could show them all fell significantly below their dream. The current median Haddam-area house goes for 149K, which buys you a builder-design colonial in an almost completed development in not-all-that-nearby Mallards Landing: 1,900 sq ft, including garage, three-bedroom, two-bath, expandable, no fplc, basement or carpets, sited on a 50-by-200-foot lot “clustered” to preserve the theme of open space and in full view of a fiberglass-bottom “pond.” All of which cast them into a deep gloom pit and, after three weeks of looking, made them not even willing to haul out of the car and walk through most of the houses where I’d made appointments.
Other than that, I showed them an assortment of older village-in houses inside their price window—mostly small, dark two-bedrooms with vaguely Greek facades, originally built for the servants of the rich before the turn of the century and owned now either by descendants of immigrant Sicilians who came to New Jersey to be stonemasons on the chapel at the Theological Institute, or else by service-industry employees, shopkeepers or Negroes. For the most part those houses are unkempt, shrunken versions of grander homes across town—I know because Ann and I rented one when we moved in eighteen years ago—only the rooms are square with few windows, low-ceilinged and connected in incongruous ways so that inside you feel as closed in and on edge as you would in a cheap chiropractor’s office. Kitchens are all on the back, rarely is there more than one bath (unless the place has been fixed up, in which case the price is double); most of the houses have wet basements, old termite damage, unsolvable structural enigmas, cast-iron piping with suspicions of lead, subcode wiring and postage-stamp yards. And for this you pay full price just to get anybody to break wind in your direction. Sellers are always the last line of defense against reality and the first to feel their soleness threatened by mysterious market corrections. (Buyers are the second.)
On two occasions I actually ended up showing houses to Sonja (who’s my daughter’s age!) in hopes she’d see something she liked (a primly painted “pink room” that could be hers, a particularly nifty place to snug a VCR, some kitchen built-ins she thought were neat), then go traipsing back down the walk burbling that this was the place she’d dreamed of all her little life and her Mom and Dad simply had to see it.
Only that never happened. On both of these charades, as Sonja went clattering around the empty rooms, wondering, I’m sure, how a twelve-year-old is supposed to buy a house, I peeked through the curtains and saw Joe and Phyllis waging a corrosive argument inside my car—something that’d been brewing all day—both of them facing forward, he in the front, she in the back, snarling but not actually looking at each other. Once or twice Joe’d whip his head around, focus-in his dark little eyes as intent as an ape, growl something withering, and Phyllis would cross her plump arms and stare out hatefully at the house and shake her head without bothering to answer. Pretty soon we were out and headed to our next venue.
Unhappily, the Markhams, out of ignorance and pigheadedness, have failed to intuit the one gnostic truth of real estate (a truth impossible to reveal without seeming dishonest and cynical): that people never find or buy the house they say they want. A market economy, so I’ve learned, is not even remotely premised on anybody getting what he wants. The premise is that you’re presented with what you might’ve thought you didn’t want, but what’s available, whereupon you give in and start finding ways to feel good about it and yourself. And not that there’s anything wrong with that scheme. Why should you only get what you think you want, or be limited by what you can simply plan on? Life’s never like that, and if you’re smart you’ll decide it’s better the way it is.
My own approach in all these
Other than that, I showed them an assortment of older village-in houses inside their price window—mostly small, dark two-bedrooms with vaguely Greek facades, originally built for the servants of the rich before the turn of the century and owned now either by descendants of immigrant Sicilians who came to New Jersey to be stonemasons on the chapel at the Theological Institute, or else by service-industry employees, shopkeepers or Negroes. For the most part those houses are unkempt, shrunken versions of grander homes across town—I know because Ann and I rented one when we moved in eighteen years ago—only the rooms are square with few windows, low-ceilinged and connected in incongruous ways so that inside you feel as closed in and on edge as you would in a cheap chiropractor’s office. Kitchens are all on the back, rarely is there more than one bath (unless the place has been fixed up, in which case the price is double); most of the houses have wet basements, old termite damage, unsolvable structural enigmas, cast-iron piping with suspicions of lead, subcode wiring and postage-stamp yards. And for this you pay full price just to get anybody to break wind in your direction. Sellers are always the last line of defense against reality and the first to feel their soleness threatened by mysterious market corrections. (Buyers are the second.)
On two occasions I actually ended up showing houses to Sonja (who’s my daughter’s age!) in hopes she’d see something she liked (a primly painted “pink room” that could be hers, a particularly nifty place to snug a VCR, some kitchen built-ins she thought were neat), then go traipsing back down the walk burbling that this was the place she’d dreamed of all her little life and her Mom and Dad simply had to see it.
Only that never happened. On both of these charades, as Sonja went clattering around the empty rooms, wondering, I’m sure, how a twelve-year-old is supposed to buy a house, I peeked through the curtains and saw Joe and Phyllis waging a corrosive argument inside my car—something that’d been brewing all day—both of them facing forward, he in the front, she in the back, snarling but not actually looking at each other. Once or twice Joe’d whip his head around, focus-in his dark little eyes as intent as an ape, growl something withering, and Phyllis would cross her plump arms and stare out hatefully at the house and shake her head without bothering to answer. Pretty soon we were out and headed to our next venue.
Unhappily, the Markhams, out of ignorance and pigheadedness, have failed to intuit the one gnostic truth of real estate (a truth impossible to reveal without seeming dishonest and cynical): that people never find or buy the house they say they want. A market economy, so I’ve learned, is not even remotely premised on anybody getting what he wants. The premise is that you’re presented with what you might’ve thought you didn’t want, but what’s available, whereupon you give in and start finding ways to feel good about it and yourself. And not that there’s anything wrong with that scheme. Why should you only get what you think you want, or be limited by what you can simply plan on? Life’s never like that, and if you’re smart you’ll decide it’s better the way it is.
My own approach in all these
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