What If Your Current Home is Your Forever Home?

If you haven’t already, embrace your current space

Photo by Lui Peng on Unsplash

My wife and I live in a one-bedroom apartment in a lower-income part of town. From our complex, there are no cool bars to walk to or parks within jogging distance. In fact, our complex is so far removed from any business that Uber drivers and friends alike struggle to find our street. When we moved into our unit in 2019, we were in a mad dash to find housing and this became home because this was the first complex to accept our application.

We planned to make the apartment work for a year or two and then move somewhere that matched our lives a little more: the lively gayborhood, the beautiful barrio, or even the trendy hipster enclave. So we made our apartment comfortable but didn’t settle in for the long haul.

Our dream of moving up and out seemed to be on the cusp of realization in mid-2020. I secured a promotion at work, we were saving massive amounts of money due to the statewide quarantine, and we started fantasizing about a two-bedroom near a park or little corner market.

But right as we started to look for places, the housing market exploded. Apartments that had only been $1500 in 2019 were suddenly renting for $2300+. It seemed everyone had the same idea we did.

Fast forward a few years and prices have only continued to climb. I’ve survived two rounds of layoffs over the last six months and now am hesitant to make any big financial decisions as I wonder if the floor will fall out at any moment. Luckily, our landlords don’t have any interest in losing tenants, so they’re keeping rent increases surprisingly low. We can afford to stay here and have a night out when we want.

All this to say, our “temporary” one-bedroom looks like our home for the foreseeable future. As I type that, it dawns on me how many things my wife and I held onto for the next place and how many changes we’ve avoided making in our temporary home. Now, suddenly, it seems foolish to treat this apartment as anything other than permanent.

It’s no secret that the United States economy is a mess: Google calls the situation with the debt ceiling a “crisis,” the housing shortage perpetuates chronic homelessness, and the cost of living keeps…