For this Home and School Buying Simulation I was given $30,000 in annual income, $2,000 for a down payment, no car, and no monthly debt. Through the use of an online mortgage calculator, I estimated that with my income I could afford to buy a house in the $77,000 to $102,000 range or rent an apartment for about $825 a month. Soon after I began my online house hunt on Zillow, I realized that my meager monthly allowance might secure me a good neighborhood, but not necessarily a good home. In East Hartford I could buy a 65-year-old house for nearly $90,000 with what looked like an endless amount of repairs. In West Hartford nearly all of the “homes” that fell into my price range were not actual homes, but actually empty plots of land.
An empty land plot for sale in West Hartford as advertised on http://zillow.com
If I chose to purchase a two bedroom home in Bloomfield for $85,900 with a $2,000 down payment, a thirty year mortgage with a 4.25% interest rate would leave me with $412 in monthly payments. Although this number initially seemed small to me considering that my monthly income is $2,500, an online amortization table from Bankrate estimated I would pay $3,830 in interest after only one year. By the end of my thirty-year mortgage, that number would be nearly $65,000 – over two-thirds the actual cost of the home.
The economic burden these types of mortgages would undoubtedly put on my simulated family makes it seem as though I should at least be guaranteed a good school district. However, if I were to rent an apartment in the Manchester School District for $800/month, my children would either have to walk to a district school that underperformed in every subject when compared to the state, or instead take a bus to one of the nine inter-district schools in Hartford that showed positive test gains in 2012. Essentially, I would be paying to live in Manchester while simultaneously busing my children back to the neighborhood they just left. West Hartford public schools offered the most promising educational opportunities – schools with smaller class sizes, more teachers, and better test scores. But this was also the same neighborhood with nearly no homes or apartments in my price range.
The results of a school search on http://smartchoices.trincoll.edu which shows a variety of schools in Hartford (about 9 miles away from the original search location) that all show positive test score increases.
With a $30,000 income and no transportation, I am not at all convinced that “life is better in the suburbs.” Sure, the suburbs are great for people with cars, stable jobs, and a comfortable amount of disposable income. But I expected my school search to be much easier. I anticipated I would see broken down houses and small apartments – and I was right. However, I hoped my investment in the neighborhood would just be a sacrifice in return for better educational opportunities. If I were to choose a final house and school for this simulation, I would either have to choose a home in West Hartford at the top of my budget with access to better schools, or choose a more reasonably priced home in East Hartford, Mansfield, or Bloomsfield with hope that through the luck-of-the-draw my children would end up in promising schools.
