House hunting

This is an essay

I am house hunting in St. Louis. Over the past month or so, I’ve viewed about ten dwellings that fit my criteria: Bungalow preferred; two bedrooms; finished or semi-finished basement; move-in ready; welcoming neighborhood.

In my quest, I’ve become a devotee of Zillow, which provides a lot of useful information. And, most listings include at least twenty photos of rooms — either staged with simple, elegant furniture or completely empty.

Photo by Tierra Mallorca on Unsplash

One particular house caught my attention because it was a rare and affordable bungalow in a great neighborhood dominated by massive, expensive piles. The interior pictures showed a very lived-in 1950s home, but I wasn’t prepared for what I saw when my brother and I walked through with a realtor.

First of all, the owners — a retired couple — still live there, along with at least one adult daughter and her child. All, except for the child, seemed low-spirited when we arrived. The place felt like the home of a family in distress, a family that had lost hope. The term "quiet desperation” came to mind.

The house — which looked great from the outside — was crammed with possessions: books, magazines, knick-knacks, outdated electronics, children’s toys, too much furniture in too little space. Paint was peeling off the walls. Baseboards were half stripped away in some rooms and gone in others, leaving only discoloration to show they’d even existed. The wood floors were gray after years of wear and tear.

The kitchen looked as if it hadn’t been updated since the 1970s, and not in a cool vintage way. The bathroom had a newer vanity, but the medicine cabinet mirror was unusable. Let’s just say the bathtub had seen better days.

We found that part of the basement was being used as a bedroom, without any of insulation or sign that it could be kept warm in the winter. Hangars looped over various pipes held dozens of dusty and forlorn jerseys representing professional sports teams. A new washer and dryer sat next to their defunct counterparts.

The couple was using the garage as a storage space. It held an old stove, a bicycle, tools, broken furniture and — displayed on a large table — dozens of trophies. We found out later one of the couple’s daughters had been a star basketball player in middle and high school. Later, she was too short to make it on the college courts. There were no working lights in the garage, but our phones illuminated the collection of trophies. They gleamed at us, like messengers from happier times.

A contractor friend walked through the house with us on a second visit. He concluded that the place would need a new roof, new HVAC, new floors, and many more improvements and updates. Even if I got the sales price down, the cost to make all the repairs made the house a no-go for me.

According to a study from Harvard, about 11 million older Americans are cost-burdened, meaning more than mortgage payments or rent eat up 30% of their incomes. And, according to the report, housing that is both affordable and designed to support older people’s health and well-being is becoming harder to find. The internet tells me that there are an estimated 4.8 million households with three or more adult generations under one roof. There may be as many as 60 million people living in homes with two or more adult generations — like the family in this essay.

I know very little about this family. They bought their home decades ago, when the neighborhood was affordable. I don’t know why they didn’t do the maintenance necessary to keep the house up. I don’t know if and when they stopped caring or became overwhelmed by circumstances beyond their control.

As it turns out, someone made an offer on the house right after my brother and I visited. I really hope the couple gets their asking price, because they need the money to move into a wheelchair accessible home — for the husband — and enough room to accommodate their adult daughter and grandchild.

Song of the week

Our House, by Madness (1982), really captures the barely contained chaos and emotional soup of life in a home of a working class family. It’s tinged with the nostalgia many adults feel about a time that was far from perfect but seemed simpler — better somehow. Also, the video is a great example of the early MTV era, musical acts were discovering the artform.

Father wears his Sunday best
Mother’s tired, she needs a rest; the kids are playing up downstairs
Sister’s sighing in her sleep
Brother’s got a date to keep, he can’t hang around