Mark Morford - I Do Not Have $1 Million

Well, neither do we. It's rather shocking the differences in the housing markets in Houston vs. San Francisco. To get what we got in Houston, just 10 blocks from "downtown" in a comparable location in San Fran, I am told, would set us back over $1 million. Yeow! Houston may be lacking in many things, like culture and style, but the housing is still pretty "affordable." Affordable being a relative term, of course.

I Do Not Have $1 Million
Ergo, I cannot buy a delicious home in San Francisco. Ergo, I am screwed forever
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, June 15, 2007

I did not get in on the ground floor of Google. I did not grab 50,000 shares of Flickr before it was bought for $8 bazillion by Yahoo, thus instantly affording me a fleet of new diamond-encrusted Aston Martins and a set of solid-gold teeth.

I do currently own a nice fistful of Apple stock which I bought at 17 (!) and which is now worth a small carload of iPhones, but in this ridiculous and demeaning and utterly depressing San Francisco housing market this equates to enough money to buy roughly 9 square feet of a former meth lab in an industrial loft in the outer Mission.

(There is some good news: I plan to release my first book sometime in late 2019, after which I will quickly make numerous millions of dollars after Oprah has me on to tell me how my soul-altering tome caused her to forsake skanky celebrity interviews in favor of yoga and cold sake and sex toys and books that aren't just painfully maudlin coming-of-age, rite-of-passage examinations of oppressed sexually abused lesbian sisters from broken raging alcoholic families from the South.)

But until that time, if I want to live in San Francisco, if I wish to have some semblance of space and hope and urban love with enough money left over for Peet's and good wine and relatively decent porn, I must do what all commoners like me must do: I gotta rent.

Apparently, quite nearly forever. (San Fran pic)

It appears that I am, in formal real estate jargon, totally screwed. I currently suffer what is now a brutally typical San Francisco plight, the biting conundrum of any true lover of urban vibes and modern architecture of a kind that offers a decent amount of space sans any gunfire or bloody drug deals just outside the front door, all still within drooling distance of, say, Tartine and the Ferry Building and shockingly intoxicating dim sum on Clement Street.

It is a common refrain indeed: You love the city? You don't come from money and you don't have a giant trust fund and you totally forgot to sell your soul to the devil/Rupert Murdoch in exchange for a Stanford MBA and a deeply unsatisfying but incredibly lucrative gig working 14-hour days in the Financial District and getting drunk the rest of the time out on the huge deck of your really, really nice split-level Edwardian remodel in Noe Valley?

Well. How unfortunate for you. You will likely die never knowing the deeper pleasures of San Francisco home ownership, of that cool freedom that comes with having your own urban space but which also comes with eternal mortgage payments and massive property taxes and the deep thrill of retiling your bathroom the entirely wrong style and then having to pay a small fortune to rip it out and start all over.

Ownership is, you can easily argue, a mixed blessing. But it does seem to raise the eternal question: What is this thing about wanting, so badly, to own property? From whence does this mad desire arise? Yes, buying a home carries a certain pride of ownership; it remains one of our most reliable indicators of arrival and success, a deep social marker of American cultural values. Plus, it's just sort of cool. OK. But besides that.

It also raises the other eternal question: Can you just rent forever? Is it not only acceptable and fiscally tolerable but morally conscionable? I get no equity. I get no tax breaks. I get no opportunity to indulge my fetish for Dwell magazine design aesthetics by remodeling my living room by way of Roche Bobois and Propeller and then landscaping my backyard with bamboo and cool slate stonework surrounding a gorgeous sunken hot tub while I turn up the wireless stereo as loud as I damn well please, despite how I don't really care to do that anymore. But it sure would be nice to, you know, have the option.

One million dollars. This appears to be the magic number in San Francisco right now. Yes, 600K will get you a tiny corner studio in a remote condo development with a view of some shattered bus shelters in a part of the city where you don't even let your dog walk outside alone at night. 850K will get you a nice little place with a bathroom large enough that you may turn around in it without knocking over the refrigerator.

But $1 million seems to be where it's at, the true starter level. It's an amount that opens most possibilities and provides enough square footage so that every single day you are not feeling the overpowering urge to hurl a large vase at the head of the universe because you cannot get out of bed in the morning without bumping into your desire for a just a tiny bit more room.
It is also, quite obviously, an amount so far from the reality of a newspaper columnist/yoga teacher's income that I might as well be considering a yacht to dock outside my third home in that nauseatingly surreal Palm Island development in Dubai.

I know what you're thinking. "But what about all that borderline illegal 'creative financing' I've read so much about?" I know. I could probably do it. I could leverage my decent credit score and total lack of debt and my hugely unstable job into some sort of massive loan that will lock me into massive payments for 47 years, thusly ruining my dream of writing my fourth book while living in a huge conversion loft in Amsterdam. Yes, buying property in the city on a humble income is rumored to be actually doable. Insane, but doable.

(Houston pic)

Another option: I could just shut the hell up and be happy with my lovely rent-controlled San Francisco flat and/or maybe consider getting over my silly urban addiction and just go buy a place "out there" in some foreign distant galaxy like, say, Oakland or Hayward or Livermore, and be happy writing columns about the damnable heat and the surly neighborhood teens and how my neighbor's yard looks like a disaster scene from hell's own Romper Room. Fun.

Perhaps I am going about it all wrong. Perhaps my values have simply drifted too far askew and I read too many hip real estate and design blogs and too much Dwell and ogle too many photos of sleek sexy interiors full of tasteful furniture and swooning appliances and lickable mahogany flooring I will probably never afford, much less roll around on naked and cooing. We are, after all, a deeply covetous culture. And I am far from immune.

It can be enormously confusing. Because in this bizarrely inflated, cartoon real estate market, a million bucks seems at once hugely embarrassing and impossibly rich, and, well, not all that much at all. Hey, is a humble, well-designed million-dollar pad in the city really too much to ask? Oprah?