Bay Area Living or When Buying Potential Is Your Only Option

Reality Check

The old yellow house with peeling paint and a serious dry rot problem was smaller than it had looked in the pictures on Zillow.

I had caught it online just as it hit the market that day and asked our realtor to add it to the houses we were going to see later in the afternoon. It was in a small town I'd never been to before, at the northernmost edge of the East Bay.

We walked up the rickety steps.

Inside was as bad as outside, moldy walls and floors, a decades-old wire slung treacherously over a nail in the wall. Popcorn ceilings probably containing all kinds of imaginable toxins, loose floor boards that made it unsafe to walk, and an indescribable smell emanating from the bathroom.

"It needs some work," our realtor said. "But it's a good deal. And it's all you can afford."

I shot her a look, but we both knew it was true. We'd been looking for a house to buy in the Bay Area for almost a year. We had two incomes, yet we couldn't afford anything.

Despite everything that was wrong with this one-hundred-year-old foreclosure that had been abandoned for several years, I noticed how the sunlight was streaming in through the broken windows. And I saw that my partner noticed it too.

I told the realtor we'd think about it.

"Think about it?" she snorted. "Girl, if you don't put your offer in today you won't need to think any further. It'll be off the market tomorrow."

Put in an offer today?

A lot of emotions came up. I grew up in Germany, a culture not known for spontaneous decision making, especially not when it involves taking on thirty years of debt.

I didn't feel equipped to act that fast. Very old memories surfaced, like a screenshot of my life. How did I get here? I had a carefree childhood. I grew up being provided for, not wanting for much. My father was the CEO of one of the biggest printer companies in the world. In those first years there were no worries.

But all good things come to end, and reality always finds you.

When I was nine, my parents got a divorce, and my fairy tale ended like a train crash. A long, painful process that has never been fully resolved in our family, but that's a different story, for a different time.

I ran away from all of this at a very young age, and I ran as far as I could, all the way to California. But,of course, no matter where you run to, you carry your baggage with you—until the day you choose to remove the backpack from your shoulders and face what's inside.

With the backup of my father, I sustained myself the first few years in the U.S. I graduated with a master degree in L.A. and, with the unfinished business of this broken family, escaped into the arts. It wasn't a bad life. I tried many things, but I always knew I hadn't arrived yet.

I moved to Sausalito and started working as a freelancer. Waking up every day to the glistening ocean in the bay with Alcatraz and San Francisco as a backdrop was a dream come true, or so it seemed. Rents in the Bay Area were exploding, but my income as a translator and editor wasn't. Not one day went by without reading or hearing about some gruesome tale of people whose rents were doubled or tripled, sometimes literally over night. Landlords were getting away with it, even though their properties were old, like the one I was living in, and in need of much more than a paint job. My landlady had not only been raising the rent every year, she was growing increasingly impatient and, actually, rude, making no attempt at hiding the fact that she wanted me to leave.

We knew we needed to do something. We started looking. But after driving around the Bay Area every weekend for almost a year, it started to become clear to us that we only had two options: leave the Bay Area or buy a pile of garbage and figure out how to remodel it ourselves.

As our realtor explained the process of the inspection period and escrow, I felt dizzy. I was terrified of the idea of having a mortgage and never-ending costs for maintenance. And, after a life of running away, was I ready to put down roots?