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The Dubious Charms of the Single-Family Home
No thanks, I’ll pass
I grew up in single-family homes. Everyone I knew lived in a house in which their families were the only inhabitants. Moreover, everyone I knew growing up owned their own houses. The four-bedroom house we lived in after moving to Ohio when I was nine set Daddy back a cool $12,000 in 1967. True, there were these things called garden apartments outside of town, but only drug dealers and divorced moms lived in them. Renting obviously was for down-and-outers.
Respectable people, people with kids and jobs bought houses.
Only one other time after leaving my parents’ home did I live in a single-family home. No, we didn’t own it.
This slightly dilapidated beast was on the near(ish) West Side of Cleveland. It had four bedrooms and each room in the house had exactly one electrical outlet. The only phone jack was in the living room. And without fail, dozens of times every day, whatever I needed was on the floor I wasn’t. But the rent — if memory serves — in 1985 was $200 a month. And it had a fire pit in the backyard.
Other than those experiences, my homes have always been apartments or once the upstairs of a two-family home that was the worst of both worlds. No privacy and no security.
