Affordable Housing Institute : US

Because the home encases a household, changes in housing consumption usually are caused by changes in family status — marriage, children, emptying the nest, downsizing, moving to congregate living.

 

Might we have the causality backwards? 

 

What do you mean, I have a clear view of where I’ve been!

 

Might the pressures of housing cost trigger household changes? 

 

We’ve already seen that more bedrooms means more babies because putting the bed in bedroom is a major motivator for young people to move out of their parents’ house.  Such practicality-plus-propinquity-produces-proposals possibilities are unwittingly implied by a New York Times article that should have been datelined February 14:

 

Marriage and real estate in one iconic image

 

Love Me, Love My Apartment

 

Real estate in New York City has a way of looming large in matters of the heart.

 

My semi-serious point is that when supply is ample, people have choice; when it is scarce, they have to grab from a limited menu.  This is as true in dating as it is in house-hunting.

 

Fabulous apartments at equally fabulous prices are so hard to come by in New York that the possession of one, or lack thereof, can easily tip the balance in a relationship. While major life changes like marriage and children influence real estate decisions in all parts of the country, the scarcity of New York real estate bargains actually seems to cause life changes, or at least push them along.

 

“Real estate can define relationships in New York,” said Pam Fica, an agent with DJK Residential.  

 

Ms. Fica, ready to help you define your relationship

 

Moving in together, for example, becomes an issue here sooner than it might elsewhere. “When you hit the one-year mark and you’ve said the ‘I love you’ s, then what?” she said. “In other places, you can afford to keep your own place, but here, everything is so expensive, you ideally want to be able to share the rent. So if you’re not talking about it, you start to wonder: What’s wrong with this relationship?”

 

Price creates its own dynamic.  Since people value only what they pay for, paying more for something means you must value it more highly.  Compared with the option of living together, if you’re paying that much not to live with me, what does that tell me about our relationship?

 

And since New Yorkers tend to live in tight quarters, being able to share that space is often seen as the ultimate test for a relationship. Conversely, this may be the reason that relationships sometimes don’t last in New York.

 

Ooo, it’s so tough to live in the Big Apple.

 

On dog day afternoons, it is

 

“I know people who figure if they can survive living in a studio or a small one-bedroom in forced closeness, then they know they can stay together,” said Amy Herman, an agent with Halstead Property.

 

If you can make out there, you can make out anywhere?

 

It’s up to you, New York, New York!

 

That’s precisely what Vincenzo and Cynthia Roberto thought when he moved into her one-bedroom last January after having dated her for only three months. Seven months later, they married.

 

Mr. Roberto, who is an accountant, first suggested the idea of living together when a colleague asked if he knew of an apartment he could sublet for a month. “I said to Cynthia, ‘How about I sublet my place, and we could try to live together for a month?’ ” he said. Ms. Roberto, who works at Alessi, the Italian design company, said she agreed because “I was 36, and I didn’t want to waste time figuring out if he’s the one.”

 

Vincenzo and Cynthia Roberto: from the NYT

 

Instructive in Cynthia’s perspective is how comfortable she is with cohabiting without resolving the relationship issue.  That’s a change brought by the sexual revolution.  Forty years ago, such living-together would have brought external family pressure to decide.

 

Then again, propinquity breeds procreation, or at least recreation:

 

“One month became two months, then three months, then six months and then I proposed to her,” said Mr. Roberto, 32. They were married in a civil ceremony last August, and they are now planning a big wedding this summer in Bari, Italy, which is Mr. Roberto’s hometown and coincidentally also the birthplace of both of Ms. Roberto’s parents.

 

Committing raises the stakes, particularly when assets are pooled to increase consumption that is predicated on remaining together:

 

Ms. Fica, the DJK agent, said she had a client who initially planned to buy a modest one-bedroom in a condo under construction. But then he and his girlfriend decided to pool their money and buy a much more expensive penthouse.

 

“I told him I didn’t think it was a good idea because they’d only been together for a few weeks,” she said. But he felt certain that their relationship would last, and besides, at the suggestion of the girlfriend’s father, they had already drafted a plan for her to buy him out if they broke up.

“So they had an exit strategy, just like a pre-nup,” Ms. Fica said.

 

Formalizing relations always means a cost to dissolve them.  That cost is not always merely financial:

 

Fast forward 12 months to late 2007, when the building was finally completed. About a month after the couple moved in, the client called Ms. Fica to say they had broken up and he needed to find a rental. “All of a sudden he was apartment-less and furniture-less because he had sold all his things so they could buy new furniture together,” she said.

 

Her advice to buyers: “Don’t buy something with someone you just met.”

 

I’ve previously posted many times on the value of rental as a more flexible form of tenure, as it follows rapid changes in consumption levels, household composition, and location.  Unwinding a lease is easier than selling a house; moving out of a roommate rental is easier still (as any of us who’ve ever experienced the skip-out or deadbeat roommate can well remember).

 

Who’s been drinking my milk?!?

 

Couples who have actually been together more than a few weeks or months, when faced with the decision of whether to live together, often struggle over location, because many New Yorkers find their identities are closely tied to their neighborhoods.

 

Not just New Yorkers.  Neighborhood is a tribe that everyone joins.

 

New York may be distinctive in its ability to foster such intense attachments to its neighborhoods. Dr. Pepper Schwartz, a sociologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and the relationship expert at Perfectmatch.com, said, “I don’t know if there’s any place else that’s like New York in that way.”

 

Dr. Schwartz, you should visit the English Midlands.  Rooting to place is stronger there than anywhere I’ve ever seen, going back generations.  It’s actually a very significant labor-mobility problem for Britain.

 

Originally called the Quarrymen

 

Dr. Schwartz works with couples across the United States and says she has met people who want to avoid driving more than an hour for a relationship. “But that’s nothing like what I hear from New Yorkers, who say things like, ‘I can’t be more than 20 minutes away,’ and ‘I’m not interested in meeting anybody I have to move for,’ ” she said, adding that they mean having to go uptown or cross-town. It’s a stance she calls “bizarrely limiting.”

 

It’s certainly limiting.

 

Surviving the scrutiny of a co-op board is another real estate process that can sometimes lead couples to marry when they might not otherwise do so. Carolina Donadio, a vice president of Leron Inc., a luxury linen shop, knew firsthand the intense interest that boards take in personal relationships, because when she bought her first co-op in 1995, the board asked to meet her former husband.

 

Don’t you just love co-ops?  In these living clubs, nothing whatsoever is out-of-bounds.  Being on a co-op board is the apotheosis of busy-body-dom.

 

“They wanted to meet him, just in case we got back together,” she said. “Fortunately, he made a good impression.”

 

Sutton Place is well known as the toniest of neighborhoods, so self-infatuated as to be positively narcissistic. 

 

Three years ago, she and her new partner, Stephen Justice, became enamored of a maisonette off Sutton Place.  Ms. Donadio originally planned to buy the apartment in her name, but their broker, Edward Johnston, an agent with Brown Harris Stevens, suggested that their financial package would be stronger if they bought it together.

 

Love my assets, love my liabilities?

 

No one suggested they should get married, but Mr. Justice, an automotive sales executive at Allison Transmission, proposed before they submitted their personal and financial data to the co-op board, and they were married a few months later at a chapel in Las Vegas.

 

Isn’t that sweet?  Mingling not only toothbrushes but tax returns.

 

“We were just great together, and we didn’t see the need to get married,” said Ms. Donadio, who said she is in her 50s and Mr. Justice is in his 60s. But real estate helped push them toward the decision.

 

“Sutton Place is a very old, staid kind of family-oriented area,” she said, “and we thought it might improve our chances of getting the apartment if we seemed more stable.”

 

Stephen Justice and Caroline Donadio and their dog, Dallas, in their Upper East Side apartment: from the NYT

 

Perhaps there is no more telling sign of how big a role real estate can play in a relationship than the way Luke Ward, 31, chose to propose to Michelle Solomon, 30.

 

The two had been dating for about seven months when they moved in together. “My lease was coming up, and I knew we hadn’t been together that long,” he said, “but I also knew that within another six months I would want to move in with her, so I just asked her.”

 

Luke Ward and Michelle Solomon moved in together about seven months after they started dating.

 

Losing a lease is like living for love?

 

In the one-bedroom they now share, they find themselves captivated by television shows like “House Hunters” and “Property Virgins.” On lazy Sunday afternoons, they find themselves lingering outside real estate offices to study the apartment ads.

 

So Mr. Ward, an advertising copywriter, went to the Halstead office on the Upper West Side last month and asked if he could propose to Ms. Solomon, a financial consultant, via the plasma screen in the window. What could be more normal than taking her by the hand and walking her up to the window for a look?

 

The first slide read: “Now Available: This stunning (yes, stunning) semi-neurotic male features top-of-the-line Boboli pizza-making abilities, great sense of humor and a full head of hair. Perfect for a beautiful, dainty, Jewish girl from Long Island with fantastic jingle-writing skills, a boisterous laugh and a smile you could spend the rest of your life with …”

 

The next slide read, “Michelle, will you marry me?”

 

She said yes.

 

If only the house-hunting were that easy.

 

Love in the lease?

 

 

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