2am in the Mission, and I’m eating whiskey-flavored pizza with my old pal Tom Devaney, who once trained me how to deal with America. A cute Mexican walks in, carrying a full pint from the bar next door. He weaves, then falls slowly onto his backside, raising his glass like an Olympic torch. It’s a move I’ve seen two hundred times in Dublin, but here it makes me laugh out loud. “Shit, man,” he says, and shakes his head. “Shit. You see that?” He picks himself up and staggers over to our table. “I di’n spill any of it. Not one drop. You see that?”
Christ. Here we go.
“We watched you. You held right onto that thing,” says Tom. “Control. Priorities. It was very impressive. “ The guy is flattered.
“Wass your name?”
“Tom.”
“Where you from?”
“I’m from Massachussets. I’m visiting.”
“You’re a goo’ guy. I can tell. I can tell from looking at you. I can tell from the way you talk. Educated. But also down to earth, you know?”
“Thank you. That’s very kind of you to say.”
“I mean it. I have a good feeling about you.” He wags his finger at Tom, and turns to me. “You guys just met. You should go out with him. Actually, you should go home with him tonight.”
“We’ve known each other for ten years,” I say. He looks doubtful. So do I.
“Well. He’s a good guy. Also he’s handsome. Thass all I’m going to tell you. He’s a…prize.”
“Your wallet is hanging out,” says Tom. His new friend stares down to where it dangles from a security chain at knee level, and slaps his thigh.
“Man, I always lose shit. I lose so much shit, you wouldn’t believe. And people are assholes. They don’t give my stuff back. I lost three wallets. Thass why I got it on a chain now. Now I can’t go home without it, as long as I got my pants on.”

(This sounds like a worthwhile lifehack. I’m going to start chaining valuables to my pants.)

He draws his wallet back up like a yoyo, and stuffs it back into his pocket. “See, I told you he was a good person,” he says to me, sternly. “You’re lucky to know him.” He shakes Tom’s hand and walks out without buying a slice, still clutching his beer.

“Only in San Francisco,” writes Tom from New York afterwards, “could I be eating pizza with a hot chick and have a drunk guy check me out.”

I am alive�because
I do not own a House�
Entitled to myself�precise�
And fitting no one else—Emily Dickinson

In my fifty-person office, at least six people are looking to buy a home right now. That small sample says something about the San Francisco real estate market, where increasingly the froth looks less like champagne and more like late-stage rabies.

I’d spent two weeks trudging to Craigslist rental flats in the rain when I got to my friend Romanus’s birthday party. We were on our second pitcher of strawberry margaritas when his friend and realtor, Helga, arrived: a vision in lilac shantung, offering tulips. “Ciao, darlings,” she said, and got to work on the blender to make another batch of drinks. Helga was Marilyn blonde, like her sports car, and though I could see she was good-hearted, I was still scared when when she turned the high-beams on me.

I told her I’d just moved here from Brooklyn. No, my company was putting me up for a month. No, I was planning to rent, at least until I knew the city a bit better.

Helga was having none of this. She was going to hook me up with a friend of hers, a great mortgage broker, to see what my choices were. Then she’d take me out, show me some neighborhoods, a few apartments in my range. Educate me. If I decided I wanted to rent, great—I’d be out twenty-five bucks for Sophia’s credit report, and I’d have some groundwork done for next time. What’s to lose?

It seemed settled. There was nothing for me to do but nod.

A few days later she sent me to Sophia, another abundant North Beach Italian in an overflowing office. I liked her. She lived in a world of phones and paper. I signed six or eight pages of disclosure agreements, and watched her cover loose sheets with figures.
“And here’s an 80-10-10, with a floating arm. We could get you this one real easy, with your scores. So, interest payment on the first loan, fixed rate, plus interest on the line of credit, floating, plus HOA, plus property tax of 1.25%…I’m looking on the ratios on your salary, and here’s what I think you could get..”
“What’s HOA?”
“Homeowner’s association. Condo dues. Covers water, insurance, maintenance.”
She gave me a motherly tutorial on credit ratings, closing costs, and the kinds of outgoings that ten-year-olds don’t think about when they wish they were grown up. Numbers bore me, but I like independence enough to pick this stuff up fast. And I liked being inducted by women. With women, business blurs into life, the way it used to before Adam Smith decided we should specialize. Look, here’s what we need to know in order to take care of ourselves, they seem to say. Just because it’s business doesn’t mean that we can’t talk about our sick parents, our kids, or our ramshackle love lives. On the contrary—why else would these scribbled figures be important, bella?

Sophia totted up my allowance. I felt like Dr. Evil, cackling over the million dollars he didn’t realize was meager in the market he’d woken up to. Maybe I could buy love for soggy San Francisco, in spite of its refusal to be Brooklyn.

Helga put me in her Jaguar and hauled me through her city. She shrieked at the stiffness her exuberance brought out in me. “When are we going to the Mission proper?” she’d mimic. “Oh sweetie, you’re killing me. The Mission proper. Where’d you get that from?” At the open houses, I was glad that the badass broker was my badass broker.
“What are the comps?” she’d demand from the hapless selling realtor.
“Well, a unit on the fourth floor sold for $597 in September…”
“September was a whole different market. It has nothing to do with what’s going on right now. What are you guys really expecting?”
“Well, we’re seeing in general that, you know, the market has gone up maybe 20% since the fall. So we’re using that as a cautious guide, though of course you never know…”
“So how many disclosure packets do you have out right now?”
I’d watch them dance. It made me go dreamy in panic. In Helga’s car, I’d want to fall asleep to the sound of the windshield wipers, though her illegal parking always snapped me to attention. “What’d you think? Be honest. You won’t hurt my feelings.” I didn’t really know. I’d been distracted by the pink Kitchenaid mixer, or the black-and-white tiles, or the built-in bookshelf. Patiently, she tutored me on exactly what that apartment would sell for, and why. After a few attempts, I could guess along with her.

I appointed a San Francisco Advisory Board, six friends who knew the market. One was still shopping, and the others were newish homeowners. Their counsel wasn’t a surprise. Come on in, they said. The water’s lovely. Mind the sharks, some added. I wrote to the two landlords I’d liked best—women my own age—telling them I wasn’t ready to rent their apartments because I was looking at places to buy. “Right on Dervala!” answered Michelle. “I’m a huge advocate of owning a peice of the rock!” “Totally,” said Catherine. She’d wondered why I was renting in the first place, with those credit scores I’d shown her. (Immigrants have to keep good credit.)

I began to nurse daydreams about life as a home-owner. San Francisco is an early-to-bed city, a better place to develop an interest in Williams-Sonoma and window treatments than New York. Not that I’d be able afford Williams-Sonoma with a mortgage this fat, but the catalogues would keep me company over beans and rice. I’d stroke the walls: mine, all mine. Cait and I had once hoped we’d end up as spinsters in a book-lined cottage, where we’d entertain gentlemen callers, and it now seemed it might come true, at least for me. I got a verbal acceptance of my (conditional) bid on a Victorian condo I’d seen only in the dark. It faced north over one of the busiest traffic streets in San Francisco, and smelled of old man, but it was a bargain, just like those January shoes you don’t really like.

I asked my ex-husband to send some paperwork for my mortgage application. He forwarded two recent Economist leaders which claimed the smart money was on renting. This needled me. I told him I wanted a sense of home after all my vagabonding, and I’d been listening to this stuff about the property market for years. He wrote back. “Remember that Alan Greenspan was talking about irrational exuberance in 1996? Three years later we said to hell with it, put our savings in the market and started a dot com. Oops.”

Goddammit. Ten years before, when Jason still a cute young socialist, I’d started him on a steady diet of the Economist. Only when we’d strayed from its righteous path had we ever run into trouble. I gave in and read the articles he’d sent, which I’d been ignoring on the magazine rack at work. Of course they made elegant sense. I re-read them and though about turning 40 stuck in negative Victorian equity. Then I called Helga and babbled about a bubble. “I think you’re feeling pressure.” she said, graciously. “I want you to be happy.” My friend Peter bolstered me with more real estate bubble-bursting from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Here’s what’s going on here right now: when I looked at Craigslist tonight, half the rental listings are for apartments I’d looked at five weeks ago. Perfectly nice places. I’m almost always the only prospective tenant at a showing. Landlords call me, offer discounts or a free month or two. Some seem unable to accept how soft the market is now that everyone is stretching to buy instead; that rents need to come down again; that the dot-com days aren’t coming back. They’re the ones who keep re-listing.

Five years ago, everyone tells me, thirty or fifty or seventy people showed up at each rental showing. They waved credit reports and college transcripts. They brought their checkbooks to sign away their signing bonus, if only the landlord would consent to accept ten months’ rent in advance, and maybe a little sweet something for the kids’ college fund.

And that’s still happening in the seller’s market. The unwritten rule here is that you should offer at least twenty per cent over the asking price to win the inevitable bidding war. When I’d fallen for a little condo in unsexy Bernal Heights, Helga told me I’d need to offer a 50% sweetner to get it. We sat in a cafe, late into the evening, filling out the paperwork for my first ever bid. Next morning I balked and dropped my offer to a 40% premium. I lost to a bidder who offered more and said he didn’t need a contractor’s inspection or a mortgage contingency. The natives act like this is normal.

I can rent something far better for less than half the cost of interest-only repayments. And if I bought a place, I couldn’t cover the mortgage by renting it out. Buyers dismiss this because they’re betting on capital gains. The demand that pushes prices up is fueled by people like me, who have been running alongside the train for years, and fear it’s steaming out of the station. The Irish market has been like this for years, but it’s ugly to watch it up close.

San Francisco buyers seem out of touch with how weak the rental market is (or they don’t care). They’re not hanging out on Craigslist, watching the same “Edwardian charm” pimped out week after week, sliding from $1600 to $1550, then $1500.

To judge by my postbag when I said I was moving, people truly love this city, and they continue to want to live here. The job market is healthy. There’s little room to build new housing. I don’t think there will be a catastrophic fall in house prices, though of course it’s possible. But the enormous year-on-year appreciation is going to stop, and very soon. Rates will creep up, and the foreclosures will start, and we’ll look at each other and realize that it’s not smart to throw Dr. Evil dollars at places we’d hate to get stuck in. At that point, I’d start to ask myself where else I could have put that down payment and those fat closing costs, or how I could have invested the extra money that would otherwise be paying off mortgage interest. The numbers only add up if you believe that the house price train will keep steaming ahead, or you want to stay put for longer than the average tenure. It’s seven years nationally; I’m sure it’s shorter in San Francisco.

That’s why I’m spending Saturday moving into a Bernal Heights rental: a sunny 2bd w/charm, eat-in kitch, shared gdn, hardwd flrs & vws. I’ll sleep easier without the traffic, and the HOA dues.

************
Further reading: Trading Places: Real Estate Instead of Dot-Coms.
“Real estate-crazed Americans have started behaving in ways that eerily recall the stock market obsession of the late 1990’s.” —New York Times

Survey Says It’s Cheaper To Rent—Much Cheaper —Curbed

200 v 2005: Totally Insane! —Curbed

My friend Ann is an Irish theater nurse who lives in Munich (she’s also known as Mrs. Rainy Day). In February she and a team of German doctors and nurses flew to Dar es Salaam for a two-week open-heart surgery marathon. Their ultimate goal was to train local medical staff in their techniques.

The Hmong have a phrase, hais cuaj txub kaum txub, which means “to speak of all kinds of things.” It is often used at the beginning of an oral narrative as a way of reminding the listeners that the world is full of things that may not seem to be connected but actually are, that no event occurs in isolation, that you can miss a lot by sticking to the point, and that the storyteller is likely to be rather longwinded.

“In New York, freedom looks like too many choices,” Bono sings. When I moved there I was shy about ordering the plainest deli sandwiches and confused by the flashing Don’t Walk signs that made people run. I had no visa, and it took a month or two to find work at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, a proud literary publishing house I’d never heard of. I filled Jiffy bags with reviewer’s copies, and cut out the assessments that were sometimes granted in response. I filed the reviews in moldering folders—Kincaid, Jamaica; Nadas, Peter; O’Brien, Edna—along a corridor where Mike Hammer might have rented an office. I was paid in hardbacks, which I rarely read. It’s a rule of mine: never read anything bigger than your head.

Eight years later, I arrived for my last shift at another volunteer job on a freezing New York night. Between calls I flicked through People and US Weekly and worried about Brad and Jen. My shift partner, whom I didn’t know, read for a while too, and then slung his feet up on the desk and fell asleep. Because he was handsome, and wore yellow socks, I sneaked a look at his book to see if he was worth waking up.

It was The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman. At Farrar, Straus & Giroux I’d packed a carton full of review copies and sent them around the country, but I’d decided it was too worthy to bother taking home (and I lacked the enterprise to sell it). Who wanted to read an epic about a Hmong toddler’s epilepsy, and the clash between her refugee community and the doctors at a Californian county hospital? I wasn’t sure what a Hmong was, even, and in any case I was preoccupied with Princess Diana’s funeral.

Since then I’ve visited a Hmong village in Laos, a day’s walk from the nearest dirt road. At sundown, when the villagers went to the river to bathe decorously under sodden sarongs, I slipped on the muddy bank and fell in, and cried. For dinner they killed a rooster—a precious rooster—and fed me the boiled head. I eyeballed this baleful Pez dispenser and made a show of fake humility in handing it to the teenaged monk who was my guide. Pon lit up. It was the end of Buddhist lent, and for over a month he’d eaten nothing after midday, and no protein at all. He sucked the rooster’s tongue like a lover, and then crunched through to the brain. I swallowed gritty gizzards. The villagers gathered in the doorway to watch the feast in silence, though they didn’t eat. Afterwards, someone made coffee, pouring the whole packs of Nescafe and sugar I’d brought into a kettle of river water and boiling it to syrup. I sipped mine, until Pon pantomimed that there were only two plastic tumblers and no one else could drink until we finished. We unrolled mats on the earthen floor, feet pointing towards the door to keep bad spirits out. I lay awake in a coffee buzz while underneath the stilted house the men hammered a coffin for somebody dead, and got raucously drunk on laú-laú moonshine.

I was an ungracious guest, frustrated that I knew so little and hung up on details. How much money should I offer the head man? Which one was he, anyway? How would I tell them I needed to go to the toilet? Why were the children scared of me? Why wouldn’t these people build better shacks? Were the men opium junkies? Were they really this dour? Oh Jesus, was that a leech?

I didn’t know how to begin.

Nor did the people in Anne Fadiman’s wonderful book, which my new friend hand-delivered to San Francisco last month. Both Hmong immigrants and locals were baffled and helpless. The Hmong didn’t want to be on welfare in Merced, California. They wanted to be back in their villages in Laos, where ‘pig-feeding time’ marked sunset and sunrise. The local taxpayers wanted them back home, too. Kissinger’s adventures in Laos had been kept so quiet that most Americans neither knew nor cared that Hmong tribes had been recruited to fight a private war for the CIA, and had been kicked out or slaughtered when the Americans lost 1975. Their path to America was traumatic, involuntary, and took a great deal longer than the Orderly Departure planes that left them stranded as homegrown traitors. “It was a kind of hell they landed into, “ said Eugene Douglas, Reagan’s ambassador-at-large for refugee affairs. “Really, it couldn’t have been done much worse.” Both sides expected gratitude, and got resentment. The Hmong had little left but their culture, and no interest in giving it up to become American.

That’s not an immigrant approach that America is prepared for. Think of the graffiti in Rio: “Yanqui go home—and take me with you.” America defines us so thoroughly that I could arrive in New York as a full-grown adult and feel at home except at the deli counter. But the Hmong had stayed apart so successfully that they were confused by toilets, and canned food, and electricity, and money, and hospitals. American doctors were known to steal body parts, without which souls couldn’t rest. (For their part, the doctors saw their Hmong patients as ungrateful and “non-compliant”.) It would be hard to imagine the scale of their bewilderment, except I remember it first-hand, stumbling in that river and wanting desperately to go home.

Fadiman begins with a description Fish Soup, as told by a Hmong student at Merced High School:

To prepare fish soup, he said, you must have a fish, and in order to have a fish, you have to go fishing. In order to go fishing, you need a hook, and in order to choose the right hook you need to know whether the fish you are fishing for lives in fresh or salt water, how big it is, and what shape its mouth is. Continuing in this vein for forty-five minutes, the student filled the blackboard with a complexly branching tree of factors and options, a sort of piscatory flowchart, written in French with an overlay of Hmong. anecdotes about his own fishing experiences. He ended with a description of how to clean various kinds of fish, how to cut them up, and, finally, how to cook them in broths flavored with various herbs.”

To tell Lia Lee’s story, Fadiman makes a fish soup of her own, winding through Hmong history and culture, the American War, immigration policy, western medical training, anthropology, welfare reform, a changing community, and a family. Like Tracy Kidder, or a Hmong fisherman, she watches and waits, and unfolds her tale with startling delicacy. In puzzling out a catastrophic clash of cultures, she looks for answers rather than blame. Along the way, she changed medical culture and won the National Book Award. It’s beautiful. Read it if you can.

I was a gadget geek. Then a paper purist, haughty about the toys that tethered the unenlightened ones. Now I’m a gadget geek again.

Truth is, for all my Zen posing, my pared-down life wasn’t a conscious renunciation of what the Quakers call “cumber”. It was just that I kept losing shit.

I lost my Sony laptop. Two cellphones. A digital camera. A Palm PDA. A film camera (or three, if you count the ones I owned with my ex.) A few wallets. An iPod, given to me by Meetup. On my way to an interview for my new job at Stone Yamashita, I abandoned my IBM laptop on the A train platform at JFK—perhaps acting out a fear of San Francisco.

Mostly, I shrugged. It’s just stuff. I didn’t feel rich enough to replace it, so I took each loss as one less thing to fret about. My co-workers made fun of my gadget-repelling forcefield. My friends and family complained that they could never call me, but that was okay; I find a whining phone no better company than a mosquito.

But the stuff crept back into my life. Meetup kindly gave me another iPod. Hooked by that touch-me iPod, as groovy as Courreges go-go boots, I bought a Bose Dock so that it could live out loud. I celebrated my new job by replacing the lost laptop with a matching iBook, proud that I’d finally earned a product designed in California. When I got there, Stone Yamashita trumped it with a sleek 17” PowerBook that made the iBook feel like an Etch-a-Sketch.

Before the move, I’d given in and bought a pay-as-you-go cellphone on eBay so that I could wrangle movers and realtors. Then Stone Yamashita handed me a BlackBerry that I clip to the strap of my backpack for full dorkish effect. It hasn’t helped my email twitchiness, though its clunky Canadian icons annoy me whenever I take a digital hit.

Yesterday we moved to new offices, just down the street on Brannan and Fourth, where the dotcom ghosts walk. It must have been wrenching for a small, cultish company to leave ten years of stories in the old loft we’d outgrown. To ease and celebrate the change, the partners handed us champagne and Shuffles, and fifty grown-up faces lit with glee.

I used to wander Brooklyn with a notebook, a pen, and a secondhand paperback. Now I schlep two laptops, two phones, and two iPods through SoMa (though I draw the line at listening to music in public: I can’t be in two places at once.) In the words of Mr. David Byrne, �How did I get here?”

In a Hayes Valley thrift store, a forlorn man pushed his cart.
“I cause nothing but trouble,” he said, a five-year-old’s whine in a grown man’s baritone. He looped through the books and crockery and polyester Women’s Jackets, head down, intent on his sing-song confession.

“I cause nothing but trouble.
I don’t blame you for not talking to me.
I. Cause. Nothing but. Ch-rubble.”

As he passed behind me, I wondered what mother he addressed.
“I cause nothing but pink stocking trouble.”
A few shoppers noticed the twist, and glanced at my bubblegum tights. I’m trying on his words on as an epitaph.

The next evening, on the Muni platform, another lonely man struck up a chat. His beard and missing back teeth gave him the sunken look of a civil war veteran. It was raining, as usual.
“Must be heavy if you can hear it on the roof all the way down here.”
“Must.”
“Sounds like a stream a ways away. The runnels make me think of a creek running over stones.”
“That’s exactly what it sounds like.”
“I hear these things. I’m from Washington State. I hear things city people don’t hear. I could hear a bird far away even in the city. If I listen hard. People here don’t listen so well.”

Oh, darling. What happened to you? I was afraid to ask in case the answer followed me home. Instead he told me about western birds.

“I like your shoes,” he said. I was wearing the new trainers I’d bought on my last Sunday in New York. They are silver patent leather, something the Tin Man would have worn, and I like them too because they make strangers laugh. “Where did you get them?”

I tried to think of ways not to say “Prada”. “New York,” I offered finally.
“Oh,” he said. “If it was here I’d have liked to get a pair.”