Love Your House, Hate You

Keeping up with the Joneses is never easy, what with their plasma TVs and German sports cars. And it stands to reason that if we sometimes envy other people’s clothes or cars, we very much envy their homes. After all, real estate is perhaps the biggest investment most people ever make—especially here in San Francisco, where a house costs double what you’d pay in many other cities. Naturally, people can become a little obsessed with what kind of building and neighborhood they live in.

Nowhere is this obsession more obvious than online. Websites like the Real Estalker offer an intimate look inside the houses celebs across the country are buying and selling, complete with the price and details of the deal. Meanwhile, locally based sites like Curbed SF and SocketSite dish out tips, trends, gossip and, most importantly, photos and inside information on properties up for grabs. (One recent posting about a new high-rise in SoMa drew nearly 150 comments.)

“Looking at fabulous houses is like looking at pornography,” says the Real Estalker, a San Franciscan now living in Manhattan who needs to remain anonymous so that his sources will keep leaking him info about their high-profile clients. “There’s a lurid pleasure in looking at something you think you want, but can’t have.”

Perhaps more painful are the occasions when the green monster attacks in person rather than virtually. At some point, we’ve all been invited to a fabulous loft or a beautifully restored Victorian, gazed out the window at a drop-dead view and felt simultaneously awed by and sickened with desire for such a beautiful home. Just listen to how Chris Wiggum, a thirty-year-old independent-film publicist, describes it.

“I went to a party in a cavernous, meticulously designed place in SoMa that had just been bought and remodeled by three friends,” recalls Wiggum. “I love San Francisco and can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather be, but it crushes me when I walk into a place like that and am confronted by what I’ll never have. It makes me want to leave behind my job in the arts and start over as a stockbroker or real-estate agent. Or maybe rob banks.”

“This type of purchase envy hits close to the bone, and bites with pangs of inadequacy,” says the Real Estalker. “And unfortunately, it’s much worse in San Francisco than in New York. New Yorkers have a long history of renting until they die. Whereas in San Francisco, not being able to purchase is a more recent trend.”

But—as any longtime Manhattanite can testify—even rentals can inspire real-estate envy, if the apartment is nice enough.