Want to be happy? Don’t try to buy a house

With interest rates about to rise and a lot of restless pandemic people desperate to live in a tottering something that resembles a house in name only, people are still shopping for homes in Toronto, the suburbs, and tiny previously unheardof towns named Wetslog and Brianburg.

Apparently the desperate quest is still news. I should really retire the stale word “desperate” in favour of “audacious,” never mind “rash,” “harebrained,” “heedless” and “foolhardy.” And those are the nicer ones.

Even though the inflation rate reached 4.8 per cent in December over the previous year, which means the fun years of negligible interest rates will soon begin to end, nothing seems to dampen demand for home ownership.

The heart wants what it wants, and isn’t it awkward that it was Woody Allen who said that, about his wife’s young adopted daughter. The notorious Soon-Yi is 51 now and Allen can’t be happy about that. This is what I mean about domestic dreams.

At times it resembles the desire to have children, something most humans will wish to do whatever the hardship. Parenthood locks you in for life; at these prices so might your mortgage.

I won’t argue with you, only mention some things you might consider although you won’t. First, birth control is fairly reliable. When it turns out not to be you, you have options. In Canadian cities at least, you can get an abortion, but you cannot back out of a home bid.

Second, have you met children, so lovely yet so expensive and tiring, yanking on the attention string, which eventually goes whang, and where did the passion go, that first fine careless rapture that spawned the whole structural mess?

Years pass. Buyers will still have a massively mortgaged house whose value might have fallen hard, with children, who will then have their own children. Only yesterday I talked to an investment adviser who suggested that the market slide didn’t matter because we could always sell our once-overpriced house (bought a scary few months before COVID-19) at a busting profit.

But I don’t want to, I said. I want to stay there.

There might come a time, she said, when those children won’t let you die alone there.

Oh, I think they will, I didn’t say direly.

We have travelled far from our original dilemma. I was urging you not to rush into real estate. It makes you less agile in a world where change arrives like a drive-by shooting. It glues you to a bad job, it pinches your wiggle room, and the fixed costs are borderline ruinous.

Stay in your rental and have a great life. Many do.

Real estate stories are frightening. I will not discuss the recent CBC story about the St. John’s woman who bought a $168,000 bungalow in 2020 and discovered she had in fact bought a dressed-up detached garage that had suffered a major fire.

The story didn’t name the sellers and without a living target, I couldn’t get up a head of steam about her catastrophe. Obviously when you buy a house, you should check if it once had up-and-over doors.

But she had hired a home inspector. He didn’t spot that. Nowadays audacious people are regularly bidding on houses without a home inspection. For some reason that is legal.

Home inspectors were once like lawyers, never out of work. Now their jobs are as fragile as everyone else’s. Could they not do better work faster, with the same gut instinct that propels the best police detectives, the kind always at war with senior command?

I don’t like it, Home Insp. Gadget might say on a furtive walkthrough, the only kind of inspection a harebrained bidder can get away with now. Something doesn’t feel right. Do you smell gasoline? Why are those rooms shaped like

Rushing into real estate glues you to a bad job, it pinches your wiggle room, and the fixed costs are borderline ruinous

car service bays?

He knocks on a wall very low down. I’m hearing lax crack sealant. And this house is suspiciously square.

We bought a house with only a glancing post-purchase visit by an inspector our agent used regularly. He missed important things, but we liked the place anyway because it had merits.

I was also under the impression that the seller was a Buddhist. I based this on nothing. I am now aware that the Dalai Lama takes no position on missing lot plans.

It wasn’t good, but it’s whalingly better than the houses we looked at. I recall every detail of them now, the same way you will never forget your worst summer job, memories like salt stains.

We are in a pandemic. Nothing works properly, nothing. Your selfcontainment is thin right now. Interest rates rise, infertility knocks, parents are ill, China threatens, Ukraine trembles, a particular Omicron sequence gains ground, antivaxxers yowl like Yankee feral cats, heatwaves get hotter, freezes persist.

You need a place to hide. You must have your bolthole.

But our problems are large collective ones. When you buy that house and its baggage, you’re on your own. The purchase might feel like a personal masterstroke. I have my doubts.