Happy Boo-hoo Birthday to Me

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

This is the house that I grew up in—until we got foreclosed on in 1981, when I was eight. Then we moved to a rental around the corner, where the weeds and fleas were, where we put down oil-stained carpet and I lived in the garage.

You can see from Zillow that the people who bought it then have held onto it since—those 3000 square feet, on half an acre, that they picked up for three quarters of a hundred grand. There were tangerine, orange, lemon, lime and grapefruit trees. There were pomegranates. There was a pool, though not this natural rock one you can see all the way from the satellite. There were four bedrooms, a dining room and a den, and my mom painted the eat-in kitchen China red.

It wasn’t Mediterranean, or built out all the way to the lot line. There was nothing McMansion about it—they didn’t have those in 1963. When the new owners moved in, they went medieval on the trees out front, which made my mother cry, but the past 26 years have been kind. It’s practically Sherwood Forest up in there. Look at that tree in the top left corner. Now look at our two-story house.

We lived a lot of places before I hit 18 and decamped Thousand Oaks—12 different houses, if I counted right. (I counted right.) There was the first house I remember, on Calle Abedul, where I would cross the dead-end street and pick mustard flower bouquets for my mom when I was three. There was a charmer on Lake Sherwood (now a gated, golf-coursed community where Will and Jada Smith live) with built-ins and a spiral staircase, where my brother would take me out to the middle of the lake and then leave me crouching on a four-foot rock slick with bird shit. There were lesser homes, every year or two. But Jeanette was the only house we owned, the house where my mother could tear out the seventies shag and put down smoke blue carpeting and have extravagant book club meetings—book club meetings with catering and a rented dance floor. I’m probably remembering that wrong, but really I don’t care.

I’m one of those people who gets spitty when Hillary and the other Dems talk about those poor folks losing their homes to foreclosure. You’d think I would be more sympathetic; are you always so very wrong? We paid for our house in cash—commercial real estate was kind to my father in the late ’70s—and then put it up as collateral for one of my Dad’s lousy investments just as his luck began to change. (In this case the investment was a resort hotel in Silver Lakes in the high desert, resembling nothing so much as The Shining in its depopulated creepiness, while the community now is hollow-eyed and meth-only.) Instead of being sympathetic, I log on to housing bear websites like the Irvine Housing Blog and Exurban Nation. I revel in the spittiness of my fellow angry Americans, until the comments invariably turn to the scourge of illegals, and then I am embarrassed at the company I keep.

But seriously—$400 grand for a shitbox on Estara Ave. This is what makes me angry. When I was a little girl, houses in North Ranch cost $400,000, and North Ranch was where Tommy Lee and Heather Locklear lived. Granted, that’s 25 years ago now. Blah blah blah inflationcakes, but even back then people who made one and a half times the median income weren’t pouring it into houses terrorized by the Avenues gang. And in 572 square feet.

If you’re reading this on Monday, I am 35 today. I am feeling very sorry for me, but it’s a clockwork consequence of my PMS; I know that as a middle class Californian, I don’t have room to bitch. When my mother was 35, she was moving her family into her new and beautiful home on Jeanette, where she would brush and braid my hair in the sunshine by the pool. The good times certainly seem to have lasted for the people who bought our house from the bank.

And so we will bail out the banks who made these stupid loans, and we will bail out the people who drove the prices up till they quintupled (current foreclosures, of course, make rents go up; don’t you know how the magic free market works?), and we will send $300 to everyone—instead of, say, investing that $150 billion in infrastructure, which creates jobs here instead of in China—because the Wal-Mart heirs think you don’t have enough crap, and because Schwarzenegger, with the car tax rebate, already proved how easily you can be bribed. A friend of mine bought socks at Wal-Mart yesterday. Looking closely at the plastic casing, he pulled off the Made in America sticker. It said “Made in Mexico” beneath it. For God’s sake, don’t tell the housing bear blogs. You wouldn’t like them when they’re racist.

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