TO OUR READERS

THE BIG PICTURE ON HOUSING

I BOUGHT MY FIRST house in late 2005, nearly at the height of a real estate bubble. Three years later, that bubble popped under the weight of subprime mortgages and took the economy with it. The value of my home plunged. So I installed a high-efficiency gas boiler, finished the basement, upgraded appliances and landscaped. But when I sold my house in late 2019, it still didn’t command as much as I had paid for it. Flash forward two years into an overheated market, and a Zillow check shows its value skyrocketing.

Chalk it up to bad timing. I don’t think I made huge mistakes (other than the effort I expended in renting it out for a period after my husband and I bought our house in Silver Spring). Over all my years in that house, I appreciated having a cozy Baltimore row home that provided shelter and a place to entertain.

Everyone has real estate stories. How could we not? A home is a huge investment, the physical center of our world and the place where the business of life happens. Acquiring or selling a home is a life milestone.

In Bethesda Magazine’s Home Issue, we present some of those real estate stories: Rachel Pomerance Berl examines how this pandemic-driven market has squeezed buyers, particularly millennials, in “How We Got This House”; Carolyn Weber chronicles the trend of luxury apartments as an option for those same millennials and for empty nesters as well in “High Life”; and we tell the story of the market in numbers and tally up the sales of agents who got the deals done.

But we have more stories to tell. “How We Got This House” contains a telling quote from McEnearney Associates’ Joan Caton Cromwell related to clients Sam Rosner and Monica Ajinkya, both young doctors: “I take no pleasure in saying that $700,000 is entry level” for buying a single-family home in this area, she says, before noting the price point meant the couple had to make trade-offs. They waived key contingencies, leaving them few options once the bid was accepted.

For the record, the median sale price across all housing types in Montgomery County in December 2021 was about $525,000.

But let us pause to consider a world where, at least according to one industry observer, a family has to have $700,000 in cash and financing just to have access to the single-family home market, and even then their hands are tied behind their backs.

In this case, the story turned out fine: The couple and their Bernedoodle, Lola, were able to settle into a nice colonial in Silver Spring.

But does this kind of market have anything to offer the many others who play important roles in our community, such as teachers, grocery clerks, police officers, house cleaners, firefighters, utility workers, nurses and delivery drivers? Montgomery County residents take pride in how enlightened we are, yet home prices here raise important social justice questions about who gets to live where.

There are also practical conversations to be had about economic impact and talent pools. The great teacher at your child’s school won’t be content to live forever in an apartment with three roommates, and when that teacher wants to buy a house, she’ll buy where she can afford, perhaps out of Montgomery County altogether. It’s not a leap in logic to see her tire of commuting and leave her job for one closer to the home she can afford.

As Bethesda Magazine contributing editor Gene Meyer has reported previously in these pages, the county historically has had a strong east-west divide that furthered racial segregation and continues to divide populations to this day.

I don’t think it’s provocative to say Montgomery County needs to house people of diverse incomes, races and ethnicities. I’m not going to litigate Thrive Montgomery 2050 and NIMBY/YIMBY in this space. And there’s no going back to 2005, when I got that starter home for $168,000.

But the county is facing a need to house tens of thousands of people, affordably. Expect to see more coverage of this topic from Bethesda Magazine, both on BethesdaMagazine.com and in this print edition.

There’s no time like the present to grapple with how to make the county welcoming, livable and accessible for all members of an ethical and productive society.

ANNE TALLENT Executive Editor