Dear Babies

Dear Babies,

Today we gave the realtor a big fat check to serve as earnest money on a new house. Your new house will have one fewer bedroom (2) than this current house, and no yard to speak of. This, by American standards, is a Very Uncommon Thing to do. In fact, some people might think we are outright crazy.

So, in order to better articulate why we are moving to such a house while also explaining to our family and friends that we really think we aren't crazy (mostly), your dad wrote a white paper. This is the way it goes:

Matt's White Paper

Whenever Microsoft does something that they thing is really brilliant, but everyone else thinks is less bright, they issue a “White Paper” to try to explain why they did what they did (as if they use a different color paper for everything else)

So consider this a white paper on why we are thinking of living in a house that’s built like a cruise ship.

Why Change?

Right now, we have the perfect setup for babies. A big, cooled screen porch that they can spill water all over. A nice cheap house with nice neighbors. And for everyone’s current age, we can’t do much better.

But they’re becoming more social, and our little corner of the city is becoming kind of small for the babies. Almost every day they want to go for a ride in the car – to the store, to a park with better playground equipment, more playmates, and less mosquitoes than our fenced backyard, to a music class, to feed the ducks. In our little corner of the neighborhood, most people are really happy to have just enough financial resources to have a little apartment or little house, and there’s not enough additional money flowing around to support amenities in the way of classes, nice parks, preschool, and even nicer grocery stores.

All of these things are back in town, and so looking forward, we see ourselves doing lots and lots and lots of driving. And with the odds of Joyce finding work outside of the central city pretty low, she’ll be driving into town to work, too.

So we figure, let’s move into town. Seems simple so far.

And off to School We Go

As in the rest of this country, segregation is alive and well in Houston, perhaps more so than it was before Martin Luther King, Jr. There are four neighborhood elementary schools in the central city that have good reputations, high test scores, few discipline problems, etc. Three of them, however, cheat. They draw their school boundaries so that they include only neighborhoods where deed restrictions allow only single family homes – no apartments, no townhomes, no condos. With the price of land in the city near $300,000 for a quarter acre, this means that the average house price for these schools is in the range of $550,000. The average house price in the entire city, not counting apartments, is well below $200,000.

The school that the C&D attend will go a long way towards shaping what they see is “normal”. If all of their friends get taken to school by the live-in nanny and picked up by mom in her Jaguar, then that will seem normal. But we’d like them to have a broader perspective on the world than what they see at the high-end section of the Galleria.

The fourth neighborhood school is in a more urban neighborhood, but it draws from a true cross-section of the city. Multi-million dollar homes sit a half mile away from subsidized housing projects. The school does well because of a high level of parent involvement, and it has programs (like art, music, PE) which most public elementary schools in Texas don’t have anymore.

In the same neighborhood is a public Montessori elementary school which is just getting started. Some parents like it, and some don’t – but because it is just starting it’ll be tough to understand its level of quality for a few years. It is a magnet school, and seems like you can transfer to it fairly easily regardless of where you live – but it’ll be nice to be close to school in any case. The city’s magnet school for gifted and talented kids is close by, too.

There are lots of different types of housing in that area, known locally as Montrose. Apartments, duplexes, townhomes, and single-family homes with yards sit literally right next to each other. There’s no zoning, which can be both a bad and a beautiful thing. The population is full of people who can probably be best described as liberal types – college students, young professionals, artists, musicians, and families. Our vegetable co-op is nearby, and you can walk to the city’s flagship Whole Foods. Montrose is as close as Houston gets to Berkeley or Laguna Beach, but with big oak trees on every street instead of an ocean.

Your housing options in Montrose are basically:

1) A house with a big yard, built in about 1920. Beautiful old houses, and within our price range with a bit of a stretch.

2) A townhouse built in the last 5-7 years (Houston’s economy has been booming since about 2000, and lots of townhomes are built). Pricey, but some are just within our price range. Granite countertops, 2500+ square feet, balconies.

3) A few (very few) townhomes built in the late 1970’s-early 1980’s, when Houston’s economy also boomed. These are smaller (1500 square feet or so), but have bigger porches and balconies (land was cheaper then). Very few homes in Houston were built from 1980-2000 because the economy was still recovering from the oil bust.

Kids = Yard!

We’ve tried to understand what life will be like in a few years, when we’ll both be working and kids will be in school.

If Mom stays home with the kids, a suburban yard can be a beautiful thing. The kids come home from school at 3:00, and then can just run around the backyard while Mom keeps half an eye on them and half an eye on dinner, or the legal briefs she brought home from work, or whatever. And then all summer, the kids have a safe, fenced, immediately accessible place to play. (This isn’t maybe a very realistic scenario, but it’s the one everyone imagines will happen in their imagined suburban utopias. What we see in our street instead, however, is that both kids and adults tend to think their fenced-in, buggy yards are boring and blasé. Everyone instead hangs out in the front yard or street, where they socialize and BBQ and have lots of room for throwing around a Nerf ball. We did the same, BB, before babies.)

But what if Mom is working, too? It’s next to impossible to find a job that doesn’t run from 8-5. So the kids are in an after-school program of some sort, where they can play on really nice playground equipment, or learn art and music, or whatever. And once everyone gets home at 5 or 5:30, there’s time to cook dinner, do whatever homework there is, wind down, and go to sleep. Not much time to use the yard. And if summer is spent in a summer program or camp or school, you find the same story – not much time at home to use the yard during the week.

On weekends? You can always walk to the park. There are two nice city parks within a 10-15 minute walk from the neighborhood we’re looking at, plus the elementary school within walking distance, and the middle school with a big field. There’s also open green space at Rice and the University of St. Thomas and the Menil Collection, all plenty big enough to kick a soccer ball around on. And if dad takes the time he would have spent mowing and edging and spends that walking to the park instead, it might be even more enjoyable.

Lots of kids grow up in the city without a yard, and lots of parents raise those kids without a yard, and they all seem to come out OK. We’re not adamantly against having one (although in all respects a small or no yard is ultimately more sustainable than everyone living on a ¼ acre of grass), but we just can’t see ourselves using it much, or paying a huge premium on a place to live just to have one. A yard has some investment value, but so do lots of other things, so that’s not really reason to have a yard, either. Some outside space is a useful thing –space to grow a few plants or play in a little swimming pool or whatever. We use that type of space in our screen porch all the time and can’t see giving it up. But the townhouse—we refer to it as The Ship around here—has that space in an 18’x18’ patio, and a breezy balcony off the kitchen, as well. If you throw a big party, the yard is useful for that day, on the three days of the year when everyone is willing to stand around outside (remember, this is Texas!). But otherwise, is it really that necessary?

Lastly, the very lack of yards, or the very small yards in this area, is precisely why it has so many walkable amenities—the place is dense. The Ship is roughly ½ mile to Whole Foods, ½ mile to Fiesta, ½ mile to Poe Elementary, ½ mile to University of St. Thomas, 1 mile to Wilson Elementary (the public Montessori school), 1 mile to Rice, and 2 miles to the ducks at Hermann Park. And let’s not forget all the co-op preschools, the pottery studios, Art Mix and even church. Why spend all our time behind a fence, when we have the best of the city before us?