"Without an exit strategy"
On the home you actually have, rather than the one you want. (another look at the mysteries of It's a Wonderful Life)
How many hours a week do you spend on Zillow? Do you browse Zillow with purpose or just out of curiosity? Do you look up the values of your friends’ homes? Do you check in on a few specific streets or blocks, wondering if anything is coming available?
Some on Twitter (X? Xitter?) have joked that Zillow should embrace its role as social network and allow for all the messaging, commenting, liking/disliking, and general engagement that other websites center. It already has the traffic/critical mass of users, so why not? For all these folks who are already giving hours of their time every week to scrolling through the listings, why not harness that energy and generate more interest? Imagine the vibes that might emanate from a horde of disgruntled commenters under an egregiously overpriced listing. Maybe this is the kind of counterbalancing feedback our present real estate market madness needs.
It strikes me that the fascination over Zillow gives us a window into our present dispositions and attitudes towards place and belonging. Millennials and Gen-Z folks especially tend to be in frustrating real estate situations: stuck renting at prices higher than we want to pay so that we can live near jobs that don’t pay enough for us to buy the homes we actually want to live in. Browsing Zillow is a reflection of this: an example of a pervasive sense of “where will I end up next” as expressed in homeowning and renting anxiety.
Fundamentally, this is a core crisis of the stories of most of our lives: will we get to live in the places we really want to, or will we be stuck in situations we didn’t choose because of circumstances that are out of our control? Every story is determined by the obstacle the main character must overcome, and in so many of our own stories that obstacle is housing.
Like I wrote last week, It’s a Wonderful Life is characterized by the inexorable pull Bedford Falls has on George Bailey, frustrating and entrapping all of his desires. George wants to leave town, but he keeps getting stuck. No image sums up his frustration more than him staring at the model bridge:
It’s a poetic shot. The deep focus juxtaposing his family in the background with his own foregrounded struggle, his back turned, the model bridge of his dreams ironically leading right back towards his family. He promptly kicks the bridge over, frustrated at being taunted by his lifelong hopes of traveling and building while being mired in the latest Bedford Falls calamity. George is stuck, and he loses his temper.
Years ago, I did an internship with an amazing church in a college town. College towns are, of course, fundamentally transient. For that church, the consistent challenge was not finding people to join the community (and BOY does that church have some cool folks in its congregation), but finding people who would stay in the community. The pastor, Josh, told me their communal commitment was to “live without an exit strategy.” The rest of the congregants repeated this to me as well, throughout my time there. They consciously and consistently aimed to “live without an exit strategy.” For the vast majority of students and professors who came in and out of the church over the years, this was a hard teaching. But it made a difference: even though most folks still churned through and moved on to their next destination (academia is famously cruel that way), plenty have stuck around. The church’s commitment was not to forcing everyone to stay in one place (kinda culty, tbh), but to live as if they were never going to leave.
I’ve thought about that commitment ever since I first heard it. Many church teachings — peace rather than violence, humility rather than pride, kindness rather than cruelty — sound reasonable and wise even separate from the teachings of Christianity or any particular faith tradition. There’s good logic to wanting peace, humility, kindness, etc. But to stay in one place, to not have an exit strategy? That’s a tougher one.
Contemporary American life is premised on free movement from one place to another. That’s my whole job as a realtor, frankly: to help people make that transition seamlessly. Allegiance or commitment to a place is a recipe for career suicide or, more broadly, stubbornly limiting one’s horizons and opportunities. If you really want to grow, the thinking goes, you have to leave town and follow where your fate might lead you.
And yet, this church commended all of its members to “live without an exit strategy.”
The proof of such a teaching is, as with all teachings, in the fruit. For this church, the fruit was a locally engaged, politically bustling community. Even folks who knew very well that their tenure at the university had a hard end-date were invited into and shown the ropes of local commitment. Joining in and organizing protests, participating in political organizations, helping out in service efforts, getting to know neighbors, attending block parties… The long-term residents of the town and church would invite newcomers (including me) to jump in and get involved.
I guess evidence of the fruit of this teaching is also evident in George Bailey’s life. The conclusion of It’s a Wonderful Life is essentially arguing that patient participation and care for a community generates a wealth that money can’t touch. “To my big brother George, the richest man in town!” exclaims Harry Bailey.
Browsing Zillow has come to feel an awful lot like George staring at that model bridge: a dream perpetually deferred, a hope receding into the distance. But… we don’t really know what the future holds, do we?1 Maybe soon enough the market will thaw and you’ll be on your way towards your dream home on that block you check on Zillow every week. And of course, maybe not.
But in the meantime, why not live without an exit strategy? Isn’t that a habit that’s worth building? Wouldn’t that be a worthwhile posture to nurture? I said earlier that my whole job as a realtor is to help people move seamlessly, but that isn’t quite right: fundamentally, my work is to help people belong to a place. In a country fundamentally scarred by settle colonialism, maybe living without an exit strategy is the perfect antidote.
You might be heading home for the holidays or hosting folks in your own home. Whatever the case, why not take these last few weeks of the year as an opportunity to enjoy simply being where you are, without an exit strategy? What if you went into this holiday season with eyes open to how your friends and family might be showing you a better way to belong to a place?
If you end up moving and making it into that dream home you own with a low-interest-rate 30-year mortgage, then you’ll have practiced the kind of place-ful-ness and belonging that will certainly benefit your future neighborhood. If you end up staying where you are for a while longer, then… well, you’ll have loved it as if it’s your forever home. And in my opinion, that will bear fruit, even if you can’t perceive how. Hey, maybe your friends will show up on the worst night of your life and dump cash on your dining table while singing Christmas Carols.
And to be clear: the news is pretty grim. The Fed is gesturing towards interest rate reductions next year, but… that will be a double-edged sword, in my opinion. All the buyers who have been waiting on the sidelines this year will likely flood back into the market, creating a frenzy that could 1. spook the Fed again, precipitating a new rate rise and 2. make it hard for you to look competitive in such a crowded field of buyers. A real solution would be a massive increase in housing stock availability… but that takes a while, and we’re not close in that regard.