Dream Home

My wife, LauraBeth, and I bought our first house in 2006, in the New Jersey suburbs. I was twenty-four and she was twenty-three. We had money for a down payment because her mother had died and left behind some insurance money. We purchased the house for $175,000, at what I later learned was an obscene interest rate of 6.9 percent. Our realtor assured us the price was a good one; houses were moving quickly, and you had to be decisive. Houses always went up in value, and it was the safest investment you could make. After all, the previous owner had bought it for only $69,000 in 1999. We weren’t ready to own a home, but we bought one because that’s what you’re supposed to do. You go to school, get engaged, buy a house, then get married. Maybe you have a couple kids. In eight to ten years, you sell the house for a healthy profit and use that money to upgrade to a bigger house.

We handed over a $20,000 cashier’s check as a down payment. I’d spent the previous two years working as a teaching assistant at a large state university, making about half that amount annually. I hadn’t even heard of cashier’s checks.

You know what happens next. You know about housing bubbles and subprime mortgages and recessions and too big to fail. Within two years, the real-estate website Zillow’s “zestimate” for our house had dropped by $30,000. Three years later, it had fallen $50,000 more.

After moving in, we were featured on a short-lived home-renovation show called Moving Up, hosted by Doug Wilson, a C-list celebrity designer better known from his stint on the show Trading Spaces. The conceit was this: Family A sold a house to Family B, and Family B sold a house to Family C, after which the buyers would renovate, and then the sellers would return to their old homes to critique all the changes. Families A and B were already signed on, and they needed us to complete the chain. My wife hated the idea, but I talked her into it. I thought it sounded like fun.

Our neighbors lived in what was once a one-room schoolhouse. From the street, it looked like a church, with its steeple and large windows. Rich and Doris were in their fifties, both on second marriages and both heavy smokers in different stages of alcoholism. On our second day in the house, they brought us two bags of tomatoes from their garden, plus a loaf of fresh zucchini bread. “I love making shit,” Doris said. I never saw her without a cigarette. When she poured a glass of wine, she always seemed to be emptying the bottle. Some days she sang along to Tom Jones loudly enough that I could hear her from my bedroom. A few weeks later, I heard Doris howling in her driveway and saw neighbors rushing across the street. I stood outside on my top step with my arms crossed over my chest, in the universal pose of the concerned neighbor. A siren screamed in our direction. I learned that Doris had an adult son and that he was dead in the driveway. He’d overdosed on heroin.

We sent them a card and some cookies. We never talked about it.

Moving Up was a dumb show, predicated on manufacturing conflict where there was none. Watching strangers paint their walls is inherently uninteresting. Mimi, the producer, stood beside the cameraman and exhorted us to keep talking, to never, ever stop talking. The more words we produced, the more likely we were to say something inflammatory.

The show’s formula demanded we have easily identifiable home-decorating styles, so LauraBeth was told to say “French country,” and I was told to say “college dorm.” As we walked into the house, our job was to express disgust at the previous owner’s choices. The goal was not to tell an interesting story; it was to check specific boxes and move on. When we later learned that the seller had cut our phone lines out of spite, we couldn’t talk about that, because it was too messy a topic. They wanted conflict that could be summarized quickly after each commercial break and then resolved by a few choice words from Doug about compromise and growth.

You open the episode by introducing yourself and saying what your job is, and then your wife introduces herself and says what her job is, and then you give a two-sentence summary of your relationship. You explain how owning the right home is key to achieving your shared dreams. You give the broadest possible description of those dreams. You begin the performance of shopping for a home, of rebuilding and renovating, of reinforcing sagging supports. You try to prove to the audience that you deserve this.

I can’t remember the first thing that broke. Things were always breaking. From the street, most houses look relatively stable, but on the inside, ours often felt like the walls were crumbling around us. During the first six weeks, I began learning, on camera, how incapable I was of making basic home repairs. My father was not a handy man, and he’d never taught me how to fix things. My father-in-law had worked for most of his life in facilities management, and so he and I spent many hours together as he coached me through how to spackle a hole in the wall, how to use a socket wrench, how to stain wood. Owning a home emphasizes your powerlessness more than any other financial decision. Suddenly, you are in a thirty-year battle against entropy, and if you look at the amortization schedule for your mortgage, it is easy to despair. The house wants to collapse, and you have to hold it up long enough to sell it at a profit.

During filming, we overhauled four rooms. Every job took several hours, or even days, longer than we expected. When contractors were involved, they invariably would reach their hand into some dark space in the walls and grunt and say, “Weird.” Pause. “Oh shit.”

Inside every wall there is a secret, and every time you expose one, there’s no putting it back.

In our episode of Moving Up, titled “Beige Be Gone,” Family A was the downsizing older couple, and Family B was the middle-aged couple that wanted a home with pizzazz. LauraBeth and I were the young couple who might not make it. One day, the producers asked her the same question seven times in a row until she gave them the answer they wanted (“Yes, I’m nervous to be moving in with Tom”). Because I was unemployed, most of my time on-screen was spent explaining my failure to be a breadwinner. They did mention I was a writer, the sort of vague nonjob that’s easy for a skeptical viewer to disregard. In one scene, I take to the streets to sell limericks to strangers and come home with eight dollars. This was long before I’d learned to stop treating my writing like a joke, before I decided I wouldn’t allow people to condescend to me for the work and the life I’d chosen.

Later, on an internet forum, someone would write, “I give that marriage two years before she leaves him.” Someone else wrote, “LOL, and what is the deal with his acne?”

The network we most often watch at home is HGTV, because Laura-Beth loves House Hunters. If there is a House Hunters marathon airing, as there is most days, we are watching it. She doesn’t like reruns of sitcoms but will happily watch the same couple choose again between the modern house with the outdated kitchen, the spacious townhouse that’s too far from work, and the condo with high association fees. The show is hypnotic in its dullness, and yet I have developed intractable opinions about granite countertops and “man caves.”

There are good things about home ownership. The ability to invite the whole family over for dinner. To make changes without asking permission. To look at a building and say: That is mine. But also you’re constantly reminded of the limitations of the place where you live. It wasn’t until I’d owned a house for several years that I really knew what I wanted out of a house.

In 2011, we decided to move. We wanted a more functional layout and enough room to allow one of our aging parents to live with us, should the need arise. Our current home is twice as large as we actually need—at 2,300 square feet for two childless adults—and it invites us to continually fill it. Knickknacks and books and luggage and storage shelves to hold the kitchen gadgets we use once a year. We’ve spent embarrassing sums of money at The Container Store, buying new and innovative things to hold our other things.

Because our old place was smaller and had only one bathroom, it was what people called a “starter home,” but the recession made it impossible for the typical starter couple to buy a home. The market was dead, the value of the house had dropped too dramatically, and it needed too much work. We had to rent it.

Before you’re allowed to become a landlord, you need to get a certificate of occupancy (CO), and before you get a CO, the borough has to inspect your house.

I was forty minutes into the inspection when I texted LauraBeth, “I think we’re in serious trouble.” Keith, the inspector, was jamming his head between the spindles on our stairs, trying to see if a child could get stuck. Keith shaved his sideburns two inches above his ears, and his devotion to strictly interpreting the rules of the town code was rabbinical. Near the end of one inspection, he made me move a smoke detector from the ceiling to the wall, then measured and saw that it was six inches too low on the wall, and when I moved it up, he measured again and said it was an inch too high.

We failed the first inspection on twenty-six counts. All the windows were dangerous and in need of immediate replacement. The total cost of repairs would wipe out our savings.

I spent nights digging through old boxes for things to sell on eBay. I found some commemorative silver plates my grandmother had bought from the Franklin Mint, each of which went for a couple hundred dollars. I sold sports memorabilia. I sold books and Christmas decorations. As each sale processed, we were able to pay off another repair.

It seemed every day like we were on the verge of catastrophe.

My father-in-law was there with me as we struggled to make the necessary changes. He was too big and too old to dive into the crawl space, but he held the flashlight as I lay on my back trying to ignore the mouse droppings next to my face. He coached me through closing off an old circuit and its junction box, and then securing waste pipes to the joists. I’d lived in that house for six years, but I barely knew how any of it worked.

After the second failed inspection, my neighbor Rich saw me sitting on the front steps with my head in my hands. He took the report and returned a few minutes later with an invoice pricing out the lowest possible numbers for all remaining jobs. He said he could get them done within the week. Sometimes people can be kind for no reason at all. Everywhere I’ve lived, I’ve had neighbors who are friendly and generous and decent people. This has happened by pure chance, this luxury of living adjacent to nice people, of even being able to afford

home ownership in a town that is considered safe and desirable, and I remind myself sometimes how tenuous my comfortable life is. How unearned much of it is.

During the four weeks of despair between putting the house on the rental market and trying to pass the borough inspections, I cultivated an intense hostility toward Keith. I dreamed in graphic detail about murdering him: I am hammering something, and he’s standing over my shoulder telling me I’m doing it all wrong, and I turn and club him in the face until he is lying on my floor in a pool of blood. I call Laura-Beth and ask her for help in disposing of the body, and we meticulously remove his limbs, shove them into trash bags, and scatter them in the Pine Barrens. I would wake up feeling no remorse.

Three days a week, I had to go to the borough hall, where Carol, the only receptionist, never remembered my name, my face, or my requests. I wanted to tell her she was ruining my life, but instead I nodded and signed the forms and said nothing. I don’t know if that showed restraint or cowardice. Once, I knocked on the door of the construction commissioner prepared to fight him. He wasn’t there, but I banged on the door anyway, then left him a voice mail saying that I was just trying to live my fucking life and he was making it impossible.

You confront your own incompetence when you have a job like replacing a P trap beneath a sink, the kind of thing a plumber could do in three minutes, and it takes you three hours and several trips to Home Depot, and there’s still a tiny leak that you have to decide whether you can tolerate. I watched so many YouTube videos on basic home repairs, and for me, none of them worked the way they were supposed to. Somewhere in there, we also failed inspections of our water heater and our shed. (How does one even begin a career as a shed inspector?) Every time it rained, I hoped a magnanimous lightning strike would topple a tree onto our stupid house and save us all the trouble.

In the midst of this string of failures, I had the idea to surprise LauraBeth. I took the train to Center City in Philly and waited in the lobby of the Wanamaker Building, where she worked. The plan was: I would see her and hug her, and we would go out for a drink and talk about things besides the house. Probably we would have a second drink. I would put it on my credit card. I sat in the lobby for forty-five minutes, but none of the women coming down the escalators was my wife. Finally, I called her. She was already home, had somehow walked right past me.

On the PATCO train from Philly, I cried as we rattled through Camden and toward a home I did not ever want to see again. The accumulation of indignities, the feeling that even the simplest task was destined to go wrong destroyed my will. I went home in a bleak mood, the kind of self-loathing depression I hadn’t felt since my teen years. I knew millions of people were living harder lives, with debt guaranteed to outlast them and their children, with injuries and illness making it impossible for them to ever get right again. We both had good jobs and, as middle-class white people, no structural disadvantages limiting our opportunities. But I also felt like we were at a turning point in our lives: If we failed at home ownership, if we went broke and lost our house, then that meant everything else was on the verge of failure too. It was a referendum on my marriage and my adulthood in general, and I thought then that I deserved to have it all taken away.

Months after the inspections—which Rich had helped us pass, finally—I went back to the house to check on the leaking dishwasher. When I arrived, Rich was standing on his sidewalk crying. Doris was in the hospital, he said, and they weren’t telling him anything. He had sneaked a look at her chart and seen the words bronchogenic carcinoma, which he’d scribbled on the back of a crumpled old invoice he’d kept in his pocket. He knew LauraBeth was a nurse, and he wanted me to ask her to translate it. I had a guess on the first word, and I recognized the second. I was too afraid to be honest with him, so I said I wasn’t sure what it meant. Still, it was clear he understood she was dying. He said something about how she’d led a good life. He never stopped crying. She died a month later, and three months after that, her surviving son kicked Rich out of the house and sold it. The couple who bought it had planned on flipping it but found themselves trapped there by a stagnant housing market and Rich’s habit of doing home repairs without permits. Six years later, they’re still trying to sell the house.

I don’t know where Rich is. I don’t have his phone number. For a brief moment in my life he was incredibly important, and then he was gone.

This is what the TV shows tell you will happen: The first thing you do after you buy your dream home is chop some vegetables. Wherever you were living before just wasn’t what you deserved, and it would never have allowed you to live your perfect life. Your spouse pours chips into a bowl. Some acquaintances are in your open-concept living room, heads tilted back in laughter. There is wine. There is probably a dog. You wanted a fixer-upper with rustic charm, but she talked you into the contemporary colonial because it’s more practical. You’ve been in the house four days and you just love it. It’s been better than you could’ve dreamed. This is when you would place your hand on your wife’s belly and announce she is pregnant. You would say this was a great purchase and you couldn’t be happier. You would say this house will enable you to truly be a family, for the first time, and that now you can pursue your dreams. You would turn to your wife and smile. Then the next episode begins.

Our last tenants at the rental home wallowed in a level of filth that caused one contractor to say, “I don’t know how humans could live like this.” An electrician refused to enter the house until it was cleaned. I had anxiety attacks in the car as I drove there. On my visits, I stepped on discarded underwear, scattered cat litter, miscellaneous debris. Once, I stepped on a sandwich. Whenever I stopped by, Bob, one of the tenants, was in a recliner in pajama pants and no shirt. He never apologized for the mess or even indicated that he was aware there was a mess. He made me hate my own house. Sometimes we would get a call about a pipe that had been leaking for weeks and which they hadn’t mentioned. Sometimes they would call to complain that it was too dark at night and they didn’t feel safe walking outside. They were excellent at identifying problems I could not solve and ignoring problems I could. When their lease ended, LauraBeth and I agreed we had to sell the house. As landlords, we’d endured six years of relentless anxiety and continuous repairs. We lost money every month. We were willing to leave the house vacant and let our savings hemorrhage on the chance that we could make the sale.

The good news is the house finally sold, and the bad news is everything else.

Without renters, we spent ten months paying two mortgages. I visited the house every other day to check for damage, run the water, mow the lawn, shovel snow.

Even though we sold it, I still have nightmares about the stairs to the attic collapsing under my weight. Last night, I dreamed I was in the crawl space, and the new owner was closing the entrance behind me, trapping me there forever. During the closing process, we had to make twenty-seven new repairs. One hour before closing, my realtor called to tell me the buyers were thinking of backing out, and I was filled with a rage I hadn’t felt since I was an angry teenager punching holes in my wall. We had to agree to two more fixes to get them to sign the contract. In the end, we spent nearly thirty thousand dollars just to finally be rid of the house. For the second time in six years, our savings were gone.

Already, we’re discussing downsizing from our 2,300-square-foot house. But on this block, there are three abandoned homes. On every street nearby, I see houses in various states of disrepair, some that have been in foreclosure for years. Still, people keep buying homes, even next to these grim husks that each used to be somebody’s dream.

By any measure, our first home was a terrible investment. When I say this, my brother-in-law, a much more sentimental person than I am, says, “But what about all the memories you have there?”

We, like millions of others, never questioned the plan. We watched the HGTV shows and internalized the language of home purchasing, of laminate floors and shiplap and authentic exposed brick. Such shows are designed to generate anxiety and envy, to convince you that you’re only some good luck and a savvy renovation away from owning your ideal home. They actively shape the fantasy by highlighting designers who tell you, again and again, exactly what a real house should look like. There’s something particularly insidious about this business model, which picks at the most deep-seated anxieties in American culture and tells you the dream is right there, just out of reach, and if you exceed your budget by only a little bit, then you can have it all. Even after the bursting of the housing bubble, those house-flipping shows remain more popular than ever, and we’re expected to actually root for the goddamn house flippers.

The before-and-after shots don’t tell enough of the story: where the money comes from, who gets it, or what happens once people move in. Through fractured narratives and the performance of prosperity, these shows convince you to stop thinking and give yourself over to the mortgage-lending industry, which has destroyed millions of people’s lives, suffered no consequences, and continues to victimize poor and working-class people for profit.

I’m sitting up past midnight, tired but unable to sleep, because lately there have been maintenance problems in our second home, and I’m trying to find a new concrete guy to take a look at the cracks in the foundation. In the darkness, I listen to the sounds of my house settling. Homes are unnatural; we build them to fight against nature, to shield us from the weather. You can interpret the house’s creaking and groaning as normal, or you can hear those sounds the way I’ve come to hear them: as the land itself trying to reclaim what it once had. It’s in the quiet times that I’m most fearful, as I think about the futility of the effort to keep this structure standing.

In the morning, I wake to the sound of power saws buzzing next door. Our neighbor is gutting his house and rebuilding it from the ground up. On every block, there are waves of hope and despair, all leavened by an unaccountable optimism.

Read more from Issue 16.1.