Sure, there’s the $8,000 tax credit.  Cannot fault somebody for taking advantage of a government subsidy, particularly in a depreciated market like this one.  Good deals abound, and getting eight Gs back makes any purchase easier.

And, of course, we are no longer spring chickens.  My friends and I are hurtling through our mid-20s like rogue comets, barreling into the dreaded late-20s like bulls in Pamplona, staring down our unfathomable 30s and the something or other that is supposed to happen by then as though high noon approaches, my trigger finger feels itchy, and I can’t see my adversary though I know he’s just ahead.

But we are still young!  We are not so old as to all ready begin the process of becoming our parents, are we?  I showed up in Milwaukee on the first of July and a solid 40% of the friends I spoke with were in some stage of purchasing a house: doing walk-throughs, working out financial details, making offers, anxiously awaiting news, discussing neighborhoods, talking of square footage, sharks to blood-soaked waters full of delicious baby seal.

I asked a friend who was not purchasing a house how he was doing, in a general sense, and he said, “Well, I’m not buying a house right now, so I guess I’m not doing that well.”

I’ve rented since college, never worked a job that would qualify me for any kind of mortgage, especially in light of the recent subprime difficulties.  Though I will be moving soon, I remain pumped that the apartment in which I reside (for the next two weeks anyway) has been my place for two years consecutive.  A similar thing happened in college, but more for convenience than anything else.  And now, come to think of it, that’s perhaps the main reason why this place lasted.  Nothing in it works, on account of bush league landlords, and it’s not particularly large, but it is convenient to good times and the overhead is manageable.

We don’t own this place and therefore don’t care too much about what happens with the appliances.  We’ve learned to deal with an oven that takes an hour to preheat and a dishwasher that must be manually moved along to the final cycle, lest it run for hours on end without ever leaving the rinse mode.  The landlords don’t care about fixing anything, so why should we?

The place isn’t ours, the appliances aren’t ours, but the memories of good times we have had while stationed here are ours and ours alone.  As a base of operations, we could not have asked for more.

But then again, if we just owned a place, as well as everything in it…

Everything would be more expensive, but it would also be ours, for whatever we wanted to do with it.  No more absentee landlords, no depending on the short-term memory or kindness or attention to detail of someone you don’t know and would never otherwise, under any circumstances, meet.  And mortgage payments, if you get a halfway decent one, aren’t too much more a month than rent, payments which go towards securing a house as ours, not padding the pockets of a young couple who are only in the country half the year, have never fixed anything we asked them to, and refused to throw us a bone when we needed an extra month on our lease (long story), an extra month we wouldn’t need if we owned the place outright…

Maybe those friends of ours are on to something here, something I never would have considered had the house-buying party not been in full swing, amidst a shaky economy and the burgeoning maturity of the moneyed youth who are not so young anymore, when I visited Milwaukee for a relaxing holiday weekend.