Along with its pollen counts during spring and summer, the local news should also offer an index on real estate fever. My case is rather acute this year. No doubt it has something to do with a recent move from a city with an obscene real-estate market to one where it is merely overheated (and said to be cooling—bring on the deep freeze, please!). Who hasn’t gotten pumped up in the past few years with stories about record-low interest rates, refinancing bonanzas, the next hot neighborhood, loft conversions, and so on? Everyone talks real estate these days, not just New Yorkers. Banks are hawking home loans with Day-Glo posters in their windows, just like the coffee-and-donut specials at the gas station down the block. Then there’s the host of expos, parades, tours, showcases, and other home-and-garden events that further stoke the fires—of domestic inspiration (and consumerism) in some, and of other, less charitable, and sometimes petty feelings in others.
The annual Minneapolis & St. Paul Home Tour, which took place for the seventeenth time last month, is distinctive in that participants put their homes on display as part of a broader showcase of urban neighborhoods—and civic boosterism. It’s also a publicly run event, rather than the private or nonprofit affairs organized by trade associations, garden clubs, and the like. Coordinated by the city’s Neighborhood Revitalization Program, with help from both the city and Hennepin County, the Home Tour originated in 1988, when urban flight was a problem. Emphasizing its civic component, this year’s tour included several city- or county-rehabilitated homes for sale, and other homes that had been the beneficiaries of NRP investment.
Nevertheless, the Home Tour is also a marketing opportunity, both for its government sponsors and the host of advertisers in the twenty-eight-page Home Tour guide, which mapped out and profiled the fifty homes on view. It’s a way to “sell” a city of proud burghers busily upgrading windows, remodeling kitchens, planting bulbs, and generally plowing money into the homestead.
For the participants, however, the Home Tour didn’t seem to be so much about marketing as simply showing off. That’s partly because urban flight (or blight) is not the problem it once was—things have turned around, and how. “Minneapolis has never been more vibrant!” wrote Mayor R.T. Rybak in the Home Tour guide. He might also have crowed about vibrant home prices, which have doubled over the past ten years in some neighborhoods (the same cannot be said about the income of most people, notwithstanding the Clinton boom years and the Bush tax cuts). Homesteads around these parts once literally were people’s livelihoods; now the home is the future—the goose we nurture, counting on it to lay a golden egg when we trade up or retire.
So it’s not surprising that homeowners’ pride—once the righteous preserve of urban pioneers toughing it out in downtrodden neighborhoods—now seems glazed with a measure of boastfulness. It was detectable without even visiting the homes; one need only read the profiles in the tour guide, written by the homeowners themselves, which are riddled with the real-estate and interior-design jargon that has been adopted by the broader population: “charming Tudor cottages,” a sunroom that “boasts large windows and a vaulted ceiling,” “a custom-made granite-topped vanity,” and “prize-winning gardens and a spectacular Minneapolis skyline view.” Kitchens are updated “in an English country style” or with “a peninsula that seats three,” while a bungalow “boasts coved ceilings, hardwood floors and custom-made maple cabinetry.” Another home shows how “wall color, refinished hardwood floors and a Corian bathtub surround make big difference in comfort, style and maintenance.”
And what of the spectators, the thousands of us who followed each other around the cities all weekend, tour guides and “passports” in hand, rows of our slip-on shoes flanking the sidewalk outside each featured home? The comparison between house-hunting and dating (or mating) is, like most aspects of love (or sex), a well-worn cliché. As a subset of this practice, home tours have a peculiar pornographic twist—if you define pornography beyond sex, which is not hard to do. Countless cookbooks and magazines substitute sexed-up food for human bodies; in motivational posters, screensavers, and Sierra Club calendars, nature is the stand-in. Shelter mags from Architectural Digest to Nest, along with the dozens of domestic-makeover and home-design television shows (even public TV has one), count as professional purveyors of domestic porn—which makes home tours the domestic counterpart to amateur porn. As with those salacious home videos, home tours involve consumers/voyeurs and performers/exhibitionists. Both parties get what they want—to see and be seen—while leaving out the middlemen (snooty interior designers, television producers, magazine editors).
Another key similarity is that, unlike a real-estate open house, the goods put up for display on a home tour are not for sale: You can look all you want during these periodic orgies centered around granite countertops, open-plan baths, attic renovations, historic restorations, and sleek birch cabinets—without committing to anything. It’s fantasy. (Don’t ask me what this says about people who go to open houses not intending to buy, but just to nose around someone else’s dwelling. That’s perverted!)
On a more wholesome level, the home tour is also localized and populist. It’s not lifestyles of the rich and famous, it’s jus’ folks. Still, someone has to decide which lucky homeowners will get a coveted spot on the tour, which means that people have to submit themselves (and their homes) to judgment by some sort of organized body. In this sense, home tours tapped into a particular impulse—the average Joe’s desire to compete and show off in the public realm—that would later be exploited by the reality-TV juggernaut.
These days, the home tour has become a real real-life counterpart to the television’s real-life domestic programs. So maybe your charming Tudor cottage or woodsy urban retreat struck out in the big leagues of Homes Across America or Building Character—it could still make it on the home tour circuit. On the Minneapolis & St. Paul Home Tour, a proud papa showed off the regiments of gorgeous maple cabinetry in his remodeled South Minneapolis kitchen; not far away, people were lined up almost to the street to get into a 1950s Lustron house constructed with enamel steel panels, whose owners must have been both overwhelmed and overjoyed at the attention.
Playing host is one thing. But home tours, and the larger remodeling/home improvement industry, emphasize that grown-ups also enjoy playing house—they just spend lots more money on it than their children. Do you want Ralph Lauren preppy or something vaguely ethnic? Soft contemporary or the edgier urban contemporary? Log-cabin rustic or an explosion of blowsy chintz? The home is a cluster of miniature stages on which we play out a series of wish-fulfillment dramas, all in the service of achieving that ever-elusive “dream home.” Whether it’s five or fifty or five hundred projects away, the dream home continues to hold out hope that the right abode can fix everything else wrong with our lives.
As with cosmetics, the marketing of home-improvement and interior décor products is couched in positivity and potential, even as it targets our anxieties and deficiencies. What it comes down to is that your windows are not insulated well enough. You don’t have the right kind of partyware. (What, no margarita glasses?) You’ve got winter draperies and rugs out in summertime, and your accent pieces are all wrong. Your lawn is not lush or green enough. Your neighbor’s home theater system is more awesome than yours. Your down comforter is declassé, and more important, it has no cover. Let’s not g
et started on your sham-less pillows or the thread count of your linens…
Not to add insult to injury, but despite this continual dissatisfaction with our surroundings, we also can be frequently misguided in our attempts to change them. Just the other day a real estate agent showed me a place that was a nightmare conglomeration of home-improvement projects, from the mint-green, too-short Formica kitchen counters to the carpet-glue residue still coating the floors in the master bedroom. The do-it-yourself movement has wreaked untold havoc on our built environment: otherwise winsome homes appended with clunky wooden balconies and front stoops, plastic picket fences, tawdry lampposts, and the biggest trespass of all, vinyl siding. Somehow, the army of people, services, and products put into place to help us do it ourselves just isn’t passing muster, which proves that you can foist “good design” on the masses, but you can’t give them taste.
On the Home Tour, my friend and I saw some rather dubious ideas about what it means to preserve history, including smoked floor-to-ceiling mirrors flanking an antique fireplace; acoustic ceiling tiles; cheap paneling and spongy carpeting made spongier still with a pair of Isotoner foam slippers (literal padding from the harsh world outside). My friend took special umbrage at one place whose gorgeous parquet floors were almost entirely covered with cream carpet.
Overall, the atmosphere of the Home Tour was quite convivial, if also tinged with that peculiar brand of Minnesota reserve. One domicile had snacks, both sweet and savory, set out—and an owner that immediately started asking questions. We felt trapped. Was the food a lure? Were lengthy, expository conversations compulsory with each home visited? We didn’t see a check-off for this on our “passports” (really just a survey tool). Each home also had volunteers stationed everywhere, most of them middle-aged ladies, their nice-o-meters turned way up. It was impossible to ignore the fact that, like the professional greeters at Target or Wal-Mart, their presence was intended both as a welcome and a warning to the tourists: Ogle all you want, but don’t go trying to pilfer the soap or rifle through the lingerie drawers.
Beyond its marketing value, the Minneapolis & St. Paul Home Tour has the quasi-civic function of “community-building.” Ultimately, it seems difficult to discern between the two. Is it real community when people stand around talking real estate and school quality, or trading tales from their home-improvement ordeals? Probably it’s just as valid as any other community—the canine-lovers who meet daily at the dog run, the tattoo crowd, the bikers at Bob’s Java Hut. Still, there seems to be something a tad disingenuous, or maybe just sad, about a home-tour brand of community. It’s a staged way of socializing. Come ogle my home. Come make our neighborhood “hot” (we’ve already bought). Help us jump-start those property values. We’re all in this together, right?
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