Not This Time
20
To the Future
WE STARTED PRESALES in April. All the infrastructure was completed and the build-out of the commercial village on the ground floor was underway. The first level of condos was framed and our showpiece was ready to be decorated. I hired and trained an entire office staff for sales and management. We weren’t going to be able to count on the services of Loring Properties in the office in South Minneapolis for this. Gordon shared part of the office to focus on listing the property that people needed to get rid of in order to move to the Mill. This was quickly looking like it could become the most prestigious address in Minneapolis.
The covenants were firm in the complex. The exterior of the condos, facing the ‘streets’ were controlled by The Mill. Owners could not alter them beyond a restricted set of door and window decorations. Windows. That was another innovation. Apartments, condos, and hotels did not have windows facing the hallways. The Mill did. In designing the units as a community, we determined that social life would be just as important as private life. If you closed the door of your condo and left the world behind, you were no longer a part of the community. But with a window that you could look out of or draw the curtains on, you could maintain a feeling of oneness with your neighbors.
I was called in on a customer meeting to resolve an issue regarding unit size. The male part of the couple was a little older than I expected our target market to be, certainly in his early forties. He had black hair with just a few threads of gray, and a bushy mustache. He was introduced as Greg Forest and when he stood to greet me, I realized he was about the same height as I was. His partner, Chris, carefully not introduced as his wife, was a statuesque blonde at least six inches taller than him. Chris was almost hyper in her excitement about the condos and I guessed she was at least fifteen years younger than Greg.
“I want to be able to have parties,” Chris said. “I don’t mean noisy, raucous, loud parties, but like a Christmas party for friends. Everything is perfect, except the units are too small. I need a bigger kitchen and a much bigger living room. Greg needs a home office where he can handle his investments on days I keep him in bed too long to go to the office.” Greg moaned.
I picked up the vibe pretty quickly. Chris was the trophy wife for a guy who was pretty well off. Well, maybe she wasn’t actually the wife. She might just be the mistress. Either way, it was obvious that Greg was whipped. Anything she wanted, he was going to give her.
We had to look at a floor that was not completely framed. Of course, Chris wanted to move in tomorrow, but we were talking about a customization that went far beyond what was normal. I ended up selling them two units next door to each other. From the outside, they would continue to look like two units, but inside, they would be joined together. There would be only one large gourmet kitchen. The unit would have three baths. There would be two bedrooms on one side and Greg’s home office would be on the other side. Between would be the open living room/dining room area. The cost included the base cost of two full units plus the customization, bringing the sale to about four times a normal sale. I sure never expected a unit in this complex to sell for three-quarters of a million.
And it opened up another market for us.
The architects did a number of drawings that would be expandable for people like Chris and Greg who wanted all the maintenance-free living of a condo with the space of a single-family home in the suburbs. We were all surprised at how many people fit that description. I just hoped they all had enough money stashed away to pay for the condos once the market started to tank around Y2K. Some of the units were even two stories high on the inside, even though they looked like normal units with facades on two different floors of the complex.
We were already beginning to see the artificial inflation of tech stocks, even in Minneapolis. Control Data had made no secret that they were looking for a white knight. 3M was redefining its product line to get out of magnetics as quickly as possible. Other tech companies with branches in the Twin Cities were expanding, contracting, and redefining themselves as desktop computing became the standard and the Internet started to really become accessible to all. It took people about ten minutes to set up an online business with the promise of limitless wealth.
My stockbroker was pretty pissed with me.
“Why don’t you just buy a seat on the exchange and do your own trading?” he demanded. “You are making ridiculous requests. Microsoft is dominating the market. Apple is in chaos. It makes no sense for you to be moving funds from Microsoft to Apple. And who is this company? I’ve never heard of them.”
“Adobe is going to be around for a long-long time. Just get me out of these short-term stocks. AOL is going no place fast. Cisco is on its way. I want everything transferred from AOL to Cisco. And get me out of MCI! I never authorized a buy for them.”
“Here!” my broker said. “Write down your instructions for buy and sell. And understand that I am advising you against such a heavy investment in technology stocks. You should have a strong balance. Energy stocks are the way to go. You should be moving money into Enron.”
I snorted.
“No, thanks. That business is dirty. If anyone ever examined their books, it would fall apart. And for your information, you should be focusing some of your corporate energy on developing an Internet presence. Before long, people will be buying and selling their stock over the Internet and brokers will be a backend necessity that get a flat rate rather than a commission.”
“You must be kidding. You are a real estate broker. Are you going to put everything online?”
“Hmm. That’s a good idea. Not right now. But you have to know that we’ve developed an entire sales system for condos that doesn’t include real estate brokers. We’re going to see a big uptick in FSBOs when real estate commissions hit 7%. I can well imagine some flat rate, non-commissioned agents entering the market when it crashes,” I said.
“Housing never crashes. The only safe investment is real estate. The key word is ‘real’. All this computing stock, none of it is real.”
“You don’t know how true that is,” I said as I finished writing my instructions. “Everything will change in the new millennium.”
“You are twenty-two years old,” he said. “I’ve never heard anyone your age talk about a future so far ahead.”
“The future is as real to me as yesterday,” I sighed. “I think about it all the time.”
I was thinking about the future a lot lately. I’d been back in time for four years. I’d long since given up hoping I’d wake up back in my own body in a hotel room in California. Nor would I want to go back. I had love, home, and a purpose in this life. And I was going to make damned sure my family was taken care of.
Emily was almost four years old. And she had no friends.
That wasn’t completely accurate. I’d joined a new place called Gymboree and we went there for playdates twice a week. We’d met a few other young mothers and arranged to get our kids together to play as well.
But when I was growing up, all I had to do was step outside the door and I could see kids my age out playing and calling me to join them. Willa grew up in the same house and the neighborhood had begun to turn over about the same time my parents died. There just wasn’t that much difference in Fargo, North Dakota in twenty years. She had playmates and friends a minute away. Outside Emily’s front door there was a quiet, carpeted hallway. And I was concerned about school as well. I didn’t see a future staying in a condo in South Minneapolis.
“The new condos give you the bug?” Lily teased. “You want us to move into the new neighborhood you are creating?”
“No. That wouldn’t help.”
“What is it, love?” Bruce asked. “Why the sudden interest in moving? I thought you liked it here.”
“Oh, I do. Always have. But Emily doesn’t have any playmates here. We need to be in a neighborhood where we know our neighbors and they have children and they play together and we have them over to dinner and…”
“I get the picture,” Lily said. “I understand. But I worry, too.”
“What about, love?”
“Well, we’re not exactly your normal everyday Minnesota family. What will the neighbors think when they find out we’re two women with a man and we’re all lovers? That none of us are married? That Emily isn’t your and Bruce’s daughter? That I’m a lesbian? With one exception. I mean, Minneapolis is pretty liberal, but we still don’t fit the mold,” she said.
“We’ve never really had a problem with that,” I said. “Our friends and neighbors all accept us. My coworkers all accept us. I don’t see why people in a neighborhood wouldn’t accept us.” Bruce and Lily both looked at me and sighed. “What?”
“Honey, have you ever noticed that neither Lily nor I have friends except your coworkers and the grandma down the hall who would befriend anyone if they stop and talk for a few minutes? Even you seldom have guests over for dinner, but us—never,” Bruce said.
“Why?” I gasped. “Am I such a tyrant that you can’t have friends? Am I the only one who gets to invite people to the house for dinner? I can’t believe you’re saying this!”
“It’s not that,” Lily said. “You started right out letting your boss and coworkers know that we were a trio. Even before Bruce came along, Jim knew you and I were together. But… I’ve never come out at work. Even when Nancy and I were together, we never went to school functions together. I’ve never told anyone at my job that I’m a lesbian. There are probably a couple who have guessed or at least suspect, but even they would faint if they found out I was part of a triad.”
“And you, Bruce?” I asked. I had tears running down my cheeks. I couldn’t believe we were in such a stupid predicament.
“Um… Well, Grace College is a religious school,” he said. “I’m not. Religious, I mean. But you wouldn’t believe the stack of agreements and ‘covenants’ I had to sign when I took the job out there. As far as anyone there is concerned, I’m just a single guy who has two roommates sharing an apartment. I go to some of the expected faculty events, but I never let anyone know anything about my personal life.”
I let what they had to say soak in. What a screwed-up world we lived in. Why would it make any fucking difference to anyone? Who would care that we were a triad instead of a couple?
Still, I knew that in my former life, raised in a narrow and judgmental society, I would have been one of those condemning us. I would have said how ‘unnatural’ our relationship was and would probably be talking about how it was an unhealthy environment for a little girl to be raised in. Could we survive this?
Ultimately, Bruce and Lily agreed that we should look for a place that would be better for Emily. I had let the subject drop until they brought it to me. Then we all started looking at what was available.
It was a good market for buyers as we headed into the slow season in Minnesota. Mortgage rates dropped under seven percent for the first time in several years. It would still be tricky for me to get a mortgage without a cosigner. I had the best financials of the three of us, but I was only twenty-two. There was no way a lender would advance money to three unrelated people. We’d had to make special deals with a couple lenders in order to get them to lend money to unmarried couples buying a condo. We were entering a time, though, when I knew mortgage lenders would start making riskier and riskier loans. It was going to start driving housing prices higher as underqualified buyers discovered they could buy bigger houses. With ARMs at just 5.5%, I knew that people would get burned when interest rates started to climb. The real estate market would be in shambles in ten years and in fifteen, there would be a flood of repossessed homes and banks in danger of folding.
In mid-October, we found a house just south of Lake Harriet. I could tell that Lily and Bruce loved it even when they were making comments about all the work that would need to be done. The kitchen would need to be remodeled and updated, as would the two baths. Maybe we’d even need to add a bath. It was drafty and Bruce went around sticking his fingers behind panels to check the non-existent insulation. The house was built in the 30s and had probably been some rich person’s ‘summer cabin’ near the lake. But now the neighborhood was filled with these gems that were sometimes on streets that ended or became one-way facing the opposite direction.
“Let’s do it!” Bruce said after we’d toured the home. “How do we buy a house together now that we’ve found one?”
“I’ll talk to Gordon,” I said. “He probably has a lawyer we can talk to about structuring a partnership or something.”
“I could talk to Carla,” Lily said. We both looked at her. “Just talk,” she squeaked. We laughed at her. We’d all had several orgasms when she’d told us about the ‘women’s retreat’ she went on with Carla. It turned out to be just the two of them. But after the weekend, Carla had never suggested a repeat. As a city councilwoman, she, too, walked a thin line regarding proper behavior. But we agreed that Lily should talk to her.
By the end of October, our offer on the house had been accepted. It looked like we would close at the end of November. We decided to wait until our new home had closed and we had time to do some remodeling before we’d put the condo on the market. I wasn’t worried about selling it, but if things didn’t go well in that regard, I was prepared to rent it out. I’d bought it with only a $30,000 loan that Jim guaranteed. I’d paid the loan off in two years.
We got a finance company to lend us 50% loan to value at 6.5% interest. I was pretty disgusted. A 15-year fixed should have come in at 5.75%, but I wasn’t willing to pay extra points to buy down the rate. I planned to pay it off in five years anyway.
Real estate functions on a huge lie. Every real estate broker tells people what a great advantage it is for them to own a home that appreciates in value each year while they pay a ridiculously huge mortgage and make a mint by deducting the interest from their taxes. But you don’t actually gain anything. You still pay the same amount. You just pay the tax to a bank instead of the government. And in the kind of housing market I knew was coming, the value of your investment was going to go down. Thousands of people would end up owing more for their homes than they could possibly sell them for. Foreclosures would be at an all-time high. When that day came, I intended to owe no man anything. Our house would be mortgage-free and secure.
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