In Spring, 1980... I have a very specific and vivid memory of my experience moving into my childhood home
The house looks gigantic to my five year old eyes. I'm running around the back into a second driveway leading to a 2 car garage. (It has TWO driveways!) There is a long row of lilac trees at the back border separating the yard from the other neighbors. Between the back yard and garage is a gigantic BARN....gray and brown with a sliding front door. It is the COOLEST THING EVER with an UPSTAIRS and you can hear the skittering of squirrels on the roof. I want this home. I want this to be our home. Our old home off 69th and Colorado, just down the street from the Lee's and Gerulises backed up to an enormous cornfield that had recently been blocked off for a *development* and my parents didn't want us to have to walk across the busy four way intersection of 69th and Zane to go to school.
My big-kid eyes make me feel my dad doesn't like it, but the storage alone had my mom's tail wagging. (I didn't know that hoarding was a problem. I just saw places to *play*) Our neighbors: The Peterson's, Illgen's, and Johnson's all seem like nice people and it was a quiet cul-de-sac. As a cop/HCSO deputy, the neighbors are welcoming. I know Dad likes the energy and the idea of importance.
I'm starting kindergarten in the Fall. This is my childhood home in Brooklyn Park.
It's Christmas, 1994, and I am a newly minted 19 year old. I normally live in a tiny sublet apartment in NE Minneapolis but I'm house and pet-sitting my neighbor's for the third year in a row in Brooklyn Park for the Winter. Today, we're gathered at my Gramma Pat's in Robbinsdale for Christmas dinner and I'm in their cool cold basement on a bed, the smell of turkey and cooking and menthol cigarettes wafting throughout the home and I'm daydreaming *hard* - I think about owning this house someday. About using Killz to cover the smoke-smell, about replacing the curtain in front of the 2nd bathroom in the basement with a real door...I'm essentially using the logic of a child that sees a pile of cushions or boards laying around and I'm building a fort. I'm thinking about hosting party's with alcohol and being able to fool around in privacy and my best friends being my roommates. I talk to my dad privately after subsequent gatherings about the idea of my moving in after my grandparents moved on or go to assisted living. I sell it to him by saying I'd carry on the tradition so we can all still gather around the holidays. I know he thinks it's a good idea. My dad can't live without these kind of traditions.
Gramma passes in early Winter, 2001. My older sibling is gifted the house which they eventually sell for a profit in 2005. I never cop to this out loud. I never argue. Of course it goes to the older sibling.
We never hold another family Easter, Thanksgiving, or Christmas with my extend family on my dad's side again.
In 1987 my dad explained to me the idea (in Robbinsdale) of the boomer homes that sprouted up on the Parkways between 1945-1950's. He familiarizes me with the idea of land and property being "the only investment that consistently increases in value*." In doing so, he plants the seed of home ownership being a "sure thing" and I have no reason not to believe him. In fact, by Christmas 1994, I've got the "why pay rent when you should be paying a mortgage on an investment" threaded through my mind.
After high-school, I'd been either living at home, house-sitting, or living in that tiny NE Minneapolis sublet. In the mid-90's, I had been spending my nights with my girlfriend in the room in a 4 BR Camden rambler shared by their weekend warrior roommates. I pestered the owner about home ownership and all he would say was: "Don't do it.". My first full year as a student at the University of MN I was still committed to housesitting my Brooklyn Park Neighbors for the 5th year in a row, but as student at the U it made no sense I lived so far away, so I made the move to Uptown (after my father insisted I pay an exorbitant fee to rent my own room.**) Even then, I dreamed of owning my own home without having to bang on walls to quiet down my neighbors.
It's 1997 and I'm working at Target Financial Services off 394 and Penn. I'm a caretaker of a small building in Uptown off 33rd and Lyndale. I love it. I pretend it's my home. I vacuum, mow, shovel, wash windows. I still find things to hate about it. I hate being called by the management company. I still daydream about a home. I start a habit at work on Sunday's where I grab a free newspaper on my break. I read the Variety (comics), theater employment (the 550's for auditions), and the real-estate section. My dad has been talking about NE Minneapolis for years- how much he likes it, how it's old school. He means white, without saying it. Polish. Czech. He wants me to buy a fixer-upper. We occasionally go on car rides together. It doesn't matter that I have never re-wired a home or used a saw outside of a tree-saw. He thinks I can buy a $40K property and turn it around in 6 months. That the price will double based on my occupancy. I buy the hype. Why would I not believe him?
Our weekend IT help desk supervisor, Geno, sits next to me on break as usual. He says he's a part-time realtor and asks me the usual questions like "where are you looking" ("Northeast is cool") and how much money I have ("None? Well ,you might qualify for blah blah blah"). He then asks me: "Well, if you're planning on staying here for the next 5 years you should be good..."
5 years. I'm 23 years old. I don't know where I'll be in 5 weeks much less five years. That question terrifies me. The "What If's" crash on my head. I don't know the ideas of privilege or how to even save for this. I like going dancing on Friday and Saturday night's. I have $343.00 in credit card debt. Five years would be 2002. Jesus. That's a cold-hearted question, to me.
I wind up in NE Minneapolis for another year, after spending 3 months at age 25 living at my parents and feeling like a failure. I wind up working in Western ND for the Summer of 2001 as a singing/dancing cowboy***. I come home and my parents and the parents of my partner secure us an Uptown apartment next to Bde Mka Ska for $825 a month. The world and the US goes tits up in September of that year.That's the absolute last time I would live in an apartment after I turned in my keys in the late Summer of 2003 and moved to a rented house.
It's September, 2003 and mom and dad take a picture of us on the front stoop after a long day of moving. We're paying $1,200 a month for a 2.5 room bungalow in the Lake Harriet neighborhood. And after about 6 months and a wedding proposal, my partner and I decide we are wasting our money and should find a house if we're spending so much money. I have 2 credit cards now. I feel poor all the time in spite of working 2 jobs
The house right next to us opens up for a rehab sale. It's a pig sty, but we're optimistic. The realtor asks us what we do and we tell them we're actors and their demeanor cools. "Maybe you should find a nice apartment or townhome?" Fuck you. We find an ambitious new realtor and spend the Spring 2004 looking in earnest. We're shot down dozens of times. I spend so much time on a mortgage calculator figuring out what we can afford with no down payment and come to a figure of $180K. We take the Summer off. After searching Hopkins, Saint Louis Park, South Minneapolis, and Golden Valley...I ask if we can start looking in Nordeast.
Our realtor starts emailing us potential NE Minneapolis homes.
*I love my dad. It took me a while to start finding flaws in his arguments, but there'd be none bigger than realizing my dad didn't understand real-estate in the contemporary sense. Dad saw it as a post-depression/Eisenhower-era gratification investment. It's here, when sifting through their investments I learned my father strayed away from anything that held a lot of risk and shoved it all into REIT's. This, I'd like to say from my own simple experience, was just fucking dumb.
**I know my dad was doing it to keep me out of the home and foraging my own path. I also know he would have likely kept my checks or paid me back with interest from an account as a "gift". What I never understood is the cold-hearted way he (and my at-the-time GF's dad) thought, in 1995 dollars, charging $800 a month in rent was a reasonable ask. I don't think any of us were even clearing $450 with working part time and being full-time students. Shit, my rent at the sublet was less than half so I was paying $175 of the $375 total.
***It's late-August 2001 and I'm working part-time at the local coffee shop in Western ND. My co-worker is very pregnant and runs the shared shop space that sells pottery. She lives in Eastern Montana, about 47 minutes due West on 94. It's their second child. We've a flirty, polite friendship that's grown over 14 hours a week for the last 3 months. She asks about my new Minneapolis big-city place with my girlfriend. She knows how relieved I am to have found someplace sight unseen. She asks how much rent is.
"$850 for a one-bedroom. $825 if we choose to do a one-year lease"
(I hear coughing and choking) "Are you okay?"
"Are you SERIOUS? My MORTGATE isn't even $450 a month and we have a 4 bedroom HOUSE!"
Yeah...it's Eastern MT, but you get the idea.
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