I currently pay over $100 per day in rent. This is the story of why.

Until I was about 9 years old, my parents were renters. We moved every year, sometimes more than once in a year when I was little, depending on my dad’s job or whatever drama my mom was into. My parents only became homeowners because Ronald Reagan told all the poor whites like my parents that they should own homes, and made home ownership possible through a combination of HUD loans and new cheap suburbs off interstate exits in what were recently cow fields. This was part of a larger effort to get poor white people out of cities in the 1980’s and it worked. I was to spend the rest of my childhood isolated from social services, after school programs, and streets with sidewalks. Some years later, one of my sisters entered a rehab program after her own childhood ended, and discovered several of our former neighbors from the cheap aluminum sided HUD neighborhood all in the same program. Moving us out of the city in the 1980’s didn’t shield us from drugs or violence, it just limited our access to taxpayer benefits we really could have used, and kept us from opportunities we sorely needed. I vowed I would raise my own kids in a proper city after being robbed of the experience.

When it came time to start my own family, I had been renting near Little Five in Atlanta for several years, and it made sense to buy in the neighborhood. The husband came to our marriage with an inheritance from his grandmother, and we bought a tiny converted warehouse just off Dekalb Avenue, the perfect starter home. For years after our mortgage and taxes all together were only $880 per month, a figure that seems laughable now. I loved that loft, but the husband soon came to regret the purchase. Technically we were in Inman Park, but once the heroin dealer moved in a couple of units over, the illusion that we lived somewhere really nice was often punctured by police calls on the condo complex, and memorably, a body being taken out once or twice. I didn’t like it, but I knew the heroin dealer and would wave hi to him as he hung out in the parking lot. I enrolled our small daughters in self defense classes for children and kept a close eye, because otherwise I loved that place. I lived in the warehouse loft longer than I’ve ever lived in any one place in my whole life - how could I not love that kind of stability?

My real problems with the first home we owned were the condo board that did nothing to remove the heroin dealer, and the asshole who owned the brown lot that was next to our condo. I successfully took the landowner next door to court for his illegal dumping, a battle that took years with the (at the time) very dysfunctional codes enforcement office of the city of Atlanta. I also tried to be part of the condo board, but there were several neighbors who would oppose any sort of improvement because they were hardline fiscal conservatives. These neighbors would not spend a dime for lawyers to evict the heroin dealer. No money for lawyers to address the illegal dumping in the brown lot next door. No money to address the ongoing parking problems, etc. etc. We also outgrew the place after about a decade; it really was tiny. The final straw came when a new owner of the brownlot next door built a house two meters away from our wall – we owned an end unit – and did about 40k in damage to the unit we owned in the process. The husband and I successfully collected 20k in the builder’s insurance, but a lawyer we had to pay on our own (again, I can not stress how much our condo board sucked) advised us that we would have to spend 15k to collect the other 20k in damages. We gave up – it was time to move anyway. We marked the price of the condo down 20k and sold the thing.

We chose to rent for a year in between selling the Dekalb Avenue condo and becoming homeowners again. The sale of the first house didn’t profit us. By the time everything was said and done, we broke even on the money we poured into the place. We had enough in the bank after the sale that we could pay off the husband’s law school loans and pay for me to get much needed dental implants in Costa Rica. We looked for an entire year for anything in the same school district that we could afford, but we were victims of what architects call “the missing middle”. All the homes at the time in our school district were either out of reach or just as tiny as what we had left. Eventually we thought we scored by buying the house in Lake Claire that became our biggest mistake.

I remember, vividly, the gut feeling I first had entering the place for the first time – a strong sense of dislike. I actually have the email I wrote the realtor apologizing for how negative I had been in our first walk through. Another reminder to always, always trust your gut. I let myself be talked into the purchase because everyone told us this house was a great investment, and the husband really wanted it. I had always loved our tiny loft on Dekalb more than he had, and he had let me talk him into our first house purchase, so I let him talk me into our second. Of course, COVID had a huge role in ruining the investment, and having to be at the house all the time for two years made me dislike it even more. The pandemic put the husband out of work or underemployed for 18 months, and then when full employment came back, the cost of the fixes the fixer-upper needed had all doubled. The husband will have lost his inheritance on this one bad investment, and it’s not really his fault. Everyone really did believe in Atlanta real estate as a way to safely park and grow money - it had been, for lots of people who also had inheritances, until the world changed. The Lake Claire house just re-listed. People are looking at it again, and I’m not allowed, nor do I want to be, anywhere near the process. I’m too honest. Someone is going to see that big house, at that location, at that price, and think they too are making a score. The house will be a score for someone who wants to pour money into it, who wants to raise their kids in a great school district and has the kind of cash to make the place livable. But just like we didn’t have the 15k to sue the shitty developer who still owed us 20k in Inman Park, we didn’t have whatever it would cost to keep the giant Lake Claire wreck going for some miniscule payout in another five or ten years.

My two experiences in home ownership have, therefore, pretty much convinced me I’m probably not meant to be a homeowner. Generations of my family were renters in city apartments or houses before World War 2 (and many after). Those who have owned homes have experienced grief similar to mine. Houses are always ending up devalued because the neighborhood changed, or there’s a natural disaster, or the home falls into disrepair after ruinous medical debt. After the construction damage to our Dekalb Avenue loft, I thought I had moved into a home in Lake Claire where construction damage wouldn’t happen to me again. Alas, building behind us happened almost immediately, causing run-off issues twice. I was too tired from battling with the previous place to try fighting construction damage again. I ended up just concentrating on remediating the problem myself, because it cost me the same amount in labor and time. Houses are nothing but heartache, and I’ve had enough.

The rental townhouse we’re in now might be expensive, but it’s on the landlord to fix the water issue from Christmas. The rental town house has a condo board, I’m sure, but that’s none of my problem. I had hoped not to move the children more than twice under the age of eighteen, given my own background, so I’ll pay over one hundred dollars a day in rent to prevent changing their public school district as I’ve now moved them three times. This place is stable, and has all the opportunities of a city, and it’s stability and opportunities I’m after as a parent. There isn’t even a heroin dealer to wave at in the parking lot here. It’s worth more than one hundred dollars per day to stay where the kids can walk to everything they could possibly want or need. I will fight to my last breath to make sure my two girls can graduate from the school where they’re enrolled. They’re true Atlantans, through and through, conceived and born and raised so far here. I won’t screw that up by making them graduate High School somewhere else.

I don’t think I’m meant to own a house, and as soon as someone takes the Lake Claire home off our hands - through purchase or, as is increasingly likely, foreclosure - I’ll be extremely relieved. The monthly payment on my recent homeowner nightmare is/was even more than we pay to live in the rental, and don’t get me started on the energy costs. This last adventure in homeownership has bankrupted me in every way but the legal one, and that’s not something that’s off the table for 2023. The American Dream, as I once had someone from Europe tell me, is what happens when you’re asleep. I’ve always been an insomniac.