Hanging around home, sweet home

JOSEPH N. BELL

We got three letters last week from local real estate agents, all

saying essentially the same thing.

The area in which we live is hot. They have a waiting list of

people who want to drop untold wealth on us just to live there. Our

house fits their clients’ needs admirably, and the agent will

cheerfully make the connection for us.

We’ll be rich, the buyers will be ecstatic, and the agents will

bask in the satisfaction of bringing all these good things to pass.

What followed then, in one of the letters, was a list of recent

sales with the amounts paid, mostly for houses on streets I can see

from my upstairs windows.

The prices were breathtaking -- almost grotesque.

I live in what was called Santa Ana Heights when we moved here 22

years ago. Somewhere along the line, it took up the tonier name of

Bayview Heights. And two years ago, we became part of Newport Beach.

The main reason most of my neighbors wanted to be annexed by Newport

Beach was their conviction it would increase our real estate values.

Man, were they right!

I had reasons to be dubious. Santa Ana Heights is a highly

eclectic neighborhood in a city of establishment wealth. Our homes

are a mix of the remnants of a middle-class housing development a

half-century ago, a sizeable number of creative remodels, and a

growing number of tear-downs that are being replaced by houses best

described as mini-mansions.

We still have horses walking our streets, mobile homes and trucks

parked in our driveways, open garage doors and aircraft from John

Wayne thundering over our patios at what seem 30-second intervals.

But we also have comfortable homes and spacious yards, and we

connect with our neighbors and feel a strong sense of community.

Except for the aircraft , those of us who live here embrace the

eccentricities, but I suspected they might turn away buyers at the

prices I saw listed on that real estate letter.

Man, was I wrong!

Real estate agents seem to be seeking properties to sell in my

neighborhood more aggressively than adding to their waiting list of

buyers.

That raises a critical question for those of us fortunate enough

to own such properties. Do we take the money and create a whole new

lifestyle somewhere else with considerably less financial stress? Or

do we see it as a pleasantly startling increase in our paper wealth

but certainly not a sufficient reason to upend a lifestyle that is

working?

During the same week I got those real estate letters, a number of

articles appeared in newspapers and magazines speculating on when and

how the real estate boom would self-destruct. A Los Angeles Times

headline summed it up this way: “It’s Not a Bubble Until It Bursts.”

Government figures show that while median home prices rose 15% in

the nation last year, they rose by 23% in Southern California, a

five-year trend that has certainly shown no sign of weakening in the

Newport-Mesa area.

But this hasn’t stopped the doom-sayers who have long been making

a cottage industry of predicting when and how this bubble will burst.

Typical was an article in Fortune magazine that three years ago

said: “U.S. housing prices are stretching the outer limits of what’s

reasonable and sustainable.... In a year or two, prices will fall

with a thud.”

So that’s what we’re looking at in Santa Ana Heights: housing

prices outrunning even the imagination, accompanied by multiple

predictions that they might cave in soon, played off against the

temptation to cash out at the peak and restructure our lives in a new

mode.

Against that backdrop, priorities have to come into sharp focus --

and in our case, it wasn’t much of a contest.

We have spent two decades caressing and fine tuning our home to

our needs and desires and dreams. It meets all of those expectations

and then some. Putting a price on this is like selling a child. There

may indeed come a day when changing needs dictate a new and different

lifestyle. But not now. So out of curiosity, we check out the houses

on the list of those that just sold and marvel at the prices -- and

then go home and settle in.

*

How many of you watching the 2005 Tony Awards from New York on

Sunday were aware that one of the big winners was a local boy?

Bill Irwin, who won as best actor in a play, grew up in Newport

Beach and graduated from Corona del Mar High School before taking off

in a career as notable for its creative diversity as its remarkable

humility.

His parents, Horace and Elizabeth Irwin, were close family

friends. Both of my daughters attended high school with Bill.

We enjoyed barbecues on the Irwins’ patio and shared vicariously

in Bill’s successes. He graduated in theater arts from Oberlin

College in Ohio, got his advanced degree at the Ringling Brothers and

Barnum and Bailey Clown College, and cultivated his mime skills on

the streets of San Francisco before he polished them in a small

circus that became his first performing family.

By that time, Bill’s parents had moved to Mendocino, and we were

invited to Bill’s wedding in their spacious back yard, a memorable

event that included the entire circus cast. Bill left the circus to

write and perform a play called “Regard of Flight” that helped win

him a MacArthur Genius Grant, a profile in the New Yorker magazine,

and that helped launch a career in the theater that has been

recognized with three previous Tony nominations -- as a writer, a

choreographer and an actor.

The last time we saw Bill perform in Los Angeles was in a delight

he wrote called “Fool Moon.” We attended with his parents, down from

Mendocino, and -- after the show -- Bill took our theatrical son,

Erik, for a backstage tour and talked shop with him. “Fool Moon” was

the capstone of Bill’s mime character of the gentle, downtrodden,

self-deprecating, well-meaning victim, which made Sunday’s Tony even

more remarkable because it was achieved in the role of an acerbic,

sarcastic college professor in a revival of Edward Albee’s “Who’s

Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

I talked to his parents after the awards ceremony.

Because the telecast was delayed on the West Coast, a lot of their

friends in the east knew the results and phoned congratulations,

reducing their suspense, but not their excitement.

Health problems will keep his father at home, but Bill’s mother

will be flying to New York next week to see the play. And back home

where it all started, we’ll be wondering where his creative juices

will take him next.