Here are a few things that I have Googled in the nine months or so since I bought a Victorian terrace home in Philadelphia:
Does a crack in the lintel mean my house is going to collapse?
Ways to tell if your house is about to fall down
How to tell if your pipes are frozen and are going to burst
Can you die of asbestos poisoning by accidentally breathing in lots of dust while sticking your head into a hole in the wall to check if your pipes are frozen?
Is buying a house a terrible idea even though everyone tells you it’s the pinnacle of adulthood and what everyone should aspire to?
As you can probably tell, I am starting to have a few regrets about buying a house. I love my home but, bloody hell, is home ownership overrated. First of all, it’s not as though I even really own the thing, is it? I’m basically just renting it from the bank. And, unlike a landlord, the bank doesn’t come over to check on your possibly frozen pipes. “But instead of throwing money away on rent you’re building equity! Homes are a great investment!”, people might say. Well, yes, that’s true – just as long as you buy in the right place at the right time and are able to hold on to it for the right number of years and sell at the right moment. If you can do all that then you’re grand. If you can’t, then real estate can be a very iffy investment.
Unfortunately for me, I’ve already failed at the “buying at the right time” part of the home ownership success equation. House-hunting in 2021 was like the Hunger Games: you’d wander into one place only to be told that someone had already snapped it up way above the asking price. Desperate times called for desperate measures: people did ridiculous things such as waive inspections and promise to name their firstborn child after the seller in order to try to secure a home. To make matters worse, it’s not as though you could just rent and wait for the madness to subside: rents rocketed and trying to find somewhere to lease was just as difficult.
While I always expected buying a home to be anxiety-inducing, I thought the worry might subside a little bit after we’d completed. It didn’t. Instead, I realised that home ownership is just a never-ending series of expensive things that need to be done. Which is extremely annoying if, like me, you hate doing things. And while owning gives you stability, it also means you don’t have a lot of flexibility. The house next door, for example, is undergoing a very disruptive construction project. If I was renting, I would move. As it is I am stuck here, with only fantasies about racoon-based revenge to keep me sane.
I realise that complaining about home ownership, by the way, might be met with tiny violins from some quarters. The last time I wrote about my house I got hate mail saying I shouldn’t boast about owning somewhere with a washing machine. I’m fully aware that being able to buy a house nowadays is a massive privilege. But my whole point here is that buying a house shouldn’t be a privilege. Shelter is a human necessity and yet we’ve turned housing into a speculative commodity. Home ownership has become this enormous milestone that people feel immense amounts of pressure to achieve – even if doesn’t really make sense for their circumstances or finances. Now, however, it’s starting to look a bit like the housing market might crash and – even if that will be bad for me personally – I hope it recalibrates our relationship with homes. Anyway, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and Google what asbestos looks like.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
