Choosing A Home

[dragonlady7]

Downtown vs. surburbia, is my dilemma. But of course it's not that simple.

I am currently facing a dilemma. It involves where I should live.
My boyfriend and I have vacated our apartment in Westchester in order to take up residence in Buffalo. We did this in a rather abrupt fashion, with the end result that we are currently in his mom's house and all our worldly possessions are in her garage.
This could be worse: she just got high-speed Internet access, and Dave set up his wireless router from our old place, so I'm now comfortably ensconced in the dining room with my computer at precisely the right distance from my eyes, and my feet up on a cushy chair. So, things could be worse. In fact, things are measurably awesome. We so totally just escaped Westchester.

My dilemma is not a cruel one. No, it is actually rather a pleasant one-- but a dilemma it remains, for all that.

We looked at two places today and now I have to choose between them.
I will describe them in the order we saw them, and then sum up, and you'll see why it's not that simple.

The first was a 3-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side. It was near the chic Elmwood strip (bars, boutiques, tattoo parlors, coffee shops) and also quite near to the beautiful Olmsted parkways-- Bidwell, Chapin, etc. It's a beautiful district and a chic neighborhood.
The apartment itself was lovely. Original hardwood floors, original woodwork-- a leaded glass window in the front room, an ornamental fireplace with a quarter-sawn oak mantelpiece. It had three bedrooms, numerous large closets, an eat-in kitchen, a dining room, a little bitty sunporch, a big front porch, a pantry, a bay window with storage-bench seating in the living room (I've always wanted one of those, since I was little)...
Also, laundry facilities and some storage space in the basement.
Its rent would end up being about $190 a person if we had three people in there.
(We could afford not to have the third roommate so if that didn't work out we'd stil be ok-- about $290/person with two people. Our budget is $300ish.)

Upsides: Walking distance to chic locales and pretty things. (Close to Buff State and the Albright-Knox art gallery [andy warhol's soup cans].)

Downsides: No off-street parking, bedrooms smallish.

So, high on charm and funkiness, a little low on convenience. But for convenience it leaves our last digs in the dust.

Second choice:
A cozy 2-bedroom house in North Buffalo / Tonawanda (right around the border there where the city ends and the northern suburbs begin). It belonged to Dave's Aunt Matilda who bought it shortly after she and Dave's grandparents arrived from Latvia, fleeing the aftermath of the Second World War. She sold it to Dave's mother for like a dollar when she started getting really decrepit, and now lives in a nursing home.
The house is in beautiful condition; she was OCD about keeping it nice (they found that the pipes in the basement had been wrapped in tinfoil to keep them from getting dusty, and the foil had been recently replaced). It has a dining nook, two bedrooms, unfinished second floor / attic, dry basement, sun porch, yard, garage, off-street parking, a pantry in the basement, laundry in the basement, an extra fridge and stove in the basement. The back yard has two smallish flower beds in it. The picture window faces out onto the playing fields of the boys' Catholic high school across the street (the very same one Dave attended, coincidentally).
The bathroom has a beautifully-tiled blue-and-white design in the shower, designed by Dave's graphic-designer sister and done by Dave's late father (who was a contractor). The place has been lovingly maintained and is currently occupied by Dave's cousins, who have just made an offer (and been accepted) on a house about 3 blocks away. They love the neighborhood and just need a bigger place (one adorable toddler so far, and I think one in the planning stages perhaps?).
There's plenty of offstreet parking. It's walking / biking distance to Anderson's (awesome ice cream, beef on weck), the Tonawonda gym/aquatic center, Ted's (footlong hotdogs!) and numerous other North Buffalo / Tonawanda landmarks and locations.
The rent there would be $150 / person / month, to cover taxes and fees associated with the place.
It's two blocks from Dave's mom's house.
We could have a grill there, and I could dabble in gardening without getting in over my head (the yard's not big but it's cute).

Upsides: Convenient location (by automobile), plenty of space, privacy, beautiful details, very comfortable, really beautiful details (when I say suburbia I don't mean the soulless kind, I mean the cozy kind), family history, and you couldn't ask for a better landlady. Any improvements we want to make: sure, go ahead and do them, and they add to the eventual resale value of the house, which is money in Dave's mom's pocket. She's considering making the unfinished second floor into a third bedroom, which would up the house's value considerably. Also, plenty of parking, nobody cares if we have out-of-town guests for however long we want, and the town has excellent snow removal (better than the city). The off-street parking is a big plus.
Moving our stuff from Dave's mom's garage would take no time at all and would be darn easy.
And hell, it's all the convenience of owning a house without the hassle and commitment (!!) of actually buying one.

Downsides: The second bedroom is quite small. It's not walking distance to the cooler bars. And, we'd have to wait to move in until mid-July at the earliest, as the current occupants have yet to have the mortage on the new place approved. The house isn't architecturally significant or historic in any way, and the neighborhood borders on soulless in places. It's kind of, well, suburban. We couldn't go ahead with our plan to have Dave's buddy Corey as a roommate, which we'd been considering.

Basically, the conflict is between the two styles of Buffalo. (When I say "Buffalo" I generally mean the northern neighborhoods of that city; I don't think I've ever been south of downtown, and rarely enough that far down.) There are really two major, predominant styles of architecture in Buffalo, and the senses of style that go along with them. The first is the grand era when Buffalo was the Queen City, the era of the Frederick Law Olmsted parkways and the afterglow from the World's Fair (where McKinley was shot). Big houses dating from the 1920s or earlier, with fireplaces and leaded glass and hardwood floors and bay windows, second-story porches, hardwood trim, etc. Buffalo was a significant city, a cosmopolitan center, a center of culture and learning and night life.
The second style is more predominant as you move out to the suburbs, and seems to largely follow the Second World War. Houses are cozy bungalows, with little yards, affordable for the blue-collar American dream. The big industrial centers fueled this, and every nuclear family had a white picket fence and a car in the driveway, and tight-knit ethnic communities fed the factories and the Catholic schools in the postwar boom. Little houses, low ceilings, small fenced yards, very tidy and cozy, sitting on tree-lined but broad streets.

I kind of wish I were a chic and cosmopolitan person.
But I really think I'm a snug suburbanite at heart. I want the extra fridge in the basement, I want the fiercely-defended little square of lawn, I want the driveway that comes up to the side porch that everyone uses more often because it goes into the kitchen where most of the life is anyway. I want the privacy of having My Own Place, I want the convenience of the driveway that goes right to the kitchen door.

I really think I'm going to cast my vote for the house, even though it means I'll be semi-homeless and possibly nomadic for the next month and a half, and will probably have to get a car. (But I'm only spending half my rent budget, so as long as my insurance and routine operating expenses add up to less than $150/month or so, I'm well within my budget. I tried to get a quote from my insurance company but need info I don't have just this moment, so I'll have to try again tomorrow.)
I'm growing to like Dave's mom more and more (I find her inscrutable and so while I know academically that she must not dislike me because she displays none of the behavior I have observed her to use on people she does not like, I still remain a bit confused as to whether she actually likes me or not, as I am always awkward around her and usually say stupid things), and I would like to be near her after all. It's Dave's home turf and really, that's what makes it home instead of just another recession-wracked city. Also, we wouldn't have to deal with landlord chicanery. Nor would we need to put down a security deposit. Dave's mom wouldn't have the hassle yet of selling the place, and we'd save a bit of money. With the car I'd probably have to have, I'd be able to expand my possible area of job search (I'm still not sure what kind of job I'll pursue).
And we could leave or stay as long as we wanted, without worrying about leases and timing and the like.

But, it was a nice apartment. (I make it easier on myself by pointing out that the rent was very low and yet there was no observable flaw. Something must be wrong somewhere that I'm not noticing. Still, if anyone else wants to rent it, ask me for the number-- it's totally gorgeous.)

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

That's pretty crazy. That 3BR costs less than my 2BR in the South Wedge, and I've got a schweet-ass deal going.

Not that I'd ever move to Buffalo. Ever so slightly, plates trump wings.

darius