Ezra Berkley Nepon, 2008 with a new preface from 2024
Preface
Almost 25 years after the events of this piece, the possibility of buying a house in good shape for so little money feels like a chapter from a distant history book. So many of the options in this story hinged on the very small scale of the costs. Still, I’ve heard from many people over the years that the piece offered a useful prompt to consider a range of possible choices beyond what seemed to be assumed in the process of buying and selling a home. I hope this reflection continues to be useful both in documenting a different moment in time and possibility, and sparking ways to think creatively about buying and selling a home.
BUYING
In 2001 I bought a house in Philadelphia in partnership with a close friend for $25,000. The three story, five-bedroom house was in good shape. We made the purchase in cash, through a personal loan from my friend’s grandparents with a relatively low interest rate of 7%. We collected a total of $625/month for the combined “rent” among all of the housemates (including ourselves), which paid the “mortgage” and monthly bills with a little left over for home repair savings.
We and our various housemates were all white and flamboyantly gendered queers moving into a working poor Black neighborhood. We bought the house because we knew the only white people in the neighborhood, a couple with strong relationships throughout the block. Though we eventually also built relationships with many of our immediate neighbors, we often felt open hostility from people in the surrounding blocks – and we knew that it was a response to the real threats of impending displacement that our presence suggested.
Looking back, if I had it to do over again, I would not move there. I have more experience and language for understanding gentrification now, but I don’t have better answers to how we could have done it more “right.”
We had anti-capitalist intentions, but we were hazy on the strategy. We were clear that we wouldn’t sell the house for a profit, and definitely never to a developer. But we didn’t really imagine selling the house, so we never got very concrete about those conditions and never put anything in writing. That made things a lot harder when we faced the reality of actually selling the house in a capitalist system. Perhaps my strongest advice is to make and document decisions about how selling will be done during the early stages of a homebuying process, while relationships between co-owners are strong, healthy, and optimistic.
We intended to live in this home for a very long time. We planned to take an old house and restore it. We wanted to create a refuge that felt safe and comfortable for our queer community. We didn’t want to pay rent to a shady landlord. We dreamed about the projects we would start once the house was paid off, like solar panels and roof decks for gardens.
All of the people who lived in the house also worked on home repair projects, and there was an explicit agreement that working on the house and paying “rent” were both investments. In this model, the house’s “worth” belonged to all who invested in it, and if the house was never sold that investment would be a more philosophical one, a gift of community-building for future inhabitants.
We were transparent about how we paid the “mortgage” and bills. There was a power-imbalance in the reality that two of us technically owned the house, and that power did matter, but as much as possible we tried for horizontal shared decision-making. Housemates reflected that it was meaningful to know that they were not just paying rent in our house, and to feel that it was collectively owned.
SELLING
About five years later, the house was paid off but the relationships of the group living in the house had dramatically changed. Our lives were shifting in ways that didn’t make group living/homeownership a functional option. After lots of heartbreak, those of us still living in the house decided to sell it.
We briefly considered land-trusting the house (a commonly used model of collective housing in Philadelphia) but didn’t pursue that option because land trusts permanently end the financial asset of owning a home and I wanted the option of putting the house up for bail or selling it to raise funds in the case of an emergency. The context of the time was key for this concern: we bought the house right after the traumatizing Philadelphia Republican National Convention protests of 2000, where many were kept in jail with bails set as high as $1 million. In the aftermath, legal expenses cost tens of thousands for some individuals who were targeted by the Philly police for their political organizing, charged with layers of felonies and facing massive repression. A week after buying the house in 2001, I had put it up as collateral to bail a friend out of jail.
We envisioned our ideal situation for selling the house that could be some kind of harm reduction for the ways our own presence had often felt like a threat to our neighbors. These criteria were partly about hoping that the house wouldn’t be flipped or lost to developers through our sale. We also made a commitment to each other that we would not sell the house through word of mouth in our white subculture.
We put out word about our house to people on our block and through an organization of African-American anti-gentrification activists in a nearby neighborhood. That organization was how we connected with the buyers.
There were lots of other external pressures confusing me about how to sell the house in an ethical but not white-guilt-stupid way. Lots of people told me we were making a mistake by selling the house for too little money right before impending gentrification due to a new fancy charter school in the neighborhood. And, as we were deciding to sell the house, I witnessed a drive-by shooting murder on our block. Afterwards, I was anxious that people would think we were white-flighting to a “safer” neighborhood.
In the end, it turned out that our neighbors mostly didn’t care if or why we moved. I was wrapped up in what we now might call “main character syndrome.”
We tried to be as careful as possible about where we put money in this process. We didn’t work with a realtor, and we used a lawyer recommended by the network that we connected with to spread word about the house. We didn’t originally get the house appraised. Instead, I looked at online house sale records from city hall for my block and came up with $60,000 as a number that seemed in line with recent sale prices and considering the home improvements we had made. The buyers counter-offered to buy the home for $45k. We struggled with confusion about what was fair. We had recently discovered that the oil tank was leaking – a big problem that we had told the buyers about but did not plan to fix before the sale. We also believed that selling too low could negatively impact other neighbors’ property values. So, we got the house appraised and even with knowledge of the leaking oil tank, the appraisal came in at $65k. My co-owner and I agreed that our initial offer was a fair price, said it was final, and the buyers agreed to the purchase.
The final housemate group decided to donate $10,000 of that sale price to a number of local housing justice/anti-gentrification groups and to split the rest of the money between the 7 people who had lived in the house for six months or more, pro-rated by number of months each had paid into the house. In this arrangement, we each got back about 75% of the money we had paid in, with a letter to each person who was getting money explaining how we sold the house and how the money was divided.
We made donations anonymously through Bread and Roses Community Fund, with specific organization and grant amounts advised by a local anti-gentrification organizer. An announcement by the Fund about these grants from the sale of a house prompted a large number of donations in response!
Questions for Potential Homeowners
Since initially publishing this article, I’ve often thought about how the super-low cost of our home—$25,000—was key to our ability to be creative, flexible, even experimental in our process of buying, living in, and selling the house. Although the specifics of this story won’t easily apply to most homeownership situations, the experience raised a number of financial and ethical issues that I encourage people to consider when buying or selling a house, in whatever ways they can integrate into your own process.
- Where is your money going? Are there ways to fund social justice movements/aligned individuals with the big chunks of money that go to lawyers, realtors, contractors, moving companies?
- Who are you asking for input or advice about this process? Can you connect with groups or organizers in your neighborhood or city, informing your choices beyond your own perspectives? Is anyone challenging you?
- Who understands and shares your political commitments? If you diverge from the primary goal of accumulating wealth, many voices will tell you that you are making mistakes. Even if you feel sure of your position, it helps to have supportive allies.
- Can you buy or sell through word of mouth rather than paying a realtor, and that way keep the sale price lower and the process less commercial?
- How do you choose your lawyer for the final sale paperwork? Do you need a lawyer?
- How will your sale price impact the homeowners and renters in your neighborhood?
- Are you making a profit? What happens to that money? How much money did you put into the house? How much do you “need” or “deserve” to keep? Can you direct any percentage of those funds into movements for housing justice or other liberation movements?
- If you do keep some money from the sale of your home, where does that money live? What are your harm reduction options for banking or investing? Under what circumstances would you be willing to spend it or give it away?