overrode my lust for home ownership. “Jimmy, are you all right?” I asked, standing up and putting my hand on his shoulder. “Should I call 911?”
He offered up a weak smile and shook his head. “No, it’s okay,” he gasped. “This happens all the time. It’s just acid reflux.” He pointed to another spot with his free hand, the one not planted on his sternum. “Just initial here,” he croaked. His face was still contorted, like a marathon runner toughing out that last five hundred yards before the finish line. I would have signed anything at that point just to get out of there. We finally finished up, and Jimmy rose unsteadily to his feet. He offered his hand, which was wet and clammy. “Piece o’ cake,” he said. “I’ll be in touch when I hear back from the lender.”
I stepped outside into the nearly empty parking lot. I heard the door click behind me, no doubt the secretary locking it. I imagined Jimmy and the secretary celebrating, like Paul Newman and Robert Redford in that scene from The Sting when they pull off their big scam. I told myself not to be so paranoid. With the bright California sun shining down on me, I wiped my hand, still slick with Jimmy’s sweat, on my pant leg. I was one step closer to home ownership.
In the end, Ralph and Jimmy were both right. It was not a sound financial move for us to buy a house in San Francisco, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t get a loan to do it anyway. We moved into our new home shortly before the Thanksgiving holiday in 2004. Sergio, our big cat, inspected the place while Traci and I stood in the living room holding hands. He cautiously sniffed every corner, then calmly turned and sprayed a wall in the living room. He was marking his new territory. Thus, our first truly domestic act as new homeowners was screaming at the cat and mopping up pee. Too late to back out now.
We were surfing a wave of dubious, if not toxic, mortgages that would eventually help bring the world financial market to its knees. At least the lender bothered to verify our incomes, an annoying step that many would eventually dispense with altogether. But Traci and I certainly had a financing package that would have made my grandfather shake his head in disgust. No money down. An interest-only adjustable first mortgage for $446,000 with a low teaser rate that would balloon after two years, plus a second home equity loan at 7.25 percent that was instantly maxed out at $105,000. The plan was for the property to appreciate on paper enough for us to refinance before the two years were up. The $25,000 that would have traditionally been part of the down payment went toward shoring up the foundation of our magical unicorn cottage where fairy sprites danced on the banks of the fish ponds, which almost immediately began to crumble, the picturesque river stones sliding into the murky water to reveal the black plastic liner beneath them. Discolored drywall chipped off the bedroom walls because that section of the house was rotting from the ground up, a result of the foundation problems.
Every few months we’d get a letter in the mail announcing that our mortgage had been sold or that a new servicer would be collecting payment on the loans. There was Aurora Financial Group, CitiMortgage, Sierra Pacific, and a highly reputable outfit called No Red Tape Mortgage. I’m leaving out a few others because I lost track of them all after a while. But our original plan did come to fruition. In May of 2006 our house was reappraised at $705,000, which just happened to be the exact value we needed to get a new thirty-year fixed rate mortgage serviced by Wells Fargo Bank, albeit one with a ten-year interest-only grace period before the real payments kicked in. The appraiser who somehow hit that magic number was hired and compensated by our new mortgage broker, named Justin, also suggested by Michelle. (Jimmy was apparently no longer in the picture; I imagined him singing songs like “Poison Ivy” in the lounge of a casino in downtown Las Vegas, slugging Maalox before he went on stage, hoping to land a better gig on the strip.) The appraiser knew exactly the valuation Justin needed to make the new loan work, but I’m sure that didn’t influence him in any way.
So we had lucked out. I guess. We had managed to buy just before prices climbed out of our reach. And we had a locked-in rate of 6.625 percent, which was higher than the prevailing rate because this was considered a jumbo loan. The good news was that we didn’t have to worry about the interest rate skyrocketing when a teaser rate expired. The bad news was that we had an interest-only monthly payment of about $3,050, which was more than half our take-home pay, without making a dent in the principal. Don’t forget the $600 a month to cover taxes and insurance, not to mention the maintenance costs. Basically, we were in the very situation that my grandfather would have cautioned us to avoid at all costs.
Traci and I altered our lifestyles in accordance with the financial demands of home ownership. Despite the rainy winters and the chilly fog of the so-called summers in San Francisco, we rarely turned on the heat in our house. Eating at the city’s famed restaurants became as rare as making a deposit to our IRAs. Our fleet of luxury cars—my aging Camry and Traci’s banged-up Hyundai Elantra—would not be upgraded anytime soon.
This wasn’t a huge adjustment for me. Despite frequent bailouts from my grandparents, I’d grown up in a household in Flint constantly in the throes of financial crisis. A minor repair to one of our unreliable GM cars was a calamitous event. I learned early on how to misdirect bill collectors when they called our house, often employing a fake British accent. We regularly ate breakfast for dinner—pancakes, bacon and eggs, or waffles—when money was especially tight. I knew how to live on the cheap. Although Traci had grown up in a more financially stable family in the scenic San Juan Islands north of Seattle, she adjusted to this new age of frugality. But there was no denying that buying a house in San Francisco put an end to many of the tangible benefits of living in one of America’s greatest cities. At least the spectacular views in the City by the Bay were still free.
3
Bourgeois Homeowners
I liked to believe I was immune to popular sentiment, unaffected by the predictable middle-class longing for hearth and home. I thought it was important to keep your options open, and I was drawn to journalism because it allowed me to discover a new story, a new place, and a new group of people—and then move on. I fancied myself an outsider who didn’t do something just because everyone else was doing it.
So it was tough to reconcile this self-image, however delusional, with the deep satisfaction I felt as a first-time homeowner. The house was supposed to be nothing more than an investment. Just like an apartment, except it belonged to us and not some landlord getting rich off our rent. But I quickly came to love standing next to Traci in the little front yard with its overgrown vines and cracked walkway, basking in the knowledge that we actually owned a house together in San Francisco. We joked that cosigning on a home loan in this city was a far greater sign of commitment than simply getting married, which anybody could do. (At least any straight couple at that time.) It was a good feeling.
Once possessive of my free time, I now welcomed lost weekends spent botching minor home improvement projects and having long conversations with more skilled friends back in Michigan about the proper way to refinish wood floors or plane a sticky door. I hired day workers hanging out on Cesar Chavez Street to help with the more ambitious jobs. (Drywall translates into tabla roca, by the way.) I bought power tools. I wore a tape measure on my belt to Home Depot to look legit. What a poser. But as much as I hated to admit it, I enjoyed acting like a regular American. I was proud of our home.
The house even altered our taste in entertainment. Who knew that Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House with Cary Grant and Myrna Loy was so good? I thought Ice Cube showed real range in Are We Done Yet?, which was basically an updated version of the same movie, channeling the familiar couple-versus-house theme. Then there was The Money Pit with Tom Hanks. It sucked but we watched it anyway. Online home repair shows became porn for me. Oh man, check out the double-pane windows on that bungalow!
But it was a book from an unexpected source that helped me understand the psychological underpinnings of my newfound nesting tendencies. Before he became the darling of foodies and the arbiter of all things organic with The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan wrote a book called A Place of
