Jennifer Wilson was complaining about her rent in New York City when an acquaintance suggested she look into buying a place.

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Jennifer Wilson was complaining about her rent in New York City when an acquaintance suggested she look into buying a place. “There were just about 770,000 problems with that plan, the main one being that that number is the average sale price of a one-bedroom co-op in the city,” Wilson writes. But the person told her about a Housing Development Fund Corporation co-op—below-market-rate apartments for low- and middle-income New Yorkers. If she took a ten-hour class with a local organization, the city could provide her with $100,000 toward a down payment. “To qualify at the time, I needed to make less than 80 per cent of the area median income,” Wilson writes. “I had never been so grateful for my terrible life choice to major in Russian literature.”
This past December, Wilson went to attend an information session for first-time home buyers. “I had gone that night expecting to hear how I could save money, but instead it felt like I was there to be saved,” she writes. One presenter suggested that homeowners were “more likely to vote,” because they were “more invested in their communities.” We would be building “generational wealth,” another speaker said, for those who came after us.
“Still, I wasn’t sure that buying an apartment was the solution. Some of the monthly maintenance fees for co-ops neared $1,000,” Wilson continues. “I thought of a friend who had just bought a place in Crown Heights. ‘I can’t really save now. Or spend,’ she had told me. I suddenly pictured myself in my future apartment, my freedoms and pleasures restricted, all so that I could one day pass on real estate to a hypothetical child. Was this an info session or the set of ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ ?” Wilson traces the role of homeownership in American culture and contemplates the question of whether to rent or buy in New York City.

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