Housing Market Boom Is Back but the Thrill Is Gone
The Southern California housing market has finally, really, rebounded, just in time to fly back out of sync with the rest of the economy. Out-of-sync, it seems, is getting to be the official state rhythm for that sector. Still, the past month or so has been almost nostalgic--the multiple offers, the “Another One Sold!” signs, the jumbo moving trucks parked ramp-down at the ends of driveways.
Almost nostalgic, but not entirely. Something has been missing, and anyone who has been here awhile can feel its loss. It’s in the ease of dinner party conversation, in the uncanny niceness of rival buyers at open houses. Last month may have posted some of the whopping-est prices and home-sales figures for L.A. and Orange Counties in more than a decade, but if this is a boom, it sure seems a bland one. Land--something that, 15 years ago, seemed to all but define the average Southern Californian--seems to have no mojo this time around.
To illustrate, let me share a personal experience. The year was 1989. For more than three decades, I had lived happily as a renter. Then one lunch hour, my best friend stood up at her desk and announced, cryptically, that she had to go out. Her face was excited, and a little furtive, and her eyes had a look I’d noticed only once before, when a perfect Ann Taylor cocktail dress suddenly materialized, half-price, in her size. When she returned, she announced that she and her husband had made an offer on a Pasadena cottage priced at about five times my salary. She seemed, to my then-thirtysomething eyes, to evolve instantly into a “grown-up.” A “grown-up” whose new house was appreciating at a rate of something like 50% every six months.
She was getting rich--rich, I tell you!--just standing there, talking about property values. “I’m telling you, you’ve got to get into this market now, before it’s too late,” she advised. Suddenly, there seemed two kinds of people in the world: “grown-ups” who were “in the market” and abject losers. Suddenly I craved a mortgage more than I’d ever craved anything in my life.
*
That was how it was then, in that real estate rebound. It was all about big easy money, yes, but it was emotional, too. The drive to be “in the market” was so basic, so demographic, it seemed almost developmental. To be, ahem, Pre-Propertied was to risk watching your whole generation turn a corner without you, to stand by as stampedes of baby boomers got theirs while you--the late bloomer--failed, pathetically, to get yours.
And then, overnight, it seemed, the stampede was over. The Cold War ended and defense layoffs began. The local economy tanked and no one wanted to hear about the developmental greed-arc of baby boomers. No one wanted to hear the phrase “baby boomers.” All that cocktail chat, about who had equity, and who was refinancing, and who didn’t know whether to plant dope in the flower bed or yell, “Honey, I’m ho-ooome” like Ozzie Nelson--you just didn’t hear it. All that steely eye contact at open houses among yuppies--remember yuppies?--you just didn’t see it. People took out second mortgages and hunkered down.
All along, though, there was the assumption that no bust lasts forever, that land would be more than mere land again soon. The history of this place, after all, a famous writer once noted, is the history of the boom.
*
Now housing prices have finally, really, made their comeback here, though the capital gains are nothing compared to, say, the Bay Area. And neither are the emotions, as any connoisseur of Sunday open houses--the window on the soul of this metropolis--can attest. (We looky-looed our way last Sunday through a remodeled bungalow-and- guest-house in Santa Monica, a “steal” at $850,000, and two couples actually smiled and stopped to chat.)
No one means real estate now when they talk about being “in the market.” Though everyone seems to be buying or selling houses, that extra tingle that came with regarding your property as your jackpot has gone away. Some say the bust made people here wary, but it may also be demographics: The generation staking out first homes now makes up a smaller chunk of the population, and the boomers who are trading up have lost their old contagious urgency.
A personal theory, though, is that the thrill is gone because the coordinates of greed and envy--and equity--have migrated. A few months ago, a guy we know took his tech company public and became a multimillionaire in the course of an hour or two. The shakeout hasn’t touched him. He’s rich--rich, I tell you! As for me, last month, I finally changed houses. I’d go into detail, but nothing bores a Southern Californian like yesterday’s boom.
*
Shawn Hubler’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.
