MILLIONAIRES

I live on a street of millionaires, or at least a lot of close-to-millionaires. So how do we millionaires spend our time? Cavorting, lawn parties, entertaining others of the leisure class?

Hardly. The younger ones go off in the morning to government offices, law firms, medical jobs, and the like; basic middle-class occupations. Some of us who are supposed to be retired—the cranky old guys—work for chump change. One teaches at a community college. Another turns out the lights at a local golf course. Still another is a low-level editor—a comma counter—with a government agency. All for chump change. The neighborhood poker group plays for nickels, dimes, and quarters: chump change.

So are we millionaire retirees working for chump change because we enjoy it? Yeah, right. The bottom line is that we need the chump change to bear to the cost of having outrageously priced property. That cost is called real estate taxes.

Decades ago we bought middle-class homes in a Washington, D.C., suburb. As the years went by, the prices others were willing to pay for these homes moved inexorably upwards, sometimes slowly, sometimes in disturbing bursts. On one hand, we felt good about feeling wealthier. On the other, the local government was not bashful about tapping that wealth. That was okay for those few whose income was on a decided upward track. For those of us not so fortunate, buying our rapidly appreciating property anew each year from the local government has taken an ever heftier share of our stagnate or only moderately increasing earnings.

And for some retirees, the yearly re-purchasing of their homes has become a real burden, eating into the funds set aside for those final years in the House of Drooling on Oneself.

As home prices began approaching the million dollar mark, the nature of the buyers began changing. Most of them are really good people. But most of them are also something the neighborhood did not have much of: Republicans. In fact, one of the cranky old guys—an unreconstructed Henry Howell-Keep the Big Boys Honest Democrat—began referring to the neighborhood as the neighborhood of Young Republican Starter Homes. He hypothesized that the newcomers would only be here a few years because they would soon want to join their own kind in places such as McLean and Belle Haven.

So is there a moral to this story? It’s certainly not easy to sympathize with property owners who have the option of cashing in their greatly appreciated properties and moving to cheaper locales. So what if they have to abandon their homes of many decades. The Ownership Society is not a free lunch. Perhaps the only moral is that being a millionaire is not what it used to be.

(P.S.: If you don’t know who Henry Howell was, you are either no Virginian or too young to be reading this.)

DSH