I have Millennial and Gen Z kids who are setting up or consolidating households. They're thinking about buying, even in this sellers' market and with these high interest rates. I don't know how things will turn out, and home ownership can definitely go wrong, but I think it makes sense for them to buy if possible and I’ll try to help. That's because home ownership has been the way that my family, people with modest careers as teachers or writers, have generated some wealth and stability. I’ve generated some wealth and stability, and I'm a career semi-failure and emotional wreck who tries to ignore all money or budgeting matters as beneath my intellectual dignity. I should be broke and anxious. But I'm not.
My parents, a teacher and a reporter, were born in the 1920s and lived through the Great Depression. When they married in 1957, they bought a two-bedroom house in the Chevy Chase neighborhood of DC for $15,000. In the 1950s, Chevy Chase was still a white enclave in one of the most effectively segregated cities in the world, a situation created by redlining and the housing policies of the federal government that ran the city. If they hadn't counted as white, they couldn't have bought where they did, though they were advocates of racial equality.
They bought low, almost absurdly so in some respects. They fixed the place up, and eventually my mother and step-father built an addition, making it three bedrooms. They spent the 1970s saving every penny, because they wanted to retire as teachers and start an organic farm, my step-father's dream. And by 1980, the value of their house had increased by something like twentyfold. They sold, and bought a 20-acre farm in Rappahannock County, Virginia, near the Blue Ridge. Zillow now estimates the value of the $15,000 house I grew up in at around $1,750,000. My parents got to do what they wanted with their lives because of that 1957 purchase.
I just moved to the farm they established in 1984, which might be worth almost as much as that DC house. My mother’s 100 years old, and I’m set to inherit the place. The idea that I, with my bottom-feeding academic career and an extreme lack of financial acumen, seem to control such substantial assets is almost incomprehensible. I never got to 80K in salary, never made full professor. I lived most of my life paycheck to paycheck with a load of consumer debt. I spent 30 years paying off student loans. Now I'm.... sort of wealthy?
I worked 20 years at Dickinson College in Carlisle PA (retired in 2023). Seven years in, I bought an old one-room schoolhouse 20 miles south of campus. It was unoccupied when I bought it in 2011 (for $110,000 at a market bottom) and a pretty bad mess, though strictly habitable. All kinds of stuff was in foreclosure all around south central PA at that time. It was practically impossible to get a mortgage, took months of begging and adjusting. But my mom lent me $20,000 and it happened.
I always wanted to own my home. My millennial daughter and son-in-law just got kicked out of their rental, for example, because the owner wants to sell, and renters are even more vulnerable than homeowners. And then, as a renter, you have to answer to your landlords, let them come look at your place. If you improved it, you'd be helping them financially, not yourself. Owning a home always struck me as a symbolic and real autonomy and just a little bit of safety.
My partner through this era has been Jane Irish, an artist and a highly competent worker with her hands. I added a window upstairs when I bought and in subsequent years we re-floored the living room in hardwood that was left over from a project at her sister's house. Jane re-did the kitchen floor with hand-painted tiles. We worked pretty hard on the yard and garden and Jane built an art studio that could also serve as a garage or workshop. In 2021, we refinanced when interest rates were at their lowest, ending up with a mortgage under three percent and pulling out $30,000, which we used for travel and further improvements.
Then I retired and it dawned on us that we really didn't have a lot of reasons to keep living near Carlisle, PA. We sold the schoolhouse and moved to the family farm. Again, the timing proved fortunate. We put the house on the market in May for $250,000 and started showing it. In three days, we got 11 offers, the lowest of which was the asking price. We sold for $295,000 to a guy who bought the place for his single-mom daughter. We paid off the mortgage and banked $175,000 or so.
It hardly seems possible, but I don't feel that financially stressed. I expect that when I pass away, I’ll leave my three children a considerable estate, including this beautiful farm and some cash, though I was never not in debt through my whole life. I guess we have real estate to thank, though I never did any systematic or rational investing. I just bought and sold at the right times, by luck or coincidence (though we did refinance consciously to take advantage of low interest rates).
My kids think Boomers are insufferable though lucky twits who don't understand the privileged era we've lived through. They think they’ll never be able to afford to buy. But I think they will, with their parents' help, perhaps. And even if what they buy is very modest, it may end up changing their financial outcomes if they can get the timing right.
It's not that my race, gender, and generation are not in there, reflected in my ability to get a loan or to pay it off, reflected also in what neighborhoods I've inhabited and what schools I've gone to. On the other hand, I also tend to think that DC's segregation was intended to keep housing prices high in the white neighborhoods. I’ve no idea what the price for that house in Chevy Chase would have been in 1957 in an integrated city. None of these factors can easily be quantified, and I do want some credit for hard decisions and steady work, those of my parents in particular.
At any rate, privileged or not, of this generation or that, I still think it makes sense to buy a house.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell
