Our older son was a toddler when we bought the split level with the red door and the gorgeous pear tree in the front yard. Our younger son came home from the hospital to that house, and with one exception, our neighbors around the cul-de-sac remained exactly the same across the changing seasons, watching each other’s children grow. We lived on Salsbury Ct, no ‘i’, for 8 years and then, in an unexpected whirlwind, we moved our family and lives to Massachusetts.
Our neighbors were not thrilled with our decision to rent our home out rather than sell it; several said so out loud. But honestly, we never considered doing anything else. Sell? Now? In this market? We’d eat it! No worries, though, these are good people.
And they were, and probably still are, but sometimes and for all sorts of reasons, good people do not behave as good tenants.
All seemed well enough through one year and beginning another. Then, in autumn, our renters let us know that they were moving out of state effective the following month.
I flew back to Kansas to prepare to list the property with an agency, hoping to turn things around quickly and secure a renter for the new year. I ended up having to effect a lock-out, and to clean/rehabilitate/give up on a mess such as I have not seen, before or since, in any dwelling. After confronting a pile of trash on the lawn that was wider than my car, tall as our garage and so awe-inspiring that I kept staring out windows as I cleaned to assure myself that it was real, we learned that our tenants had moved out of state ahead of schedule and months before communicating with us. All except one: they left their 18 year old son to tend our home. Which had gone pretty precisely as one might expect that it would.
I learned some things then about covenantal relationship, by which I mean about what we might owe to one another. My first focus, admittedly, was on what I was owed, and on the breakdown in relationship and in contract that might allow this level of destruction to occur to a place I love at the hands of people I trusted.
But our relationship with the renters was not the only covenant at issue.
Those same neighbors, the ones I had glibly assured, when they asked, that all would be well, had been counting the costs—and absorbing them.
And so it was that I had to kiss some serious suburban-cul-de-sac-neighbor ass just to be able to borrow something to stand on so I could reach light fixtures and repair damage (I am 5’3”, the house has cathedral ceilings, and the tenants left their trash but departed with all of our garage tools).
The circumnavigation of the cul-de-sac happened across a week, doorbell by doorbell, and with each apology I was allowed a taller ladder. It was a parable for our times; at the first house, they eventually and grudgingly located a footstool, but by the end, days (and perhaps notably, some gifts of chocolate) later, my next door neighbor Paxton let us borrow a 9-foot Louisville and we were able to replace the gutted smoke detectors and to look our countrymen in the eye once more. Never before has “sweat equity” played such a significant role in my experience of homeownership.
I’ll pause here to note that “we” in this usage is actually not shorthand for “my spouse and myself.” Craig was back in Massachusetts caring for our kids and working. My friend Jack was in town from the Twin Cities and bailed me out. Jack is tall. Jack is gracious with pissed-off neighbors. Jack has my eternal gratitude.
In the end, every shred of carpet in the house had to be replaced, multiple walls patched and repainted, and I spent literally hours apologizing and coming to terms with the various parties who had, in one way or another, been dealing with the externalized impacts of a bad situation. (These included, by the end of things, two different town departments and also the local police.)
This sucks, right? It’s bad for everyone. Except, maybe, for a certain 18 year old and his friends, but I don’t think on the whole it was great for him either.
Fast forward a few more years, and I can report that since then, we do actually have great renters. We try to make their lives easier and we recognize that they take better care of our house than we ever did; it’s our house, but if we’re being honest, it’s their home. And in fact, we tried to help them buy it a few years ago, in a faith-rooted effort to pay forward some of what we have received.
That did not work out; we continue to be homeowners, and they are not. We called off the effort at their request, a situation I approach with the humility of knowing that we can’t hold the weight of what others carry or know the path that is right for another person.
What I can know is that we are likely, at least as of now, to reap a windfall when we sell the house that will be in excess of anything we imagined in purchasing it.
I can attest also that the bad experience we had with our first lease was terrible and in some ways heartbreaking, and that it was 100% tax deductible that year and, in the end, not at all impactful to our overall bottom line. I can confess, in fact, that we basically neglect the property and in return it acts as a stable investment, and that it would be a money farm if we were inclined to make it so, padding our income in a rising rental market while we contribute little to nothing in return.
I am in something of an odd place right now, researching property law and its various accountability analogues (these include bankruptcy, torts, environmental law and public policy) while acting as a landlord, myself. I am digging into the legacies of industrial rise, ruin, and decay while under contract in a town* that epitomizes that journey. And I am critiquing the outputs of American capitalism while simultaneously using some of them to purchase a vacation home together with my spouse.
I think I’m giving up on trying to keep this Substack tightly organized—the discovery process doesn’t work like that. I’m not reporting on what I once learned; I am, instead, learning-while-reporting, which has turned out to look like detours down salt mines and into property law, all while trying to reckon with the legacies we inherit as involuntary postindustrialists.
In that spirit, there is much that I want to tell you, tied to all that we have talked about, but I found I could go no further without first nodding to grief and the claims that it makes in our lives and on our bodies, and without next acknowledging that I’m coming at these things—all of them— as a student of life. I am caught right in the middle, held in multiple and often conflicting ways, by the same processes and products I am critiquing. We need to talk about landholding and about landlordism, and I will be engaging here as someone participating in both.
My faith invites me to look rather than to look away. And my heart calls me to do so as kindly (not nicely, mind you- kindly) and as honestly as possible.
More soon,
j
*Proctor, Vermont y’all—sometimes I find postindustrial ruins so wild I apparently want to hold a piece of them in legal perpetuity.
Been there. Same kind of horror story… and beyond.
Am there, in fact. So long we own the place without a bank involved.
And continue renting it so far below market that it’s awkward…