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September 10, 2009
When Home Shrinks
By HARVEY ARATON
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IN the quaint central Connecticut town of East Haddam, Bill and Rose-Marie Evans built a theme park for their three children. Their property included a pool, a hot tub, a swing set, a trampoline, a paved basketball court and more than enough yard to host neighborhood soccer and kickball games.
They had expanded the ranch house they bought in 2001, turning it into a 3,000-square-foot home with room indoors for games like pool, table tennis and Foosball, making it a prime sleepover destination. “The master bedroom was on the first floor,” Mr. Evans said. “There were three bedrooms and a second family room upstairs. The kids had 1,200 square feet to themselves.”
But then in mid-June, the moving van arrived, and the Evanses left behind their own personal vacation land and squeezed uncomfortably into a 1,200-square-foot rental, while they began building a marginally bigger home. The couple had decided that with the economy uncertain, they had to conserve money and live more modestly.
Leaving the home they once believed would be theirs into retirement was a painful decision, one many baby boomer families are facing. It’s an issue that especially resonates in suburbia, where highly taxed, stressed-out parents wrestle with the prospect of moving sooner than they had planned. But children can be uncomfortable with decisions that change their notions of security, and their unhappiness forces parents to consider what they do — or don’t — owe their offspring.
In the Evans household, the oldest child was upset about the change, even though he is a college student at the University of Central Florida. “We always believed that was going to be the place we would come back to with our own kids for Christmas and Thanksgiving,” said Andrew Inman, 19, who, along with his sister, Brittany, 17, is Mrs. Evans’s child from a previous marriage. “We kind of felt lied to.”
Baby boomers are already driving a new market for smaller, less expensive homes, according to Stephen Melman, the director of economic services for the National Association of Home Builders in Washington. In a recent member survey, 59 percent of builders nationwide said they were planning to or were already significantly downscaling from the McMansion era.
“Many boomers seem to be thinking they are going to do it eventually, they may as well do it now while they need the money for tuition or because there’s just less money available,” Mr. Melman said.
Under the pseudonym Mr. Go To Retirement, Mark Patterson has blogged extensively about the benefits of downsizing, but said that many parents, responding to his blog posts, have said they have difficulty relinquishing the family home, even when there obviously is no more practical need for it.
“There are so many boomers struggling with this concept,” he said. “I talk about my own family, how we purchased a second home in Kentucky, half the size, and spent a lot of time there on holidays with our three sons, kind of a ‘Guess what, guys, we’re going to be selling the house you grew up in.’ ”
Mr. Patterson, a patent lawyer, said he hasn’t taken the plunge because his three young adult sons are so attached to the family home, on a golf course near Nashville.
“I saw how they reacted a while back when my father sold a home that they loved visiting in North Carolina, ” Mr. Patterson said. “There was a real sense of loss, a real sadness, and I could see it again when we started talking about downsizing ourselves. It’s going to be disruptive emotionally for them, so I told them that it wouldn’t happen until they were all out of school and comfortable in their own space.”
Children do not always resist a parent’s decision to move on, and can be part of the solution when finances are difficult. When Jayme Howard’s divorce left her unable to maintain her 1,400-square-foot home in south Denver, she tried to sell it. With no offers by July, she asked her 21-year-old son, a college student in Denver, to move back home with his girlfriend.
“They’re helping me out, paying rent, and it’s cheaper than their apartment was,” said Ms. Howard, 52, a postal worker. “I’m hoping we can do this for another two years and then I can sell for a decent price.”
In Ocean Township on the Jersey Shore, Jane Graver, 52, a single mother with two sons, ages 19 and 17, recently sold a 3,000-square-foot split-level home and rented a house in a nearby town that is half the size of the one she sold, with just enough room for her, the boys and her tea business, Ducky Life. Because she also vacated her office space, she anticipates significant monthly savings.
Her older son, Holden Sandlar, just started his sophomore year at the Rochester Institute of Technology and has already told Ms. Graver that he does not intend to move home after college. Her younger son, Miles Sandlar, will graduate next June from the high school he has attended and has been promised by his mother that he will get one full year of college to visit her in the house she is renting.
“After that, he’ll have to figure it out,” Ms. Graver said, describing herself as an “old hippie free-spirit,” who hopes to settle in Vermont eventually. She believes that her sons, after finishing their education, will be resourceful enough to lay their own roots. “Moving when your kids are younger is much simpler,” she said. “But in this case, the boys have been part of the process.” They helped her choose the new house.
“I think by going through this with me and actually helping, they have been able to realize how much easier this is going to be for me,” she said, “and knowing that, it’s made the loss of their home and the more material things in their lives seem not as important.”
The changes involved in moving were more painful for the Evans family. Mr. Evans, 46, who works as a building manager for a local lumberyard, said he has seen too much of his company’s business disappear to be comfortable.
“I’ve seen too many guys sitting around with nothing to do,” he said. “If I were to lose my job, we couldn’t possibly have maintained the old house on one salary. It made me worry and think, do we really need three living rooms?”
His wife agreed, especially after she watched her brother and his wife, who live in Tacoma, Wash., lose their jobs.
Valued at $435,000 two years ago, the Evanses’ house sold for $305,000. The Evanses had to tap into savings for closing expenses, while the timing of the move required a hefty emotional cost.
Mr. Inman, the oldest child, had just returned from his freshman year at college and was stunned to learn he would soon be sharing a dorm-size space with his 12-year-old brother, William Evans. Sitting at the dining room table wedged into a narrow area facing the kitchen on a recent evening with his parents and brother, he said it was the message more than the move that reduced him to tears.
“It was being told that you’re only a part-time resident now so you don’t get your own space,” he said. “No child wants to feel that way. You want to feel that you have a place at home that’s always there for you if you need it.”
Faced with the prospect of an unhappy college student as his summerlong roommate, William volunteered to sleep on the living room couch.
“He’s my brother, I wanted him to be happy,” William said.
Brittany, 17, who was already reeling from a rejection by the Coast Guard, had to come to terms with going to a local community college and living in a home that feels to her like a tenement.
“We’re all in each other’s space and can get on each other’s nerves,” she said. “No matter where you are, you can hear what everyone is doing.”
Worse, her dream of a high school graduation party at the home she loved was dashed, when the purchasing family, relocating from New Jersey, was unable to compromise on the closing date.
“Brittany was angry, very hurt,” said Mrs. Evans, 46, a music teacher in the town’s school district and the author of a recently published novel aimed at 9- to 12-year-olds, “The Unexpected Adventure at East Haddam High.”
“It was toughest on Brittany,” Mrs. Evans said. “I tried family meetings. I asked: ‘How do you feel? Let’s talk about it.’ It was: ‘Why do you care how we feel? You made the decision without us.’ I’d always had a ‘Gilmore Girls’ relationship with my daughter. It’s been difficult to see her so unhappy and distant.”
Nodding, Mr. Inman said, “You couldn’t talk to her without her screaming at you.”
Emphasizing the point, Brittany extended her early evening out with friends to avoid the dining area interview. On the telephone the next day, she didn’t sound quite ready for rapprochement.
“I mean, I understand the financial situation, of course, but it was two weeks before graduation, so many things going on, and your parents decide to move you,” she said. “I had friends whose parents took their homes off the market just to ease their stress during senior year. Moving right before graduation is not what you want.”
They are all trying to move forward. William is back in the bedroom, although his sleepovers with friends are usually elsewhere. His brother has returned to college. Brittany has been enjoying her new community college classes and trying to find a day job that will ease her claustrophobia.
In the slow construction market, the family has been assured completion of their new home by November. The builder had not worked in almost a year and the various contractors had plenty of time on their hands as well.
“They all came way down on their prices because they needed the work,”
Mrs. Evans said. They are building their new home for $250,000, allowing them to clear $55,000 in the move.
Because the rental is less expensive than their old home, Mr. and Mrs. Evans have been able to save money for the last few months. And when they move to their new home, they are anticipating significant utilities savings.
“It’ll be about 1,350 square feet with a seasonal room that hopefully we’ll be able to winterize at some point,” Mr. Evans said.
Like their children, they were not happy about leaving so much behind, and each had a favorite amenity that they could not part with. For Mr. Evans, it was the pool table, now in the basement of the rental. For Mrs. Evans, it was the piano, now wedged into their living room.
Everything else had to be stored, or surrendered.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/ga...r=1&ref=garden
to
IN the quaint central Connecticut town of East Haddam, Bill and Rose-Marie Evans built a theme park for their three children. Their property included a pool, a hot tub, a swing set, a trampoline, a paved basketball court and more than enough yard to host neighborhood soccer and kickball games.
They had expanded the ranch house they bought in 2001, turning it into a 3,000-square-foot home with room indoors for games like pool, table tennis and Foosball, making it a prime sleepover destination. “The master bedroom was on the first floor,” Mr. Evans said. “There were three bedrooms and a second family room upstairs. The kids had 1,200 square feet to themselves.”
But then in mid-June, the moving van arrived, and the Evanses left behind their own personal vacation land and squeezed uncomfortably into a 1,200-square-foot rental, while they began building a marginally bigger home. The couple had decided that with the economy uncertain, they had to conserve money and live more modestly.
Leaving the home they once believed would be theirs into retirement was a painful decision, one many baby boomer families are facing. It’s an issue that especially resonates in suburbia, where highly taxed, stressed-out parents wrestle with the prospect of moving sooner than they had planned. But children can be uncomfortable with decisions that change their notions of security, and their unhappiness forces parents to consider what they do — or don’t — owe their offspring.
In the Evans household, the oldest child was upset about the change, even though he is a college student at the University of Central Florida. “We always believed that was going to be the place we would come back to with our own kids for Christmas and Thanksgiving,” said Andrew Inman, 19, who, along with his sister, Brittany, 17, is Mrs. Evans’s child from a previous marriage. “We kind of felt lied to.”
Baby boomers are already driving a new market for smaller, less expensive homes, according to Stephen Melman, the director of economic services for the National Association of Home Builders in Washington. In a recent member survey, 59 percent of builders nationwide said they were planning to or were already significantly downscaling from the McMansion era.
“Many boomers seem to be thinking they are going to do it eventually, they may as well do it now while they need the money for tuition or because there’s just less money available,” Mr. Melman said.
Under the pseudonym Mr. Go To Retirement, Mark Patterson has blogged extensively about the benefits of downsizing, but said that many parents, responding to his blog posts, have said they have difficulty relinquishing the family home, even when there obviously is no more practical need for it.
“There are so many boomers struggling with this concept,” he said. “I talk about my own family, how we purchased a second home in Kentucky, half the size, and spent a lot of time there on holidays with our three sons, kind of a ‘Guess what, guys, we’re going to be selling the house you grew up in.’ ”
Mr. Patterson, a patent lawyer, said he hasn’t taken the plunge because his three young adult sons are so attached to the family home, on a golf course near Nashville.
“I saw how they reacted a while back when my father sold a home that they loved visiting in North Carolina, ” Mr. Patterson said. “There was a real sense of loss, a real sadness, and I could see it again when we started talking about downsizing ourselves. It’s going to be disruptive emotionally for them, so I told them that it wouldn’t happen until they were all out of school and comfortable in their own space.”
Children do not always resist a parent’s decision to move on, and can be part of the solution when finances are difficult. When Jayme Howard’s divorce left her unable to maintain her 1,400-square-foot home in south Denver, she tried to sell it. With no offers by July, she asked her 21-year-old son, a college student in Denver, to move back home with his girlfriend.
“They’re helping me out, paying rent, and it’s cheaper than their apartment was,” said Ms. Howard, 52, a postal worker. “I’m hoping we can do this for another two years and then I can sell for a decent price.”
In Ocean Township on the Jersey Shore, Jane Graver, 52, a single mother with two sons, ages 19 and 17, recently sold a 3,000-square-foot split-level home and rented a house in a nearby town that is half the size of the one she sold, with just enough room for her, the boys and her tea business, Ducky Life. Because she also vacated her office space, she anticipates significant monthly savings.
Her older son, Holden Sandlar, just started his sophomore year at the Rochester Institute of Technology and has already told Ms. Graver that he does not intend to move home after college. Her younger son, Miles Sandlar, will graduate next June from the high school he has attended and has been promised by his mother that he will get one full year of college to visit her in the house she is renting.
“After that, he’ll have to figure it out,” Ms. Graver said, describing herself as an “old hippie free-spirit,” who hopes to settle in Vermont eventually. She believes that her sons, after finishing their education, will be resourceful enough to lay their own roots. “Moving when your kids are younger is much simpler,” she said. “But in this case, the boys have been part of the process.” They helped her choose the new house.
“I think by going through this with me and actually helping, they have been able to realize how much easier this is going to be for me,” she said, “and knowing that, it’s made the loss of their home and the more material things in their lives seem not as important.”
The changes involved in moving were more painful for the Evans family. Mr. Evans, 46, who works as a building manager for a local lumberyard, said he has seen too much of his company’s business disappear to be comfortable.
“I’ve seen too many guys sitting around with nothing to do,” he said. “If I were to lose my job, we couldn’t possibly have maintained the old house on one salary. It made me worry and think, do we really need three living rooms?”
His wife agreed, especially after she watched her brother and his wife, who live in Tacoma, Wash., lose their jobs.
Valued at $435,000 two years ago, the Evanses’ house sold for $305,000. The Evanses had to tap into savings for closing expenses, while the timing of the move required a hefty emotional cost.
Mr. Inman, the oldest child, had just returned from his freshman year at college and was stunned to learn he would soon be sharing a dorm-size space with his 12-year-old brother, William Evans. Sitting at the dining room table wedged into a narrow area facing the kitchen on a recent evening with his parents and brother, he said it was the message more than the move that reduced him to tears.
“It was being told that you’re only a part-time resident now so you don’t get your own space,” he said. “No child wants to feel that way. You want to feel that you have a place at home that’s always there for you if you need it.”
Faced with the prospect of an unhappy college student as his summerlong roommate, William volunteered to sleep on the living room couch.
“He’s my brother, I wanted him to be happy,” William said.
Brittany, 17, who was already reeling from a rejection by the Coast Guard, had to come to terms with going to a local community college and living in a home that feels to her like a tenement.
“We’re all in each other’s space and can get on each other’s nerves,” she said. “No matter where you are, you can hear what everyone is doing.”
Worse, her dream of a high school graduation party at the home she loved was dashed, when the purchasing family, relocating from New Jersey, was unable to compromise on the closing date.
“Brittany was angry, very hurt,” said Mrs. Evans, 46, a music teacher in the town’s school district and the author of a recently published novel aimed at 9- to 12-year-olds, “The Unexpected Adventure at East Haddam High.”
“It was toughest on Brittany,” Mrs. Evans said. “I tried family meetings. I asked: ‘How do you feel? Let’s talk about it.’ It was: ‘Why do you care how we feel? You made the decision without us.’ I’d always had a ‘Gilmore Girls’ relationship with my daughter. It’s been difficult to see her so unhappy and distant.”
Nodding, Mr. Inman said, “You couldn’t talk to her without her screaming at you.”
Emphasizing the point, Brittany extended her early evening out with friends to avoid the dining area interview. On the telephone the next day, she didn’t sound quite ready for rapprochement.
“I mean, I understand the financial situation, of course, but it was two weeks before graduation, so many things going on, and your parents decide to move you,” she said. “I had friends whose parents took their homes off the market just to ease their stress during senior year. Moving right before graduation is not what you want.”
They are all trying to move forward. William is back in the bedroom, although his sleepovers with friends are usually elsewhere. His brother has returned to college. Brittany has been enjoying her new community college classes and trying to find a day job that will ease her claustrophobia.
In the slow construction market, the family has been assured completion of their new home by November. The builder had not worked in almost a year and the various contractors had plenty of time on their hands as well.
“They all came way down on their prices because they needed the work,”
Mrs. Evans said. They are building their new home for $250,000, allowing them to clear $55,000 in the move.
Because the rental is less expensive than their old home, Mr. and Mrs. Evans have been able to save money for the last few months. And when they move to their new home, they are anticipating significant utilities savings.
“It’ll be about 1,350 square feet with a seasonal room that hopefully we’ll be able to winterize at some point,” Mr. Evans said.
Like their children, they were not happy about leaving so much behind, and each had a favorite amenity that they could not part with. For Mr. Evans, it was the pool table, now in the basement of the rental. For Mrs. Evans, it was the piano, now wedged into their living room.
Everything else had to be stored, or surrendered.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/ga...r=1&ref=garden
She wanted new clothes for every day. :eek:
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