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 My Own. It details his desire to build a “shelter for daydreams,” a small wooden hut on his property in New England. It’s about a writer’s fastidious vanity project, a “simple” structure executed with the help of an architect, a builder, and frequent consultations with the ghosts of Thoreau, Le Corbusier, Aristotle, and Frank Lloyd Wright. But while I sometimes found the combination of philosophical musing and practical building applications a bit precious—do you really need the first century B.C. writings of Vitruvius to decide on the pitch of your roof?—there’s no denying that Pollan tapped into some of the elemental forces that had a hold on me. He helped me understand the intrinsic power of houses. They aren’t just investments; they define us.
“Like the clothes Adam and Eve were driven by shame to put on, the house is an indelible mark of our humanity, of our difference from both the animals and the angels,” he wrote. “It is a mark of our weakness and power both, for along with the fallibility implied in the need to build a shelter, there is at the same time the audacity of it all—reaching up into the sky, altering the face of the land. After Babel, building risked giving offense to God, for it was a usurpation of His creative powers, an act of hubris. That, but this too: Look at what our hands have made!”
I wasn’t building a house, but this was exactly the feeling that came over me after completing grandiose projects like replacing the toilet seat in our only bathroom, a seemingly simple task requiring three trips to the hardware store for expensive tools after I discovered the bolts holding the seat in place were threaded into the tank, submerged in water, totally inaccessible, and completely rusted. After puncturing my left palm with a flathead screwdriver and irreparably scratching the toilet bowl with a hacksaw, victory was mine. A new toilet seat. I, too, could exalt in the power of creation, once I disinfected my hand and stopped cursing the plumbing gods. It was glorious.
Despite the growing list of minor injuries I racked up whenever I worked with tools of any sort, the house became a refuge for us. We felt safe. Secure. For me, it was a totally unexpected development, but it wasn’t the only one. Reassuring memories of the modest two-story house with faded green aluminum siding where I grew up in Flint started flooding back to me at unexpected moments. I found myself thinking about the different rooms: the upstairs bedroom with the Nerf hoop and Fran Tarkenton posters I shared with my older brother; the breezy screened-in front porch where I often sat with my mom in the summer after dinner; the tiny bathroom with a tub but no shower that all five family members somehow shared. I had odd but pleasant dreams where I was driving a convertible around the familiar streets of Flint, calling out various landmarks with a megaphone like a tour guide: “On your left is the store where Saint Mary’s students used to shoplift Hostess Ho Hos after football practice. And on your right is the fence I successfully jumped in fourth grade, narrowly escaping four unknown kids intent on kicking my ass for no particular reason.” It was as if the love of my new home reignited all the warm feelings I had for my old one. There was just one problem. I was pretty sure I’d never had exceptionally fond memories of Flint before. Something weird was going on here.
By the time I graduated from high school in 1984, I couldn’t wait to escape Flint. A pretentious teenager with a new-wave haircut—a mullet in reverse—who made a big show of reading Harper’s magazine and The Catcher in the Rye, I viewed Flint as a cultural backwater, nothing more than a dying factory town.
I thought Ben Hamper, a Flint autoworker turned best-selling author, pretty much summed up the place in his hilarious book Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line:
Flint, Michigan. The Vehicle City. Greaseball Mecca. The birthplace of thud-rockers Grand Funk Railroad, game show geek Bob Eubanks and a hobby shop called General Motors. A town where every infant twirls a set of channel locks in place of a rattle. A town whose collective bowling average is four times higher than the IQ of its inhabitants. A town that genuflects in front of used-car lots and scratches its butt with the jagged peaks of the automotive