the view

When Jeremy and I met, we had one thing in mind for our future together. Okay, actually we had about a billion things in mind. But one thing stood out the most, and seems to have staying power. I'm trying not to use that word anymore, but as of yet, I don't have a better one to describe this dream of building a little house on a little bit of land, raising our children alongside heirloom vegetables and fruit trees and goats and chickens. Re-skilling might work.

This has been my dream since I was 16 years old. When we stay up at night talking about the future, this is what we discuss. For most of the past eight years we've never had any definite plans in this direction, because we lived in Utah. When we moved to Mendocino County, we set about putting our ducks in a row to make this happen. We met with a mortgage adviser and followed her directions for erasing our debt and establishing credit. We bought a car, as she directed, and kept our rent high, and never missed a payment. We checked out houses in the area, and land for sale. We thought about small-scale meat production, studied sustainable growing methods, took in some chickens and raised a garden -- all in expectation that, some day soon, we'd buy a house and learn to provide for ourselves.

Then Jeremy nearly lost his job, and I realized that it wasn't such a great idea to be self-employed, so we decided that I'd go back to school, and the entire structure of our plans shifted. At the same time, I started doing some serious research, which has precipitated some thinking-outside-the-box.

First of all, I learned that it's extremely difficult to be approved for a mortgage on raw land. There is essentially no collateral, so banks don't like to take the risk. Instead, you can either buy the land outright, or do a private deal with the owner wherein you pay at least 50% up-front. This knowledge is a bit defeating. Land in this area isn't as expensive as I expected, but it certainly is not $5000 an acre like it is in places where nobody wants to live. To buy land outright we'd have to save money for years and years, and then we'd have to try to get a construction loan, which apparently is quite difficult if you aren't planning to build at least 2500 square feet (and we definitely are not).

With this situation we could be looking at close to a decade before we're in our own home. We've considered biding our time for the next four years, until I graduate and start working, and then saving all of my income until we have enough to buy some land outright, and then building a small house... but that's still a very long time.

On to Plan B: buying an existing house on land. That's all kinds of expensive -- the average home in this area runs about $225,000. Of course, that's spread out over 30 years, during which time we may actually pay more in interest than the cost of the house, and we might see the value flip at the whims of the market, and there are endless property taxes and regulations and fees and repairs, and if we have a major financial collapse due to illness or job loss, we could lose it altogether. It's hard for me to understand why anyone should aspire to this, but this is the generally-expected method of becoming a homeowner.

There are thousands of homes for sale in this area, many of them on at least an acre, and of course it's a buyer's market, so I'm not sure why I'm so hesitant to even consider this. Other than everything I said above about mortgages and taxes and the market and the risk, I mean. Maybe because the houses in our price range would need a lot of work, and I don't want to carry that albatross for the rest of my life? Maybe because I want a small house, the chance to live lightly and sustainably, and those houses are few and far between?

Or maybe it's just that I don't want to be a slave to the bank for all of my days. I can't expect that our jobs and income will always be secure, that Social Security will exist when we're 65, that investments are wise. I don't want to owe anything to anyone, and live at tremendous risk. But more than that, I want true freedom, of the sort that is essentially unknown now. 

"Where a man is compelled to labor at the will of another, and to give him the greater portion of the product of his labor, there Slavery exists; and it is immaterial by what sort of compulsion the laborer is subdued... What difference does it make, if you can starve him, or alarm him for the subsistence of himself or his family? And is it not under this compulsion that the 'free' man labors?"

So we started looking into alternatives, like land-sharing, or house-sharing, or joining an eco-village, or arranging private leasing options with land-owners. In the meantime, we thought it might be smart to downsize in a serious way.

When I decided to go back to school, I carried a lot of guilt because I knew I wouldn't be able to work in the meantime. Jeremy continues to carry the burden of our finances entirely on his own, which has never been our intention. Anyone living on a teacher's salary knows how lean it can be, and still he is equally involved in the raising of our children and the upkeep of our home -- I'm the one who isn't stretching.

So I thought back to our friend Patrice, who lives on 40 gorgeous acres in Hopland, about 15 minutes away. Her son is in Jeremy's class, which is how we got to know her. Several times she's offered us a caretaking position on her farm, a chance to live at her place rent-free in exchange for handling the animals and doing general upkeep on the land. We've never taken her up on it -- primarily because we were obeying our mortgage adviser's admonition that we needed to keep our rent high. But now, it's time to move on from the concept that spending as much money as you make creates a good citizen, a reliable consumer, a trustworthy debtor... that one should even aspire to being a debtor at all.

Our accommodations would be very, shall we say, rugged. The studio, cut out of the barn upstairs, is a sweet little place, but it has no running water, no bathroom, and no kitchen! The couple who are living there now share the bathroom and laundry facilities in the Big House and use a composting bucket in the studio. Like I said... rugged.

Of primary concern is that the land runs on well water, which occasionally runs dry, especially in the summer. But the land is also badly in need of some rainwater catchment systems. I think I could handle a composting toilet, and brushing our teeth in a cup, in lieu of a bathroom -- the kids are too young to care about such things. We could store water in the studio. We went years without a washer and dryer -- even with two kids in cloth diapers -- so that won't be an issue. The studio does have electricity, so the couple living there now have hooked up some cooking implements, and there will be a woodstove installed soon.

It wouldn't be pretty, but I feel like I could put up with a lot to have no rent. Including utilities, we'd be saving at least $1200 a month. That's half of our current income. And we'd be learning the most valuable skills imaginable. I'll be doing most of the work, and this is about what I'd make if I had a regular job -- but I'd be producing for someone else, essentially unskilled labor that would take me away from my family.

If this works out, we could be in a very nice place.

Of course, it won't work out exactly like this! I can think of a hundred different existing and potential hitches just off the top of my head.

But I think it's worth a try.

This is our dream, after all: raising our children in a breathtakingly gorgeous place, doing work that nourishes our family and our community, raising animals, growing food, working cooperatively with other people in a shared vision, developing practical skills that are all but lost, providing for our own needs -- living small, but beautifully. How can we not make the effort?

By the way... this? is the view.