Today my husband and I went on a search for a new home. It’s been a few years since we’ve had to do this, and now I remember why so many people complain about house hunting. It’s a very emotional process. The pictures online are very enticing but are often filtered, so when you actually see the place in real life, it’s very disappointing. The carpets are stained, the square footage is small, the yard is unkept, and the most glaringly common feature is that it just didn’t feel like home. Despite what the homes looked like, as soon as I entered, I couldn’t picture my husband and I living there. They say that you have to see at least a dozen places before you find the one, and if that’s the case then we are halfway there.
I know that this is not the time, nor is there ever an appropriate time to complain about a house. One should be grateful to have a roof and bed, regardless of how the roof looks or how the bed feels. There are many people who are houseless and will probably have no opportunity to own, rent or live in a home, permanently. The idea of complaining about the size of a closet or having laminate not granite counter tops pales in comparison to the real houseless issues people are facing all over the world. Just a city over, in San Francisco, I can tell you two streets that have become tent communities, meaning displaced people have congregated in public land and pitched tents to form a community. This is common, not just in San Francisco, but as more and more people lose jobs and become unemployed and as the cost of living in the bay area continues to rise and as more and more resources become scarce, tent communities will be continue to increase.
I need to put this into perspective the next time I visit a potential home. Sure, many of them will require me to use my imagination, which actually could be a fun experience, but if I think about the opposite– imagining the option of not having any home– then a quaint, humble, simple place to rest my head is nothing to complain about.
Sheila E. Navarro 