Chamber of Commerce Weather
In December 2011, Kim, youngest son Thomas and I took a road trip. We flew into San Francisco, rented a car and began a West Coast odyssey to find a new home for the future. I had sold my Park City home in 2007 during the worst moments of the Bear Stearns hedge fund debacle. That was not a home that I felt particularly attached to. I had bought the monster big house in Park City in 1999 during the salad days of the Bankers Trust sale to Deutsche Bank. I enjoyed it for a while and then decided it was just too damn big and too damn expensive to maintain. I put it on the market and waited for almost three years to find a buyer that was willing to pay a price even approaching its value. When they came along they brought with them a smaller home that they wanted to trade with cash for the bigger house. When I did the swap, I figured I would keep the smaller house for a while, but then the hedge fund whirlwind spun me around and threw me unceremoniously to the ground. While I was down, I had this massive shadow looming shadow over me. The subprime mortgage tsunami was churning up a whole host of problems that all touched me. Specifically, there were rumblings in the U.S. Attorney’s of the Eastern District offices and those rumblings included calling me in as a witness (note that I said witness and not subject or target) to what some people thought must have been a crime during the hedge fund machinations. There was even a certain CNBC reporter who suggested on the air that I was to become an indicted co-conspirator in the affair. Despite my innocence, I lacked a complete confidence in the system of justice and became less than comfortable with my circumstances.
During that summer (of 2007), I went to the aide of sleeping pills for the first and only time in my life. I also decided that the world (both my world and the financial world at large) was coming to an end, or at least an untimely comeuppance. That caused me to decide that it was time to sell my Park City home with some degree of dispatch. I believe I made the sale in record time and did so at a decent price. I came away thinking (correctly) that I might have gotten off the last decent home sale in Park City in that cycle. The wheels of justice move slowly and after many visits to Tillary Street in Brooklyn to discuss the hedge fund case with the U.S. Attorneys of the Eastern District, I ended up giving testimony in support of my two colleagues who had been indicted on a criminal charge of misleading investors. They were acquitted resoundingly, as they should have been. My legal concerns faded and life went on…but I was without a Western home.
By 2011 I was ready to re-enter the housing market and the prices in California were especially attractive since they lagged the nation in crashing as all home prices had. We decided that, like the Beverly Hillbillies, California was the place to be, but we headed off to figure out specifically where. Our quest began in the Bay Area with a look at houses in Sausalito. Then we headed down the coast and despite a quick look in Mountain View (a crazy silicon thought with hindsight), we chose to skip Santa Cruz and take a look in the Carmel/Monterey area. That was less interesting than Sausalito, with prices reflecting the economic prosperity of the technology industry of the Bay Area.
While we traveled down Big Sur and into the central coast of the state with all its natural beauty, we agreed that being so remote would be less than perfect for our lives in retirement. That’s right, we were planning our retirement to the West and was dragging Thomas with us for the quest. The next stop was Santa Barbara and Montecito. Now these were lovely towns, but the places we saw didn’t really inspire us. Once you start looking, you realize that Santa Barbara is jammed quite tightly between the Los Padres Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. That means that unless you want to spend a real bundle, you end up more cheek to jowl than you probably want. We chose to skip the whole L.A. basin and scooted down into Orange County to see what Laguna might have to offer. I would characterize that offering as OK, but not something inspiring. At that point we decided that if we were going to find a place for retiring in California, it would likely be in San Diego County. But its a big county with lots of options.
My sister Kathy thought that Fallbrook and Bonsal would be towns that we might find simpatico. They are both further from the City of San Diego in the North County and were in a genteel horse farm area with lots of winding country roads. As we drove up one particular hillside to look at a house. What struck us was that the road up the hill was more rural than we expected. It seemed to us that this was a bit scruffier an area than what might appeal to us. We then ended our search for that trip and settled into a holiday visit with our local relatives (Kathy & Bennett and Jeff & Lisa). On Christmas morning it was pleasant enough that Jeff and I went for a motorcycle ride around the local area. I had one of two more houses in Northern Escondido that Zillow wanted me to see, so we rode on over into the area.
What we found was that the gated community of Rim Rock was inaccessible. This agreed with my generally dislike of gated communities where the inhabitants try so very hard to build their walls high enough to shield them from anything or anybody that is not like them. Screw them. The other home was on a nearby hillside between the community of Hidden Meadows and the Ocean. As we rode up the hill I was struck by how different it was from that hillside in Fallbrook and certainly from that hillside leading up to Rim Rock. This hillside was covered in flowering bougainvillea and roadside matching ice plants. In a word it was lovely.
We sat on our motorcycles at the bottom of the driveway of the house that Zillow was pitching. It had had a meaningful downward price break and seemed like excellent value, at least from the 40 or so pictures I could see online. The front hillside of the house was covered in a wide variety of cacti and succulents and looked as lovely as the hill road leading up to it. There was a car in the upper driveway, but being Christmas, I chose to defer on bothering the inhabitants on this holiday morning. Instead, I rode back to Jeff & Lisa’s house and put a call into the listing broker. I confirmed the availability and price and then arranged for a visit by my sister Kathy and Lisa since Kim, Thomas and I had to fly back to New York the next day.
During the walk-through, Kathy called me and told me what she liked and disliked about the house. Being an architect and generally a person of high aesthetic standards, I knew I would get a realistic assessment. She loved the house and I took all her suggested improvements in stride as being part of her nature. I bought the house without ever having set foot within it. The first time I was in it was at the closing when it was devoid of furnishings. It was more special than I had expected and what struck me more than anything were the views. It looked over the Ocean in one direction and the mountains in the other. It seemed a perfect home to which Kim and I could aspire to retire.
This morning I am think about all this because I am sitting here at the renovated kitchen counter, waiting to drive to the airport to pick up Thomas and his fiancé Jenna. I am looking out over the hills towards the Ocean and it is as clear a day as that day almost ten years ago when I first spied this hillside. After a few days of rain, the air is crisp and clear and perfect for the next few days for Thomas’ visit. It is what I have always called Chamber of Commerce Weather because it is the sort of weather that draws people to places like San Diego. Thank goodness I found this place a decade ago, I don’t think I could be in a better spot.