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 Michelle, our real-estate agent, the couple, and the housing inspector we hired. A mere formality. We were all strolling through the basement, checking out the storage space, when we came to a door with a homemade sign taped to it: “Rosa’s Room. Do Not Enter.”
“Who’s Rosa?” Michelle asked, immediately suspicious.
The couple glanced nervously at each other. A look of panic came over the face of my compatriot from Flint. She was about to speak, but her husband shook his head to silence her. “It’s really nothing,” he finally offered, stroking his beard and looking at the floor. The thick accent that had once been so endearing now made him sound like a double agent about to betray his best friend in a spy thriller. “It’s not a problem.”
The door opened suddenly and an elderly woman, clearly pissed off that we were making a racket, scowled at us. Behind her I could see a bed, a dresser, and other telltale signs of habitation. She amped up the dirty look to make sure we fathomed the depths of her displeasure and slammed the door shut.
“That was Rosa,” the composer said softly, a note of defeat in his voice.
“Is she living in there?” Michelle demanded, not softly at all.
“Well, in a way, I suppose,” he said. “But you don’t need to worry about it. We’ve got it all taken care of. It’s fine.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Michelle said to me and Traci as she turned and headed for the stairs leading out to the street. Apparently, the inspection was over.
We were about to discover a new San Francisco real-estate term, one that has killed many a promising deal in the city: “protected tenant.” Over the next few tortured days we learned that Rosa had lived in the building when the couple bought it years earlier. At one point they had attempted to get her to leave. She filed a complaint with the San Francisco Human Rights Commission and received a favorable ruling. She now had the right to live in the building as long as she wanted, a situation that not only dramatically lowered the value of the property but also opened us up to all sorts of legal entanglements if we became co-owners. Worse, as Michelle emphatically pointed out, the couple tried to hide this information from us and their real-estate agent, who quickly dropped them as clients. Not exactly the way to start off a TIC partnership. The deal was off.
“I thought Midwesterners were supposed to be wholesome and honest,” Traci said when it was clear we were headed to more open houses.
“Flint’s not really the Midwest,” I answered feebly. “Neither is Norway.”
Eventually, even my competitive spirit, stoked in the gyms and on the football fields of Flint, was overwhelmed. Traci and I decided we’d look at one more batch of houses on Sunday, then call it quits. We didn’t expect to find anything. It was more of a token gesture. We checked out a cool little place in Bernal Heights. The flyer called it a “tranquil and magical cottage!” (“Cottage” is San Francisco real-estate jargon for incredibly small.) It had fish ponds in both the well-landscaped front