Affordable Housing Institute : US

Aswan, Egypt’s southernmost city and one of its oldest, was not founded by chance; it sits on the banks of the Nile’s First Cataract. 

 

The Old Cataract Hotel, where Agatha Christie wrote Death on the Nile.

 

At Aswan, the low-water Nile flowed over granite falls, but once past it, the Nile flows smoothly to the sea.  Indeed, all of Egypt’s ancient cities are situated at river junctions:

 

·         Luxor (ancient Thebes) at a natural bending eddy

 

The Temple of Karnak, at night

 

·         Cairo where the delta opens

 

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·         Alexandria where the Nile kisses the Mediterranean.

 

The pharos of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

 

Why are cities founded at junctions? 

 

Junctions mean changes and portages, and the need for specialized services.  Cities are the exoskeletal and endoskeletal residue of a service nexus.

 

In our modern world, housing tenure is like a vessel floating along life’s river, in which we rise economically or drift socially.  As on a real river, now and then we need to change vessels: it’s too small, it won’t go where we want, we can afford a bigger boat or we no longer wish to maintain such a yacht.  At each such financial junction, there spring up service providers who facilitate our passage, including the novel enterprise featured in this Washington Post article: moving down.

 

Last Wednesday, a moving van pulled up to the three-level, four-bedroom Potomac home where Ernie and Ann Stacey had spent the past 33 years, rearing three children among furnishings and keepsakes acquired during a half-century of marriage.

 

 

Markets work in part because whenever there is an unmet need, the market creates entrepreneurs who design not products or services, but solutions:

 

[Susie] Danick’s firm, Transitional Assistance and Design, is one of a relatively new type of business that helps older people move from homes that have come to seem too large into new quarters that might easily seem too small and unfamiliar.

 

The essence of a professional service: I do for you what I do for many, and because you do it once where I do it hundreds of times, I become an interdisciplinary expert, and that adds value for you — to say nothing of saving you time.

 

They help clients choose the cherished furnishings to bring along and arrange the logistics of the move.

 

In our old house some years back, Nancy was cleverly concealing our stereo system into a built-in cabinet, but to conceal the speaker wire, she needed to run it down through the floor, along the basement ceiling, and then back up on the room’s far end.  I found her staring fixedly at a two-foot-square patch of floor, paralyzed with indecision because, as she explained, she feared hitting a stud.  After briefly studying the floor, checking the basement, and doing some visualization, I selected a spot and firmly laid my index finger upon it.  “Drill here.”

 

I have a lot of confidence in your judgment, my dear.

 

Fortunately, it proved to be a suitable spot.

 

Decision facilitation is a critical service.

 

Part amateur designer and part social worker, Danick said she tries to make the transition as comforting as possible, right down to photographing chairs, tables, rugs and knickknacks in the old house and re-creating as much of that familiarity as possible in the new surroundings.

 

The service has emerged in response to changing demography and changing habitation:

 

More people are moving to retirement communities and assisted living centers, and they need help with the physical chore of relocating as well as the emotional strain of downsizing, said Margit Novack, the first president of the 80-member National Association of Senior Move Managers formed in 2002. She estimated that there are as many as 200 other firms that provide similar services.

 

What these movers sell is not a do-it-yourself kit but rather an assembled and integrated service package:

 

Designer Pam Newton of Reston began specializing in senior moves six years ago. “We get the moving company, we help them get rid of things. We’ll call in appraisers, refinishers, reupholstery people. We’ll purchase new things and get the windows done, the walls. Sometimes we take out builder-grade carpeting and put in hardwood or tile floors. . . . In some cases we’re pulling out the tub and installing a roll-in or step-in shower.”

 

Sounds heavenly, doesn’t it?  You’d pay something for it, wouldn’t it?

 

The professional service provider’s value proposition!

 

My dear, I offer great value because I am expert, having done this many times.

 

Senior move managers usually charge $65 to $125 an hour in this area, but costs vary depending on the services required and the region of the country. The Staceys paid Danick about $3,500, which broke down to $2,700 for her firm’s labor plus $800 for lighting, hardware and a bit of carpentry.

 

$3,500, is probably much less than they paid the real estate broker who helped them buy the new place.

 

 

 

Professionals also displace amateurs who undertake tasks out of affection or obligation, but are inexperienced at them — or, in this case, at least pay for the relocation.

 

Even if seniors cannot afford a fully orchestrated move — which can include throwing out worn items, arranging a charity pickup, buying new furniture and “staging” the home for resale — their children, members of the sandwich generation who are often busy rearing their own offspring and working full time, may pick up the tab.

 

“We couldn’t have done it,” said Julie Snider, the Staceys’ only daughter, who lives in Vienna. “There is just so much emotion involved in the move and leaving the house. One of my brothers lives in the area, too, but is really busy, and the other one is in North Carolina.”

 

[Sidebar: observe how some family members are relocating away from expensive Washington DC to cheaper venues.]

 

The service is not limited simply to facilitation, there’s also the vital element of emotional distancing:

 

“We are objective, we’re not family. It’s not my mom and dad or stuff we grew up with,” she said.

 

“The parents are more honest with me than with their own kids. They will say they’re tired. And the emotional issues don’t pop up with an outsider.”

 

This allows people to decide with confidence what they could never bear to do on their own:

 

“For someone who has a lifetime’s worth of accumulation, think of the volume and physical task of doing it. There are the emotions of our things: a woman giving up dining room furniture that she has served holidays meals on, her china closet with all her pretty things,” said Martinko.  “A lot of the losses are revisited.  Often they have lost a spouse, they have lost their mobility.  Maybe they are giving up driving, losing their vision, their hearing, their home.”

 

The move service is thus not a wham-bam but rather a customized execution:

 

Sue Ronnenkamp of Living Transitions in Austin, Texas, said she asks each client such common-sense questions as “Where do you spend your time? What chair do you sit in? Where do you work? It could be a desk, a dining room table. I moved a baby grand piano for one man. That was his priority.”

 

Even if the new vessel is ready to sail, the captain and pilot need to move:

 

On moving day, with the house soon to be stripped or left with minimal furnishings, Danick urges the occupants to spend the night with family or friends. The Staceys opted to splurge on a hotel. The next day, their daughter took them out to lunch before they headed to the new apartment.

 

Meanwhile, the elves were at work:

 

Danick and her husband, Joel, who is also her business partner, already had spent six hours working with a handyman and several unpackers to stock the refrigerator and kitchen cabinets, accessorize the bathrooms, hang clothes in closets. Armed with digital photos of the old house, they knew where every painting and throw pillow should go.

 

When Gamel Abdel Nasser decided to dam the Nile for hydroelectric power, the rising waters threatened the irreplaceable Abu Simbel:

 

 

For millennia, Abu Simbel at the Second Cataract had stood as the symbolic boundary between Nubia and Egypt, its multiple seated serene pharaohs intended to make manifest the might and splendor of the lush kingdom into which the northbound travelers were now passing. 

 

 

Abu Simbel sought to intimidate, and overawe, and succeeded.

 

With the dam, it would drown — unless, as with our elderly families, it was disassembled and relocated. 

 

 

In a great exercise in global emotional philanthropy, this was done, the monument cut apart in blocks and replaced higher:

 

 

Today the ancient Abu Simbel gazes over a shimmering lake made by man three and a half millennia later.  Relocation has saved it; some might argue, renewed it.

 

 

Does home relocation work?  Let’s return to our first couple:

 

Twenty-four hours and 6.4 miles later, the couple walked into their new home, a two-bedroom retirement apartment in Bethesda, and found themselves blinking back tears of both joy and relief.

 

“Oh, my goodness, I can’t believe these are my things. It’s so gorgeous. It looks better than it did at home,” said Ann Stacey, 73, as her husband, 81, echoed the sentiment with a simple, “I can’t get over this.”

 

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