The irony of any foreclosure is that it always happens after the most important things. After the strain of financial ruin, in the wake of wars with debt collectors and the judging glances of neighbors. At the end of the American dream.
Our houses hold more than our sofas and tables, kids and cats; they hold our identities. They are the architecture of who we are.
Or, in too many cases, who we were. So many people — 937,840 American property owners — lost or were losing those properties to foreclosure in the third quarter of 2009. That’s a 22 percent jump from the same period in 2008, according to the company RealtyTrac. In Colorado, 16,265 people went through the painful process.
It’s easy to see this crisis as a string of sad stories that all sound the same, to blame borrowers for overstepping or banks for overlending. But each time a home is lost — burned in a fire, drowned in a flood or, yes, taken by a bank — it’s a tragedy with lasting after-effects.
We are attached to these buildings beyond a basic need for shelter. We could get that from an apartment — and not have to shovel the snow. When we own a house and take responsibility for its care, we connect to architecture in a way that is profound. When we buy or renovate a house, we begin to see it as we see human beings. Physically, we see its skeleton and circulation systems, its health and weakness. Spiritually, we see its potential, its limitations and quirks.
We are addicted to our houses, seeking, over time, bigger, smarter, pricier homes. These days the average size of a new house is 2,480 square feet, according to the National Association of Home Builders, up from 1,400 square feet in 1970.
At the same time, the average size of a household is shrinking, down to an all-time low of 2.56 people, the U.S. Census Bureau reports.
Take a small mathematical leap, and the numbers are astonishing. Do people moving into new homes really get 900-plus square feet of individual space?
That’s equal to half the size of an Olympic volleyball court that can hold six players.
Our houses give us wealth and power. They protect us from everything the planet throws our way. Shut the doors, and winter is vanquished. Put in a screen, and mosquitoes are disarmed. Our houses put us above the law. We can kill a home intruder and joke that it makes our day.
Who are we? Our houses have the answer. Are you rich or poor, tech-savvy or traditional? Are you cozy in your bungalow or cool in your midcentury modern? Are you one with nature in your log cabin? Do you reach for the sky in your penthouse?
“Why are we vulnerable, so inconveniently vulnerable, to what the spaces we inhabit are saying?” writer Alain de Botton asks in his recent tome, “The Architecture of Happiness.”
He knows the answer.
We judge ourselves, and others, based on our houses. They define our present and shape our stories for eternity. Consider Elvis and his Memphis spread. Betsy Ross and her tiny, Philadelphia box. William Randolph Hearst and his San Simeon castle, Molly Brown and her meticulous new-money mansion in Denver.
That seems fair. With computers humming and washing machines churning, we spend more and more of our time in our homes — 8.6 hours a day sleeping; 1.7 hours cooking, cleaning and mowing lawns, according to government studies. We spend 2.7 hours watching TV, nearly all of it at home. Add to that the hours we spend combing our hair and putting on makeup, or sitting around the kitchen table.
Our houses give our lives rhythm like the sun. They set our pace: 24 steps from the bed to the coffee maker, 10 stairs to the laundry room in the basement, eight steps to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
Monthly we pay our mortgages, once a year we clean out the gutters. There is the tick of marks on the wall that measure our children’s growth, the tock of grandfather clocks, Sunday evening dinners and Chinese New Year parties.
When the house goes, the drumbeat stops. We lose our architecture, we lose ourselves.
A string of 937,840 sad stories lost.
Ray Rinaldi: 303-954-1540 or rrinaldi@denverpost.com
