I sold my house in Venice Beach, Los Angeles, six months ago, but every now and then, I check into the neighborhood Facebook group to make sure things are still terrible and getting worse.
When I told my LA friends I was selling my house and moving to New York, not one of them asked me why, whether I was ready for the cold weather, or what part of the city I had settled on. Instead, they all asked the same question: “When did you buy your house in Venice?” Which is another way of asking, “How much money are you going to make on this deal?” Which is another way of saying, “Lunch is on you.”
I bought my house in 1997 during the Venice Beach drug gang wars — I could hear gunfire occasionally, and police helicopters circled overhead every night — and sold well after the neighborhood had been thoroughly gentrified and discovered by the new millionaires created by the Snapchat IPO.
In other words, I bought low and sold high. Taxes and whatnot aside, I’m not complaining. Buying and selling real estate is an extreme sport in Los Angeles, and, #humblebrag, I’m in the winner’s circle.
But I’m only a winner as long as the real estate market in Los Angeles, and Venice Beach in particular, doesn’t get much better.
Any idiot can buy low. Just look at a crime map of a particular area, drive around one of the not-so-scary parts until you see the green shoots of fancification (a place that sells $75 candles, somewhere to buy a cup of complicated coffee), and make your move.
Selling high is riskier. In the first place, you have to believe that things are getting worse — that’s not really challenging for someone like me with a basically conservative outlook — but declining slowly enough so that other people haven’t noticed. Even as you’re signing the documents and handing over the title, you’d have to be a gold-level Stoic not to wonder if maybe the people buying the house know something you don’t. Maybe they know that the homeless guys in the alley who have multiplied and settled in over the years are planning to move on, that the crime rate just seems to have risen but is in fact flat or sloping down, that interest rates will never head north, that LA traffic will unsnarl itself — that things can only get better.
Which is why I check in on my old Facebook group: to make sure that none of that is happening. I made a respectable profit on my house, and I am truly grateful for it. If subsequent owners make a similar or even larger pile, well, good for them! And even more important, I’m really happy in New York.
But here I am in the most dynamic and electric city in America keeping tabs on the miseries and complaints of my former neighbors just to reassure myself that I made a smart real estate move. I make myself happy by immersing myself in my former neighbors’ bad news, and the worse the news, the happier I am.
This is a serious character flaw. But let’s be honest: It’s not unique to me.
“Good fences make good neighbors,” says Robert Frost’s neighbor in his poem Mending Wall as the two of them walk along the stone wall that divides their land to repair the gaps and replace the fallen stones.
That’s about the limit of the dialogue, and we’re supposed to imagine the two men engaged in grim and silent work, building up the walls that separate us as the darkness gathers.
But like a lot of poetry, this is BS. You know what they were doing as they were mending that wall? They were trash-talking the other neighbors, complaining about the lack of city services, wondering if they’d ever get fiber-optic cable, and asking if the people down the road are selling their house — there was a rumor going around the local Starbucks — and then one turning to the other and asking, “What did you pay for your place again?”
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
