Home for the Holidays

My family is reuniting in Boulder, the home of our son, daughter-in-law, and grandson, for Christmas this year. As we fly cross country with millions of other Americans traveling to be with people they love, I am struck by how much my sense of place, family, and community have both reinforced and shaped our family’s real estate needs and those of so many of our contemporaries.

I grew up in a family with an enormous sense of place. My mother’s parents, grandparents and great grandparents were New Yorkers; the Upper East Side, where all of them have lived, has always felt ancestral to me, truly like home turf. For just that reason, I wanted to strike out on my own. I needed my choice of home to update their sense of values, and add the beliefs that my wife and I shared and needed to assert independently.  Our moves, first to Brooklyn Heights and then to the Upper West Side, were a sort of Declaration of Interdependence. On the one hand, we were not completely rejecting the lives of our Upper East Side parents. On the other hand, in choosing to live in a less gentrified and more economically diverse area, we were using real estate to announce our distinct family identity (and believe me, the Upper West Side of 1977 really WAS a different world.) We made friends who shared our beliefs in the West Side playgrounds. Our kids went to different schools than the schools to which we had gone. We felt both connected to and distinct from our families.

Then, as we matured, so did the neighborhood. As we became more affluent, so did the neighborhood. Much of the economic and cultural diversity which we liked in first moving to the West 80s has evanesced. So when our kids came to the age of setting up their own homes, they did what we did. They sought out areas which they felt better embodied how THEY viewed the world. Our daughter, our niece, and many of their friends moved to Brooklyn. Meanwhile, our son and daughter-in-law found opportunity west of the Mississippi and moved to Boulder, where they are now surrounded by a community of like minded young liberal professionals and where they will probably buy a house in the next few years.

Americans redefine themselves by place. As a society, we don’t stay put.  For each generation, our choices about where to live, whether across the Park, across the bridge, or across the country, become a statement about how we see ourselves in relation to both family and community. And wherever we go, into whatever places we believe will reflect us best, we are always working to create that basic human need: a sense of home.

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