Homeownership, Family, and Competing Responsibilities

Sort-of revisiting some previous thoughts here

Back in fall of 2021, I wrote an essay at this newsletter titled “Apartments, Ownership, and Responsibility.” Perhaps you’ve read it—it’s among my most-read pieces here. In it, I responded to another author, who had written a piece arguing—essentially—that homeownership was virtuous and that renting was lazy. I wrote:

Suffice it to say I disagree more or less with every word of this article. For one thing, it tries to force a primarily economic issue into the culture war. For another, it ignores condos and apartments that can actually be owned, in some markets. Owning vs. renting and detached houses vs. apartments are different debates. Is renting really most young people’s “final goal”? Are renters really consciously paying extra in order to offload the responsibility of “stewardship”? I highly doubt it. Besides, most major work (roof, HVAC, flooring, cabinets, new tub), and stuff like trash removal, is done by companies and professionals in suburban subdivisions too, and for most detached houses owned by their occupants. “Tactile reality”? This sounds like a lot of navel-gazing and abstraction, in the face of an issue that is and should be aggressively practical.

And I wrote about my best friend’s experience, who, like me, grew up outside town in a detached house on a large-ish property. That contrasted with our parents, for whom suburban life was an escape from the crowded, and, in their time, more dangerous cities:

We grew up in big houses with land. It was our baseline, our normal. My friend didn’t grow up dreaming of one day owning a property like this and achieving the fullness of the American Dream.

He grew up dredging the backyard frog pond and dragging around bags of corn to feed the deer. He grew up watching his dad commute two hours each way into Manhattan every weekday and then on weekends, labor away taking down and painting the shutters, power-washing the siding, repainting the deck, informally finishing the basement. He grew up seeing the burden of the housework and the maintenance, and the sheer amount of stuff that accumulates in a 2,000-square-foot house with a basement and an attic over 30 years. And he doesn’t want all of that.

You can call that selfish, I suppose. You can even call it ungrateful: How dare you not want the kind of life we sacrificed and labored to make possible for you? But it’s just…not. Sure, ownership might engender responsibility in the abstract. But when you’ve got a $15,000 bill to replace a roof the month after the sump pump fails and floods the basement, that’s a lot of things but it isn’t “responsibility.”

I believe what I wrote, and still do. But now my wife and I own a house. Suddenly we are responsible for the basement and the roof and the siding and the gutters, whether or not these actual duties entail the vague virtue suggested by the word responsibility. And I’ve been thinking about all this again.

Certainly, owning a house leads to a different daily routine and workflow (or should I say life-flow?) than renting, or owning a condo unit. Life in a house is much less routinized. There’s a lot more to learn, and a lot more that can go wrong. There’s no building manager or list of approved contractors to call up, no work-order form to submit. There are a lot more things which can derail your day, and a lot more rabbit holes you can go down. (Did I expect to spend an hour watching YouTube videos on replanting grass or unclogging dryer vents, and comparing methods and recommendations? Not really.)

As it happens, one morning back in my little grad school apartment, my dryer broke down. My first impulse was to try fixing it (I like tinkering with stuff). I tried spinning the drum, which was frozen in place, and tried googling the problem. But then I remembered that the building did all this stuff, and that if I somehow damaged the dryer further, I might be charged for my attempt. (No good deed goes unpunished.) I put in a work order online, went out, and when I came back in the evening it was fixed.

Once my bathroom sink drain was a bit clogged, so I undid the metal clip under the sink and pulled the drain plug out to clean it. But I couldn’t quite get it back together. After a couple of minutes of fiddling, I put in a work order. Fixed.

There’s no equivalent of that in a house. There’s no guarantee things were done right, no easy way to find out, and no recourse if they aren’t (other than home insurance in catastrophic cases). The home inspection is an imperfect exercise. Read about them, and you’ll have trouble trusting a single inspector. (Of course, the same could be said about builders and contractors. Maybe you shouldn’t read about them either.)

And yet. Despite the manifest inconvenience of being on my own when it comes to maintenance and repairs, I like it. Part of the reason, I think, is that it’s an excuse to put down the phone and laptop and engage with the real world. Some of it, no doubt, is just the excitement of doing it all for the first time. But—dare I say it—some of it is almost a kind of gratitude at being forced to take responsibility for the building I live in: for having to expand my knowledge and mental world a little bit.

You could argue, of course, that this is itself a dilettante attitude. It’s all well and good to wax poetic about “tactile reality” and “stewardship” when you have no kids and no commute (and when even home improvement adventures are fodder for newsletter pieces). But if dealing with these problems competes with the limited time you have to be responsible to your family, then the truly responsible thing would be to outsource that “tactile reality” as much as you could, for a different and higher one, right? 

And yet—perhaps there is something to the idea that being forced to steward the stuff in your house, being forced to maintain it and be a part of its rhythm, in turn reinforces the virtue of responsibility in general. Specific house responsibilities might compete with specific domestic duties. Yet perhaps the character and habits that drive one also drive the other.

Now, I reject—forcefully, and completely—the implication that renters are somehow people of deficient character. I reject—forcefully, and completely—the notion that “homeownership cultivates responsibility” as a prescription or as an ideology. Yet, I think it might be true in my case, as a practical if not a moral matter. I’m not sure what to do with that.

Or maybe I’m just delaying unclogging my dryer vent.

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Related Reading:

About That Avocado Toast

“Why Don’t You Just Move?”

Still Renting After All These Years

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