It’s hard to put happiness theory to work in a personal real estate strategy, especially when you are part of a species programmed to make the wrong decisions. But policy-makers have begun to pick up the slack. Britain’s Labour government used it to reform that country’s unemployment system. The city of Bogotá used research on status to underpin a restructuring of its road system, taking prime space away from cars and giving it to buses, bikes, and pedestrians so poor commuters could feel more equal. Optimism shot up.
How would the lessons from well-being research inform a happier home policy? Would we tax big house lots as we do booze and cigarettes? Slap tolls on highways to push people into denser neighbourhoods? Combine old folks’ homes with child care centres? The theory may actually support such measures, but it could just as easily be used to justify herding the poor into low-income ghettos such as the Downtown Eastside — after all, the jobless feel markedly better when they hang out with other unemployed people. The territory is as risky and uncertain as my own big-house conundrum.
But the market may have been kind to my man and me, in a roundabout way. We weren’t employing happy economics when we chose our new abode. We just couldn’t afford a house of our own. That’s how we came to buy a third of Keri’s 100-year-old creaker in a quiet, leafy nook of East Vancouver, the cheap side of town. The house was cramped, but interest rates were low. It seemed natural to borrow more cash and invest it in a renovation. Everyone else was doing it. Now the place has grown three extra bedrooms. It’s bigger than the neighbours’ houses, bigger than all our friends’ houses, too, and our mortgage payments have grown apace.
According to the arithmetic of well-being, this financial maxing out is a recipe for misery, especially if we decide to feed our monster mortgage by working harder or longer for more money. Instead, we have chosen not to let our house become proof of Rayo’s unhappiness formula.
No, we’re not selling it. We’re filling all those spare rooms with renters.
I never imagined I’d be living with a gaggle of roomies when I hit forty. From a distance, the prospect has the appearance of a kind of half-assed slackerism, a failure to maintain a respectable status trajectory. Yet on good days, I have glimpsed in the half-framed shell and flapping plastic of our house a model straight from the hedonic textbooks. We will fill those rooms with four, five, six bodies. We will all cross paths in the unfinished kitchen. Since we won’t have the money to eat out, we will share meals on an old table alongside our recycled cabinets. There will be wine, too. Lots of wine. Our voices will carry over the arm’s length to our neighbours’ windows, and they will come over to borrow cups of sugar.
Our acquisitive, status-hungry genes may wish for a life more grand, more private, more sweepingly elegant and expansively lonely. But scarcity will have relegated us to a life of conviviality and trust. It will be hard to avoid the shared moments that drench baboons, cavemen, and even middle-aged slackers in feel-good neurotransmitters. If the economists are right, this big house just may render us happy, in spite of our unrealized desires.
