‘The ache for home,” the poet Maya Angelou wrote, “lives in all of us.” It is where we are allowed to be ourselves.
Nearly every day, it seems, that ache is captured in one story or another in this newspaper. Finding and affording a home is a pressing matter, and that’s why it is so newsworthy.
A few recent examples:
In coverage last week, reporter Scott Merzbach and photographer Andrew Whitaker introduced Gazette readers to Tim Barnes of Belchertown and his two daughters, Claire, 4, and Riley, 6. The girls are too little to swing hammers, but their dad is investing at least 150 hours of sweat equity to help a Habitat for Humanity team build homes on East Pleasant Street in Amherst.
The girls got to peek inside the other day and try to envision, amid the rough framing, what their rooms will look like when they move in next year, after this admirable nonprofit completes its 38th and 39th local projects. Dad says the girls are eagerly discussing paint colors.
The Barnes family will share the new duplex with a single mother of three. Both parents were lucky enough to join the Pioneer Valley chapter’s mission to rally community volunteers and businesses to deliver, family by family, on the dream of home ownership.
Intern reporter Taylor Telford has also been talking to people about housing. She attended an open house last weekend and quizzed home-shoppers about the state of the market at this pivotal time – as the summer selling season winds down.
She found that single-family home sales in this region have been ratcheting up. One broker said that due to strong demand and a limited supply of properties, some sellers are getting multiple bids.
While that’s good news for property owners, some of whom are getting more than their asking prices, the competition injects even more anxiety into one of the biggest financial transactions most people will undertake. Some buyers have been writing letters to sellers to add a family story to the cold numbers of an offer – and finding that tactic helps.
It does because many sellers see their homes not just as investments, but as repositories of family memory. Why wouldn’t they like to hear of a new family’s affection for the place?
The housing market’s vigor means higher prices overall, but so far, only moderately. The median sale price for the first six months of this year was up a modest 1.8 percent over the same period last year, according to the Realtor Association of Pioneer Valley.
Statewide, the rising costs of single-family homes risk putting ownership out of reach. The state’s median single-family home price hit $372,000 in June, the highest ever. The outlook is better in this region, with the median price of January-June sales at $260,000 for Hampshire County and $209,000 for the Pioneer Valley as a whole.
Historically low interest rates are keeping even rising house prices within reach for many. Brokers say that millennials, those who came into young adulthood around the year 2000, are well-represented in this summer’s field of buyers and would-be buyers. That’s encouraging, but in another time, their parents and grandparents were taking out mortgages much earlier in their lives.
For others, the “ache for home” remains only that. In a guest column in today’s Viewpoints section, a representative of the nonprofit Amherst Community Connections laments that the town has not stepped forward to help fulfill hopes laid out in a 2008 report, “All Roads Lead Home: The Pioneer Valley’s Plan to End Homelessness.”
The author, Abra Lipton, reflects on a recent community forum on the issue and argues that Amherst can do more. Across the region, communities are facing up to the fact that temporary solutions to homelessness are costly and disruptive.
The permanent housing program recently dedicated on the grounds of the veterans hospital in Leeds shows that these goals are not far-fetched.
At the end of the day, this ache – whatever someone’s means – is about having a roof overhead. And having one’s own ground below, because home, as another poet, Robert Frost, put it, “is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”