It’s not just a financial commitment. It can alter people’s relationships to a community, a place, and even time.
Growing up, Erin Nelson used to make fun of their dad for spending so much time looking out the window at what the neighbors were up to. “Now I’m that person,” Nelson, a 31-year-old who bought their first house a year ago in Portland, Oregon, told me. “I’m always peeking out the window … That’s like my new TV.” Nelson, who uses they/them pronouns, has realized that as a homeowner, their life is bound up with the people next door in a way it never has been before.
Buying a first house is, for those who can afford it, among the largest financial decisions someone makes in their life, and lately, the process has only gotten more stressful: During the pandemic, home prices have shot up, and shopping for a house has become intimidatingly competitive in many places. But even some winners of the competition have buyer’s remorse. In a recent survey from the real-estate site Zillow, roughly one-third of respondents reported regretting how much work or maintenance their home required, and roughly one-fifth concluded that they had paid too much.
Perhaps forgotten amid the bidding wars and the rush to lock in a mortgage as interest rates rise is the fact that this transaction has a way of changing people as well. In addition to buying an assemblage of wood, glass, and other materials and committing to a host of unfamiliar chores, homeowners are also buying a psychological grab bag of new stressors, time sucks, comforts, perks, and trivial fixations—such as the neighbors’ comings and goings. Homeownership can change your mental time horizon, your conception of your community, and your stakes in a physical place.
For starters, homeownership alters people’s relationship to the tangible stuff that makes up their house. “When I [rented] an apartment, I was like, ‘I’m hanging this photo on the wall. Whatever—not my wall!’” Maia Bittner, a 34-year-old in the Seattle area who works at a financial-technology company, told me. “Now I’m like, ‘Good God, I put every dollar I have into the down payment and this drywall is like a shrine.’”
Today’s new homeowners may even feel more of a desire to preserve and perfect their living space than previous generations. Logan Mohtashami, the lead analyst for the real-estate news site HousingWire, told me that buyers tend to hold on to their home for longer than they used to; the typical length of “tenure” was five to seven years from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, and is now, according to the real-estate site Redfin, about 13 years. “The psychology is that this is yours and you’re going to make it as good as possible because you’re in for a long time,” Mohtashami said. Bittner does not love the work that this requires, though. The stress of home maintenance—say, coordinating the repair of a leaky window—is less meaningful to her than the stress of her job, which she feels at least has the benefit of moving her career forward.
Committing to owning a house can also tie people more closely to a place. Nelson, who works for a tech start-up, told me that after moving frequently during childhood and hopping from rental to rental in their 20s, they find homeownership “very calming” at age 31. It has also led them to wonder, “Now that I’ve settled and claimed this little piece of land, what am I going to do to invest in my community?” One of Nelson’s answers has been to devote about 10 percent of their disposable income to local nonprofits.
Read more like this on The Atlantic.
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