Owning a Home, Not Just a House

What follows are some thoughts on ownership in general, and home ownership in particular. But first, I want to talk about collecting comics, which, of course, is also ownership. Stick with me. It’s all connected.

I was born in 1980 and introduced to comic books by my uncle in 1986. I read his collection when he was not at home and started my own around that time. I was mostly a Marvel reader and a big fan of the various X-Men titles. Those are the titles I started collecting again about three years ago.

Some of them are really inexpensive. For example, I managed to buy the entire first run of X-Factor for about $200. But The Uncanny X-Men is an extremely popular title, especially because of the forthcoming movie. My goal has been to collect issues 93 through 300, since those were the ones I read as a kid. Some of those comics have gotten insanely expensive. There are more than a couple of issues that would cost what I paid for the entire collection of X-Factor.

So I’ve been looking for what you call raw books. These are books that have not been graded. Grading is where you assess the condition of a comic book on a 10-point scale and then put it in what’s called a slab, basically a sealed plastic container designed so you can view the front and back covers while protecting the condition of the comic book. Graded comics are considerably more expensive than so-called raw comics.

Well, I’m pretty devoted to this quest. I don’t want to overspend money on it. But there’s another problem I have with graded comics in a slab, and that’s the one that relates to this entire conversation about ownership.

The purpose of comic books is to provide a visual story a reader can enjoy. If you slab them up, you can’t read them. And I want to read them.

Now, of course, you could buy two copies: one that’s slabbed and one that’s not. But that’s expensive, and still, the slabbed copy becomes something else. People will say it’s an investment. It’s something you can hand down to your kids. True, but not as a comic book. They won’t read it. They won’t get to know the characters and enjoy it anywhere near the way you enjoyed it as a kid, which is why it matters to you.

For me, I moved from town to town year after year when I was small. Back then, comic books were sold in drugstores and grocery stores, and my mom would let me go to the magazine section and sit there and read comics while she shopped, and often she would buy me one. Then I’d take those comics home, read them, trace the pictures, and read them again. They were kind of like friends. They were a comfort, and that’s why I like them.

I’m buying them to read them again in their original format, and I’m trying to share that love with my kids. But it’ll never be for them what it was for me, because we don’t move around a lot, comics aren’t sold in grocery stores anymore, and the circumstances are very different. But they certainly wouldn’t appreciate them for what they are if they were just slabbed up, like Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back.

So I do want to hand these down to my kids, but not necessarily so they can sell them and get the cash. I want them to enjoy something their father enjoyed. If they sell them, that’s their decision. But I’m not presenting them merely as something you can cash in. Their value isn’t primarily monetary, not to me.

This brings me to home ownership.

This is a subject I care about deeply because I have children, and I want them to own a home. Moreover, I am a pastor, and I care about the young families in my church, especially their ability to own a home.

The housing market has been insane for many years, and based on what I’m seeing, it will undergo an incredible correction sometime late next year. There are many factors, but a big one is that the older generation is aging out of their homes. Many of these homes have exponentially increased in value, but there aren’t enough buyers who can afford them.

As I read on this topic, I notice that people think of houses primarily as financial investments: something they buy that increases in dollar value, which they can then sell for more dollars and perhaps upgrade to a house that is better in some way.

Now, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with buying and selling your house for a profit. What I do think is that a house is, at its core, more than a financial investment. It is your home.

It is the place where you share meals together, where kids learn to walk, and, in some cases, where they were even born. It is a place where memories are created, a place of safety and warmth. The doorframes have little lines on them reminding you how tall you were when you were two, five, and thirteen. It’s a home.

It is something that can be passed down from one generation to the next. When a family member gives another family member the childhood home, it’s much more than a financial gift. It’s a little baton of history. It’s the setting of their family’s story. It’s a store of wealth that, yes, has financial value, but that’s only part of it.

I don’t like how we treat comic books and homes first and foremost as financial investments that allow us to get more USD at some point in the future. It seems to me that we are allowing the worldly materialism of our day to rob us of enjoying things for what those things actually are.

I live in a house that’s just under 2,800 square feet on three acres of land, with a large barn and garage. For a family of ten, we’re packed in pretty tight. We have five small bedrooms. But Hudson moved out in January. He doesn’t live there anymore. And while we’re not rushing anyone out the door, our smallish home is going to get more spacious every couple of years going into the future. Soon, except when the grandkids come over, we’ll have more room than we know what to do with.

I don’t want to upgrade to a bigger house. I don’t want to lose the memories. My son Pascal is buried on this property. My son Foxe was born in this house. This is our home, and I want it to stay in the family. I want it to be part of our roots.

The only childhood home I have is my grandmother’s farm, which was sold to a non-family member in 1997. It killed me. I actually cried. All the other places I lived in were rentals, usually for only a year. And the apartment I lived in the longest in Bloomington was such a dump that it was knocked down and replaced when they built a larger bridge over Tanners Creek.

I’ve been unable, to a certain degree, to show my children where I grew up. Yes, the cities, but not so much the homes. I love that my wife’s childhood home is being kept in the family and that my children have stayed the night there with their grandmother.

I am very interested in accumulating wealth for my family, but of a robust sort: a wealth of traditions, a wealth of skills, a wealth of memories, the wealth of a place where you belong.

Stories are written to be read, and houses are built to become homes. And when possible, some houses become homes for generations. In those situations, ownership isn’t just the possession of a financial asset, but a much more robust sort of wealth.

Painting: Sofiya Bryuhovich