Real estate is eternal. “Poor naked wretches,” King Lear called the market’s losers. “How shall your houseless heads âe¦ defend you from seasons such as these?” Yes, I know, he’d just lost his ancestral castle, but was there nothing the old narcissist couldn’t moan about?

That’s what I thought when I read a feature in my local city magazine on couples who had just paid ridiculously inflated prices on what turned out to be damp, flea-ridden shacks, rife with joist-rot and electrical wiring made of dental floss. I live in Toronto, where housing is almost as expensive as in Vancouver, and useful personal energy is sucked up by talking about the housing market. Otherwise sane people find house prices fascinating and dread the idea of the market tanking.

“You already own a house,” I say.

“But if prices go down, I won’t be able to make a profit and trade up.”

“If prices go down,” I say, “young people can afford to buy houses.”

“But I’ll be eating Swiss Chalet for the next 60 years to pay down a mortgage I took out for a chunk of air.” The air is the profit he would have made if prices went up.

In other words, his version of heaven is someone else’s version of hell. See, this is why they write features about real estate; so readers can have a good laugh at someone else’s expense.

House and home

I recently had a strip torn off me on a left-wing website to which I donate a delayed version of this column. Why are all columnists rich and white, some readers complained.

I, being neither, chose to be offended. Why are Globe and Mail columnists all male (and that includes the women)? Go pester them, I thought.

I dug deeper and found that they considered “owns a house in Toronto” as the definition of “rich.” And this is where I part company with almost everyone who owns a house or wants to own one.

I live in a home, not a house. It is not an investment. It is where I hide from the world and I don’t care what it’s worth because if I sold it, I would still need another hideout, which would cost the same. I am in fact desperate to sell my home as I have grown to hate my neighbourhood, but as my husband points out, pretty much every neighbourhood everywhere has the same collection of defects: the beige stucco that is the aluminum siding of the modern era, alcoholism, pedophiles, the primacy of dogs over children, the hounding of homeless people, a stalker, casual anti-Semitism, the trickle of water pressure in the taps that gets slighter each year, the local resentment about rising property taxes from people who won’t clear their sidewalks or pick up litter “because it’s the city’s job,” and what seems to be a grudge against good food in restaurants.

These are things I wouldn’t mind if I were investing in a house. But I’m living in a home.

Give me liberty or give me mortgage

As for the “mortgage-enslaved generation” referred to in that story’s headline, this is past a joke. Mortgages have always meant enslavement. The word translates as “pledge unto death.” Just as everyone who comes home with the new baby understands that sex is a lonesome train whistle headed west, everyone with a mortgage becomes a sharecropper.

Naomi Klein recently wrote in The Nation about this. When U.S. President George W. Bush spoke in his first term about the “ownership society,” he wanted to turn poor people into homeowners and he told financiers to lend, lend, lend. “Subprime lenders were taking their cue from the top,” Klein wrote. Bush’s notion was based on former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s scheme to sell off council houses to their tenants, a financial disaster but a political masterstroke. Because once you have a mortgage, you have a stake in the status quo and you will vote rightwards. But what if — as now — you don’t own a house, but rather a debt you can’t pay?

My local magazine thinks it will be a disaster if house prices go down. No, it won’t. The disaster will come when overextended mortgagees lose their jobs. These couples eating hard-boiled eggs for dinner and delaying having children will remember 2008 as the gilded age. Jobless with a mortgage, they’ll be eating sandwiches of library paste and roof tiles, and bearing children to rent them out as kidney donors.

It’s going to be horrible.

Read your way to financial freedom

Here’s my advice. Buy Hidden Profits in Your Mortgage, by Alan Silverstein, and learn what you are paying the bank — just in interest alone. Ask your bank for an amortization schedule. Your mortgage is not shrinking, it is shaving you with dull blades.

Consider renting.

Read memoirs by deranged homeowners. Read The Jewel Garden by Monty Don. He nearly went mad. He’s fine now. Or read Miranda Seymour’s In My Father’s House. It’s not a good book but it’s a great case study of a snobbish man ruined by house psychosis. Hell, read The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and sleep on the beach.

Excellent grass

It used to be that when I thought of houses, I thought of security. “That feeling of safety you crave, it comes at a hard, hard price,” Bruce Springsteen sang disapprovingly. Now I think of the British political writer John O’Farrell, an Old Labourite who bought a house and got staid. “A friend told me he had got hold of some really excellent grass — and I knew he was referring to the problems I’d been having reseeding my lawn. It’s just as well we didn’t all go on demonstrations any more because the chants would have changed somewhat. ‘What do we want? A winter-flowering clematis! When do we want it? Before we lay the patio!'”

P.S. Paint your window trim in the Para Paints (they’re Canadian) version of Benjamin Moore’s Cloud White. Don’t do scary white. Everyone makes this mistake. Good luck to you, sir.

This Week

No Hallmark holiday is more loathsome to me than Valentine’s Day. But yesterday, Knopf Canada sent me a copy of their new fiction anthology, Four Letter Word: Original Love Letters, by Joshua Knelman “It’s a lot of fun,” they promised me. (As you read this, play Love Hurts by Nazareth on your iPod.)

Now I love a good cry, I like to sob till I’m dehydrated, it’s a great release, but sadly rarely happens.

I have a nice line in morose. Five times a day, I lapse into despair. But scrunch my face up, do some experimental lung-heaving, tell myself Bobby Kennedy’s still dead, Joe Strummer won’t be backâe¦ and I still can’t cry.

Knopf was right. Four Letter Word is a lot of fun. I started reading — mmm, this is quite moving — and then hit page 71 with Gautam Malkani’s heartbreaking letter from a young boy to the mother he never knew. Waaaaaaah! I wept so extensively I soaked my hair and had to be sat upright, patted, rinsed and brought a special new box of Kleenex. It wasn’t like the end of Such a Long Journey by Rohinton Mistry where you’re a stunned mullet, it’s so sad. My eyes leaked teaspoons; there were puddles on the pillow. I couldn’t eat my dinner, which was my favourite steak, and was put to bed early with comforting honey in my tea.

Thanks, Knopf! All howled out for another year.