Addicted to Real Estate

By now, everyone knows the financial reasons for the housing bubble, from lax lenders to greed.
By: JUNE FLETCHER: wsj.com
But there's another, emotional side: In our rootless and confusing culture, our domiciles have become more than mere shelters, investments, havens or even status symbols. Rather, they have become extensions of our narcissistic personalities, glorified by entire industries of shelter magazines, websites and cable networks.

It's no wonder, writes Meghan Daum in her new book "Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House," (Alfred A. Knopf), that by the middle of the decade, scads of Americans were "buying real estate and melting it down to liquid form and then injecting it into their veins."

It was an addiction shared by Ms. Daum, an essayist, novelist and columnist for the Los Angeles Times. And it almost ruined her life, she writes.

Fully aware of how neurotic such an obsession is, Ms. Daum examines it neurotically, almost as if she were a recovering abode-aholic. She reveals personal details that—even in this blogging age—sometimes made me a bit squeamish (do I really need to know about the dog poop on the patio of one of her many temporary abodes)?

Nevertheless, her candor also reveals the roots of her restlessness: Her jingle-writing father, who settled the family in New Jersey, really longed to live in Manhattan, while her creative and frustrated mother channeled her suburban ennui into constant redecorating and endless trips to open houses.

Ms. Daum doesn't make the connection overtly, but the reader feels how much she internalized this sense of familial dislocation and discontent (her parents eventually separated). Her longing for a safe place where she'd belong is revealed in one bittersweet childhood anecdote: Instead of fantasizing about a grand wedding, like most little girls, she re-enacted cozy scenes from Little House on the Prairie.

By the time she was a Vassar student, Ms. Daum simply assumed that your habitat defined you. And yet, no place ever quite felt right. She blew through a succession of dorm rooms, and then overpriced Manhattan apartments. But, as she wrote more than a decade ago in a widely-read New Yorker essay, she could never afford the sort of glamorous place she salivated over in decorating magazines, and wound up buried in about $80,000 of debt. Worse, her materialistic aspirations also impoverished her spirit: At one point, her aesthetic snobbery caused her to evict a roommate simply for the sin of owning a baby-blue carpet and orange chair.

“ By the middle of the decade, scads of Americans were "buying real estate and melting it down to liquid form and then injecting it into their veins." ”

Fortunately, she tired of this shallow identity and tried on a new one, inspired by her Prairie fantasies. Unfortunately, her restlessness remained. In friendlier and more affordable Lincoln, Neb., she donned and discarded a series of farmhouses, as well as a boyfriend. By now, her obsession is full-blown: The houses are described in loving detail; the boyfriend is simply called "an aging slacker." Inevitably, the nameless boyfriend soon becomes known as the Ex. She also acquires a dog during this phase, named Rex.

During her Nebraska days, she wrote a novel, "The Quality of Life Report," which attracts the attention of Hollywood. So she packs up again and moves to Los Angeles, Rex in tow, to re-frame her life in a series of unsatisfying rentals that she deems too tacky to show to potential dates—so she stops going on them. She becomes ever lonelier, but doesn't yet connect the dots of her disconnection. She describes the problem as "being alone with awful furniture."

The solution, she decides, was to commit—not to a person, but a house. Unfortunately, she starts searching at the height of the bubble, and so has to settle for a tiny stucco box with dirty white carpet and a dilapidated garage. (She's now about $100,000 underwater on her mortgage, she writes.) Still, ripping up the carpet, installing stainless-steel ceiling fans and buying a purple futon seem to settle her—so much so, that she soon begins spending far too much time alone in her pajamas in her newly remodeled kitchen, eating Stovetop stuffing.

At this point, a reader may want to scream: "It's time to break up with the house!" But Ms. Daum doesn't realize this obvious fact until a promising new boyfriend tries to move his bikes and books in, and their arguments (including whether or not to saw his beloved sofa in half) threaten to derail the relationship.

I don't want to spoil the ending, so I'll just mention the opening scene in the book, set in the present day, when a chunk of stucco siding falls off in Ms. Daum's hand and–instead of running to a repairman–she simply throws it away.