photograph by anna traverse fogle
I’ve been fortunate recently to spend time traveling. One of travel’s many gifts — for me, anyway — is coming home, and not just for the creature comforts (although I am very fond of our espresso machine and mattress) or the actual creatures (although I do miss the dog and cats terribly whenever we’re away). I also find that travel invites me to experience and appreciate home more vividly, more intentionally. Not to bury the lede: I love my home, but I can only afford my home because it’s in Memphis.
I live with my family in Central Gardens, in a home constructed around 1905. We bought the house in 2019, when it was 114 years old. In those years, our plot of land has been home to lawyers (three, including my spouse), a reporter, a paper salesman, a cotton salesman, a nurse, a dressmaker, a painter, a driver, and more. It’s a four-square, meaning there are four bedrooms, all upstairs; the downstairs was reconfigured sometime in the mid-twentieth century into an open floor plan, with clean lines and clear views from front to back. The price tag worked for us only because the place wasn’t the gleaming showpiece so many buyers nowadays desire; instead, you might say that it had “such great potential,” as if the house were a bright but listless teenager.
We looked at a lot of houses (a lot of houses) before we decided on this one. It wasn’t the loveliest home we toured, although it might be today. We considered options in several other neighborhoods, where almost every property has been renovated within an inch of its life. The kitchens all looked exactly the same, and we sensed that these houses didn’t have much more appreciation in them, beyond the general fluctuations of the market. They were as good as they were going to get. This one, though … well, it had potential.
And then — as you might remember if you’ve been reading this column for a while — the house caught on fire not three months after we closed. The fire was scary, and sad (so many lost books!), and inconvenient, but we all survived, pets included. And the house? Well, against all odds, it thrived. While we were displaced for several months, it was put back together in better condition than before. It’s safer now, and more beautiful too. We call it The Phoenix, for its journey out of ash and flame.
In most other cities, though, we never could have afforded a house like ours in the first place. When I’m out of town, whether out of fantasy or sheer curiosity, I often find myself opening one of the various real-estate apps to check out the local offerings. Only to realize promptly that I have it pretty good, and not just because I happen to like my home and my hometown. No, I also have it good in that if I wanted to roughly duplicate my current home in another town, my husband and I would both need to double or maybe triple our current salaries. And yet, when we see jobs in other cities posted to various professional networks, they usually clock in within the salary ranges we currently earn. So, unless we become independently wealthy overnight (unlikely!) or decide to downsize radically, we’ll be here, in this complicated old house of ours, for a while yet.
Even in Memphis, of course, housing prices are higher than they once were, and too many people are squeezed out of good options. I don’t want to suggest that it’s easy to afford a nice home in this city. But homeownership isn’t impossible to fathom, either. Other cities may be fun to dream about, but I’ve found carving out a life to be more viable in this one.
