Why I’ll take a moldy California condo over a stately French castle

My husband and I recently put in a low-ball offer, just shy of $700,000 on the three-bedroom San Diego fixer-upper we’re currently renting. It has no garage, no air conditioning, no GFCI outlets, drywall rot, drainage problems and such a significant need for updates that my relatives outside California think we’ve lost our minds.

Appalled that a six-figure income doesn’t always translate into homeownership in California, my extended family is staging a housing intervention.

One cousin sent me a listing for a five-bedroom house with an adjacent full-size barn in the Midwest. We could complete any necessary repairs and buy it outright with just the money we’ve saved for our down payment!

Meanwhile, my brother never fails to point out the beautiful homes, with five times the square footage as ours, that we could purchase in their fancy Dallas suburb.

Another cousin, living in France, started sending me videos comparing literal castles and chateaus in Europe to the similar prices of run-down North American properties. After watching one with me, she laughed. “This sounds like your house.”

What disturbs me most isn’t that my family’s intervention is justified.

What’s crazy is that I still want the San Diego condo.

After all, we only have a little mold. And even better, our lead paint has been successfully hidden under decades of repaints!

Then I shake myself, wondering when I drank the California Kool-Aid. How did those of us who live here recalibrate our definition of “normal” so thoroughly?

I grew up in coastal California, but it wasn’t until I moved back as an adult that I became acutely aware of the housing crisis. At first, my husband and I spent years waiting for the seemingly inevitable housing crash. Everyone told us that these prices couldn’t last. We kept our down payment liquid and waited.

Now, more than a decade later, our financial adviser is shaking his head, begging us to move our money into higher-return investments. But now that our landlord is finally selling and our family of six has to move otherwise, we’re finally attempting to buy into the market we thought would eventually become less ridiculous.

I’m not the only one doing bizarre housing calculations. Most other parents I know don’t blink at spending over $5,000 a month to house their family.

Then there are my friends’ adult children who can’t afford to fly the coop. Many of my neighbors live in homes where multiple generations squish into too-small spaces. At least I feel compensated by the village green surrounded by palm trees, where my kids can play.

California housing isn’t simply an economic or political issue. It is an embodied reality shaping how we work, raise children, date, retire and share space.

We organize our lives around expensive housing so thoroughly that it has become a cultural norm. Californians have officially graduated to be like New Yorkers, Londoners and Parisians, who gripe about living in spaces the size of walk-in closets, but are content to do so to keep the lifestyle they want.

Meanwhile, I ask myself why I’m not making an offer on one of the potentially wonderful homes my family sent me. My brain immediately supplies answers: In Europe, I’d face the challenge of being an immigrant. And stateside, everywhere else seems to have cold winters and humid summers. Would we survive?

But under those superficial layers, there are more serious reasons.

Where would my husband get a job? What types of community are even available to people who live in European castles? Who would my kids make friends with and go to school with? Could we even belong somewhere else?

Those willing to transplant outside California must be brave. For even when we know what our money could buy elsewhere, most of us stay. Uprooting the homes — jobs, children, communities and lifestyles — we’ve built in California carries its own cost.

Most Californians I know can’t imagine leaving the state. When I ask them why they won’t, they’ll feed me a line, skirting around the more visceral sensation of being rooted in a place they feel they belong. No wonder we play it off like it’s only “the sunshine” keeping us glued to these expensive shores. 

Meanwhile, we sit together at happy hour complaining about the cost of our crappy housing. Maybe this is simply what it means to be Californian.

Elisa Johnston is an author, coach and social impact consultant at AverageAdvocate.com while also writing about paradigms, trauma recovery, and autoimmune disease on her Substack, Authentically Elisa.