Where The Heart Is

As I wing my way east across the country for the third time this month, I look forward to getting home. What a powerful concept home is! For me, a fifth generation New Yorker who loves everything the city has to offer, home denotes both the specific apartment in which I live and the city itself. More broadly, it also embraces the rolling hills of Westchester County, where I spent my childhood summers and week-ends at my grandmother’s house, up through the northwest corner of Connecticut where I spend my week-ends now. It’s my landscape and I feel at home in it, a member of the herd on familiar ground.

For my wife, northwestern Connecticut also feels homey, because it reminds her of the rural England of HER childhood. My cousins, on the other hand, grew up in the same New York I did but have scattered to the mountains: eastern Washington, Aspen, Vermont, New Hampshire. They feel at home in these rugged dramatic landscapes which I find awe-inspiring but off-putting. Likewise my brother in the high desert. I couldn’t trade the lush green of New England for the stark sparse landscape of Santa Fe.

The concept of home resonates differently in America from other places in the world, because we are, and always have been, a nation of people on the move. Our ancestors had to be on the move just to COME here, many leaving towns and villages which their families had inhabited for hundreds of years. For most of history, many generations of the same family lived close together in the same area, with an almost indistinguishable connection between the sense of family, the sense of greater community, and the sense of place. For most Americans that complex sense of rootedness does not exist.

My son has lived in six different towns and cities in the last ten years, and in my observation his experience is not so unusual. He and my daughter-in-law work hard in every new place to create a home, make friends, build a community. People everywhere, even as they relocate for a new job, or a new love, or a better lifestyle, yearn for connection, both to people and to place.

Many people, perhaps surprisingly, find connection in New York. We are actually friendly here. Relationships spring up in the elevator, in the coffee shop, in the park with the dog, in the theater or the concert hall. And they are easily sustained because there are so many different things to do.

I read all the time that we are increasingly a world of global citizens. We are at home anywhere and everywhere. I don’t believe it. Most people want to belong somewhere, to a place and to a community. Real estate agents cannot make that happen, but we can ease the transition.

I am lucky to live in a space that I love, in a city that I love, with easy access to a landscape that I love.  In our best moments, we real estate agents can facilitate such connection for those we serve. We find them homes which vibrate with their particular chord as they walk through the door. We help connect the dots to create a sense of comfort in the city in which they already feel, or hopefully will feel, a sense of belonging. We can introduce our clients to like-minded people, help accumulate school information, restaurant information, ideas about where to go for this or that. For buyers moving to the city or within the city, we are the thin edge of the wedge of community. I want every Warburg client to feel that, thanks at least in part to us, they return to their neighborhood and their property every day feeling: Ah, I’m home!