One More Time, With Feeling

I came back from our June trip to Detroit pretty despondent. I practically refused to talk about the house with Chai. She was ready to plan out next steps and I couldn't see past the dollar signs blocking our path. Most of the time, I was so stressed about it that I felt like throwing up. Every time Chai would bring up the topic, I'd get defensive and pissy--mostly because it was hard for me to have any sort of back-and-forth when I didn't know myself where I stood anymore.

I mean, I still loved the city and I still loved the house. I couldn't see giving up on the prospect of a life there--especially considering that our West Village neighbors already felt even more like real neighbors than any place I had ever lived before. But the cost of the renovation was freaking me out. I couldn't see where the money was going to come from and what kind of long term impact that debt would have on our lives.

What would it mean for us if we didn't go? I mean, aside from the fact that we would let all of our new and old Michigan friends down. Aside from that we would have blown at least $35K in cash so far and would still be saddled with what would then be an albatross of a house. We'd still be stuck with the problem that we don't want the life we have in Colorado anymore and something has got to give.


So, I revisited my entire thought process from the beginning. There are a lot of reasons why Colorado isn't working out for us. Chai's job had disappeared. I still like mine but for two years have had to commute to a place I hate in order to keep it. The lack of diversity here is a real problem. Every time we come home from, say, Toronto (where mixed marriage and a smorgasbord of cultural influences are the norm), we feel like our lives just got smaller and more stifling.

So, I went back to the list of qualities that describe our ideal place to live--the one we made 18 months ago when we started considering other options. We had been divided on some, such as ...

• Proximity to an ocean, or at least as a body of water large enough to hold us over until we could vacation at one. (Supremely important to Chai. I couldn't give a toss.)
• Near mountains or national forest. (Just the reverse.)
• Winter severity. (Chai wasn't happy about winter in general, but she was willing suffer a moderate-to-mild one. I grew up with it and would miss it in warmer climes.)
• Number of sunny days per year. (Chai prefers the cloudy, rainy weather of Vancouver and England. But I become hopelessly one with the couch if there are more than 3 grey days in a row.)
• City as a collection of unique neighborhoods. (Again, Toronto was our model. Chai was adamant about this. And I could see the appeal but it wasn't a deal breaker for me.)

But we shared in common most of the qualities important to us.

• Culturally and ethnically diverse population. (Having just one, non-white shade of people, especially if they are also predominantly Christian, does not count as "diversity" in our book.)
• Lefty things that tend to go hand-in-hand: Gay friendly and politically liberal; educated population; proximity to major universities and/or renowned colleges.
• Significant "creative class" and vibrant cultural scene.
• Access to fresh food, green values, parks and open space.
• Proximity to an international airport hub.
• Affordable housing within an easy commute to work.
• Low cost of living.
• Low violent crime.
• Near family.

Now, here is just how nerdy I am: I had made a spreadsheet with two tables and weights to help me calculate the perfect place for us. Both tables had as columns the categories of things we were looking for in a city. The first table had a row for each person and in each of its cells, the ranked importance the individual gave to that column's category (the quality). The second table had the potential cities in the rows and a score for how the cities did in each category (for which I got most of my data from Sperling's Best Places and Kiplinger's). And, yes, I put formulas in the spreadsheet to automatically calculate individual and combined best cities.

What a great way to take all of the prejudice out of it and open us up to cities we weren't familiar with yet, right? Well, I put Denver and Boulder in there as controls. And with the individual weights and city scores factored in, Toronto came up first and Boulder and Denver came up second and third as the cities best-suited for me by far and for us combined overall. (Fourth was Washington, D.C., and fifth was Raleigh-Durham.) For Chai, Toronto was the only stand-out winner, all others were about equally meh. So, nerd FAIL.

So, this time, I just ignored the numbers and broke it down logically.

• Chai would have been happy to throw caution to the wind and make a go of it in Barcelona. As much as I could enjoy vacationing there over and over again, I want to be closer to my parents for the foreseeable future. Also, I suspect that, as close as Chai is to her mom and brother, we'd be spending an awful lot of money flying back and forth from Spain to North America.
• The "near family" requirement put us in reach of the East Coast. Anyway, the "sunny" requirement had eliminated the Pacific Northwest for me; and since I find the rest of coastal California entirely too crowded, traffic jammed, and generally stuck on the idea of itself as thee only place anyone would ever want to live, that pretty much eliminated the West Coast.
• My extended family is from the South and some of our closest friends are there. So, I've got a soft spot for the region. But it got eliminated too. I could give you all sorts of individual reasons why interesting metro areas such as Raleigh-Durham, Charleston, Savannah, Atlanta, Jacksonville, and Miami didn't make the cut. But there was no getting past that Chai just couldn't picture being brown and Muslim there, and frankly I couldn't argue. Even if it were not an acrimonious coexistence, she had spent enough of her life feeling like she stood out. She deserves a place where she can just live normally, with an opportunity to blend in when she wants to. (Houston would have been an exception and we do like its art offerings and cost of living, but we have bad memories associated with the place. Hey, Houston, it's not you, it's us.)

In a few strokes, we had narrowed things down to a triangle that went from Washington, D.C. to the Twin Cities to Montreal and back down. We kept whittling.

• The frigid winters eliminated the Twin Cities and Montreal.
• I feel claustrophobic in dense metropolii. (10,500 people per square mile is about tops for me.) That knocked out NYC, Boston, and Chicago.
• In terms of sizable (but not too sizable), metropolitan areas, that left, Toronto, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Cleveland, Columbus, Milwaukee, and Detroit. Lack of racial diversity and a paucity of major universities and renowned colleges did Columbus, Cleveland, and Milwaukee in.

Toronto: We already know and love Toronto and had looked at moving there already (even to the point of already having interviewed for jobs). We have friends and family there, we could be legally married there, and the non-WASP population is larger than its counterpart. It's like a breath of fresh air for us every time we go. But when we went house shopping, we found that homes in our price range were so far away from the city center that we would be spending hours commuting (albeit on a kick ass public transportation system). Deal breaker.

Washington, D.C.: I loooooove Washington (just so long as I'm within a reasonable access to a Metro station). I have good friends there--friend I could grow old with. A couple of them had bought row houses for cheap just over a decade ago in a neighborhood that had nothing but a liquor store with bars on the windows. I took Chai for her first visit and she instantly fell in love. Educated, diverse population; good public transport; amazing cultural offerings. But that neighborhood I mentioned was now completely gentrified. Boutique stores, bars coffee houses, upper middle class people pushing baby carriages. Those homes were going for $750K. <*cough*> We had missed the curve in D.C.

Philadelphia: We already knew that it was half white and half African American. Not exactly the level of heterogeneity we desired. But it had some other things going for it (e.g., art scene, universities). Chai went to an architecture conference and checked the place out. It didn't immediately grab her. Perhaps if we spent more time there, it may have opened itself up to us.

And then there was Detroit and the vibrant DIY revitalization image it was projecting into the viral media. With an art project that she could attach herself to, Detroit had grabbed Chai and made her feel more welcome than nearly any other place she had ever lived or had roots in, from Nairobi to San Bernardino. And that made my very very proud of my hometown. I am, after all, still a Midwest girl with Midwest values. What makes more sense than for me to come full circle and spend the next phase of my life right where I was born?

OK, so, we're back to Detroit. The next logical decision was where to live. If we really wanted to be a part of Detroit and the energy there, we weren't going to be able to do it (or be accepted into it) by living in the suburbs. And we wanted to be within biking distance of the cultural centers but still get a big enough house and yard that could give us the domestic lifestyle that had evaded us in Colorado. And it is in the DNA of an architect to rehab a historic house. And doing so would get us plugged into the experience into the community revitalization spirit more than buying something move-in ready. (After all, part of what we want in exchange for our current life is the feeling of a being a contributor rather just than a consumer of what the community has to offer.) So, that pretty much put us right back in West Village. And when I think about all the locations in West Village, ours still pretty much takes the cake with its southern exposure and adjacent manicured lot and rock star neighbors.

I still don't know how we are going to be able to afford to renovate this house. But, at this point, I have faith (I have to!) that we will figure it out eventually. There have been a handful of times in my 40+ years when I have been absolutely clear about major life decisions even though people closest to me couldn't understand them. Acting on those hits of intuition has never led to regrets for me. And all I can say right now is that this feels like one of those.

So, see you in Detroit some time in ... uh ... soon, we think.