If you’re like me, you have dreams, big dreams. A dishwasher. A surprise inheritance. A six-figure columnist salary. And of course, a house upstate. You have hundreds of homes saved on Zillow in far-flung towns due north with names like Whitekill and Cocksport. But columns don’t pay like they used to. Sex and the City this is not. So you set your price filter to $150,000 max. You’re looking for a fixer-upper. Turns out you’re actually going to need to make money off this property. So you expose a few beams, redo a bathroom, paint it charcoal (or is that trend over?), invite your journalist friends up for the weekend, get an impressionable couple to move in next door, open a coffee shop or a farm-to-table diner or a project space or a farm-to-coffee-table-shop-space-project. Suddenly Whitecock is the new Hudson. Easy, right?
Recently, my forays into Zillownership delusion have been supplemented and reinforced by Cheap Old Houses, a popular Instagram account, subscription newsletter, and now HGTV show. Host Elizabeth Finkelstein, an enthusiastic architectural historian and preservationist, is joined by her largely silent husband Ethan, as they travel to forgotten towns across America—usually the Rust Belt—in search of homes under $150k. Stray homes with big sad eyes in need of adoption. Homes with beautiful bespoke details, ornate fireplaces, farmhouse sinks, built at a time when money was flowing into these industrious hubs only to run dry. Fixed capital locked in a place where the liquid assets left. Zombie dwellings in poverty-stricken places, where Dollar General and Stewart’s Shops are the big retail tenants.
Last month, I arranged a visit to one of these stray homes on a drive up to Montreal to visit my long-distance fiancé—dreaming of a domestic paradise in between our two cities—where we could finally untether our “high-energy” rescue dog from our tired arms and spend some quality time together ripping up carpet, demolishing drop ceilings, and arguing over paint colors. Things that we’ve been taught add value to homes easily. All you need is vision and taste—something aging millennial creatives like myself believe we each possess individually and uniquely. Located about fifteen minutes off I-87 on the shores of Lake Champlain, the hamlet of Port Kent has seen better days. It’s bucolic but also kind of busted. Ferry service to Vermont has ceased for the foreseeable future. The town tennis court is cracked. There’s an unstaffed Amtrak station, a minor stop on the eleven-plus-hour slow-speed rail journey between New York and Montreal, largely for tourists with nowhere to be.
The house is priced at just under $100,000. The Zillow listing describes it as “one of the first houses in Port Kent” (“once owned by William J. Sussdorff,” in fact), with windows that are boarded up to protect the “original 12 over 8 blown glass.” It also notes that “the original spring that used to feed the entire town is on this property and is still in use”—but real estate agent John, who arrives by motorcycle, recommends that I hook it up to the town sewer.
A mobile home where the owner, an “ex-military guy,” lived as he made renovations to the home comes with the property. John gives me a tour since it’s a selling point in the listing—“can be used to live in while the house is being remodeled”—but I really wish he hadn’t. The bed wasn’t made. It smelled like a used coffin.
Speaking of death, I looked up William J. Sussdorff, expecting him to be a well-to-do landowner from the 1800s, but could only find a 2008 obituary of an unheralded man who “loved his dog Rusty” (which is actually really sweet).
Maybe city life is enough. Maybe the American dream is not having to clean the gutters or mow the lawn. Maybe it’s walking down Sixth Avenue with a fresh fade and a dirty tote.
On Instagram, the Cheap Old Houses caption reads, “I’m intrigued by this one,” suggesting a cautious optimism. but in person it’s clear that this is less a fixer-upper and more a tearer-downer. John kept mentioning demolition—“$99,900 is for the lot,” he said at one point. I asked him how the house got listed on the account. The mods reached out to him—it cost nothing. Upon first glance, this home seems like a place worth saving, but $99,900 is actually a lot to pay for a concept of a house. It’s still for sale in case the money pit in your bleeding heart is telling you otherwise.
Although I continue to frolic in fields of upstate fancy, momentarily freed from my abject urban existence (I don’t have laundry-in-unit), I’m pretty sure I would hate living in Port Kent or any of these small towns, isolated from friends, food, and general faggotry. And while it can feel like an easy escape, buying a shitty house where you don’t know anyone hours from the nearest airport is pretty extreme.
I’m not sure these cheap old houses need saving. What needs saving are the people who waste time dreaming about them, like myself, pioneering for a sense of purpose in zombified small-town America, still obsessed with the increasingly obsolete idea of homeownership. Attached to a dream we’ve been sold but can’t afford. An anti-sharing economy utopia of a single-family house, a fenced-in yard, a private car when all we can hope to own is a fictitious share in this market of dreams. Save a home on Zillow, like a cheap old house on Instagram—and in some small way we get to possess it. For just a moment, that dream is ours to imagine.
But what if we started affording people dreams in the places they live, so that they’re content in their rent-stabilized railroad apartments with a shower in the kitchen. Maybe city life is enough. Maybe the American dream is not having to clean the gutters or mow the lawn. Maybe it’s walking down Sixth Avenue with a fresh fade and a dirty tote. Maybe the American dream should be to live within walking distance of a small army’s worth of anonymous sexual partners.
The more talkative host of Cheap Old Houses likes to say that the people who buy cheap old houses are “a little bit crazy.” And they’re right—my Zillow brain is smoother than a resurfaced hardwood floor. But like most mental illnesses, this one’s societal. But there are cracks in the foundation of our mass delusion, and I’m starting to wonder whether a laundry room will deliver on its promise of a better life or whether it’s time to wash and fold.