Home Buying and Our American Dreams

To be honest with you, my best guess is that the College Station house, the one I helped design in my mid-20s, with its sage green kitchen island and giant bathtub, is the nicest home my family will ever own. It will, almost certainly, be the least-expensive home we ever own by a differential so great it feels like we should be talking about a house bought generations ago.

My experience is far from exceptional. According to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, in 2022, the median sale price for a single-family home in the United States was 5.6 times higher than the median household income. For comparison, two-thirds of large American markets had price-to-income ratios below 3.0 as recently as 2000. For homeowners, this means that a stunning portion of their income goes toward housing costs. For those eager to buy, the current state of the market often prices them out, forcing hopefuls to continue renting at skyrocketing rates, decreasing their ability to build up savings for an eventual home purchase.

The point is, it’s rough out there. And yet, people keep trying.

I spoke to several homebuyers and home-buying hopefuls across the country. Their stories reveal the multifaceted nature of home buying, something that is probably always true, but especially so in a time of sky-high prices and cringe-inducing interest rates. Home is an emotional place. It’s also an expensive place, and a place that requires significant mental energy. For these personal reasons and others, some interviewees requested that I use only their first names or pseudonyms. Those changes excepted, the stories you will read here are unaltered, as is the clear longing for home in each heart.

When the Scriptures say that “the Son of Man had no place to rest his head,” humans feel what that means perhaps even more deeply than we can put into words. All of us long for a place where we walk through the door and, in our souls, we know we are home.

Of course, in America, or simply in a broken world, this longing gets corrupted by all kinds of other things. Some of us spend endless hours at work yet wonder if we will ever earn enough to purchase a house. Others have more than they need but feel perpetually dissatisfied with their homes, content only until a neighbor does another remodel.

The truth is, even good desires like financial stability, neighborliness, and hopes for specific forms of hospitality, are not always going to be fulfilled. And yet, the stories of homebuyers remain instructive and insightful, shedding light on an experience as personal and intimate as it is common and communal.

Marissa

I talked to a minister in Dallas named Marissa who is really excited to have just purchased her first home. She also admits that the 575-square-foot condominium that was listed for nearly $220,000 isn’t, exactly, her dream home.

Marissa had been living in a garage apartment for more than four years. The living arrangement kept her costs low and her gratitude high, but she had been feeling ready for her own space for a while. She wanted a full kitchen and, as someone who loves to host, to be able to have people over without requiring them to walk through someone else’s backyard. Two years ago, Marissa met with a lender who, upon reviewing her numbers, gently asked if she was interested in purchasing a home with a friend.

Discouraged, Marissa put her home-buying dream on the shelf for a while. That is, until a friend sent her a listing for the condo. At first, Marissa essentially ignored it. The home was only 125 square feet larger than the garage apartment, and she wasn’t convinced that a condo would move the needle on her ability to be a host, what with the maze of parking and insufficient number of guest spots that such complexes often have.

And yet, Marissa found that she couldn’t stop thinking about the listing. Eventually, she went to look at the condo. The complex, she found, was smaller and quieter than she’d imagined. The parking wasn’t a hassle, and the unit was on the ground floor just past the main gate. While small, the floor plan was well laid out, and the condo had just been redone — including a new HVAC system.

While Marissa was pleasantly surprised in some ways, she remained hesitant about the condo’s potential for hosting. The unit had a hybrid living-dining room, which was not the guest-friendly setup she’d been imagining. The vision was people gathered around a table, and she wasn’t sure that a large enough table could even fit while leaving room for living space. She crossed the condo off of her mental list of possibilities.

But then, Marissa spoke with a friend who owns a home and had previously owned a condo. The two discussed the realities of home buying right now and how, for many, ownership requires a stepping stone. The first place isn’t going to be the dream, or maybe even close to the dream, but it might be what it takes to enter the market.

“I started to realize that for me to live out my dream of homeownership in this city, in my circumstances, with my career, some kind of concession would have to be made,” Marissa explained. This reframe in her thinking empowered Marissa to see the condo as an opportunity to do two important things: first, have her own space, and second, build equity by getting into the market.

And so, she made an offer — a low one that the sellers responded to with a counter, and Marissa countered again after that. They accepted. Marissa was a condo-owner.

Lauren and Tim

For Lauren, Tim, and their two children, the home-buying journey is yet to find its conclusion. Despite being the first and only ones in their families to earn four-year college degrees — accomplishments they worked toward largely due to a desire to pursue homeownership — their parents and siblings own homes while Lauren and Tim do not.

“Despite each of us being very careful with our finances (through things like keeping expenses low and sharing one car most of our marriage), and despite having chosen schools in part due to their cost (local community college first and then state university), we’re still renting many years later than our parents and siblings had,” explains Lauren. “We missed out on when the market was better for buyers. There are starter homes in our area that have literally more than doubled in price the last few years.”

Tim and Lauren have often been stuck in a frustrating position similar to that of many Americans — they make too much money to qualify for assistance, but it’s not enough money to buy a home.

“When we couldn’t afford preschool for our oldest, and to our knowledge didn’t qualify for assistance, it was because on paper we were making money even though most of it was going to rent, student loan payments, or self-employment taxes even while our fridge was empty,” Lauren says. “That so many assume assistance is just handed out like candy is really misunderstanding how things work.”

Whitney

Whitney, who finds great peace near the water, had hoped that her family’s move to Rockwall, Texas, which features Lake Ray Hubbard, would be her chance. In fact, she and her husband chose the area largely for that reason. But then, as often happens, the home that made the most sense for them wasn’t near the water and wouldn’t include proximity to the lake on Whitney’s commute. Like Marissa, Whitney is honest that their now-home isn’t the fulfillment of her dreams. Also like Marissa, Whitney sees how God is meeting her needs.

The cookie-cutter homes on Whitney’s street don’t exactly appeal to her aesthetic. (“My neighbor three doors down has the exact same house as me,” she laughs.) But the relationships this new home has brought about sure feel like home. Families play and chat with one another in their front yards from about 4 to 6 p.m. nearly every afternoon, Whitney says. She and her neighbors have a supper club together. And her kids are flourishing in friendships on their street.

Megan

Megan and her husband, who had rented in Southern California for the first few years of their marriage, would have loved to purchase a home in the area. But it soon became clear that doing so wasn’t in the economic cards. They decided to put an offer on a house in Houston. Two days after doing so, Megan’s husband’s company rescinded their work-from-home policy. They had to back out of the house.

A year later, Megan’s husband was working at another company and they decided to try Houston again. They put in an offer on a new house only to discover during inspections that the builder had been dishonest about some major issues. Failed buy number two.

As challenging as those experiences were, Megan says, they provided an opportunity to rethink their next steps.

Marissa, Megan, Lauren, and Whitney

A few months in, Marissa says that the condo has been the perfect amount of space. “I’ve got a great kitchen and living room that I’ve made into a living and dining room. I have a great sized bedroom, bathroom, and closet. It’s just me, and it’s all the space I need.

“But this isn’t what I imagined, and that’s what I had to come to terms with: This purchase was a way to enter the market. I had to do something that wasn’t the original dream. God reoriented the dream and gave me a longer-term vision. I’ll live here faithfully as long as God has me here.”

Lauren’s family is still trying. They would benefit greatly from a home that’s closer to the specific regular medical care their oldest child needs, but so far they’ve been priced out of those neighborhoods.

“Our ideal house used to be something old that we could fix up that had a staircase and a porch. Now our ideal house is one with enough room for both of us to share office space, with a bigger kitchen to more easily manage prep for dietary restrictions as well as being compatible with physical mobility restrictions for our oldest,” explains Lauren. “Being able to store more groceries (and making fewer grocery trips) and being able to make more meals ahead of time (and therefore not be constantly doing so many dishes) because we’d have space to store ingredients and freeze food feels like a really big deal.”

Megan and her husband decided to reorient their search to the Denver area and bought a home in the suburbs, or, more accurately, a suburb that, when Megan describes it, sounds like it’s straight out of a Hallmark movie or episode of Gilmore Girls. There’s a charming main street, a farmer’s market, and, when the temperatures turn cold, an ice skating trail. It’s a new place and new people, which is equal parts daunting and thrilling.

And while Whitney still hopes to live near the water someday, she knows that the memories and community she and her family are forming in this season can’t be bought. “I’m counting my gold and counting my treasure in all of my friendships on the street,” she says.

In a time when we can’t go a day without a new headline about the loneliness crisis, maybe the challenge to buy a home that checks all of our boxes is one that might prompt us to look for a new dream come true. For those with children, the opportunity to raise a family in a home where the doorbell frequently rings with offers to come outside and play is increasingly rare and precious. Whitney notes, for example, what a gift it has been to realize that her kids are spending less time on screens because they’re too occupied playing with neighbors.

Me

The house we live in now, the one we bought in 2020, more than meets our needs. The open living space is perfect for our two boys and their myriad friends who appear on our doorstep and in our backyard more days than not. We are three blocks away from our children’s elementary school and will be close to the same distance from their junior high and high schools. We have three bedrooms, two bathrooms that can fit two people each if they say “excuse me” a lot or communicate via nudges, and a laundry room slash pantry that’s big enough to squeeze in a Peloton. The house is smaller and half a century older than our first, with fewer bedrooms and bathrooms. It cost twice as much.

But it works for us. It has closet space so tiny that it makes me want to become a minimalist. It’s fine.

Psychologists who study dreams say that homes symbolize the dreamer’s inner world. From a Christian point of view, it seems fair to say a longing to live near the water, the desire for a long table, the hope of a kitchen that makes safe, delicious meals just a little easier — these dreams echo the paradise from which we come.

And then God separated the waters from the waters.

And then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation.”

The home-buying process, always and uniquely now, echoes that fall from paradise. We work and strive, yet we cannot make our own dreams come true. We long for places of peace to call our own, yet we find ourselves in need of reoriented dreams and recasted vision. We long to return to Eden.

In the meantime, perhaps we consider what it looks like to pursue a sense of home for ourselves and others — places where we gather around a table or squeeze onto a couch, places where children with mobility needs can move, and people who work diligently don’t have to wonder if their bank accounts will ever have enough zeroes.

If anything, perhaps we can treat one another with a deeper kindness, recognizing that so much has changed in such a short time, and the dream many of us were raised on — work hard, go to college, buy a house — may not map onto reality in the ways we wish it would. Maybe we just start with honoring one another’s longing for home.