mortgage broker.”
The new guy, let’s call him Jimmy, was down in San Jose, the sprawling city an hour south that languished in the shadow of sophisticated San Francisco. He called after we sent him another thick batch of financial info and told us not to worry; we were already preapproved for a $551,000 loan. He sounded confident, if not a little giddy. I had more or less resigned myself to not buying, so his breezy disposition made me uneasy. I told him what Ralph had said. “No idea why he’d tell you that,” Jimmy replied. “That seems a little unprofessional, but I’d never criticize another broker.”
Thus began the summer of house hunting. Make that the summer and fall of house hunting. Traci and I spent every Saturday deciphering the property listings like code breakers. Sundays and numerous Tuesday afternoons were devoted to open houses. That was our routine for six months. At first we tried to look presentable, but after a while the long slog wore us down, and we opted for comfortable clothes—cutoff shorts and T-shirts. We told ourselves we might appear to be anticorporate Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who had struck it rich creating a useless bit of software or a doomed website. Besides, looking fancy wouldn’t do us any good when we got outbid on a house. And we got outbid five times. Or was it six? Once by $129,000. And once by someone who made an all-cash offer. (Probably some dude in cutoffs.)
We started to recognize the other bottom-feeders as we made the rounds of anything priced at $499,000 or below. Knowing that everyone overbid, this was the only price point we had even a remote chance at. It appeared that the same forty people without enough money to buy were looking at the same low-end properties every week. I started exchanging the manly chin lift of acknowledgment with guys and friendly hellos with women. They were our competitors for these properties, but the fact that they kept showing up meant they were as unsuccessful as we were. I developed a low-key camaraderie with them, although we seldom said more than a few words to each other.
There were times when well-dressed yuppie couples—women in dresses, men in suits minus the tie—would roll up in a Mercedes or an Audi for an open house, and you could feel the collective despair and resentment ripple through the rest of us as we checked out a bedroom closet or ran a hand over a kitchen countertop. We knew that if they could afford the car and the lifestyle that involved suits outside of funerals, job interviews, or weddings, then they could outbid us. It was pointless to even bother with a place if they wanted it.
Traci and I worked to maintain the veneer of low-key positivity when we were at the open houses. We wanted to look like people who were there to seriously check out the property. We tried to seem like a couple who had options. We’d complain about the utter hopelessness of the search back at our apartment, when I’d rant and rave about wasting my life looking at houses we could never have, or houses that we wouldn’t want to live in even if we could afford them. But one fellow bottom-feeder, with black curly hair and a perpetual five o’clock shadow, stood out because he didn’t bother to conceal his darker emotions. He’d walk into a tiny bedroom the size of a closet and let out an exasperated sigh before saying out loud to no one in particular, “Hey look, a bedroom for our pet hobbit! Bilbo will be so happy.” A bathroom with crumbling tile would prompt a response dripping with sarcasm: “Hey, I’m in the public bathroom at the Mission Playground. Awesome!”
He became increasingly bitter as the weeks ticked off. He was giving off such a poisonous vibe that the other couples—and it was always couples, both gay and straight—maintained a five-foot buffer from him at all times. He had his own personal force field of disgruntlement. He was always with a fairly chipper woman who was his wife or girlfriend, but even she began to keep her distance. We thought he’d finally lost it at a two-unit condo that required the owner to walk through the living room of the downstairs neighbor to reach the backyard, which was considered common property shared by everyone in the building. Whoever bought this tiny place would need permission to do a little gardening or have a cookout. If that wasn’t bad enough, the two condos shared a washer and dryer. A coin-operated washer and dryer. “You’re fucking kidding me,” the voice of all our fears yelled out, desperately trying to make eye contact with someone, anyone, so that he might properly convey his rage. “I’m going to pay half a million bucks for this dump, and I’ll still have to pump quarters into the washing machine?”
The laundry room quickly cleared out. I figured the other house hunters, like me, were in a fragile emotional state, wavering between delusion (Yes, we can buy a house!) and despair (No, we can’t buy a house). Some guy shouting the obvious might send us all over the edge. We saw him the next week at a house in Noe Valley, a blandly prosperous neighborhood that was proving to be way out of our price range. He was sitting in a lawn chair on the back patio with his head in his hands. He may have been silently crying, but I didn’t want to get close enough to find out. He wasn’t even bothering to look at the houses anymore. I worried that I could end up just like him in a few weeks if I wasn’t careful.
In desperation, we finally resorted to considering a TIC, or tenancy in common, a strange bit of San Francisco real-estate exotica that involves teaming up with someone else and buying a property together. Typically, you join forces with strangers, even though you’ll be cosigning a loan with them after paying an attorney to draw up an elaborate legal document that spells out the solution to everything that could possibly go wrong with the arrangement. Of course, it’s often a very long document, a testament to all the potential pitfalls. Michelle told us she was working with another couple who was in a situation similar to ours—not enough money—and that we might be able to work something out. Traci and I met them for coffee in Dolores Park. It was like some sort of couples blind date, where we all tried to act casual despite the fact that we were deciding whether to enter together into what might be the biggest financial transaction of our lives. (Traci warned me not to discuss my love of Morrissey, an ’80s musical icon, or my propensity to scream at the referees while watching meaningless NBA regular season games on TV.) He had a British accent. She was from Ohio. They rode around the city on a scooter. They seemed normal. Hey, what else did we need?
Now we were simultaneously looking for two-unit buildings with our TIC partners and regular houses or condos for us. This was even more exhausting and somewhat awkward because we often ran into our partners at one house, indicating we might be competing against each other for it, before meeting them to look at another property that we might bid on together. None of it mattered, though. Even when we bid on TIC properties with the combined incomes of four well-educated professionals, we still got outbid.
Our housing odyssey may have been frustrating and time consuming, but it didn’t become truly weird until we connected with a sophisticated music composer from Norway and his wife, a red-haired documentary filmmaker from an equally exotic locale—Flint, Michigan. Her mother worked at the public library where I had spent countless hours goofing off in high school. Unlike most San Franciscans, who actively disdained American-made cars, she had actually ridden in a Buick, albeit years ago. They already owned a two-unit building in the Mission District and were searching for TIC partners to occupy one of the flats and become co-owners with them. We made a bid. They accepted. It seemed like fate had finally intervened in our favor. Flint synergy was flowing. Nothing could go wrong now. I was ready to crack open a Stroh’s beer, a Michigan favorite, in celebration.
All that remained was a run-through of the building with
