West-Word: House & Home

By Sadhana Seelam

Turns out my niece, who is in the throes of buying her first home in the US, braving the challenging Silicon Valley housing market no less, is experiencing the same 'first time buyer cold feet' that is germane to pretty much sixty per cent or more of first time home buyers in the United States. Given human psychology and what constitutes confidence in us all, which is just plain living and some nice grey to show interspersed in whatever color hair we've been endowed with naturally, this 'cold feet' status is fairly endemic.

The ‘buy versus rent’ debate seems as old as the chicken and egg debate, with vociferous advocates for both sides. I remember having cold feet and pulling out of two or three home purchase offers, many years ago. Unsupported by guidance of any sort, I depended on a shaky whim and feeble instinct to guide me on the path of the American Dream.

Home ownership has always been an aspirational goal and not a mere bucket list item. It could potentially stand shoulder to shoulder with marriage, etc. in terms of significance and gravity. Over the years, I’ve bought and sold and bought again. I happily admit to having inherited a real estate bug that’s deeply embedded in most Indians, the fascination of possessing tangible assets, such as properties with addresses attached to them, which in turn, become a measure of success or lack thereof.

In the US, average rents shot up from $400 in 1995 to close to $900 by April of 2017. Those numbers are of course cause for much levity in the bubble that Silicon Valley’s housing market has become. One is likely to be able to rent a garage for that price (the national rental average) in the fancy San Francisco Bay Area!

It is little mystery as to why most people doggedly pursue the American Dream of owning a home as most folks feel it is better than renting and paying ‘someone else’s mortgage.’

In the United Kingdom, rents are fairly high, pushing people towards their own enfranchisement through home ownership. Germany and some of the Scandinavian countries have a much more stable rental environment with robust public advocacy groups set up to afford a great deal of transparency to allow for renters’ rights to prevail.

Going back to my niece and her husband’s unsettled attempts at putting offers on homes, negotiating terms and contrasting the nail-biting tension of buying versus the splurge of renting in the pricey Silicon Valley geography, harkens me back to my own halcyon or clueless days (depending on how you look at them)! I recall that I went through the excruciating exercise alone and bewildered and just emerging having signed ownership documents made me feel a sense of coming of age, of having squared up with the adversarial forces aligned to thwart my clawing and forceful climb to realize the ideal that drove Americans toward their dream.

All dwellings, by virtue of the fact that we inhabit them, are houses that become homes. Or so I told myself, each time the dream crept away from within my reach back in those heart ache days, when disappointments were so rampant I was surprised and suspicious when I wasn’t disappointed. I still experience a hangover effect of some of those scars, almost three decades later. Dreams like hopes are ephemeral, houses become homes because we breathe our hopes, disappointments and aspirations into them, even when rented, the pulse beating through is owned by us.