Looking Ahead

When we first came to Pt. Roberts, a long time ago, and were looking at houses to buy, we made on offer on a tiny little house down on Maple St. in the South Beach area. It had a downstairs and a loft that was high enough to have a bit of an ocean view. It was one of those houses that you don’t often find when you are out looking: houses that are perfect as they are, that own themselves, that don’t need you to take them in hand in order for the house to continue to lead a respectable house life. Unfortunately, somebody else saw that quality just a few hours earlier, so they bought it and we didn’t.

But I still vaguely think of it as one of my former houses, so I keep an eye on what is happening to it. Today, I was walking down that way and found that my house was fine, but that the neighborhood was going to the mcmansions. Next door, someone has scooped up four or five adjoining lots, cleared them all of whatever was on them, and are now building a house that fully occupies three lots. It must have 20 rooms. Maybe the new owners are planning to offer a home away from home for the L.A. lady with the octuplets. Maybe they are going to operate a hotel (although I’m afraid the zoning is all wrong), or maybe they are just some more of that long line of folks who retire to giant houses. I always wonder whether they spent their previous 60 years feeling dreadfully crowded and only now can spread out. Whatever…

But because I am always thinking at some level about abandoned houses, I wondered if these houses will end up in that way? If, as seems quite possible at this moment, the U.S. is going to undergo a serious and long-term readjustment in its way of life, what will become of such houses? Who will want them twenty or thirty years from now when families are even smaller and when Pt. Roberts will probably still be trying to figure out a route to economic development?

When you go for the big house after retirement, you are somewhat unlikely to have a host of children and grandchildren who have fabulous memories of going to the grandparents’ for wonderful summer vacation and thus are anxious to keep the fabulous house of their summer memories in the family. When the inevitable comes, the house will get sold, but who will want so much house?

I think that the larger abandoned houses we already have have something of that kind of history. Too big, in the wrong place, family members no longer nearby even to use it let alone create grand memories, and no one anxious to buy it. So the now-untenanted house lingers around in some kind of limbo, and then it just begins to house itself and there aren’t many memories left of it. The next thing you know, it’s become an abandoned house.

So, now I’m looking at these oversized houses with different eyes. They have a future that may be of considerable interest to me. On the down side, of course, their future and mine probably won’t have much of an overlap.