There’s No Place Like Home
I have often wondered to myself what it would be like to have a home. I mean a real home, not just some place I rent from somebody else. To have my own land, a house, maybe a garage and a pool. A place I can call my own. A place that belongs to me, and I belong to it, you know, with a deed, pay taxes, all of that. It does not seem like a lot to ask. It certainly did not take my parents much to get one. They bought their home for under $100,000 and it was big enough to raise me and my four siblings in.
Since I was a child, I struggled to answer this basic question- where is home. I first experienced homelessness before I was a teenager. I remember those endless nights wandering the streets, sometimes in the rain, getting soaked, walking around all night until my feet hurt, and finally giving in to sleep to curl up inside a dumpster somewhere. Everywhere I wandered I never felt at home, always a visitor, just passing through.
I did not find out until I was much older that I was also a Native American. I did not understand how important my connection to the land was. I came to identify with the stories of my ancestors- stories which have changed with the coming of the Europeans. Stories of boarding schools and cultural dislocation. Stories of homelessness, substance use and mental health issues. Stories of a broken culture, dislocated from their land, from their home. This is my story, having spent many years of my life homeless. I have certainly had my share of battles with addiction. Mental health has been both a familiar friend and a hostile invader.
I spent nearly five years of my life following my military service living outside. The military had lost my paperwork, and without discharge papers, I was not allowed to work, receive public assistance, apply for benefits, go to school, or do any of the things a person must do to afford a home in the United States. I am a wartime veteran, discharged fully honorably from active duty for medical reasons. My unit was deployed to combat, many of them were killed in action or taken pow in the conflict in Iraq. When I left the Armed Forces, I was relieved to learn that I would be receiving many benefits- among them a VA home loan, that was supposed to be the best home loan available to an American citizen. I would come to find out that this was not entirely true either.
I spent many years turning my life around. It was an uphill battle to overcome my struggle with addiction. It seemed to take forever to get my documents from the Armed Forces, and when I did it was many more years before my mental health was stable enough to return to school. When I finally did, I found out that my benefit would expire before I could fully use the benefits I had paid for with my hard-earned money and time in service to finish college. The VA denied my application for an extension, stating that my paperwork being lost that kept me from participating in my benefits was not considered a qualifying reason to grant an extension.
The biggest disappointment has come through my experience with using my VA home loan. When I was first getting out, I was so excited to believe I would be able to finally have a home of my own. Boy could I not have been more wrong. Not only did I spend the first five years of civilian life living outside, when I did finally get my paperwork, I was confronted with a mountain of challenges in accessing this benefit. Nobody told me that I needed to have credit to use this benefit. So that was a process, first a secured credit card, and over a long period of time I finally built up my credit score to nearly 700. This was a hard-won victory for me. The next was a debt-to-income ratio, since my VA benefits expired before I finished school, I had to take out student loans to cover my expenses while I attended social work school full-time. Finally, I had to pay down the debt from my marriage, for the first time in my life having zero unsecured debt and a debt forgiveness plan in place for my student loans.
I finally had reached a place in life where I felt that I could finally get ahead. This took me many years to accomplish, as I am now almost 40. I have had a lot of success recently- I work full time for the health department and I support other people in recovery to find their path. I own a small business and even generated a decent profit from it to supplement my income. This year I made nearly $100,000, and paid roughly $15,000 in tax, and I felt proud of what I had accomplished. So, I felt finally, its time for me to get a home. I mean, what more could they ask for? I have good credit, a college education, a full-time job, great income, and almost no debt. I mean, what more could someone ask for to buy a home?
Turn out, I was wrong again. Horribly wrong. So, I have been trying to buy a home now for 6 months. I was approved for up to $300,000 on a VA home loan with a prequalification letter and my COE in hand. The last home I placed an offer on was being listed at $50,000 over the appraised value. I made an offer on that home at $15,000 over the asking price thinking how could someone possibly outbid me? Turns out the home was sold for $100,000 over its appraised value. To make matters worse, the VA will not approve a home loan if the appraisal does not come back to match the offer.
So, I mention something about this to my realtor, how is this possible? She has a frank conversation with me about pursuing other forms of lending and being prepared to be more competitive in my purchasing or offering cash down. I politely declined her invitations and suggestions, insistent that as a wartime veteran that I should use the benefit that I earned with my selfless service. Furthermore, that I believe that the VA home loan was designed to protect veterans from making bad investments- and the limitations are a good thing. I passionately believe in making fair and final offers that reflect what I believe the home is worth, and these offers need to align with the appraised value of the home- also a requirement of the VA loan.
The VA home loan was created to offer veterans a low-cost path to home ownership. How can I possibly hope to buy a home under these conditions? In further discussion with my realtor, after hitting roadblock after roadblock, she says to me that based on what she is hearing from me that it is not the right time for me to be buying a home and will not even continue to schedule showings- because I am not serious enough.
I am sitting here profoundly confused, hurt and disappointed. How is it possible that the conditions of the housing market has become so bad that a war veteran like me would have to seek other sources of funding to even purchase a home? What is the point of even having a home loan benefit at all? I feel horribly misled, feeling foolish for ever having believed that being a veteran would put me on a path to home ownership. Here I thought if only I got credit, if only I got an education and an income, if only I paid off my debt, then I would finally be able to buy a home. Only to find out that the home loan I have cannot even be used to buy a home at all. The market has become so over-inflated that the appraisals cannot possibly come back to match the offers being made on these homes. It is an impossible situation.
I did not know what else I could do, so I decided I would write about and share my experience. Perhaps there are other veterans out there experiencing what I have experienced. Perhaps there are people out there that are just as outraged as I am that someone can serve this country in wartime but cannot be afforded a pathway to home ownership. Perhaps there is some decisionmaker who reads this story and feels touched by what I have shared. All I know is something has got to change. I feel betrayed by my country, and I am really starting to question what it is to be American anymore. Where did the American dream go? How is it that we have strayed so far from what we all believe in- a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness- that a hardworking, successful veteran cannot even purchase a home with the benefit he is guaranteed for his service?
I certainly do hope for some good fortune. I have not lived an easy life. But I have always sought to do my best, work hard, be of service to others, and contribute in a generous way to my community. All I ask for is an opportunity to have my own home, my own land, a place to call my own.
There’s no place like home.
