Won't You Be My Neighbor?

Where I live, houses are so cheap a writer can afford two of them

No, this one isn’t mine. I wish! Photo by Abby Rurenko on Unsplash

If it takes everything you’ve got to cover insane housing costs, you probably can’t consider a life as a writer, musician or artist. Even things like teaching and social work are going to be a stretch. What can you do but cast your body into the corporate meat grinder?

It hasn’t always taken three decades to pay for a house

But now? We have little choice. Except for the wealthy, paying for a home is a major millstone around our necks that affects every other financial choice we make.

I bought my first house in 1990, a charming 1925 bungalow filled with pretty woodwork and lots of built-ins.

I loved that house, but the neighborhood deteriorated, and we needed to move. Otherwise, I’d still be living there and I’d probably have been mortgage-free by the time I was 35.

I’m now living in my fourth house

I will own this house (knock on its 127-year-old wood) free and clear in a bit more than a year. It’s a fixer-upper Victorian and we paid just under $100K for it in 2008. We considered buying a much more expensive move-in-ready house instead. Our credit was stellar and we were both working full-time jobs, so we’d have had no problem qualifying.

It was tempting.

Instead, we fell in love with this place, which cost far less than what the bank would have loaned us. Thank goodness we made a conservative choice, because what I didn’t know was that in seven years my newspaper career would end and I’d never again have a stable and secure full-time job.

The advantage to buying a house that needs work is that you can put things off if the money isn’t there, and do each big project as you save enough to pay for it.

I don’t make much money as a freelance writer, but I do make enough to cover this house payment.

I also still own House No. 3, a three-bedroom, one-bath house with a huge fenced yard. It was even cheaper, and had the virtue of not needing major work, which was important to me because I bought it after my first marriage ended and had no time, money or skills to do more than simple cosmetic fixes. Today, my adult son happily rents the house he spent part of his childhood in — I’m charging him a fair market price and he can easily afford it without a roommate.

You don’t have to buy the most expensive house you qualify for

Most people believe they will need to devote every penny they have to their housing, meaning they won’t have much left at the end of the month for anything else.

But there are some alternatives. Not all these ideas will work for everyone, of course.

You can go the fixer-upper route like my husband and I did. If you decide to do this, you’ll have to have some basic home repair skills and you can’t be afraid of getting dirty … or of living in chaos sometimes. (There is always some spot in my house with a couple of power tools, a can of paint and a few boxes of screws sitting there. Always.)

If you can work remote, move to a cheaper area

I live in the Land of Cheap Housing: Central Illinois. But there are plenty of other pockets around the country where you can still buy houses for eye-popping low prices.

My house cost under $100K. It’s embarrassingly huge, and we no longer use most of it now that the kids are grown. My husband built a recording studio in the attic. The old pine paneled sleeping porch with seven windows serves as my home office. We customized our yard to our liking, with a covered deck, a pergola, a fishpond, a patio and a really nice treehouse.

In some parts of the country, you couldn’t even rent this treehouse for what my mortgage payment runs! My husband built this himself using all free reclaimed wood. Even the clear panel that serves as a sunroof was a freebie. The grandchildren love it. So do the grownups. (Photo by Michelle Teheux)

It’s in a safe, quiet, walkable neighborhood. I can walk to a hospital, a grocery store, two pharmacies, almost all the municipal offices, the riverfront, a coffee shop, several bars and restaurants and multiple parks.

Two houses on my street are for sale right now. One has four bedrooms, 2 baths and more than 2K square feet. It is on the market for $140K. You’ll have to rip up the neglected fence and clean up the yard but the house itself appears to be fine. Another one offers 1,702 square feet with three bedrooms and one bath for $129,900.

A walkable neighborhood makes everyday life better. To find one, pick an older area that pre-dates the automobile and modern zoning. Look for a side street near your town’s historic mansions, which may help stabilize the area. That describes my street.

Young adults: Live at home longer, if you can

The way I gave my son a boost into a more comfortable adulthood was by inviting him to live at home for a while longer. That allowed him to dedicate everything he would otherwise have put into rent toward paying off his student loans and his car, and then he built up an emergency fund and enough money to furnish his new place — the house where he spent part of his childhood — nicely.

If you’re making quadruple or quintuple payments on your loans, you can get out of debt a helluva lot faster than you can if you’re spending most of what you make on living expenses and only paying the minimum loan payments.

Get a roomie

I hated having roommates, but the thing is, if you’re single and not making a lot of money, splitting expenses with a friend can allow you to put back some money for an eventual down payment on a house. Even if you’re not single, doubling up with another couple for a year or two lets you put back a significant nest egg.

Go avant-garde

I know a lot of creative people who have found unconventional ways to cut their living expenses. I had a photographer friend who lived in a converted two-car garage. Don’t be afraid to move into a tiny house or somebody’s granny flat for a few years.

Get a house-sitting/pet-sitting gig — I know a writer/editor who did this in one of the country’s priciest areas — Bainbridge Island. It allowed him time and quiet to work on freelance book editing. As a bonus, he got to live near and befriend a few famous writers.

For some people, a move to another country with a lower cost of living could be part of this plan.

Maybe you can live in your van temporarily, depending on whether you live in a warm enough climate — and whether you can afford a van!

I knew an artist/musician who shared a house with a bunch of other artists/musicians.

I had another friend in college who, in between leases, lived in a tent by the river for about two months. I’m not sure I’d be up for that, but it worked for him.

If I were a single young woman without kids, I’d look into being a live-in nanny in a pricey area, and then I’d save everything and use the money to eventually buy a house in a cheaper area.

For a while, someone I knew rented some office space — just one room — for a small business she had started. It was phenomenally cheap — I think around $200 per month. The building offered a shared kitchenette/break area, shared conference rooms and access to shared public toilets.

If I were just starting out and didn’t own a boatload of stuff, I’d rent an office like that, move in a desk and a sofa suitable for sleeping on and see how long I could get away with it/how long I could stand it. I’d put up a shingle offering my services in digital advertising, but I’d mostly cover the rent with my earnings from Medium and Substack. You’d need a cheap gym membership for your daily shower.

Any month you’re not paying rent is a month when you can probably tuck away money.

What if we all just refused to overspend on housing?

What if we all declined to feed the beast? What if we normalized intergenerational living? What if we stopped building such large houses? (Yes, I’m being a bit hypocritical on this one, because our nest is empty and we haven’t yet downsized.)

What if we learned to get along with others well enough to share living spaces with them?

People are paying such incredible amounts of money for just one thing, and it’s seriously cutting into what resources are available for all other needs.

And for a lot of people, the high cost of living forces them to do work they hate, rather than work they enjoy. Ask yourself this: What choices might be open to you if you found a way to cut your housing costs in half?

Maybe … just maybe … you could afford the supreme luxury of being able to do what you want for a living.

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here or on Medium. My new book is The Trailer Park Rules.

A version of this was originally published on Medium on Feb 23, 2024.