The Time of Our Lives (14 page)

When I asked about family entertainment these days, they jointly answered, “Watching the kids play in the backyard or turning on the garden hose and squirting them as they run past.” Like so many couples hit by the recession, Dan and April rent inexpensive DVDs and watch them at home.

They also made room in their home for Dan’s grandmother. “It was either that or a nursing home,” Dan said. “We couldn’t have that—so we took her in, and my dad paid for her food and drove her to her doctor’s appointments and my uncle paid for her prescriptions.”

Unfortunately, as so often happens, his grandmother’s condition deteriorated to the point where she had to have constant care. Her move into a nursing home took a big emotional toll on the family. Dan’s mother struggled with the reality that they could no longer take care of her themselves.

This is a story repeated in nearly every family across America as life spans are extended with the trade-off of commensurate physical and mental health difficulties. Care is expensive and often bewildering for family members who are forced to take responsibility for two lives: their own and their elderly relative’s. Add dementia or Alzheimer’s and it is a heartbreaking experience with too little relief.

Health-policy studies are warning of a coming cost crisis in long-term care for the elderly as more nursing home patients with dementia are using those facilities for longer periods of time. In 1999 patients with dementia averaged a stay of 46 days in hospice care with Medicare benefits. By 2006 that average had more than doubled to 118 days in hospice care. That’s one more burden not just for families but for all taxpayers who are faced with the looming mathematical catastrophe of Medicare costs.

When I commented that the difficult times meant more elderly Americans were facing very tough choices and that Dan’s grandmother was lucky to have a strong support structure, Dan responded matter-of-factly, “That’s what families do—help each other.”

CHAPTER 8
 

House Broken

FACT:
In 1999, 1.2 percent of home loans were in foreclosure. The foreclosure rate stayed in that range until the housing bubble exploded. By 2009 foreclosure rates were running at 4.6 percent. Houses financed with high-risk subprime loans were foreclosed on at a rate of more than 15.5 percent. Experts have estimated 1.2 million homes could be repossessed by banks in 2011.

QUESTION:
How much is your home really worth today? How much did you pay for it? Could you be just as happy in a smaller home?

A
t the close of the twentieth century America went through a housing speculation bubble that became our equivalent of Holland’s tulip frenzy in the mid-1600s. Mortgages were ridiculously easy to get and the terms were ticking time bombs of a little cash down, interest-only payments for a few years, and then, boom, a very large bill due down the road.

In the fall of 2010, economists declared that the technical end to the Great Recession had come in July 2009, by their measurements, but that was little comfort to homeowners who had lost their homes or were struggling against the odds to hang on to property worth significantly less than what they paid for it. Banks and other lending institutions attempting to recover were also weighed down by permissive lending practices that became long-term obstacles to renewed financial health.

The fearsome reality of the depth and magnitude of the Great Recession began to catch America’s middle class in the crosshairs. For several years wages for that section of the population had been in decline in real terms, or stagnating, while the cost of housing, education, food, and health care rocketed up.

The middle class began to borrow more, on their credit cards, at the bank, or on their homes. Too many of them made no commensurate cutback in their appetite for what television commercials, lifestyle magazines, and their neighbors assured them was the good life: a houseful of expensive appliances, dining out, long weekends at Walt Disney World or Las Vegas, leased SUVs, and late-model cars for the teenagers.

The great hope of breaking even by selling a mortgaged home for much more than the initial investment disappeared overnight. Housing prices took a sharp turn downward at the peak of their inflated value, and as late as 2010 more than a quarter of homeowners in America were stuck with mortgages greater than the value of their house.

When the bubble burst, it set off a chain reaction that nearly led to a global depression.

As the economy struggled to recover going into the autumn of 2011, fueling an incendiary political debate, housing in America remained a primary problem.

The numbers were staggering: by the end of July 2011, banks owned but were unable to sell almost eight hundred thousand foreclosed homes and were in the process of foreclosing on another eight hundred thousand residential properties.

From the start of the recession in December 2007 through the summer of 2011, banks either foreclosed on or started foreclosure proceedings on approximately ten million homes, according to RealtyTrac, a national housing survey service.

THE PAST

A few years ago Meredith and I organized an informal reunion of South Dakota friends at our Montana ranch. We also invited a wealthy, politically and culturally prominent New York family. Only partly in jest I said to our New York friends, “This is a full-service group. One of the men is the chief federal judge in South Dakota. One of the women is a state supreme court justice; her husband is the former South Dakota attorney general. Two of the women are successful lawyers; the husband of one is now a college astronomy professor after retiring as one of the state’s most successful high school football coaches. There at the end of the table with the World Series ring is a longtime friend who played second base for those championship Oakland A’s teams in the seventies, and next to him is the proprietor of the busiest restaurant in our hometown.”

I closed by saying, “They have two things in common: They’re all successful and they all grew up in small towns, on farms, or on ranches in modest houses with one bathroom.”

The federal judge corrected me. “We didn’t have an indoor bathroom on the farm until I was a teenager.”

It was good for a laugh, and then we had a lively dinner discussion with no discernible differences between the New Yorkers and the South Dakotans when it came to familiarity or insights on the big issues of the day.

The evening was, in its own way, a metaphor for the contraction of class differences on many levels in America. It was also a reminder of the expensive expansion in home construction in the recent past, and the diminished expectations of the present and future.

The increasing size of the family home and the rising ownership of second homes seemed to have happened with little commentary or examination. There may not be a more telling example of the differences in spending habits than the housing model. In the 1950s and early ’60s, the Rocky Mountain ski areas were quaint villages; they erupted into glossy sprawls of trophy homes and condos. Florida coastlines and Arizona and California deserts blossomed with sun-dappled expensive weekend and winter housing. In every state, second homes morphed from rudimentary cabins on lakes and rivers to residences a huge percentage of the world’s population would consider palaces.

My father-in-law was a successful physician in our hometown of Yankton, a thriving rural medical center in South Dakota. He built for his family of five children what the community considered to be at the time an impressive brick home with four bedrooms, three bathrooms, a small den, a “rec room” in the basement, a comfortable living room, and a two-car garage with a station wagon in one bay and a late-model sedan in the other.

The square footage of the entire house was probably about twenty-five hundred. That was a substantial symbol of real prosperity in the fifties and early sixties. Today Yankton has whole neighborhoods of homes a third again as large. The nearby lakeshore is laced with second homes, equal in size to or larger than Doc Auld’s brick house on West Eighth Street.

The summer Meredith and I were married, 1962, the only second home on the lake I knew of belonged to the local banker. It was a small, modestly furnished cabin, but in its understated way it separated the banking family from the rest of us financially.

Dr. Auld and the banker had the means to build something much grander for their families, but modesty and proportion—not showing off—was an unspoken rule. When Doc bought two productive farms nearby, there was no resentment; that made sense. But if he had built what came to be called a McMansion, the community would have collectively wondered what had happened to the man they thought they knew.

The Brokaw family home during my teenage years was a two-story, three-bedroom house on a corner lot with an attached two-car garage that doubled as my father’s mechanical workshop. It was the first house my parents purchased after twenty years of marriage spent living in small mobile homes, rented apartments, and government housing on U.S. Army bases and Corps of Engineers construction sites along the Missouri River.

Even though I was just fifteen when they bought the turquoise-colored home at 1515 Mulberry in Yankton, I was impressed by the purchase price: $11,500. It seemed a princely sum, but Mother later told me they had saved so much during the postwar construction boom that they could have paid cash.

Although the rooms were small—the bedrooms were, maybe, eight by ten feet—and there was only one bathroom for a family of three boys and Mother and Dad, it had a solid working-class respectability about it.

It was, as our visiting relatives would say, “a nice house.”

When Meredith and I bought our first home in California in 1968, I was making around forty thousand dollars a year as a local anchor and network correspondent for the NBC-owned station in Los Angeles.

The house, a forty-year-old custom-built home in the hills above Studio City in the San Fernando Valley, had three bedrooms and one bath at one end with a spare bedroom and another bath at the far end. In between there was a modern but not fancy kitchen, a sunny dining area, a small television room, and a living room with hand-hewn beams in the ceiling and a fireplace in the corner. It was in the fourteen-hundred-square-feet range.

I took time off from work to refinish a secondhand crib for our third child, steam old wallpaper off a bedroom wall, and paint a bathroom while Meredith spent a thousand dollars on handsome matching sofas and an expansive glass coffee table to place in front of the large picture window overlooking the valley.

Our small yard on a steeply pitched lot contained flourishing peach and lemon trees and an ivy-covered terrace. A stand of eucalyptus trees out back bordered a three-hundred-acre piece of county land off-limits to development. In that county tract there were deer, coyotes, hiking trails, and trees to climb.

We were surrounded by houses with pools in our woodsy cul-de-sac, and most of the neighbors were generous with invitations.

In short, for a pair of twenty-eight-year-olds from the prairie just starting a family, it was California bliss. Not for a moment did we feel house poor. For the next five years we entertained neighbors and friends, movie and television stars, presidential candidates, local politicians, famous athletes, and business moguls at casual Saturday and Sunday night dinners.

The house cost $42,500, just slightly more than my annual salary.

I occasionally drive up the narrow street on which it sat when I return to Los Angeles. I can no longer see our little nest from the street because someone has converted it into a gated mansion with an elaborate steel and concrete deck over what was once the ivy-covered terrace. I have no idea what the current value might be, but it must be at least two or three million dollars.

The reconstruction looks very expensive, but it appears to have turned out well. I hope the happiness we left behind wasn’t lost in the conversion.

A good contrast between the standards of yesterday and today in the house-buying business is Graceland, Elvis Presley’s celebrated estate on the outskirts of Memphis. It is one of the most popular tourist attractions in the Southeast and for members of my generation, it has a Shangri-La-like reputation.

Elvis, our poor-boy rockabilly icon, could rise up from his Mississippi shanty roots and buy a grand home. He purchased it in 1957, when just about everything Elvis did was breathlessly reported, and this was well before
Entertainment Tonight
or any of the other cable entertainment shows.

Graceland became more mythical once Elvis died. Paul Simon recorded a monster hit about going there, called “Graceland,” which appears on the album of the same name.

So when I finally made my own pilgrimage a few years ago I half expected the grounds to have a kind of celestial feel and the home itself to be more castle than house. It is, it turns out, a period piece, stately but more modest in scale and statement than any number of homes on any number of streets in the moneyed neighborhoods of, say, Atlanta, Houston, Minneapolis, Seattle, or Boston. Graceland is a little more than ten thousand square feet over all, and yet Meredith and I were surprised to discover the living and dining rooms were about the size of those you’d find in large modern homes so popular with the upper middle class today.