I Want to Buy a Home In New Orleans

Sorting out my feelings about it.

When I graduated from college in 2009, I considered moving to New Orleans. I had never lived there. Hurricane Katrina had displaced several of my local relatives, but made warriors of the rest as they muscled through the wreckage. My good intention was to join them, but one mentor — who himself had been swept up to Ohio by the storm — lovingly discouraged it. The city needed long-term commitment more than recent college graduates in flux. So I moved to Los Angeles instead, then Oakland. I considered moving abroad. I only made my way to New Orleans in 2013, with a graduate school acceptance as my excuse. (It didn’t work out.)

Now, nearly four years in, I am considering staying on purpose. Yes, crime rates are high. And yes, the “public” school system is a network of charter programs with dubious enrollment practices. Even the demographics of the city are a departure from New Orleans before Katrina. Oil (the state’s largest industry) has damaged the coastline beyond repair, and landlords are converting long-time homes into short-term rentals. It’s also plausible that another hurricane will bamboozle or kill us. But if the city needs long-term commitment, and I am no longer in a graduate flux, is this the time to buy the condominium for sale in my neighborhood?

Financially, barring disaster, I would break even after one year. The down payment due from a first time home buyer is in my savings with a thin (very thin!) cushion for emergencies. I could recover the amount in six months or so, and my credit score is good. I have a stable job in a low tax bracket, and in a combination of extreme privilege and moderate self-control, I have no debt. A 30-year Conventional 97 or FHA mortgage would set me back just over $700 per month, but if my boyfriend — with whom I currently live — moved in with me, then we would each owe only slightly more per month than at our current place. This is under 20% of take-home pay for each of us — so, very low.

The auxiliary costs are also low. Moving our things would cost about one day and 6,000 calories, because our current apartment is four doors down from the condo. Our furniture can fill an extra room. There would also be no added expense for parking, because we would continue to park on the street. (This only becomes a problem at Mardi Gras, when moving a car at the wrong time means parking more than ten blocks away if you’re lucky. But now we have a year before the next one!) As I consider a public, two-year graduate program, which I can afford out of pocket while working, I would rather pay mortgage than more rent.

The decision is thus fraught not with tangible problems (money, health, family), but with problems of the mind. I am well aware of gentrification, shorthand for both development and exploitation. Add to this that New Orleans is not the average American city. Urban centers typically have housing and jobs in place for a rotating cast of young people in transition. The equivalent “recovery” market is entering its teenage years here, and the needs of employers and citizens are changing again. New Orleans has historically functioned like a large hometown that tourists visit for jazz, parades, and open container laws. If I buy a home that is comfortably within my means, am I developing or exploiting it?

My family’s local roots notwithstanding, white and college-educated “transplants” abound in this city now, often where long-residing families would or could not return after Katrina. That exodus was fueled in part by the bureaucracy of disaster relief. If five generations of your family shared one house for 85 years, who knew where the deed was before the flood, let alone after? And who could afford legal services? A crippled job market did the rest, and people of means scooped up, often with no malice or ill will, many of the emptied houses of New Orleans.

I have rented apartments in three of them. Non-native roommates have gone on to law school and graduate programs near home or in other states, with heart-rending personal statements about what they learned from their time here. They are deeply good people. Many of them won’t return to New Orleans with what they learn after leaving. It is a weird, modern, second-hand brain drain, but were they wrong to contribute immeasurable effort to good causes while they were here? Would it be wrong of me to buy this home knowing that if my career requires it, I may also leave?

I want to buy a home here because I want to hold stake in the place where I live, even if I can’t actually predict living here for good. I want to inhabit my niche among my dear, huge, wacky family. I want to continue to foster the relationships I have with my neighbors. I want to keep walking to the same convenience store, where they know what kind of ice cream I like and don’t mind if I bring along the dog. I want to keep commiserating about parking during Mardi Gras and the thick, awful heat in summer. I want a condo because I can’t afford a house. I want to do all of this without undercutting people who haven’t had the huge, countless advantages I have had my entire life, from health and education to skin colorand social safety nets.

Can it be done? And if I do it, how do I help preserve and promote the health of my neighborhood? New Orleans belongs to the people born and raised here, but if I borrow it as “my” city, am I hurting it?

Colleen McLellan lives in New Orleans and works at a non-profit for higher education.

This story is part of The Billfold’s I Want It Now series.

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