As noted, the discussion starts at 7:30 pm at Town Hall located at 1119 8th Avenue, Seattle, WA 98101. Tickets cost $5 can can be purchased at the door beginning at 5:30 pm or by calling 800/838-3006. Get more information about the Town Hall Event by clicking this link. Hope to see you there!

This aspect of home ownership has been on my mind lately because since January I’ve had two deaths in my family — my father, my uncle — and part of the funk of these losses stems from the fact that my family wound up distributed all over the country, far away from each other. And this means that visiting each other, helping each other, and, well, resolving real estate choices made by other family members becomes all the more complicated when negotiated at a great distance.

My father, for instance, bought a piece of land in North Carolina in 2002. He’d been widowed a year, was in his 60s, and was facing retirement alone. So he thought he’d build a little house in the mountain town where he’d spent much of his childhood and where his father had been a Presbyterian minister. But before any hammers started swinging on the property, life presented other plans for him: He met a woman, remarried, and wound up moving to South Carolina, where she and her late husband had bought a lakefront lot and built on it. Fast forward to 2012, and my sister and I — who live 300 and 3000 miles away from my father’s lot in North Carolina, respectively — will have to sort out what to do with Dad’s property in a down market. Don’t get me started about his timeshare.

I asked my father earlier this year why he’d held on to the property.

“It’s a nice investment!” he said, pointing out that lots in the area had risen in value, but forgetting that all of that began changing direction in 2007.

A nice investment for whom? I wondered, since my father, in his late 70s, had clearly chosen to live elsewhere and my sister and I would one day have to choose what to do with the property. Ironically, the property he viewed as an investment is one we’d be inclined to price low and move fast, given the logistics of our situation, and so, in the end, we’ll probably get much less investment gain on it than is possible, simply because we live across the country and want to move it along as part of the posthumous organization you have to undertake when a relative passes.

I don’t fault my father for his dreams of his little house on a mountain, or his sentimental choice not to sell the land when he could. But sentimentality informed his purchase, which he then rationalized as an investment. Sentimentality and rationality… always at war!

Specifically, if homeowners can’t manage their own money, experience hardship (job loss, relationship status change, health expenses), mess with their home equity, or miscalculate the costs of ownership, they may wind up in trouble on their mortgage.  Owners should try to plan ahead and take responsibility for themselves after they buy, of course. But then, all the people who “sell” homeownership don’t really talk about the extent of the ownership-related costs that ultimately play a big role in homeowners’ post-purchase budgets. These costs aren’t central to the loan qualification process, but they are central to owners’ future budgets and financial positions.

What are these costs? They include the costs of furnishing the home, maintenance costs (projected to cost anywhere from 1% to 4% of the home’s purchase price annually–and that’s on a run-of-the-mill home, not a run-down distressed property), commuting (if owning costs so much you now drive a gallon a day to get to and from work), and utility expenses. Rent versus own calculators rarely ask owners to project these costs into their future housing expenses.  And there’s also remodeling–the ultimate discretionary spend.

But as of October 19, at least one of these rarely-mentioned costs–utilities–is now on the table in a new way: Indeed, two senators claim loan underwriters should factor utility spending into mortgage loan limits. The senators, Michael Bennet (D-Col.) and Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) are pushing the Sensible Accounting to Value Energy (SAVE) Act, which would mean Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loans would have to factor buyers’ projected future energy expenditures into loam limits. Housingwire covered the story today.

I’m unsure if factoring for utilities should be a legislated requirement for borrowers and underwriters. Once a person or family moves into their new home, they might drastically underperform or outperform prior residents with regard to energy consumption based on how much time they spend at home, how they set an adjustable thermostat, appliance mix, how many people live in the property, the energy efficiency of the home at move-in or post-remodel etc. etc. But I like that two senators are shining a light onto the notion that a home is a locus of multiple, future expenses that are rarely discussed in the pre-purchase phase. Their bill notes that utilities can cost about $2,000 a year. That’s a figure consistent with prior reporting I’ve done–and with what I spent when I made the move from renter to owner of this home pictured here. (Oil alone cost at least $1200 per year, with electricity, water, sewer, and garbage quickly toting my annual energy spend up to the $2k range.) I don’t know about you, but when I rented utilities cost about one-fourth of that.

Asking future owners to budget for utilities–and other expenses–isn’t a bad idea. Whether the legislation sinks or floats, it’s good there’s a new (and healthy) recognition about the true costs of homeownership.

We could walk everywhere — to diners, museums, the boardwalk that started near Gracie Mansion and ran south along the East River. The space was so small it required little upkeep: I had time to read novels, type up stories, sleep. My wallet got lifted right out front one night: I was walking home with a slice in one hand and my keys in the other, my wallet foolishly wedged into my armpit like a baguette. Once I realized it was gone, I ran down the block screaming obscenities at the sprinting guys who took it, what with its $20 in cash and  maxed-out credit cards. The mugging — and subsequent ride to the police station for a crime statement — didn’t deter me from my neighborhood. Perversely, it made me feel alive. It reminded me that however little I felt I had, I was privileged enough to live in a place people envied. And that after this place, there’d be another, and another, perhaps with improvements.

I went on to live all around, spreading my real estate seed with varying leases and, eventually, mortgages: The New York suburbs, two apartments on the Upper West Side, an apartment in Harlem, to a summer share in the Catskills, and then I moved across the country to Seattle, where I had four rentals and a house-sit before buying one home, then another. Most people move an average of 12 times in a lifetime, according to US Census data tossed around by moving companies. I’m up to 11! But leased or owned, you never forget your first place.

As a journalist and as a reader, the stories I most enjoy pit expectations and assumptions about a reality or institution against the less-appealing truth of the thing. I don’t get to write these stories very often, but when I do I relish them. Maybe it’s because I was a comparative literature major back in the day and see a clash of dueling narratives in these tales, or maybe it’s because I’m a glum Capricorn, but when I get the opportunity to write about people’s disillusionment I enjoy it. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like to wallow in others’ pain. Rather, I’m interested in where and how people develop their expectations, and what happens when those expectations don’t pan out. Usually, it’s partly the individual’s fault for over-optimism—but sometimes it’s also someone or something else’s fault for stirring that optimism into a tall, frothy whip. (Exhibit A: Dot-com boom. Exhibit B: Real estate.) An effort to figure out how we make ourselves miserable, and how we can avoid repeating it, are what I try to offer as armchair public service.

Like I said, I didn’t set out to work on the Great Rethink of Homeownership. Initially, I wanted to write about single women home buyers, which was kind of a thing in the 1990s and 2000s. Single ladies were moving more aggressively than their male counterparts into home buying. I was interested in this not so much because I was amazed that women were buying homes (my analysis: duh, why not?), but because I was amazed people were so amazed women were buying  Not surprisingly, my interest in women’s home buying was also a case of personal-is-political: I was fascinated with the vehement negative reaction I got from men (my father, a then-boyfriend) and women (but you’re not married!) about my ordinary-enough decision in 2003 to buy a relatively-affordable bungalow in a funky neighborhood. (Read about the home buy that launched 1,000 arguments here.) I wondered if social reality or mainstream psychology had failed to keep pace with socioeconomic reality — later or no marriage, smaller households, women’s economic strength — which all seemed to explain the trend. I also wanted to torch articles and books I saw that spoke of a woman’s home as her “relationship object” (no man? get a mortgage!)—even though I’d never heard a single man’s purchase depicted as a relationship substitute (typically, it’s “his investment”). I would call this book Honey, You’re Home.

The publisher who took interest in my idea acknowledged that women’s home buying was interesting and all. But, actually, the publisher said, they didn’t want my book—but something rotated several inches away, which is to say a big fat first-time buyer book. Like my idea, but stripping out the women and society thing. They wanted a “category killer” or “service” book, as they say in the trade. They wanted to publish a book about the buying process, but incorporating into the mix the new post-bubble realities of mortgage finance and distressed properties and economic mayhem. Could I take a crack at that sort of book? Initially, I was sad they didn’t share my vision about the women homebuyer story. But I had to consider whether what this experienced book publisher wanted was something I could do—or I wanted to do. Maybe they knew better than me what people needed to read.

What does a first-time buyer in today’s market need to know? I asked myself as I read the coverage, or added to it, and considered delivering some ideas on the topic for this publisher. It slowly began dawning on me that the publisher’s intuition that readers need fresh home-buying information was true, but not in the way they’d imagined. The question wasn’t one of how a first-time buyer enters the real estate market following an epic bust—but should people buy at all, was buying able to deliver all its old promises? Homeownership, as an institution, was up for a reboot. The question was really this: Is it wiser to rent or own? In the past, owning was the assumed answer, but in the present and foreseeable future, the case for renting and owning look different—with owning a little less appealing than before, but not altogether off the table.

The rent versus own question didn’t just apply to first-time buyers. It applied to America, where owning a home has long been considered The American Dream. During the summer of 2010, I interviewed a family named The Cleavers, a Chicago couple who sold their Milwaukee home at a loss and were taking a pause—possibly permanent—from owning while they regrouped financially. They were among an emerging subset of rethinkers. And then there’ve always been people who’ve defended a pro-renting stance, like Matthew Amster-Burton, author of “The Renter’s Manifesto.” I kept finding books that discussed how our historic emphasis on ownership had gone overboard or led to misguided consumerist excess—as depicted in books like Douglas Rushkoff’s Life Inc. and Alyssa Katz’s Our Lot. On it went. Owning has had a lot of spokespersons, but not too many skeptics. Until recently.

Rent Vs. Own, when it showed up as the question potential buyers need to consider, was like an epiphany from a James Joyce novel. The epiphany just kept unfurling… That publisher who wanted an old-school book for first-time buyers? They didn’t see the vision. I’m happy to say that Chronicle Books bit on my idea—the same week Time Magazine published a cover story titled “The Case Against Homeownership.”  It’s not that the case against homeownership is absolute—it’s just that so many people who’ve owned have found themselves disappointed by the promises prior markets led them to believe that it’s time to rethink what we expect of homeownership. It’s that disillusionment I like exploring: Where did we assume too much, what should we expect going forward? The truth isn’t always pleasant, but it’s often not as bad as we think.