Renaissance
by Sarah DeBacher

"When I was 21, it was a very good year": like many of us, Sarah DeBacher came to New Orleans to live la vie boheme. Then she got older, accepted responsibility, got a graduate degree and a steady job, only to find out she still can't buy a fucking house.

I moved to New Orleans nine years and a lifetime ago, when I was just twenty-one. It was the beginning of a story that’s a lot like yours. That is, if you moved here from somewhere else; if you had no real intention of staying; or if you look back now, in that after-the-hurricane way, and find that you are somehow much, much older.

To begin with, there was a plan. I would become a singer, and I would do it within a deadline. If after six months I had not executed that plan, I would move away—to some city where one grew up, where one lived an actual life.

First I found a tolerable and tolerant roommate to share rent on an apartment in the Tremé. We bought mismatched furniture at Thrift City, rode our bikes together to do laundry at Checkpoint Charlie’s, and ate Verti Marte sandwiches on our sagging balcony, enamored by the elephant ears and banana trees in our tiny courtyard. After that, I got to work. I picked up a few shifts in a bar on Bourbon Street, browsed the Musicians’ Connection in the Offbeat classifieds, and lived out those six months happily—singing—and exactly according to plan.

Somehow, six months turned into several years in a blur of days I’ve recorded in a journal somewhere, in my illegible booze-hand. I imagine you have a journal like this, too. You’ll come across it—perhaps someday soon—and read it with disbelief, maybe even sadness.

Eventually, though, after recording three badly-reviewed CDs, surviving several damaging relationships, evacuating for two hurricanes (Georges and the next one, whose name I forget), and climbing the ladder to bar manager, I woke up to discover that I was no longer so young. The hangovers were worse, for one. Also, I no longer enjoyed my drunken parlays with the sunrise. That sunrise put me to shame.

Then one day I got sick with cat scratch fever, which I can tell you is a real disease that one gets—really—from cats. During that long illness, I took expensive cab rides to the Daughters of Charity Clinic in the strip mall on Carrollton Avenue, waited in long lines with babies and babies' mamas, read decade-old issues of Highlights, and finally got poked and prodded by med students—most of whom seemed somehow relieved to examine a white chick, and who told me it might be cancer, or AIDS, or something worse; they couldn't be sure. I would need a biopsy, which I couldn't afford. So I called my parents, who paid for a lymphoma specialist, who asked me about the scratch on my arm. Several hundred dollars of my parents’ money and a Z-pack later, I was back in full health, if a little unnerved by the whole experience.

Still, it took another brush with death—an encounter on my bicycle with a car door—to convince me that it might be time to get a real job, as in one with health insurance. But that would mean getting a nine-to-five, which would mean giving up on my singing “career.” It would mean giving up on my plan.

But I did give up on that plan. For starters, I stayed in New Orleans. I enrolled in graduate school and later became a teacher. I fell in love with someone my parents approved of. I got married. And although my life these days is in some ways less exciting, this new life has its benefits: stability and health insurance; an appreciation for good wine; love.

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DeBacher & husband Simon Hand, reaping the benefits of a stable lifestyle: health insurance, good wine, and love. But still pissing money away on rent.

Next, we nest. We are married; we survived a hurricane; we are still here, still renting. So my husband and I have begun to look for a house. This makes it official: I am older now—an addict of real estate listings, that middle-aged porn.

But there's a problem.

We are both teachers. And I have debt. It’s what got me here, to grown-up-hood. Plus, it makes me American, my comrades in debt, my colleagues, say. At happy hour, we compare credit debt like battle scars. “Cheers!” we say.

So if we want to buy a house here in New Orleans, we are screwed. Unless we want to call our parents again, who are, by the way, dead, or Buddhists, or teachers themselves. The houses in New Orleans, including the one we rent, are too expensive for us to buy. Across the street from us, for example, is a single shotgun not much bigger than our own that’s listed at $349,000—down from a half million. And recently some friends bought a house in the neighborhood that’s even smaller than ours. They paid nearly $200,000.

Some of our friends suggest we buy a flood-house. There are some real deals out there, they say. You could take advantage of that. Perhaps they assume we have the energy for urban camping, the time and resources for renovation, the endurance required to take part in what realtors are calling a “renaissance.” One that we all know will take thirty years.

We don’t.

So we stay put. We swallow another rent increase—the second in as many years—and I continue to troll grimly through the online real estate listings, choosing $150,000 as our maximum price, which may be too ambitious. The search results don't change. The neighborhood we live in, the place we’ve called our home for years now, is out of our reach. In fact, all of unflooded New Orleans is out of our reach.

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"Everyone should apply": Habitat for Humanity's Musician's VIllage seems like the promised land. Except what if you've gotten off the low road and decided to settle down? Apparently 30g's is too much stability for subsidized home-ownership.

Recently, I ran into an old friend from my music days. He’s lived in New Orleans for years, and he owns a home Uptown that he bought way back in the ‘80s for a price he’s embarrassed to reveal. I told him about our wanting to buy a home in our neighborhood, about how we can’t afford the Marigny, or the Bywater, or any neighborhood. He knows me as a singer, and so he suggested we apply for a home in the Habitat for Humanity Musicians’ Village. He spoke of it as if he were their spokesperson. “Everyone should apply,” he said.

When I looked into it, I discovered that the homes in the Habitat for Humanity Musicians’ Village are to die for. Each two or three-bedroom house comes with brand new appliances, central heat and air-conditioning, a fresh, Easter-egg paint job, a termite contract, and a twenty-year, fixed-rate, no-profit mortgage. They’re landscaped and manicured and architecturally local, with porches and stoops, high ceilings and unsplintered wood floors. They’re New Orleans homes, but without the burden of age. Plus, each Habitat home is built to withstand 100+ mile-per hour winds. And the price tag—between $400 and $500 a month—includes property taxes and homeowners and flood insurance. It also includes a reassuring brand name: Marsalis. If we were lucky enough to own one, I might someday share a porch-top jam session with Wynton himself, or perhaps even Will and Grace’s own Harry Connick, Jr. It could happen.

But when I looked into applying for a Habitat home in the Musicians’ Village, I discovered that it can't happen for us. The maximum income level required to qualify for a Habitat home is low—so low that many musicians have complained that you'd have to be a really bad musician to qualify. There are deserving families who've already moved in to several of the houses, and a few hardworking musicians whom I should thank Habitat for enabling to stay in New Orleans. Still, for many who’ve applied, the story is like ours: they make too much to qualify, and too little to buy elsewhere.

So my husband and I continue to pay rent, to chip away at debt that will outlive a Habitat mortgage. And I begin to feel sorry myself, to wonder if we can afford to stay.

*

Ahh,to be so young and innocent again, with the added bonus of getting a no-interest, 20 year comprehensive mortgage.

I was in the midst of feeling sorry for myself one day when I heard a segment on the radio about the Musicians’ Village. It was a hopeful piece that made me feel badly for resenting those approved for Habitat homes. In the background, out-of-town volunteers hammered away, future Habitat homeowners used table saws. An older-sounding woman spoke tearfully of the dream of homeownership, one she thought she’d never be able to realize. Fredy Omar’s salsa music drifted in and out. And then I heard a young voice. A voice like mine. Perhaps it was a voice like yours.

She’d moved here from out of town, from somewhere up north. She’d already been planning on buying a house before the storm, but she hadn’t yet. And anyway, she said, that house had flooded, so it was a good thing she’d waited. She’d heard about the Musicians’ Village while she was evacuated and living with her parents. When she heard about it, she was like, “I’m on it.” So she came back down to New Orleans as soon as she could, started volunteering, and worked a few shifts in the service industry to make ends meet. Once she’d found out she qualified for a home, she said she, like, “couldn't believe it.” Without Habitat, she would have had to get “a real job.” Now she could play her drums, like, whenever. She could jam with her neighbors, which she sometimes does. Plus, she owns a house. Which is, like, amazing.

I hated this girl. I pictured her with a bongo drum strapped to her back, riding her Schwinn through the Ninth Ward to get to Frenchmen Street, where she would “jam” with the guy who sells hemp jewelry and glass pipes outside of Café Brasil. I pictured her working her few shifts a week, having her bad relationships, doing her bad drugs, drinking the freebies that some smarmy bartender serves her.

I pictured her coming home to a two-bedroom house with its 20-year mortgage, its insurance and taxes and termite contract all comfortably paid for with whatever tips she was making. She would unlock the door and stumble to bed, dragging with her whatever James-Something she met at the bar that night. They would stay up late, until dawn—maybe talking, maybe fucking.

When the gray light touched her tits at dawn, she would say to Something-James—in a voice that might once have been mine—“Do you want some breakfast?” Then, she would shuffle to the fridge, grab two cans of beer, and crack them open, thinking nothing of the future. She would be smiling. And it would feel to her, then, a lot like home.

Sarah DeBacher and her husband Simon Hand live hoodrich in the Marigny.