Keeping Track

“By the looks of the loads on the trains, housing starts are up,” my father said to me. “There’s more lumber. That’s a good sign.”

That was last month. Today the report came out from the Commerce Department: Housing starts were up in June 6.9% over May. They were at the highest number since October 2008.

No, my father is not a psychic. He’s a railroad man. He’s retired now, but he spent 38 years working in the freight rail industry. Now, he and my mother live in a house that’s only three lots down from a train track. When they looked at the house, he was afraid the trains would drive him crazy. Six months later, they often don’t notice the sound (and I can personally attest that the ones that come through in the 4am hour sound like they are tunneling into the living room).

Those tracks carry commuter trains too. They come lighter, less thunderous. But when a freight train comes through, my dad can tell what’s on it just by the vibration of the ground, the sound of the rails under the weight.

“Intermodal,” he’ll say.

All those years in the rail yards have taught him a lot about what comes through when the economy’s good, and what drops off when it’s not. I’d guess that for at least 30 of those 38 years, Dad could predict a mild uptick in construction before the construction industry could. He knew when the automotive industry was falling off – not just from deliveries of cars but from parts and tires. He knew when the weather had been bad somewhere along the line because shipments would slow down or back up. When Katrina hit in 2005, he wound up in a helicopter surveying the 20+ miles of track his railroad had lost to flooding, and eyeing the train cars that had been lifted and moved by the water, sometimes finding high ground a mile or two from the track. When the economy went bad in 2008, the trains got a lot lighter.

The country could learn a lot from guys like my dad.

The railroad industry is one of the least appreciated in the country, I’d suspect. It’s taken for granted. Sometimes people barely seem to recognize trains are even there. Unless they’re griping, complaining about waiting at a crossing, complaining about an accident at a crossing as if it’s somehow the train’s fault, complaining about hazardous materials coming through their towns.

The truth is, when railroads stop, the American economy stops too.

If it weren’t for trains, there would be exponentially more heavy trucks on the highways, leading to more crashes, higher fuel costs for everyone and higher sales prices at Wal-Mart because it costs more to ship the goods over land. There would be shortages of food, dry goods, paper, cleaning solvents, coal for electricity, cattle… almost anything you can think of. And yes, lumber.

This country is criss-crossed with train tracks. The connection of east to west with that rail was one of the finest hours in American innovation, paid for with a lot of actual blood, sweat, tears and broken backs. I grew up listening to one side of phone calls about shipments from one yard to the next, hearing my dad get up and go to a derailment at any hour of the night, drawing on the backs of pages and pages of intermodal routing printouts. For my first 18 years, the railroad impacted me directly. For the next four, it helped pay for my college education. And as an adult, I’m lucky to be a little more aware than most about all the things railroads do.

And if I forget, the housing start statistics… and the distant sound of a horn… will remind me.

******

Now on my bookshelf:
The Sense of An Ending – Julian Barnes
The O’Briens – Peter Behrens

 

The Slow Descent Into Madness: Phase 2

Well, I’ve done it. I’ve almost completely lost my mind. I’ve, at the very least, confirmed my pathway to madness.

Today, I met with a realtor.

I may have mused to you before about how I should probably buy some real estate some time in the near future, seeing as how the interest rates are stupidly low and the housing prices are lower than they’ve been since I had mall bangs. And I need to secure my financial future and make a solid investment that will supplement my paltry 401(k) and IRA, which have suffered, if not losses, then anemic growth in the four years since I opened said IRA. I have no illusions about home ownership vis-a-vis that of my parents’ generation: I fully expect that mine will not be a generation that profits nearly as much from its dealings in land and structure. No, unless you’re Mark Zuckerberg (who’s a few years behind me), mine is the generation whose screwedness in all things financial resembles a small monument in size. The baby boomers sucked everything up and dumped a bunch of debt and market shenanigans in our laps and now we’ll never retire, have Social Security or reap the reward of living in the wealthiest nation with the best opportunities of a once-in-a-lifetime global growth and trade boom at its zenith.

But congrats to those of you who will. I don’t begrudge you that one bit. Unless you’re responsible for my generation’s impending destitution. In which case: This is a stickup.

Alright, so anyway, since market volatility has the world freaked out and the low interest rates have my mattress doing a better job of generating appreciable savings APY than my banks (and lately there ain’t been much appreciation going on… hey-oh!)  it still seems as though real estate is the last best hope of creating some growth in the old portfolio.

So why is it crazy for me to start looking?

Well, I don’t really know what my job will be in a month/season/year.

You see, I don’t particularly like where I work right now, and it’s only getting tougher. And this isn’t about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, here. This isn’t about self-actualization. This is about the company and management treating people really, really poorly, among other, more corporately colossal clusterf—s of legal and financial weight. As regular readers may recall, I’ve been looking for a job. There is the possibility of returning to my old job, but I don’t know that the odds are tremendous because I think they want to promote someone from within, pay him less than I’d need and then hire to fill his spot on the cheap. And I’m constantly worried about losing the job I have. And I don’t want to get stuck in it, either.

But there comes a time in every woman’s life when she has to be a grownup, and those anti-anxiety meds I’ve been on for two weeks are kicking in, so I’m feeling a little adventurous. Or at least less like I’m going to die from hyperactive nervousness.

Market instability, professional uncertainty, mild mental illness. This is a great combination for homebuying, no?

I’ve been surfing the market via the Google Machine for a few years now, trying to note trends in prices and areas that spark my interest. I also have the advantage of having parents who have bought ten properties and sold seven in their lives. They kind of know the game and they like it when I ask them things. Then again, if I had done what my father wanted me to do four years ago, I’d have bought on an interest-only loan and would now probably be using my hands to paddle down a creek that smells not unlike feces.

So there’s that to consider.

In my searchings, I have found several houses I really liked, and the market is finally coming around to my way of thinking vis-a-vis how much money (and will to live) it wants to suck from me. I’m lucky that I know my city pretty darn well, so I can look at a zip code or a main road and know whether it’s a good, bad or borderline area. The other day I found a listing that I adored. It was a borderline area. My voice teacher lives four blocks away in a good part; a couple blocks east of the house gets dodgy. With gentrification, it has the potential to be a moneymaker in a shorter time than other places. The asking price was great and the seller was willing to bring as much as $17,000 to the table to unload the property. That part made me fairly sure there’s a body walled up in there somewhere, but I’d be silly not to be interested in the house. After all, it had three bedrooms, inlaid and hardwood floors, a good kitchen, good bathrooms and a full finished basement. Plus an attached garage, over which I nearly passed out with excitement, because having an attached garage in most parts of my city is like having your own unicorn. And I’ve always wanted a unicorn.

Being the curious and safety-conscious person that I am, I drove by the house semi-slowly yesterday after my voice lesson. There’s a school directly across the street, which is good for safety and maybe not so good for noise. The house looked, from my brief observation, well cared-for and tidy outside. I went back last night after work to see what goes on after 11pm. All was quiet. A woman was outside walking her dog. Wow, I thought. Exactly what I’d like to be able to do. Today I went back by again. And you know what I saw that I missed the first two times somehow?

Two boarded-up houses, three and four doors down.

Respectively.

Oh well.

But I met with the realtor, Hottie McHousehunter, to get the ball rolling on my education, at the very least. He apparently “specializes” in first-time homebuying, including finance options and ways of getting around mortgage insurance if you can’t do 20% down. I might, but then I’d be broke, so it’s not a bad thing to investigate. He walked me through the basics of the process like I’m a five-year-old, which is exactly what I need. And I was relieved to realize that I do kind of know some stuff, although I was disappointed to confirm that, as it has every day of my life since I’m in fourth grade, my brain shuts down and my vision gets all swimmy when people talk to me about finance and number-examples.

But that shouldn’t be a problem at all.

At least if I don’t like the house I’m looking at, I’ll still like something I see. Hottie McHousehunter is going to be nice to work with.