There is an award winning author on staff at the Washington Post named Anne Hull. A Pulitzer prize finalist, she has written some very insightful human interest stories that I admire. She certainly struck a nerve with an article last weekend chronicling a divorced working mother of three in Harrison in  Struggling on $300,000 a year.  I posted the article to my personal Facebook page, which immediately gathered a slew of comments, and several women in town have mentioned the article to me in the days since. The piece has registered over 1000 comments on the Washington Post site since it came out, according to the local Westchester paper which ran a story on the WP article in yesterday’s edition, Hardship in Harrison- or not? .

I am not going to judge the family portrayed in the story and although I have the greatest respect for Ms.Hull,  I do not think that our area was accurately represented in that particular story.  From a real estate perspective, Rye and Harrison both have a variety of housing stock, large and small, and many families live here not particularly for the house per se but for good schools, recreational opportunities, and strong sense of community. There are plenty of bungalows near the beach, as well as ranches and split levels intertwined between the “tear down” mega mansions that developed over recent years.

To me, this seems really a story more about divorce than the economy we are in right now in that it focused largely on maintaining a large home. Yes, it may take longer to sell a $2,500,000 home right now particularly if it is not priced right. But in such a desirable area, it will sell. As time passes, I have watched more of my female friends and neighbors deal with divorce and widowhood- with varying success- and it usually centers on whether or not to keep the masterpiece of assets, the family home. Some recent evidence suggests that the wiser decision may be to sell this primary asset. Kelly Lise Murray, a Nashville Real Estate Agent and Harvard trained Attorney, writes that the remaining spouse’s ability to maintain the home is often drastically overstated in her book, Divorce This House.

Single women homeowners represent the fastest growing segment of homebuyers and in some ways need more support to make the right decision. I’ve been interested in this topic for a long time; my first sale way back when was a townhouse purchase (thank you, Donna) for a woman who had sadly lost her husband in the 9/11 terrorist attack. Over the years I have sold co-ops and rented apartments for Rye Singles, and helped several local women negotiate their home sale following a divorce or separation. For this reason, I recently became a member of the  Women Homeowners Network and will be talking about this more in coming months.  If any of you single female readers have an opinion on this topic, I would love to hear from you (especially the Facebook ladies!).

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.