What Money Buys Besides Stuff

Simplicity, Ashen Wings

Yesterday I took a long evening walk, deciding to follow a nearby street to wherever it dead-ended in the scrubby mountains that surround the area where I live right now.

The street took me out of my apartment complex beside a series of strip malls and into the rarified air of remote, high-income estates. The median was green and well-mowed, the sides of the streets lined with rosemary and flowers and walls that kept prying eyes from seeing the neighborhoods beyond. At cross-streets I saw large houses and immaculate lawns. Cobblestoned driveways and ornate mailboxes. Million-dollar houses, easily. I detoured several times to investigate the well-marked hiking trails that pepper the area and wind up around wealthy neighborhoods into the dry, golden hills that form the boundaries of this little Southern California township.

When I was an undergraduate, I attended UC Santa Barbara and, while living in the student ghetto of Isla Vista, visited people who lived in mansions in the hills and by the ocean. When I was a grad student, I attended USC and went to parties at the houses of professors who lived in the Hollywood hills or along Malibu. And I wanted that lifestyle. I wanted the big, beautiful houses; I aspired to the lifestyles of my elders and professors.

Today, although I sometimes get an instinctive pang of envy when I see such estates, if I stop to really consider my feelings, I realize I don’t want such a big house. Those houses are too big for one person, and I’d hate to pay to heat and cool them. I’m anal-compulsively neat, so I’d also go crazy trying to keep them clean and well-kept — I’m sure many of the owners hire a housekeeper. They also require a gardener to mow the lawn and tend the landscaping, which is yet another expense. I own relatively little, so I’d need to buy unnecessary furniture and decor to keep the numerous empty rooms from feeling abandoned. And even though there’s no question that those houses would be quieter than where I’m living now, I noticed that there’s still some airplane and traffic and neighbor-stereo noise to deal with, even in the nosebleed neighborhoods.

I regretted, as I walked through the neighborhood looking like a visitor from the wrong side of the tracks in my Old Navy cargo pants and battered Salvage hoodie, that all the houses were so big. I’d love to live in an neighborhood so clean and close to the hills, but I want to own a cottage, not a McMansion. It’s a pity that some of the most desirably located estates are also so large. What about those of us who are single and want to live sustainable, eco-friendly lives but also want a well-kept, quiet, close-to-nature neighborhood?

Money buys more than just stuff, although we seldom stop to think about it that way. It also buys nicer neighborhoods. It buys relative silence. It buys proximity to hiking trails and parks. Unfortunately, it also buys big, and for those of us who don’t want big, that poses a problem.

My reading about the Baby Boomers and political trends suggests that we may be seeing the end of the conservative decades; the pendulum may be swinging back toward liberalism as the U.S. becomes more environmentally conscious and the economy begins to splinter under the weight of Chicago School economic theory and credit glut. There’s already a fledgling movement in the direction of smaller, more sustainable housing, and I can only hope that the housing market crash will underscore that movement, spurring developers to build smaller, more affordable houses in the future.

Because money doesn’t need to buy big when it’s buying so much else.

drupagliassotti @ May 31, 2008