My Redacted Life: Chapter 38 (Cont._3)

We started looking in earnest for a house a month or so after we married. We had advantages, of course, being Caucasian. Also, the GI Bill offered me a lowered interest rate and a no-down payment loan. Friends gave us a lot of advice, some good and some bad. One said, “buy more house than you can afford and you’ll grow into it as your income rises. That sounded to me like the cowboy who bought a horse he couldn’t ride because it might quit bucking someday.

The best advice simply said buy the least expensive home in a stable and popular location. The value of the more expensive homes will exert an upward influence on the value of yours. Also, buy a home you could conceivably pay for with one salary. Life is unpredictable. Some advice is ageless.

The generation before us had settled, when the war ended, for modest frame homes, some no larger than 800 square feet. Their sons and daughters would settle for no less than a three-bedroom, two-bath, brick structure as a “starter home.” That was to be one of many differences between the so-called “Greatest Generation,” and the Baby Boomers.

It also confounded the “trickle-down” theory taught for so long in planning schools. The older generation was supposed to move from their “starter homes” into more expensive ones, freeing cheaper units for purchase by the younger set. It didn’t quite work out that way. Nobody wanted the cheaper houses and they quickly converted to rental properties, with no provision for upkeep.

The only thing that trickled down was rain flowing through rotted roofs.

About this time in America, the purchase of a home began to represent, for many families, the best way of amassing wealth. This would require a steady rise in housing values over decades, much like a company’s stock that never stopped rising. It would also generate substantial benefits for homeowners that didn’t accrue to renters. We had no idea at the time how much this trend would change our country.

My non-white comrades who had served alongside me in the military faced different challenges in taking advantages of the GI Bill’s housing benefits. They faced few choices in housing location at that time. An urban renewal project in Little Rock had cleared a slum neighborhood and converted it into a spacious subdivision of mini-mansions for the wealthy and elite African-American families: physicians, attorneys, business owners, and, once, a star of the Harlem Globetrotters.

Less affluent brothers and sisters were relegated to racially acceptable neighborhoods. One can easily understand what that meant.

There wasn’t anything equitable about it. That’s just the way things were. Life rolled on. We, as a family, were about to take advantage of the inequity. We, as a company, were about to learn how rocky the underlying racial prejudice in our country could make the road of life. At the time, we were foolish enough to think that prejudice might dissipate someday, become gone with the wind, so to speak. The most wondrous dreams can sometimes be the most foolish.

We plan on buying a house.