Home Buyer's Guide: A Suburban Plot or Not?
BUY A CONDO IN THE CITY, and you’ll gain hipster friends, go to art museums all the time, and automatically dress sharper, right? And doesn’t snatching up a suburban SFH mean you’ll automatically be awarded a minivan, 2.5 kids and an Eddie Bauer credit card? Nah, choosing whether to live in the rolling hills of Prince William County or bunk down in a loft in Shaw isn’t necessarily as cut and dried as all that.
There are multiple things buyers figure when weighing whether to buy in the ‘burbs or in the city. Think everything from regional tax laws and childhood memories to employment prospects and the affordability of real estate. Really, the list of factors folks consider as they purchase homes is as multi-faceted as they are. A potent stew of wishes and dreams — ideally tempered with a heaping helping of practicality — is simmering away during any house hunt.
“Generally, the wife rules, particularly in housing,” says Pat Sawhney, a Realtor with RE/MAX 100 in Springfield. “The wife is generally the one that makes the nest, and if she isn’t happy, the family isn’t happy.”
Sawhney says that the other main factor for customers debating whether to buy an urban or suburban home is, no surprise, what living in that new pad will mean for their commute. The farther her clients get from their workplace as they search for property, the more Sawhney counsels clients to watch where they dream of laying their heads.
“Sometimes people have to redefine what is important to them, possibly giving up [space in a house] in order to be closer in,” she says. “A lot of people have bought farther out and come to regret it. They find themselves wanting to move back in.”
There was a time when Paul Herron, 39, pictured above, — who makes his living renovating historic homes on Capitol Hill and bought his own century-old rowhouse there in 2000 for $280,000 — had his heart set on a farm in Washington County, Md.
“I was single then, and I worried my social life would be really limited” living so far out. “I Rollerbladed up to the Hill one day and thought,’Wow, this is quaint.’ And then the lifestyle issues started kicking in: I don’t need a car, I can walk to work, I can reduce my stress by walking.” Married now with two small children and more committed to the city than ever, Herron’s rural fantasy is but a memory.
A study ranking traffic congestion recently released by the Texas Transportation Institute said that the D.C. metropolitan region earned the dubious distinction of second place for worst rush-hour delays. Atlanta is tied with Washington, and only Los Angeles‘ congestion was deemed heavier.
That’s cold comfort to Blair O’Connor. The Fairfax County resident, who with wife Kristin bought a home there in 2002 for $375,000, says his commute is the key downside in an otherwise ideal setup for him and his growing family: one toddler and a second child due this month.
“We didn’t seriously look at houses in the District, because we thought it would be more difficult to find a house with a yard,” says O’Connor, 37, an attorney with a federal agency. Even with a commute of 60 to 90 minutes each way (“I hate it!” he groans), O’Connor says that the pluses — great neighbors, access to the community pool, and, yes, a nice yard — far outweigh the minuses.
Thinking that they’d be close enough to the city to enjoy its cultural amenities yet far enough away to avoid most parking hassles, Marty and Rick Summerour, pictured at right, moved to “uncool at the time” Springfield 22 years ago.
“We paid about $100,000 for a little rambler house with no garage and few amenities, as far as a modern house goes,” says Marty, 59. “I suspect if we had this life to live over again, we would have tried to land somewhere in Maryland, like Takoma Park. But we like our location even now — we can run to D.C. to see museum exhibits or over to Bethesda to shop or eat dinner.”
Even confirmed urbanites like Philip Baker and his partner, David Bender, who bought their Kalorama condo in 1995 for $307,000, see the ‘burbs’ appeal.
“When your friends who live out there invite you out for the evening, you think, ‘Gee, it’s so beautiful and quiet and peaceful here,’” says Baker, 70, a retired school administrator who first lived in the city in 1957, moved to Stamford, Conn., then returned to Washington in 1986.
That said, he insists he’d never sacrifice the easy access to “everything I love — opera, baseball games, theater, concerts. Add to that a very good restaurant scene and a fabulous public transportation system that actually takes you where you want to go. I think David might think about [living outside the city] more than I do, but the longer we live here, the less he yearns to live in the country,” Baker says.
It often boils down to one partner convincing the other of the merits of buying in the city or in the suburbs. Joel Ranck, a 39-year-old an employee of Children’s National Medical Center and a communications consultant, bought a home in Brookland with wife Gisell in 2003 for less than $300,000.
“When we met, I was living on Capitol Hill and she was living in Bethesda,” says Ranck, who now commutes to his job at Children’s Hospital on a Segway (“It costs me a nickel a day to run it,” he says) since his car bit the dust last year.
“Living in the city is about walking out of your house to grab a cup of coffee rather than getting in the car and doing it,” he says. “Everything looks like it’s supposed to be there, not manufactured.” Pressed to offer a downside to city living, Ranck notes that access to box stores like Sam’s Club or Costco requires a visit to the suburbs, and “it wasn’t that long ago that [D.C.] got a Home Depot.”
Conveniences aside, Linda DeGraffenreid was motivated by other factors when she bought her home in Gaithersburg‘s Relda Square development in 1985 for $98,000. She remembers she was impressed by how “safe and peaceful” Gaithersburg felt and how undeveloped it was then.
Then a single parent of two young children, she “remembers thinking, ‘Can I afford to do this?’” laughs DeGraffenreid, 59. But “my children had the run of the downstairs, the school district was highly rated, and I joined the homeowners’ association board to meet more of my neighbors.”
With her children now grown up and out on their own, DeGraffenreid, a business development specialist, is now “at the other end of the cycle — trying to find a condo that doesn’t have a ludicrous monthly fee.”
Once again, family as well as finances guide the prospective buyer’s choices.
“Both my sisters and my daughter live in the area,” De Graffenreid says, “and I want to stay close to them.”
Written by Express contributor Amy Rogers Nazarov
Photo by Marge Ely/Express
