Real Estate, Part III

One thing I wanted to do in 2015 is move. We live in a firetrap townhouse (the insulation on the lower floor says "Flammable: Do not leave uncovered." It is, next to the furnace, hot water heater, and dryer. We are also in a three-story house, where it's a full flight up to get the groceries to the kitchen. Our next oldest neighbor in the other  twelve townhouses is twenty-eight. We don't go to football games, but we are close enough to the stadium to have to plan our movements on football day to avoid the messed-up traffic and noise.

We talked about owning, but there was a voice in our heads that said "Morgantown is not home." If that's true, then we don't have a home. I'm five years out of Los Angeles, Joe is ten years out of San Francisco. We have people in New York, Washington, Memphis, Buffalo and various places in Florida. We are not really planning on moving to those places.

On Sundays, I typically check out the real estate section of the local paper. I learned from my unfinished graduate work in urban studies that the easiest places to move are the middle of a city and the outer edges. Tree of Life, where Joe is the rabbi, is two blocks across  Decker's Creek from downtown Morgantown. There are three historic districts on The National Register (Chancery Hill, South Park and Greenmont) in that part of town. Many of the members of the congregation live in that part of town. Prior to the 1960s, Jews didn't live anywhere else in town. There are new townhouses being built around the edge of the city. The problem with the old houses is that while they are beautiful, they are expensive if remodeled, and unlivable if not.The new houses tend to be ugly and far from just about anything.

I look for more modern houses within five miles of the synagogue. Our townhouse is only 2.8 miles away, but through the University, meaning the traffic on the ancient streets is always backed up, and when classes are in session, one has to drive miles out of the way to avoid students walking to class.

Last Sunday, I saw a listing for a typical Liberty Road-style 1950s split-level house in South Park. An anomaly in that neighborhood. I called the agent for the house Monday and Joe and I went to see it Tuesday. It's only slightly bigger than the house I grew up in in Baltimore, and from the same time period. That house was cramped, but we were four. Two of us should be able to handle it. At sixty years old it can also be part of the historic district it is in, although most of the neighborhood is from the early twentieth century.

Yesterday we were pre-approved for a loan. I have enough cash for a down payment and the monthly payments will not likely be more than we pay in rent. The price seems too high. Of course, a similar house in Los Angeles would be in a rough Valley neighborhood and cost twice as much; in New York, it would be thirty miles out from Manhattan and cost a million dollars.

There may be other, nicer houses for less money, but not in South Park, which is where we really belong. It is the one liberal neighborhood in this otherwise troglodyte conservative part of the world. It's probably the only neighborhood in the 300 miles between Pittsburgh and Charleston where you might see an old "Obama" sticker on a car. This isn't an easy state to live in.

Buying a house might be the kind of "leap of faith" Joe took when he quit his job at Wells Fargo at forty-seven to start a five-year program to become a rabbi. Looking at a fifteen or thirty year loan at our age is daunting. And buying means we plan to stay here in Morgantown.

Still, it would be great to have a mid-century house, a flat yard, a finished basement to put our stuff in, a back deck to entertain in the summer, and neighbors who are already our friends. We might finally be in a home.

We still have work to do before this house is ours. We have inspections, price negotiations, dealing with banks, and then the logistics of moving to deal with. I'm hopeful.

I called this post "Real Estate, Part III" because Parts I and II were about our venture into real estate in Crescent City, California, described in my previous blog, "Barry's Excellent Adventure." It also appears in my book, Barry's Crescent City Blog: A Jewish Gay Man On California's North Coast.

I've spent a half-hour trying to upload pics from my phone and correcting the extra capital letter in the "Labels" section a dozen times. I'm so frustrated with how poorly this format works, I could strangle Sergei Brin (founder of Google) myself.