Buy this house
For those of you looking to buya house, the one on the corner of our street just went up for sale.
For $189,000, you can pick up this 976 square foot, 2 bedroom, 1-story Craftsman style bungalow built in 1920. I haven’t seen the interior, but the listing says it’s newly remodeled, and the garage out back does have the capacity to handle four cars (or one car and a sizable workshop). This little charmer looks to be well taken care of, a classic, cozy home. And with a fridge stocked with beer and a fire pit out back, I promise to be a great neighbor.
And I know that I lost a good number of people’s interest when I put “$189K” and “976 suare feet” in the same sentence. Why spend so much on such a small house when the same money will get you a house twice the size in Chaska that was built in 2002? Isn’t that a lot of money for such a tiny, old house?
Let’s put things into perspective, though. You’re not just buying a house, you’re buying a lifestyle. This is the case every time you would purchase a home, though. And so many times it seems that people base their choice of homes more on how much square footage they can get for their money than looking at the house holisticly. Sure, a little bit of consideration is given to broad things like the quality of the local school district or just how long of a commute you’ll have, but does anyone look at the kind of life you’re purchasing?
A series of books that I recommend and adhere to are the Not So Big House books by Minneapolis architect Susan Susanka. She follows one basic rule, which is put your money into quality and useability instead of sheer size. Consider the modern monster suburban domicle. In it you can find a formal livingroom, a den, a family room, and a media room. All of them are big and impersonal, and all of them have vast swaths of blank walls and skinny woodwork. These behemoths have little to no character of their own, and it’s up to the homeowner to try and fill these rooms with enough stuff to actually make the place seem homey. Susanka’s idea is that you instead create two rooms, which she calls simply a livingroom and an away room. The livingroom is for just that, living. Use furniture to create smaller subdivisions in the room for certain things, like a cluster of couches for conversation on one end and a table for games or homework or whatever else on the other, then use smart storage to keep things out of sight when you’re not using them. The away room is just that, a smaller room that’s just as functional but meant for one or two people to just be alone in.
She also applies this concept to other places in the home. Why have a formal dining room, informal eating space int he kitchen, a breakfast nook, and a kitchen island with bar stools? Why build a four-bedroom house for a couple of empty-nesters? You can take a room, give it multiple functions, and then take all that money you would have spent on square footage and give your house some character. Maybe a stained glass window, or nice trim work, or some architectural feature that says, “this home is special”. By focusing on a house that is more human-scale and less impersonal, you can divert funds away from getting that huge, impersonal home.
Not only do you have to think about the quality and character of the house itself, you do have to consider the three most important things about real estate: Location, location, location. The obvious topics of conversation would be the aforementioned commute to work or what the school district is like, or possibly the crime rate, or whatever else. I would rather focus on two things: How straight are your streets and how often can you leave your car at home?
I have found that a person’s quality of life is surprisingly dependent upon the answer to those two. In my own neighborhood, I am able to just walk to 2 grocery stores, 3 coffee shops, over a dozen restaurants, 2 specialty grocers (one Latino and one Polish/Russian), a library, antique stores, 2 baby boutiques (one high-end, one second-hand), 2 pharmacies, a hardware store, dentists, banks, clinics… The list goes on and on. And with the good old straight street grid, as opposed to the winding, twisting suburban street layout seen nowadays, it’s easy to walk about town. Not only do I have all of these amenities close by, whether I walk or drive or bike to them, but I’m more likely to engage in the healthy act of walking when I have reason to. Plenty of neighborhoods, new and old, have sidewalks and paths for walking, but it seems easier to get people to exercise when there’s more purpose than just walking for the sake of walking.
As an aside, a good majority of these business are locally owned, something that I support in that a larger portion I spend at these places actually stays in my community. Most newer suburban neighborhoods only seem to have the option for residents to drive to vast swaths of strip malls and parking lots chock full of national chains and big box stores.
Please allow me to detour you to this site: www.WalkScore.com. You can go ahead and enter your own address sometime, but right now let’s look at what information we can get on the two houses in question. My block in Hopkins has a walk score of 80 out of 100, meaning it is highly walkable. The house in Chaska? 10. Sure, you can take a stroll around the neighborhood with no trouble, but if you’re out to enjoy the evening air and want a coffee or ice cream, well, grab your keys. You can roll down the window if you want fresh air.
While I can just leave the car at home and walk quite often, I will admit that Hopkins does not have everything. But, that’s what a suburb is. It’s a smaller satellite city that crops up in the shadow of a much larger city with many more amenities, the local big city around here being Minneapolis. Another thing to consider is multi-modal connectivity. While I could just drive to places outside of Hopkins, I am also able to easily take a bus and, sometime in the foreseeable future, a light rail train line. We are getting toward the fringe of the decent, frequent area of service out here in Hopkins, but it’s there. I could go on about the environmental friendliness of busses and trains as opposed to cars, as well as other benefits such as not having to deal with what can be nightmarish traffic and parking, but I should/could save that for a different day. Needless to say, if you head on out to purchase that house in Chaska then your only option for mass transit are the express busses from nearby park-and-ride lots during rush hours.
I did sort of write this with a specific audience in mind. A friend of a friend (well, a couple) is looking to purchase a home right now, and they’re looking to move out to St. Michal, another far-flung exurb. Right now, they rent a place in Minnetonka, and while they’re outside the 694/494 loop their proximity to the mass transit that reaches out there means that they can have jobs in two different places and still survive with just their one car. Plus, they’re still in proximity to friends and places that they like to frequent. The limited conversations I’ve had with them on this have led me to the conclusion that the only considerations they’ve made in their home search are biggest-home-for-your-dollar and the quality of school districts. It seems that they haven’t considered that it will take an extra half hour to get to the places and friends they now see frequently, and that this seemingly less expensive home they’re looking at has the hidden cost of a need for a second car plus the extra gas needed to go the extra distances. Sure, the house is nice, but in the end is the added disconnect and expense worth it?
Enter another couple that I know, a couple that did take the plunge and purchase that bigger, “better” home way out in the boonies. Whereas visits to their previous apartment were fairly frequent, as traveling from one suburb to another is no problem, I have yet to stop by their house on a strictly social call since helping them move in. Driving longer distances is indeed more of an inconvenience than people realize at first, and it takes just as long for me to get to their house as it does to get to my parents’ place in St. Cloud. That’s a little over an hour of driving, and it seems that the people on either end aren’t too keen on making that effort. The drive gets long, frequent visits tedious, and people get resentful that nobody wants to make the effort to get together anymore. My wife and I have friends in far-flung suburbs that we just don’t get around to seeing because, as much as society says driving a car is the ultimate expression of American freedom, getting in the car and driving is actually a chore.
Being able to walk and take mass transit does make a positive difference in life. Prioritizing the quality of your home over the size of your home also makes a positive difference. So, as I said, come buy the house down the block. I’ll offer you a beer and a seat by the fire pit out back, or we can walk down to the movie theater or the bar some night then stumble home without risking those pesky DUIs. It’ll be a good time, I promise.
