We were inventing our future, room by room.īut I’m older now, and I know it’s not enough to become the good stranger, the wanting party who can write beautifully about an open floor plan. Narrating what we liked about a home helped us more fully imagine a life there: what we’d do with a fireplace, or a sunroom, or the weirdly ubiquitous pergola in the backyard. The other day, the sound of your garage door closing as we passed broke my heart. Dear stranger, we love your tree swing, the smell of wood smoke, the basketball left in the yard. Dear stranger, the maple tree by your mailbox makes us happy. Dear stranger, we love the way light from your kitchen glows at dusk. We began to study the homes we toured for clues beneath the stagecraft - what the seller had loved, what they would miss most. So structural constraints had yielded a new writing prompt: to describe such a personal desire without revealing anything about myself.Īt the beginning of our search, my partner and I had fun writing these letters. Per the 1968 Fair Housing Act, they must not disclose personal information that might allow a seller to discriminate against someone based on protected characteristics such as religion, race or familial status. Home-offer letters are the most vexed correspondences I’ve written, though. After all, most everything I’ve ever wanted - jobs, college admission, publishing a story - I’ve obtained by writing letters to strangers. But as a writer, I saw them as a way to gain purchase in an otherwise impossible market. I knew such letters were controversial, part of a hidden curriculum known only to some. After our first six offers were rejected, someone suggested we write a letter to the sellers to stand out from the crowd. By the time our baby boy was a few months old, prices had spiked 30 percent in one year and inventory had dropped. This is the environment in which my partner and I decided to buy a house. Acknowledging the lack of affordable options and low inventory, the city recently declared a housing emergency. Flagstaff, Ariz., has become a hard town to buy a home in - it’s one of the four-season mountain towns people flocked to during the pandemic, where about a quarter of houses were already second homes.
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