Confession: I’m a Homeowner

In the winter of 2025, Seattle held a special election to decide whether the city might use a new payroll tax to fund mixed-income housing. The idea was that it would increase the overall housing supply, lower prices, and soften the impacts of a regionwide crisis. I — a longtime renter living just outside of town, with maybe a few thousand dollars in my savings account — posted an Instagram story targeted at my friends:

I can’t vote in the Feb. 11 election but I want to afford a home in Seattle someday and sure would vote for Prop 1A if I was voting!

Seven weeks later, I bought a home in Seattle.

How that happened has made me feel distressed, and fortunate, and like it might be worth confessing on the internet, where some other Millenial who was raised to believe adulthood equals home ownership might encounter this exploration of why the American Dream in 2025 can be absolutely doused in guilt.

How It Happened

As you may have guessed, and in line with a generational trend many others have written about recently, I didn’t pay for the house I bought — or at least, I didn’t pay much. The content of my meager savings account was a drop in the bucket compared to the savings of my husband, who had also, sadly and uniquely, been given money from three different relatives who passed away. When an ugly house popped up on Zillow in an idyllic Seattle neighborhood, a bit over the budget we’d ever dreamed of, but at 72% the then-median home price, we took a $10,000 loan from family in order to submit a competitive offer — and surprisingly, it was just enough.

We got fancy cocktails after signing all the paperwork downtown, more to calm our nerves than to celebrate — or maybe we just wanted to find some kind of solace in repeating another stupid financial decision. Seeing the next thirty years of our lives mapped out on a spreadsheet of debt, with interest accruing like a virus, had felt like a trap. I thought: Why would anyone do this?

The Identity Crisis

“Congrats on the house!” coworkers offered as they heard the news in the weeks to come.

“Oh, thanks,” I’d say sheepishly, and then proceed to tell them all the intimate financial details I outlined above, whether they wanted to hear them or not. I didn’t want anyone to assume I had more money than I did, and I didn’t want anyone feeling bad about not being able to afford a house themselves. But there was another layer to my feelings that took me a while to uncover: I didn’t actually want to be a homeowner.

Did I want to live in a house with a yard and guest room and veggie beds and flower boxes and a big outdoor table to host dinners? Absolutely.

But did I want to identify myself as a homeowner? Absolutely not.

In recent years, I’d become a certified Seattle liberal. “The radicalization of Bobbie Nickel,” my friend called it once with a smile. He’d watched me evolve from a suburban, Orange County-raised sorority girl to a transit-riding, social services-supporting, bleeding heart leftie.

Renting a house on the dodgy side of White Center felt right for that version of me, a somewhat lawless area where people parked cars on the lawn and neighbors sold drugs in the alley. I was proud to live there, eager to invite friends over from polished neighborhoods and take them to the likely unpermitted street food vendor down the road. I was a white lady, yapping about how diverse and working class her neighborhood was: the very picture of gentrification. And when I’d ride the bus, listening to the local podcaster who interviews political candidates via lightning round, I’d delight myself playing along:

“Have you taken transit in the past week?” I am right now!

“Have you voted in every primary election in the past four years?” I have!

“Do you own or rent your residence?” I rent!

Renting was a badge of pride for me. But suddenly, I wasn’t just thinking about buying a house — I was thinking about buying a house in a mostly white, affluent, NIMBY neighborhood with crime watch signs and a keypadded gate to its private beach trail, a neighborhood which voted against the social housing proposition I’d championed on Instagram not even two months prior.

“I don’t want to raise kids who think this kind of neighborhood is normal,” I worried to my husband when he first found the house on Zillow.

“Yeah,” he conceded. “But think how safe we would feel. Not getting broken into. Walking around the neighborhood. Taking kids down to the beach.”

The kids do not exist, but our decision to buy the house felt like we were doing it for them. This yard, this guest room, these veggie beds and the perfect deck for a big outdoor table — this is where our whole life would play out, where we’d die, even, because Millenials can’t do starter homes. Getting this house nearly killed us, and morally, I was dying, moving into the exact kind of neighborhood a suburban, Orange County-raised sorority girl would be drawn to. I was reverting. For the sake of a family I didn’t have, and because I could, I quietly removed my renter badge of pride and joined the throngs of peers from privileged upbringings buying expensive homes in expensive markets with other people’s money.

What Now?

As it goes in wealthy neighborhoods, there are positives, and even some which coincide with my leftie leanings. There’s lots of biking and pedestrian safety; there’s a bus line that will eventually connect to the light rail; and we sit at the very edge of the city border.

“While I’m scared to admit to my liberal Seattle heroes that I am no longer a renter,” I texted my friends in local government affairs, after I moved, “I am out of unincorporated King County and get to vote in Seattle city elections again…”

If you follow Seattle politics, you know why I used an ellipsis. It’s a pendulum-swinging election season, the kind when you post cringey Instagram stories encouraging friends to vote a certain way that you’ll come to regret weeks later. But I am eagerly awaiting the August primary.

The question is, is voting enough? If I vote in what I feel is the interest of Seattle’s diverse, working class communities — a grip I will likely lose rapidly, if I ever had it, living where I do?

I find myself mulling on ways to activate — joining the elderly neighborhood council, maybe, sweet-talking them into understanding the benefits of density, advocating for rezoning. I deliberate how much I’m motivated by a need to relieve my own anxieties, but arguably, it’s better than falling into the easy lifestyle of a wealthy Seattle neighborhood, stabbing a “Hate Has No Home Here” sign into my yard and popping down to the beach. So I’ll mull until I land on something actionable.

In the meantime, I question whether any of Seattle’s liberal leaders would have discouraged me from buying this house, knowing them and their lightning round answers pretty thoroughly. It feels like a time for everyone to thrive where they can, especially as part of the generation whose memes constantly point out our multiple once-in-a-lifetime challenges. You could argue that home-buying is like traffic — that, if you’re in it, you’re part of the problem. But what would’ve been solved, had we moved into a duplex? Wouldn’t we have just taken someone else’s home? And isn’t it better that we wound up where we did, instead of yet another retired set of Boomers who doesn’t want “riff raff” in the neighborhood?

Only if we act opposite of them, I suppose. So begins the quest to be the progressive good neighbor in a light blue neighborhood — and not to lose sight of her amid the amenities.