After my parents divorced when I was 5, my mother sold our house and we became perennial renters.
I remember our first rental in Swissvale. I shared a bedroom with my sister until I was old enough to move into the unheated “sunroom”. It was so cold I’d sleep in a sleeping bag to keep warm – when I exhaled there were white clouds and icicles froze on the inside of the windows. Our kitchen had no stove – we used a crockpot, an electric frying pan and microwave. One neighbor broke into our house and stole things occasionally. Another fed 30 stray cats in the shared backyard that would fight and wail every night.
Our next rental was a dilapidated brownstone in the ghetto that I talked about here. My mother and stepfather restored the hardwood floors and the grand staircase on the first floor. In the meantime, we had holes in bedroom walls, showers we couldn’t use and a horrible rat infestation that still gives me nightmares.
From there, we moved up to the nearest place I had ever lived – a little saltbox in a lower class working neighborhood. I thought we owned it but later learned we didn’t. I had my own bedroom. It wasn’t in the ghetto. We didn’t have rats.
A few years later my mother left my stepfather and we moved to a crappy upstairs apartment in an old house. My mother had to sleep on the coach in the living room because there weren’t enough bedroom. Our downstairs neighbors were crazy drug addicts and we had mice. But I loved living there compared to living with my asshole stepfather.
Our next apartment was in a six plex in a sketchy part of town. Our landlord lived downstairs. Next door lived drug dealers. I never learned who lived above us.
Believe it or not, I’m not complaining. With just a high school education, my mom worked her butt off to support our family through good times and bad times. When possible, she made sure my sister and I had our own rooms. We did fine without luxuries like air conditioning, wall to wall carpeting and cable TV.
I just longed for the day when I’d grow up and be able to buy a real house like some of my friends had.
The summer after my first year of college I was working as a construction laborer. We were putting in a new cement driveway for a suburban house. The driveway extended from the street, all the way down a long slope along the side of the house and ended with a large pad under the back deck.
First we hand dug out the grass and dirt to make the driveway level. Then we built wooden frames to form the wet cement. We tamped down a base of rocks. After that we laid out wickedly sharp steel fencing to use as concrete reinforcement. After all the prep was done, we poured in a few truckloads of cement then leveled, floated and finished it.
It was a hell of a good job – thanks mostly to the skills of my boss and my coworkers.
It was finally done on a Saturday afternoon. As we cleaned up the remaining construction debris, the homeowner came out and passed around cold beers.
He told me he was thrilled with the driveway. He he had always wanted one so he could park his cars and play basketball with his kids in the back.
He was very friendly. He earned his living as some kind of traveling businessman. When he asked about me, I explained I was in college planning to become a doctor.
I told him that his home was beautiful and I couldn’t imagine ever being able to own something so nice. It was a typical suburban ranch house. 3 Bedrooms, 1.5 baths. Around 1500 square feet. There were birds in the trees, flowers in the garden and a lawn you could lay down on. And now he had a driveway that could park 4 cars and still have room for a basketball hoop. To me, it was like paradise. I told him,
I cannot ever imagine having a house land driveway like this. You must be very rich.
He laughed and told me he had saved for 3 years to pay for the driveway. Then he said something I will never forget:
Someday you will have a house and driveway as nice as this.
I couldn’t fathom it at the time. Even though I had plans to become a rich, successful doctor at the time I was struggling to make enough money to pay for bus fare, books and food.
Even after I moved out of mom’s and started my life with Ellen, we lived paycheck to paycheck for 10 years. We were renters who could barely scrape together first, last and security so even switching rentals was a major financial challenge.
I remember delivering the New York Times in the wee hours of the morning and gazing longingly at the nice houses of my customers. There was no path that I could see from living hand to mouth to having a downpayment and paying a $100K mortgage.
And then suddenly it happened. After years of struggling, Ellen and I both worked our way up to good jobs. We stopped living paycheck to paycheck.
We bought our first house.
And I’ll be damned, that guy’s prediction from so many years earlier turned out to be right.
If you’re living paycheck to paycheck and can’t see how you will ever be able to own a home, I hope that you too will someday have a driveway as nice as mine.
Like me, it might take a few decades of struggle, some savings and a bit of good luck as well.