A Case for Living in a Condo and Loving It

Try turning the lunchroom conversation to condominiums.

Your co-workers will probably describe condos as the mini-malls of housing: cheaply built, mind-numbingly repetitive structures forced upon unlucky communities.

Folks who live in condos are socially respectable only if they hate living there and swear they’re devoting their lives to “trading up” to a single-family house.

Anyone who lives in a condo and actually likes it is perceived as a Joe Isuzu sort of character who fears yard work would cost him time better spent cruising singles bars.

About now, Biff, that bright young junior bookkeeper the boss likes so much, will chime in that he and the missus just bought a brand-new house in Tiffany Estates or Monte Carlo Villas or some such thing, which means it’s sitting in the desert behind a mountain range.

A Traditional Choice

Sure the commute to downtown is long, Biff admits. But getting up at 4:30 a.m. can be rather pleasant, especially since his wife, Buffy, and a lot of their neighbors are up getting ready to go to their jobs too.

Buffy and Biff made a traditional, and many would say wise, choice. On their combined annual salary of, say, $50,000, they probably felt they had few housing options.

Houses in their price range in established suburban areas like the San Fernando Valley were probably “fixers” or otherwise distressed properties and were likely to be in unappealing neighborhoods. By comparison, that new, 1,500-square foot home in the desert looked good.

Maria and Mike--my wife and I--spent the first half of 1988 looking for a home and, coincidentally, have about the same income as Biff and Buffy. Like them, we’re a 30-ish couple planning a small family.

We Bought a Neighborhood

In fact, we bought at about the same time and spent the same amount of money for a home. But we’re different from Biff and Buffy in one respect: We live in a condo. And we like it. And we plan to stay.

Biff and Buffy bought a house. We bought a neighborhood. Biff and Buffy were priced out of the neighborhoods their parents live in. We live in the neighborhood my parents were priced out of. We live in Los Feliz.

Our third-floor, 1,450-square foot condo has two bedrooms and a loft, a large balcony, a 19-foot living room ceiling and lovely views of the Silver Lake hills and the Griffith Park Observatory.

Our 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage payment, $938 a month, is no problem. I work full time but, being a teacher, have the summer off. I feel no need to scramble for summer employment. My wife works part time and goes to graduate school.

During the school year, I commute to work by bicycle, which I’ve estimated saves me about $3,000 a year in car-related costs.

Park as Back Yard

The neighborhood has become our front yard. Increasingly, we seem to be walking to the supermarket, the florist or the drugstore. Sometimes after dinner we just stroll around the neighborhood with no particular destination, admiring the architecture and the hills.

Griffith Park has become our 4,000-acre back yard. I hike there with the Sierra Club and cycle with the Los Angeles Wheelmen. Including visits to the observatory, the L.A. Zoo and the other facilities, I set foot in Griffith Park about 300 days a year.

Our “yard work” is also neighborhood-based. We belong to the Los Feliz Improvement Assn., the local homeowner group, and the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Assn. Maria is vice president of our building’s board of directors. And I recently completed an earthquake preparedness course with about 35 of our neighbors. We hope to keep the neighborhood functioning in the uncertain days after “The Big One.”

If Maria and I had wanted to, we could have bought on the Westside, Pasadena, anywhere in the Valley. We were free to live almost anywhere we wanted to--except for perhaps on the beach at Malibu or in deepest Beverly Hills--simply because we agreed to live in a condo.

Condo living provides moderate-income people in Southern California a freedom they haven’t had in years, maybe decades: living where you want to rather than where you can afford.

Little House Below

I’ll give you an idea how impossible housing prices are for regular folks in my neighborhood.

About 30 feet below our living room window sits a little stucco box of a house. It was built in the ‘20s, has three bedrooms, one bath and about 1,500 square feet. It has no yard to speak of: a tiny fringe of grass in the front (maybe enough to pitch a small tent on) and a back yard that consists of a concrete driveway and a shed. Inside, the rooms are little and dark. However, the house has been nicely reconditioned. The asking price: $349,000.

All right, so it won’t sell for the asking price, but I think it will go for at least $300,000. Let’s say Maria and I were playing by the traditional rules and viewed this as a starter house (You wouldn’t want to spend your life in that cracker box, believe me.)

Let’s say that we came up with 10% down and after closing costs had a mortgage of $275,000 for 30 years at a fixed 10.5%. If we somehow qualified for such a loan (obviously an S&L; destined to be seized by the feds), the monthly payment would come to $2,515.54.

My life and Maria’s would be thrown into complete disarray. My teaching take-home pay is a little over $2,300--and I only get checks 10 months a year. I’d have to teach a heck of a lot of extra classes, plus summer school--or maybe get a new career (which I don’t want). My wife would have no hope of going to graduate school and instead would have to work full time and then some.

Working Years of Overtime

Ok, after five years or so, inflation would lighten our load, but meantime we’d be getting tired of a front lawn you can mow with scissors and a living room reminiscent of the Bat Cave and decide to trade up. Sure, the down payment would be no problem, but we would also be trading up to an even bigger mortgage. So back we’d go, both working more years of overtime (providing we could get it).

We’d rather have a life.

Biff would tell you about the modern 1,500-square-foot house that he bought in May, 1988 for $142,500. He’d tell you that his neighborhood is pleasant because it is new and clean and relatively uncrowded and will be a good place to raise kids. And if he needs to go 40 or 60 or 80 miles to work, well, hey, that’s what cars are for.

Now, if Biff and Buffy like desert/suburban living and work reasonably nearby, I think they’ve made a good choice. But if they’re making a two-hour commute into L.A., they’re working more overtime than Maria and I would be if we had bought the $300,000 house.

Think about it. Two hours each way five times a week is 20 hours--half a standard workweek. For a lot of the year, that means leaving before dawn and getting home after sundown. Or, for the first eight or so years of a child’s life, leaving before he or she is up and getting home after bedtime.

And let’s have a moment of silence to mull over what this is doing to our air quality.

Priced Out of Area

As for raising our kids, I’m sure there will be days when Maria and I will wish we had our own yard. But I also remember that when I got older and my parents, priced out of East Hollywood (not to mention Los Feliz), moved us out to a little tract house in the Valley, losing the neighborhood, and especially losing Griffith Park, was a far larger loss than the yard was a gain.

So just as Biff is destined to spend a major part of his life in traffic calling in accident reports to news radio on his car phone so that his kid can climb the plum tree in the back yard, I have my own neighborhood-based version of the dream.

My destiny, I guess, is to ride home from work on my bicycle dodging guys talking on car phones. I won’t have my own tree, but on warm summer nights Maria and I can take our kid up the hill to the observatory and look out over the seemingly infinite cityscape.

“See that long street right below us? That’s Normandie Avenue, where your dad grew up,” I’ll say. “That hill on the left is Silver Lake, where your great-grandmother lived. A little farther is Belmont High, where your grandfather was captain of the baseball team. And right below, just outside the park, is where we live.

“That’s our home.”

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