On being homeowners

As I mentioned a few months ago, Corinne and I have purchased a house. We closed at the end of March and moved in in mid-April. Four months later, we still have a lot of unpacking to do, but we've otherwise settled in to our long-desired home sweet home. 

This is not the first time either of us have purchased a house - both of us owned homes in our previous lives - but it had been so long since either of us last bought a house that the homebuying experience may as well have been completely new to us. 

Our original plan was get out of our apartment (which was becoming too small for us and was being increasingly mismanaged by the complex's new owners) and into our own home shortly after our wedding in 2020. However, the housing market during and immediately following the Coronavirus pandemic was simply too hot for us to attempt to enter. We decided to wait for the local real estate market to cool, even though it meant that we would be dealing with higher interest rates. 

We met with our realtor, a longtime acquaintance of mine, the day after Christmas to begin the search in earnest. Right after the new year we started looking at houses, focusing on areas such as Shady Acres, Garden Oaks, the Washington Avenue corridor, Montrose, Midtown, the Museum District, and even EaDo. We wanted to live inside the 610 Loop, if possible; the suburbs held no attraction for us. We were also fine with a townhome because we didn't want a big yard to take care of.

Over the course of January and February, Corinne and I probably toured forty different properties, trying to find the one that held the right balance of cost, location and amenities. 

It was an eye-opening experience. 

Even through the housing market was calmer than it was in 2021 and 2022, we quickly realized that we would be paying much more for a house in any of our preferred areas than we originally anticipated. We found it a little perplexing and more than a little frustrating that, even though we are both professionals in our late 40s making decent incomes, our options in terms of what was affordable to us turned out to be so limited. 

We weren't alone; housing prices are a source of anxiety for many Houstonians, according to the 2023 Kinder Houston Area Survey: 

Buying a home remains a goal that is out of reach for many people in southeast Texas. The median price for a home in Texas has tripled over the last 10 years while wages have remained relatively flat, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The cost of housing is now top of mind, despite never appearing as a concern in previous surveys - registering at less than 1% of respondents as recently as 2021, then spiking to one in five this year.

After many nerve-wracking weeks, we were finally able to find our home: a townhouse on the eastern edge of Midtown that met our requirements and was within our price range. It has a small yard, is about ten minutes away from my parents, and is (almost) within walking distance of Discovery Green and Minute Maid Park. However, in settling upon it we both had to give up some desired amenities: I would have liked a roof deck with a view of the downtown skyline, Corinne would have liked more cabinet and drawer space in the main bathroom (in all bathrooms, really), and both of us would have liked a larger kitchen. It's also on a corner lot and close to the freeway trench that separates Midtown from Third Ward, so traffic noise is always in the background. But it's ours. (Even if it is one of those stucco monstrosities that so many Houstonians love to hate!)

A quarter-century of aggressive townhome construction inside the loop is, in fact, perhaps the only reason we were able to find anything affordable at all:

Houston famously has no zoning. Developers have quite a bit of latitude to build what they want, where they want. But Houston still has certain restrictions on housing construction, like parking minimums and setback requirements. For years, the city had a minimum lot size of 5,000 square-feet in most neighborhoods—the standard in your typical postwar suburb. But in 1998, the city changed that rule to 1,400 square feet, unleashing a transformative wave of townhouse development.

Today, these townhouses are ubiquitous inside the 610 Loop that marks the central part of the city. A detailed study from the Kinder Institute at Rice University explored the impacts of this development pattern. Between 2005 and 2018, the Inner Loop saw 75,000 new housing units completed, nearly half of which were townhouse units. That’s more housing than San Francisco and Oakland produced, combined, over the same period. The Inner Loop also outperformed the rest of the Houston region in housing production. The area comprises 5% of the total land area of Harris County, but accounted for 19% of new housing built between 2005 and 2018.

While we do not expect to be looking for a house again anytime soon - with any luck, we'll be here for a long time - there are some lessons that we learned from this experience: 

Be patient and don't panic. It took us about two months of constant searching for us to finally find the house we purchased. This was a bit longer than we anticipated, and it was a source of angst for both of us. Homes that looked great on the har.com website would turn out to have fatal flaws once we visited them in person. Homes that we visited and really liked would go under contract before we had an opportunity to make an offer ourselves. We especially began to get antsy as the end-of-lease date at our apartment complex approached. There were times when we considered simply abandoning the home search and signing a new lease, as we weren't sure that we would ever be able to find a suitable house in our affordability range.

In the end, there was no need to panic. Houston is a big city with a vibrant housing market and the right home at the right price will eventually come along, as it did for us.

You can't anticipate everything. We put an offer on this house with the knowledge that it would not come with a refrigerator; the sellers were taking it with them. That was not a problem for us because Corinne had a refrigerator that she had purchased several years ago and kept stored. It was a larger refrigerator, so we made certain that the refrigerator alcove in the second-story kitchen was wide enough, tall enough, and deep enough to accommodate it.

It didn't even cross our minds that Corinne's refrigerator was so large that it wouldn't be able to make it up the stairs. The movers simply couldn't maneuver it up the steps, even with the handles and doors removed, without tearing up the banister or knocking light fixtures off the stairwell. It would have to stay in the garage, and we would have to buy a new, shallower refrigerator that could make it up the stairs. That cost us about two thousand dollars. 

Corinne was able to sell her old refrigerator to an acquaintance, thereby making back at least some of the money we spent on the new one. But the expense - and the days we had to keep a cooler full of ice handy while we waited for the new appliance to be delivered - were not something we even remotely expected.

My knees hate me. Like most of Houston's townhomes, ours has three stories, with the garage and a guest bedroom on the first floor, the kitchen and living area on the second floor, and the main bedroom and another guest bedroom (that we use as an office) on the third floor. This means I'm climbing the stairs a lot, which is something I didn't have to do at our apartment (which we accessed by elevator) or at my previous one-story rental in Bellaire. 

It's not like I don't need the exercise, but it does leave me out of breath at times. And my middle-aged knees can only take so many steps before they tell me I need to stop climbing for awhile.

I can be loud again. Several years of living in an apartment have trained me to tread lightly, carefully lower heavy items like boxes, and not drag furniture across the floor so as not to disturb the neighbors below. I felt horrible anytime I accidentally dropped a spoon in the kitchen or knocked a book off my desk because I knew that the neighbors beneath us could hear it. After I moved into this house, it actually took me a surprisingly long time to un-learn that behavior. I can hop down the stairs or drop heavy boxes onto the floors and I don't have to worry about upsetting anybody beneath us, because nobody lives beneath us anymore!

I'm going to be poor for awhile. Between the down payment, inspection fees, closing costs, moving costs, the new refrigerator and other expenses associated with buying a home, we have exhausted much of our savings. There are still repairs and upgrades the home inspector identified that we have to do, and at some point our hodgepodge of furniture will need to be replaced with actual living room and bedroom sets. The end result is that I'm carrying debt on my credit cards again, which I hate, and am having to be more frugal with my day-to-day purchases. We knew we would probably be "house poor" for awhile after buying this house, but it's still a bit of an eye-opener. 

With all that said, I wouldn't trade any of it to not be a homeowner again. Now if we could just finish unpacking.

Thanks to Ryan Monceaux for navigating us through the homebuying process and helping us find for we were looking for.