‘Keeping it in the family’

April 8, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

Star Tribune

MINNEAPOLIS

Chris Smith grimaced as he surveyed the faded floral carpet in his parents’ upstairs hall, then sidled past the small cross and family photos and into a corner bedroom. He waved both arms, semaphore-style, toward the back window.

“Right across the roof and down over the porch, an easy exit,” he said, recalling frequent late-night forays from his high-school years. “And out there was where my dad built a sweet tree fort. That’s where I broke my arm when I was 5 years old.”

Smith, 45, is in a particularly nostalgic mood these days. Like many folks whose elderly parents no longer can take care of themselves, he’s faced with selling the house he grew up in.

“That house is the only context I really know my parents in,” he said of the Edina, Minn., home his folks built. “It’s tough to think of somebody else living there and you can’t go to the yard anymore.”

Smith’s task is bittersweet because he’s trying to sell a house that’s been in his family since he was born, a house permeated with memories. He’s not alone.

The quarter-century after World War II saw an unprecedented housing boom. Many young couples who bought homes in the 1940s and ’50s raised their families there, and didn’t move out until they passed away or moved into assisted-living facilities.

Mary Thorpe-Mease’s 95-year-old mother died in September. Her south Minneapolis home had been a gathering place for friends and family members for 68 years.

“At one point during World War II, we had 13 people living in the house, and only one bathroom,” said Thorpe-Mease, 72.

“We had wedding receptions and celebrations after funerals and baptisms, just a lot of really wonderful history. Last year we took a photo of [nearly 50] members of the extended family sitting on the front porch, our iconic front steps. None of us can really believe we’re not going to have those steps.”

Last year, 15 percent of U.S. home sales involved dwellings that had been in the same hands for more than 20 years, according to the National Association of Realtors. A century ago, several generations might all be living in the same house, so these transactions were rarer.

Nowadays, the people who grew up in these homes have the option of “keeping it in the family” by purchasing the home for themselves. But there can be geographical, emotional or even logistical barriers.

Linda Halvorson said she would have considered buying her parents’ south Minneapolis home of 60 years, “but we already had purchased my mother-in-law’s house. So we had already done the mother-and-father thing and gone through the emotions of doing that.”

Barb Fellman of Bemidji, Minn., didn’t have that option when her childhood home in Brooten, Minn., went on the market last year. Other family members made the decision. “I was disappointed that I wasn’t consulted, but it wouldn’t have changed anything,” she said. “It was the right decision.”

Now that Fellman has no relatives in Brooten, she said she felt “very sad to not have a reason to go back to that town again.” But she said she began taking leave of the house years earlier, when her parents still owned it.

“My old bedroom, you personalize that when you’re a teenager,” Fellman said. “So it was harder for me when they changed that room into a guest room than when they physically moved out.”

Fellman’s situation — having several family members involved in making a decision — is not uncommon.

Margaret Thorpe Richards, a Realtor at Coldwell Banker Burnet, has seen a pattern in handling several such scenarios.

“There are typically one or two family members who are more tied to the house, whether it’s the oldest sibling or daughter or whoever took care of the ailing parent,” she said. “Everyone has a different timetable of when they come to grips with it. You just have to let it unfold.”

In most cases, Richards said, the sellers are not in a “let’s just get this over with” mode. “It’s typically quite the opposite,” she said, “because it’s the last thing they have to hold onto. It’s letting go of a legacy.”

Smith started talking to his parents about moving into assisted-care housing five years ago, before the real-estate bubble burst. Now four of the seven houses on the cul-de-sac are up for sale, and an appraiser estimated that the house will fetch about half of what it would have in 2007.

“But the house and lot cost $40,000,” Smith said, “so it’s money nobody ever had. There’s no sense crying over it — although I kind of am.”