<p>Alh…i think the place you highlighted is a little too much…:)</p>
<p>Uskoolfish…I understand. My wife and daughter want me to consider buying a place in SF. We can rent out a room. My daughter could live in the other bedroom. And if my daughter moved out…we could turn the place into a rental…</p>
<p>I don’t know though. SF is one of the few places where rental costs are still less than owning. My guess is that is true for Manhattan too.</p>
<p>dstark: I am highlighting the architect. Last year there were Horta townhouses available in Brussels for under a million $ (I’m pretty sure). Still too much for me, but not for some 
However, if a group of friends went in together? Of course, we would have to find period appropriate furnishings which would add to the cost. 
And, of course, Brussels isn’t everyone’s favorite EU city - but to live in a Horta house would be quite the thing imho as long as we’re daydreaming.</p>
<p>Alh…you are talking about one of these?</p>
<p>[url=<a href=“H - Wikipedia”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H</a></p>
<p>^^exactly. Some of them are pretty small - and urban! :)</p>
<p>and sometimes even for sale</p>
<p>They really do look nice…i could never live in a place that looks that nice…I would be afraid to touch anything. :)</p>
<p>my theory is… if it is old & patina is good then you can’t really ruin it. Also, those Horta houses have surfaces not very easily smudged … lots of dark wood, tile, brass… they look like a pretty easy housekeeping job to me :)</p>
<p>imho - the Millenium looks lots easier to mess up… one fingerprint might do it?</p>
<p>Alh…yeah…I would be afraid of touching anything in the Millenium too. :)</p>
<p>My parents are in their 80s and are now looking for a retirement community to move to. I think we will follow the same pattern. We need the house, yard, and space. Plus, as someone up thread mentioned, our kids want to be able to come back to the home they were raised in.</p>
<p>I just went with a friend who wants to move to an upscale retirement community in our county. People from all over the country come to this community. The common areas look like a 5 star hotel, but the apartments are…well…apartments. Small. I would get very tired living in one of those. It would feel like I was at a hotel, and I would keep thinking it’s time to go “home”. Not for me.</p>
<p>We are just starting to look at houses to move to once we don’t need the school district anymore. As another poster said, we need at least 3 BR (if nothing else, for our 2 kids stuff) and for them to have a place to come back to. The ideal would be a tiny well furnished apt in the city, and a country house upstate somewhere. </p>
<p>I see all these ads for “starter” homes. I guess they don’t want to call them “ender” homes…</p>
<p>I have some friends who have boxed up and stored all their kids’ “stuff” in climate controlled storage units when they downsized. Long term storage costs are still less than buying additional residential square footage in some cases.</p>
<p>FYI for anyone: You can find much cheaper ways to do this than PODS.<br>
I Live and learn.</p>
<p>And I have friends, like someone up-thread, who feel they could pay for hotels for visiting grown children (and sometimes just pay for family vacations someplace the kids actually want to be) after downsizing dramatically.</p>
<p>Well so even though my fantasy is to live on Chicago’s Gold Coast, the reality is that my house will be paid off around the time my kids graduate college, I live in a beautiful seaside town, and I’m still not finished decorating my 2200 sq house. I am going to go to town on that once my oldest and most opinionated child is off to college - which is soon.</p>
<p>My parents moved soon after I graduated college, and visiting them was never the same, there was no space for “me” there. Perhaps that is part of growing up but I was a guest in their new home and I missed coming back to “our house.” I’d like to imagine having grandchildren spend summers here, there’s another fantasy!</p>
<p>Yes, I fantasize a lot on real estate websites looking at urban ‘loft’ type places. I would love to live in a city, and get rid of my car. Really.</p>
<p>It is why I want a 2-3 bedrooms apartment, I want to have a room for D2 when she comes home from college. D1 is off on her own now. D1 was very sweet when we decided to sell our house, she said, “home is wherever you guys are, it’s not the house.” We did feel guilty when we sold the house where our girls grew up in.</p>
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<p>We will probably be doing the same soon. Like you, we have been living in 5500 sf for years. I think I would always want at least 3 bedrooms, one being a study which could convert to a guest room.</p>
<p>My fantasy would be to live in a beautiful old but refurbished NYC brownstone in an area near to restaurants, shops, and entertainment. I’d love to live in a walking city!</p>
<p>Sadly, we could probably not afford that kind of lifestyle in NYC and my DH would never agree to leave Texas as long as his family was still here. :(</p>
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No, you wouldn’t. Brownstone - tall and skinny, many stairs. You have to shovel your own sidewalk. It is great when you are mobile and not so foregetful. You get all the way to the 4th flight, then forget why you were there in the first place.</p>
<p>I’d like to buy a NYC brownstone, live on one floor as our apartment, rent a different floor to my NYC resident son and his wife, and rent the other 2 or 3 studio apartments on the market to others, including D if she ever wants to reside in NYC someday. The visitor’s bedroom in our apartment could also generate side income through airbnb when not otherwise in use for our own visitors.</p>
<p>If not Brooklyn, then Queens. Forget Manhattan, it’s out of reach. </p>
<p>Hello, world-class medical care. Dumping 2 cars forever would pay for a lot of taxis. When our knees weaken and subway steps are too much, the street-level buses have a step that comes down to the curb. I’m for that. </p>
<p>None of our children wants to visit us in upstate NY because they didn’t grow up here, so they’ve also said “wherever you folks are, that’s home.” For us it’s not the house, but I surely do understand those who want to stay put for all those memories. We just never stayed put long enough in any one house or community.</p>
<p>Problem is: all the career move-arounds also meant we built up no equity in the houses we’ve occupied. Without equity, I guess we’ve essentially only paid the equivalent of rent (although we’ve always owned houses) our entire marriage. The closing and moving costs eat up the equity formed in 8 years, and that’s as long as these jobs last in H’s career field. </p>
<p>We’re working closely with a financial advisor to figure out if we can do this. It may be too expensive for us, but emotionally and familial-ly it’d be fabulous for us. </p>
<p>To downsize, we have to sell and donate roomsful of books, but we’ve decided to do it. The best wall art (we have lots) will go into open boxes in the new place. I’ll rotate that, like the museum curator I’d always wanted to be. I’m told the best thing to do with all the children’s art and growing-up paper memorabilia is select best samples for scrapbooks, then scan/digitize/toss the rest. </p>
<p>The hardest part will be giving up the Invisible Fence and learning to walk the dog with a plastic bag scooper, but I’m ready and willing. </p>
<p>When I miss my open space, I figure I’ll go bother my brothers who live in NH, and get there by public transpo, too, or just swap residences with them for a week.</p>
<p>It’s all about whether we can afford it. I’d just love to retire to NYC. Fallback: rent some kind of apartment wherever Bruce Springsteen grew up.</p>
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<p>LOL. 
But I could have sworn I saw a Brownstone on HGTV with an elevator. </p>
<p>However, I could see myself forgetting why I was going to the 4th floor, even with an elevator.</p>
<p>Okay, so I should modify the fantasy to a nice 3 bedroom apartment (still like the old refurbished idea) with a very nice door man. :)</p>
<p>My sister says all my real estate perusing is real estate porn! It would be very hard to leave my house. It is a great house on a beautiful pond, with lots of character. But the town we live in, has sky high taxes(good public schools), and honestly this is just too big for me and hubby. So looking around at the neighboring towns with lower taxes, and smaller abodes. It is fun. We still have 2.5 more years in this town. So I figure, if I find a house, and it is still on the market in 2.5 years, I will get a great buy!</p>
<p>“Fallback: rent some kind of apartment wherever Bruce Springsteen grew up.”</p>
<p>Bruce grew up in Freehold NJ and did most of his early concerts in Asbury Park. Towards the beach, Asbury has gone through a revival, although some parts of the town are quite rough.</p>
<p>I’m looking for the mythical harbor-side village/town with a small but good public library, lots of places to walk, a few good restaurants and a bookstore, and decent medical care not too far away. And, not brutally cold in the winter. Not asking for much, am I?</p>
<p>(And while I love San Francisco, that website for The Millenium drove me nuts. Maybe I’m a little too get-to-the-point, but that website seems to have been set up more as a masturbatory exercise than as a useful means of conveying information. Unless the information they’re trying to convey is that they’re full of themselves.)</p>