Housing Costs Strain My Dad, a 45-year Carpenter

“I feel like I let her down,” my dad confides over dinner at Lansdale Tavern. 

We’re about five minutes away from both Tennis Court (Hatfield Township) and Morningside Drive (Montgomery Township) – two tree-lined suburban streets my family called home over the past 25 years. At the bar, my father and I are commiserating about our next prospective dwellings over sandwiches and Miller Lites. For me, the vision is simply something larger than the 350-square-foot studio I’m renting for $1,100. For Dennis – who worked over 45 years as a carpenter – his dream is a modest rental in Delaware. It’s an aspiration he shares with my mom, a semi-retired school bus driver. They currently rent the land where they park their manufactured home near the place where I grew up. 

Dad taught us the craft at a young age. My older sister, Jennifer, is pictured here.

Every summer, we rent an AirBnB in Lewes, Delaware. And lately over the holidays, we lean on the sharing economy to rent an abode large enough to accommodate our family, which includes my sister’s three kids, as well as my brother and fiancee. We’re all doing alright, relatively. We have enough food to eat and money to pay the bills. 

Towards the end of our recent Christmas gathering, I emailed my mom the results of the Housing Choice Voucher lottery. She didn’t have a winning “ticket” for helping to assure that they spend no more than 30 percent of their income on housing. I’m not seeking sympathy by sharing this, just better understanding of the diversity of Montgomery County residents who are struggling.  

Our roots 

I remember growing up in an old farmhouse next to Freddy Hill in Towamencin. It’s probably where my ice cream “problem” began. My parents purchased the house around 1984 as a fixer-upper for a modest price, a couple of years after I was born in Roxborough. During the summer, I would walk through our large backyard and over shallow Towamencin Creek to the Seipt’s house. We would occasionally play in the spacious and thorny hay silos, but ice cream and the batting cages were the main attractions. 

Sumneytown Pike is, of course, a busy road, so in 1996 we moved to a suburban cul-de-sac with sidewalks for my three siblings in Hatfield Township. My dad’s carpentry business was thriving at that time – riding the boom of single-family residential development by the David Cutler Group in Montgomery County. Hays Carpentry was doing so well that they could afford to pay private tuition at Corpus Christi and Lansdale Catholic. Faith was important to them. 

I would quickly trade soccer for my first love, basketball, but Hays Carpentry was a staple sponsor in TYA sports.

For many summers between middle school and college, I worked with my dad and his cadre of carpenters. The motley crew of characters would probably tell you that I was stealing a paycheck, since my craftsmanship and attention-to-detail never came close to matching my father’s. I guess I knew at a young age that installing cabinets, nailing trim moulding, and building stair railings, while admirable work, was not for me. I wanted to go to college, and I did – the first in our family. 

Struggles 

By the time I graduated from Widener University in 2005, the housing bubble was starting to inflate. My parents sold their Hatfield Township house for top dollar and moved to a one-story rancher near Five Points intersection/Route 309 in Montgomery Township. It had an in-ground pool! 

But it would be several years before I realized how badly the Great Recession (2008-09) had battered the small business he spent most of his life building. By this time, he had left the big builders to focus on small home improvement projects. 

“The phone just stopped ringing,” my mom once recalled. 

In third grade at General Nash Elementary, I played George Washington.

So in 2015, with the youngest of my siblings now at George Washington University, my parents sold Morningside and moved into their manufactured home full-time. I wrote this down that summer in my journal: 

After roughly 10 years of living on Morningside Drive, my parents sold their house. The decision seems logical, given their declining income, $1,800 mortgage payment, pool/yard maintenance, and two empty bedrooms. The home’s inspection takes place today, and if it passes, they will be out by August 15. My parents will move into either an apartment or trailer park. A sign of the times ….” 

Aspirations in 2025 

My dad used to say, “You can’t have the good without the bad.” He’s usually an optimistic guy. 

This year, I am hopeful that “Yes in My Backyard” will continue to expand and persuade our neighbors. That will happen with deep collaboration between advocates, local elected officials, private sector developers, and service providers for those on the margins. I can see a future where people from all different income levels have a safe, warm, comfortable place to call home.

As author Matthew Desmond wrote: “Decent, affordable housing should be a basic right for everybody in this country. This reason is simple: without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.”