From: Brett

Where do you go in New York when you’ve sold your Manhattan coop and the sale of your new suburban home has fallen through? Well, if you don’t want to spend a small fortune in rent for a Manhattan apartment only to break the lease because you are sure that you’ll find the home of your dreams in no time, then you do what any self-respecting Gen Xer would: you move back home.

Home, in our case, is the Madison/Marine Park section of Brooklyn. When we found ourselves backing out of our contract for a 4 bedroom in NJ last year, myself, my husband, and our infant twins, settled down in the house in which he was raised.

It’s hard to come from a 4-bedroom center-hall Colonial on a quiet, tree-lined street a short walk from the subway train and not want the same life for your own family. In much the same way as someone whose parents were happily married wanting to find the right mate, we search for our new home as though we were dating prospective spouses. We want to live in a village house, within a 20 minute-walk from the train and be able to walk to the town’s commercial district. We need good schools, and an hour or less commute from Manhattan. We would prefer move-in condition, since neither one of us is handy and contractors make us nervous, but we will renovate a kitchen or bathroom for the right house. We would like a small backyard, but don’t need loads of land. We can’t afford more than 10k in taxes.

Our search began in Madison two years ago, when we were still Manhattan coop dwellers, scouting out neighborhoods. The first year we visited Astoria and Forest Hills, in Queens, City Island in the Bronx, Montclair, NJ, Katonah, Bedford, Mount Kisco, Beacon, Cold Spring, and Ossining, NY. We rode the ferry to Staten Island, and the subway to Bay Ridge, and Park Slope, Brooklyn. We looked up every neighborhood where we had friends or family or friends of friends. We stumbled upon Cranford, and South Orange, Madison, Millburn, and Morristown, NJ. Through our affinity for TV and our wistfulness for greener pastures and bigger closets, we looked up our favorite fictional town, Stuckeyville, and found it’s real-life counterpart—Westfield, NJ, where we found and lost a house. Beaten, we braved the Belt Parkway to previously uncharted real estate territory and looked at Great Neck, and Huntington. What did we do over our summer vacation? We found and lost another house—this time in Port Washington. Lately, we have begun looking right here, in Madison. We’re still not sure if the neighborhood is right, but the taxes are low and the schools just got good grades from the new city report card, for what that’s worth.

Are we being too picky? Looking for something that doesn’t exist? When we explain that we want to walk to the train from our house, we sometimes get blank stares. Sometimes, Manhattan seems to be the only place in the country where pedestrians exist. Are we being unrealistic? Overlooking the obvious? The more we look, the more confused we get.