A Tool Kit for Tradition in Philadelphia
“No half baths, and no skylights!,” my realtor snapped at me, half joking but exasperated. We were standing in a windowless closet on the third floor of what would soon be my very first property, and I was pointing out the places where my grand plans would soon spring into life — here a new built-in, there a half-wall, all within budget and on schedule. When would I understand the truths about managing a property: that renovations should not be needlessly costly or lengthy, that time is money, and that tenants inevitably tear everything up?
After I started the job and saw what it really entailed, evidently. But this was my first property, and I had much to learn. I promised her, and myself, that it would be finished in six months, by the holidays; she rolled her eyes — of course it will — and I set out, high on ambition, empty on experience.
I had bought a relatively affordable row-home in Philadelphia, “gut job” being the operative term, with big ambitions and a spiritual drive; to build something concrete, a respite from my day-to-day life working on campaigns from my computer. And, also, to connect with the legacy of my late grandfather, a man I didn’t know very well when he was alive. While Israel Eisenberg lived into his nineties, by the time I was old enough to remember he had already receded into a fog of deafness and blindness. He had survived the Holocaust by miracle and chance, having made a life-altering decision as a teenager in 1930’s Poland to reject the religious yeshiva education that was ordained for him in favor of training as a carpenter. This choice was auspicious when war broke out and Hitler invaded, and while other lower-class shtetl Jews were being sent to Treblinka, my grandfather made himself useful enough to survive the camps, pulling his little brother along with him. They were the only ones in their family to survive, and after his liberation he came to America, eventually settling in Chicago, where he began life anew. He built, working on crews and eventually managing them. His investments in real estate allowed both he and my grandmother to live comfortably into old age.
So, I thought to myself many times as I was sweating over heaps of dusty glass and asbestos insulation, or rewiring every single electrical outlet in the house for the fifth time, perhaps some useful trade skills ran through my blood. Perhaps not.
I also felt the renovation project would help me bridge a yawning societal gap that was hard not to notice as I neared thirty: between people who work with their hands and people who work on their laptops. A class divide, but really more than that, one of basic lived reality. Nobody taught me how to fix wiring or use a jigsaw in high school or college. I graduated with a degree in English, but didn’t know how to change my car’s oil or install a deadbolt. This all seemed wrong to me, and it seemed to be symptomatic of a larger problem facing our country: it’s not that we don’t agree with our neighbors, it’s that we don’t even know who they are or what their lives are like. Barely anybody I knew growing up works with their hands.
But as the renovation stretched from six months to one year to eighteen months, and as a global pandemic upended daily life and severed innumerable social ties, I now knew guys. In home construction, there is a guy for everything. There was my first plumbing guy, who was unreliable and needed replacing; my second plumbing guy, a young and enthusiastic Pole who responded quickly and who I tipped with vodka. The trash guys were saviors, hauling away thousands of pounds of junk; they too received liquor, and whatever cash I had in my wallet. My HVAC guy, a soft-spoken Italian man from the suburbs, gave me a great deal on the full system. The drywall guys are all Mexican — the first crew was terrible, leaving me in a lurch but requesting partial payment through a flirtatious teenage translator; the second crew came to my aid and cleaned up their work.
In my dealings with these guys, I followed a few rules that are generally applicable to my day job, in politics: be nice, be open to ideas, and don’t condescend to people who are different from you, or put them on a pedestal. I dealt honestly, bargained firmly, paid reliably, and asked for feedback on my work. Many were incredibly generous with their time and advice. Friends and family, amazed at the undertaking, often asked me if I learned how to frame a house or wire a kitchen on YouTube; more often than not, it was by asking the experts directly. As the nation’s students moved entirely to remote learning, I was apprenticing in person.
My timing with the project was lucky, as I purchased the home before skyrocketing interest rates and renovation costs had frozen many out of the market. And as the gathering storm known as Covid loomed, I already had a gas mask handy (filtering 99.9 percent of particles!), and a project I could labor on alone, as the would-be bakers and knitters of our nation made a run on our yeast and yarn reserves. I had hammering, framing, wiring, tiling, and finish work to complete, an interminable and often exhausting list of tasks that occupied me into the wee hours of the night, as I banged or caulked or sliced away to the music of Elton John, Jon Pardi or Paul Cauthen. The country was going berserk, social life had been turned upside down, and mass looting shook much of Philadelphia. Meanwhile, I was figuring out how to lay vinyl flooring.
A year over schedule, in the spring of 2021, the home was framed, rocked, spackled, painted, and ready for tenants. These newcomers provided some financial return, and allowed me to step back and breathe, an enormous and monumental undertaking behind me. But they were also an unexpected barrier between me and what had been my baby and my anchor during a tumultuous time, for the home was now theirs, and I was just a landlord.
They stayed. They renewed their lease. Meanwhile, life took me away from my home city. Philadelphia had moved backwards during Covid, my life had moved elsewhere, and it was time to sell.
This property, my first, is likely to make me at least a small return, which was my financial goal for the project. More important, though, was the knowledge I gained; I had advanced exponentially in the fields of carpentry, wiring, finish work, aspects of home construction that I wouldn’t have understood enough even to define just a few years ago. I connected spiritually with the work, both as a philosophical endeavor and a fulfillment of some heritage that lay inside me, prior to undiscovered. In all of those senses, this investment property was an investment in my own capabilities.
I recently saw a video on Instagram, one of those quippy, stylized one-way conversations where a millennial claps back to a question posed by some strawman. In it, a young man responds to advice that he should purchase property: it is impossible, he said, because of the student debt crisis and the skyrocketing costs and late capitalism.
And yet, nothing stopped me from saving for years and investing my sweat and income into a property that was mine to keep or sell as I pleased.
Social media is the realm of the critic, it would seem. Home construction is the realm of doers.
Albert Eisenberg is the Principal of BlueStateRed, a political messaging firm, and is based in Charleston, SC, and Philadelphia. He has been featured on RealClearPolitics, National Review, Fox News, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and elsewhere. @Albydelphia.
