Real Estate: A Plan B Essay

In the Plan B essay series, writers discuss their contingency plans, extra-literary passions, and the roads not traveled.

My father always wanted me to go into real estate. It was in the family: pioneer land swaps and strategic purchases during the Depression kept the Svobodas solvent. My father would stand at the edge of one of his huge blank fields and proclaim his ownership: All of this! Then four antelope would gallop across the horizon and just before they’d disappear, he’d point at them and say that’s where the land ended. Once he managed to amass four thousand acres of contiguous field, a great feat in the cutup map that the West is made of, but it didn’t last long—he soon traded it for something else.

I bought my first country house out of the back of the Village Voice for $8,000, rehabbing it with my husband and selling it for twice the price. The buyer brought cash in a suitcase. My husband and I spent the next ten years wrestling an artist’s loft out of the City of New York, no mean real estate feat. Advertised with a purchase price of $1, the Lower East Side tenement building had no floors or roof, and a tree grew through the foundation. Five years into the rehab, the City, noticing real estate values skyrocketing, slapped a very large lien on the deal. We dealt anyway. When we had to move to Silicon Valley during its insane heyday, we were told there were no houses in our modest price range. We found one, for sale by owner, and bought it ten minutes after we walked in. Two years later, potential buyers entered a glass room where we listened to their pleading to buy the property, each outbidding the next.

My father still speaks wistfully of a cousin whose daughter is San Francisco’s leading realtor. The best I could do, aside from housing myself, was to use my writing to try to capture some of that awe of the land he so cares about.

On the other hand, maybe I did go into real estate.

—Terese Svoboda has published fourteen books of poetry, fiction, memoir, and translation.