Lagging laws

Earlier this summer, we started the process of buying a house. It finally made sense based on our financial situation and plans for our near future. And we looked at many places virtually and in-person. What shocked us the most is how most of the homes are antiquated, old, traditional era houses that seemed to be stuck in the 1950s. Most of the houses we saw were constructed back then and continually renovated by new occupants every few decades. The base structure and layout of the house, though, remained the same throughout the ages. A typical two-bedroom small house usually has a master bedroom/bathroom, a second bedroom with a detached bathroom, a living space, a kitchen area, a dining area, and some type of small outdoor space. These types of layouts were clearly made for small families. And therein lied the problem for us.

We were looking specifically for a compact and sensibly designed house. We had stayed in some “Tiny Home” Airbnbs over the past years and were impressed by how well they made use of the little space there was available. The homes were functional, practical, and thoughtful. It felt like a huge waste of space for us to have a giant bedroom when all I really needed was a small private space for a desk to call my home office. It felt wasteful to have a large dining area that we’d never use since we usually eat most of our meals while watching something on TV. We were also surprised by how many houses only had one bathroom, we were looking for at least need another half-bathroom since I have a very strict and dedicated morning/night routine involving skincare, dental care, and eye care. I wouldn’t want to feel like I’m hogging the bathroom to myself for an hour every morning and night just to apply my several ointments and clean my retainers.

As you might have guessed, we didn’t find any homes like this. Everything we saw was constructed for what was deemed to be “desirable” for that market — typically a large house in a good school neighborhood well suited for raising a family. As a sidenote, it’s really shocking to me how spacious houses are in the US. Having grown up in India, space was a luxury and even a modest 2BR in the US could easily pass as a luxury mansion in India. Anyway, we kept looking for a small and sensible space that made sense for our situation — it was just the two of us and our dog. I was personally shocked to learn about the “appraisal” process, a seemingly insane procedure that involves a single human called an “appraiser” coming to take a look at the property and determining what it’s worth based on outdated and highly flawed criteria like crime rate, school district, what similar homes in the area have sold for, and property tax rates for that zip code. This single appraiser is undoubtedly inviting a lot of bias into their appraisal based on their own opinions of what’s “desirable” in that market. It’s not uncommon to see a Black family having their house appraised for less than its actual value when a Black family is occupying it versus when a white family is occupying it.

These appraisers lower or raise the market value of a house based on the neighborhood, and since the sale price of nearby houses are taken into account, an artificial inflationary trend is created that props up the value of all houses in the neighborhood based on nothing but likeness and similarity. The neighborhood is only worth that much because everyone else said so, kind of like how money only has value because we all agreed it does. Since the appraisers are biased, it immediately marginalizes anyone who doesn’t fit that typical mold of a family looking to move in to the neighborhood because the house layouts don’t accommodate them. Modern families in America are multigenerational, with several family members living together. Single folks are forced into cohabitating with roommates for longer time periods due to historically high rent. Many people want flexible living arrangements involving partners, mates, and guests. But there’s no housing layouts available for these people.

Housing construction just hasn’t kept up with the types of houses we need today. The “missing middle” in America’s housing is depriving millions of people from living in the types of places they want to live in. One-bedrooms are unaffordable for the single-by-choice, widowed, or divorced folks. There are almost no short term stays available anywhere in the country for a few months, you simply must sign a one-year lease or a thirty-year mortgage. And the truth is that it’ll take a long time for things to catch up. Most laws and policies lag several decades behind the change that’s already taking place, and it’ll take a while for these new demographic trends to be reflected in census data. Only then will we start to see new types of housing construction and house layouts that accommodate the people being left out today. Unfortunately, this also means that there’s no real solution for those caught in the middle of it today. They simply must wait long enough for things to change, at which point their personal living arrangement and lifestyles may have evolved so dramatically that even those changes won’t suffice anymore. Throughout the whole process of looking for a house, it was just startling to see how different the lifestyles and preferences of people my age are from the types of “starter homes” available on the market. There is this huge gap that you have to be comfortable bridging if you want to start building equity in your place of residence.

The negative outcome of this is that people feel like their choices and lifestyles aren’t valid. They go out and see the built environment gleefully accommodating a nuclear family but offering nothing for the type of living situation that they want. It sends a strong, invisible, signal that they’re making the “wrong” choices. And it can be daunting to face that. These are structures of concrete and cement standing for decades that have housed and seen generations come and go. And yet when you walk up to their doorstep, you don’t feel the magic or get a sense that this house could become a home. You can’t envision living there because it was built for an entirely different type of person at an entirely different time. So you walk away hoping that the next one is it. And keep trying.

After some hundred showings, you give up and settle for a place that’s as close to your desired home that you’re trying to find. Eventually, you might even find yourself pressured to succumb to the “desired” lifestyle of that neighborhood just by virtue of living there, and that’s how this creeping, slow assimilation kills any sense of identity and individuality. It’s not long before you become a jaded, cynical homeowner who just isn’t loving the place because you’re forced to live a way of life that you were never meant to, going along with the everyday motions just because everyone else seems to be doing so. It’s a crushing blow to the wide-eyed enthusiasm with which you initially approached your house hunt, only now to be saddled with an old colonial townhome that continually keeps breaking apart and you never really liked to begin with. This is the current state of home ownership in America, and until things drastically change, we’ll see a repeat of this pattern for many, many decades to come.