Hidden Filters

I decided to look up the purchase and sale of our various houses. I had to go into the back of my deepest closet and haul out boxes and boxes of papers stored through our married life. I compiled all of the information, actually a couple of times because the first time I went through there were still missing pieces that Harry helped me compile by going through the files and looking up dates, interest rates, mortgage amounts, selling prices. It was an interesting review of our life and why we had made the decisions that we had, what hidden filters operated that now, years later, might come to light.

So let me begin with the first house we bought in Pittsburgh after having lived in various apartments in New York City and Pittsburgh for six years. Harry was a vet and so we could take advantage of the low down payment through the VA. We found a sweet little house just south of Squirrel Hill in the Greenfield neighborhood. It was a hell of a walk up the hill after the bus left me off from work in the evening, but what a great view when you got to the top of the hill. From our back porch you could see the Mon River, short for the Monongahela, coming from the north as far as your eye could see. And at its side was the hulking, giant steel mill and furnaces, by then shuttered. It did not mar our view of downtown further to the north. I had to write a letter of protest that the VA appraisers were undermining the inner city when the house didn’t appraise for what we had offered for it. I must have argued convincingly because they reevaluated and we were able to buy the house for only $39,000. We made almost $3,000 in as many years when we sold it to move to Chicago in 1981.

In Chicago we hired our first realtor and, after two days of looking all over the city I was really depressed and decided we would never find anything suitable. I still have memories of one small house she showed us with an all-black interior and bright red vinyl furniture. True we weren’t buying furniture and I could have painted, but the bordello look seemed to be the norm there in Jungle City. Then the realtor took us on a trip north along Lake Shore Boulevard and everything brightened. Back to city streets through Rogers Park but then at the city line you were at the lake again and, as you round the bend at the cemetery, there spread out before you is the north shore with beautiful beaches and stately homes and towering trees. Many of the homes were of another era and thank heaven we did not get the six-bedroom run down mansion that I desperately wanted. Still we spent much more than we should have especially in those days of 16% mortgages. We were only there two years when Harry’s oil and gas company got a new CEO who liked horses and so we, along with the rest of the company, were moving to Lexington, KY. Still we made $10,000 on the sale.

I had learned some important lessons by this time in picking neighborhoods. I looked for the older homes and found them in the Chevy Chase area with a great neighborhood shopping center and the nearby historic home and Ashland Park where favorite son Henry Clay had lived. Harry severely curtailed my house hunting by giving me a “not to exceed” limit. I was willing because we wanted to have a second child and I did not want to be “house poor” as we had been with the previous house. More about this as a buying strategy later. We found a beautiful old home with a front porch framed by white dogwood trees that bloomed every spring. That house sold like hot cakes when we had to move to Cleveland again after only two years. But again we made money. I left the red rocking chairs on the front porch for the new owners. It just didn’t seem right to take them, they had a natural place there.

I was getting to be a pro by now at picking real estate, however, now we had schools to consider as well. There were no finer schools than in Shaker Heights, which like Evanston in Chicago, had a reputation as a bastion of liberalism where they were having moderate success with integration. It had been a completely planned development at the turn of the century built with quality homes, tree-lined streets, built in commercial centers. The house we bought, typical of those in the area, had three floors plus a basement, with five bedrooms and five bathrooms and at a reasonable price. I worked away at its repair stripping wall paper even off the ceiling, after I had taken down the asbestos tiles. I pulled linoleum off the bedroom floors and refinished the hardwood. And we made money there too and when we really needed it because disaster had struck when Harry’s company was sold and all of the employees laid off. We had moved there in 1987 and when we left five years later we were on our way to Texas.

Every time you move it is a little like throwing all the cards in the air, but in moving to Texas we were moving to a whole different part of the country and we were confused. We were going to Fort Worth, also known as Cowtown. We even looked at houses where we could keep a horse. We began looking in suburbs where gated communities were filled with houses that all looked the same. As we would enter one, the realtor would announce that homes were within a very narrow price range. The next gated community up the street had houses in the next higher price range. It’s a very organized way to live, but not for us. We went into town and ended up on the west side and the girls went to magnet schools. But the house was beautiful, on the top of a hill with a view of downtown –this time with a pool. This house was actually my worst nightmare because bit by bit I felt I could hear it crumbling around us. Even after we had taken out a second mortgage to replace the furnace and redo the floors and other cosmetics, I feared that the cedar siding, completely without insulation in the brutal summer heat and sun beating down, was about to pop off the house. Then I began to fantasize about the pool getting a crack. I thought we would never be able to sell it but sell it we did when a tornado blew through town and destroyed Harry’s company’s headquarters in 1999. The company called up everyone at home to announce that they had been sold and we were moving to Houston. We made more on the sale of that house than any of the others.

In Houston we bought our first townhome, our most expensive home to date. Harry’s company was in the Woodlands which is a 45 minute drive from Houston, still a drive he preferred to make so that we could live in the city. This was truly Harry’s house to select and my biggest fears were for the neighborhood which was very transitional when we bought. It was an excellent choice, however, for the neighborhood most of all. I would not say we were urban pioneers, however, the city has invested in light rail and other improvements to support housing redevelopment that we have watched take place over the past now 14 years that we have lived in our townhouse development of 8 units. And the price of these units continues to go up. We plan to sell the house in Houston to help pay for building the new house in Monterey. If our estimate is correct for the amount we think we can sell the Houston townhome, we will have made $250,000 on six homes over 35 years. That is a 15% annual return on our initial investment of $2,000 in the house in Pittsburgh, which is not bad. It certainly beats what we might have gotten from a traditional savings bank at about 2% per annum,  and better than we would have done in the stock market (S&P) record for that same period. But the hidden filters are being in a good housing market. It made a big impact on our numbers that the moves and realtors’ fees were paid for by Harry’s company, but we also made reasonable decisions. We certainly were not urban pioneers, but one thing we did by curtailing how much we spent on the house, we kept it affordable and ended up selecting properties at the upper end of lower priced neighborhoods. By keeping our cost down we had the money to be able to do the upkeep necessary. Then too we were right in the middle of the Baby Boom Bubble that assured a good market for family homes in neighborhoods with good schools. There have been many downsides to moving, but one upside appears to have been good investments in real estate. Harry says we weren’t investing, just looking for homes where we thought we’d be happy. These were all terrific houses, but, what made them great places to live was the surrounding community, our neighbors and friends.