CHAPTER VIII.

TO OWN OR TO RENT: A DIFFICULT QUESTION.

"Half the sting of poverty is gone when one keeps house for
one's own comfort and not for the comment of one's neighbors."
—Miss MULOCK.

When the ideals of an older generation are forced upon a younger, already struggling under new and strange environment, the effect is often opposite to that intended. The elders in their pride of knowledge, and the real-estate promoters in their greed for gain, have been urging the young man to own his house on penalty of shirking his plain duty. They say he must have a home to offer his bride, as the bird has a nest. Building-loan associations, homes on the instalment plan, appeal to the sentiments they think the young man ought to heed.

The young man is often modest, almost always sensitive, and he prefers to bear dispraise rather than to tell the real reason he hesitates. His ear is closer to the ground, he feels even if he cannot express the doubt of the disinterestedness of the land-scheme promoter, of the wisdom of his father. He knows better than his elders the uncertainties of salaried men, young men with a way to make in the unstable conditions of to-day.

The effect of this well-meant advice is not to hasten his marriage, but to put it off because he is not allowed to take the course he feels safest. Or if he is willing, the parents of his prospective bride are not, and so young people do not marry on $1000 a year, for fear of the elder generation and their supposed wisdom.

The young people are not justified by present-day conditions in owning a house on an income of $2000 a year unless

  1. They have money to put into it which it will not cripple them for life to lose;
  2. They care so much for the idea of ownership that they are willing to take the risk of losing one half the investment should they be compelled to move;
  3. They possess the fortitude to give it up at the call of duty after all they have lavished on it;
  4. They care enough for the real education and the real fun they will get out of it to save in other ways what the running and repairs will cost over and above the amount estimated. This saving will be largely by doing many things with their own hands.

To be bound hand and foot either by unsalable real estate or by sentiment is an uncomfortable condition for the young family who may find itself in uncongenial surroundings, in an unhealthful situation, or who may need to retrench temporarily.

Another serious objection to building and owning a house in the first years of married life is the chance that the house will be too large or too small, or the railroad station will be moved, or the trolley line will be run under the garden window, or a smoking chimney will fill the library with soot (although the latter will not be permitted in the real twentieth-century town).