As parents, Karen and I have moved our daughter Alexandra a lot. We helped her move to New York for college; nothing odd about that. Lulling us into a false sense of security, she stayed in the same dorm for four years, and even stored her stuff in the dorm basement over the summer. After college, things changed. Since graduation we have moved her about seven times, depending on how you count it. The most recent one was unique, and not only because she moved to a pass-down house. But that’s getting ahead of the story.
The first move was from New York to an improbably large tract house in Modesto, California rented by Alexandra and her then-paramour. Their belongings quickly proved that household goods are a gas-phase material—they expand to fill the available space. By the time the one-year lease ended and the two went their separate ways, one spare bedroom held an Olympic weightlifting rack and another was devoted entirely to storing packaging from large items delivered by Amazon. Fortunately, the weightlifting rack went with the roommate, and we managed to get all Alexandra’s stuff into her new one-bedroom place.
All too soon, it was time for Alexandra to leave Modesto to work at a startup, in San Francisco of course. Which meant for us the joy of U-Hauling Alexandra’s stuff through the Central Valley. And for only twice the rent she was paying in Modesto, Alexandra moved into a brand new, state of the art, super glossy two-bedroom place in the uber-trendy neighborhood of Mission Bay. Unfortunately, she was joined by a roommate, along with the roommate’s dog, cat, ostensibly-live Betta fish, and more kitchen paraphernalia than one can possibly imagine being owned by a 27-year old person who works 12 hours a day and doesn’t cook.
Well, the roommate situation and the startup went the way those things do, so the next fall, Alexandra opted for graduate business school and a return to dorm life. Alexandra was downsizing, which meant we were upsizing. This also created the opportunity for two separate moves. We turned to our new friends at U-Haul and dragged Alexandra’s furniture to our garage and the rest of her stuff to the dorm. The highlight of the dorm move was when a very top-heavy box of kitchen stuff dived off the hand truck onto the pavement, prompting most of the Ikea dishes inside to spontaneously explode into a million bits of pointy Swedish glass. Less to move next time!
By spring, Karen and I were feeling a need to move somebody, and since Alexandra was busy with exams, we moved my parents out of their house and into an independent living facility. It was a lot like moving Alexandra into the dorm, except that the neighbors use walkers instead of bicycles.
For her second year of business school, Alexandra banded together with several women to rent a pass-down house. But you say, what the heck is a pass-down house? It turns out pass-down houses are a longstanding tradition at Alexandra’s business school. It seems some folks who happen to own spare houses in town have outsourced their leasing operation to students. Every year, a new batch of students rents the place, and every year they recruit a new batch from the following class to take over. What could be better than having a steady stream of earnest, responsible business students who, at a bare minimum, are about to start pulling down salaries that are easily sufficient to be garnished to cover back rent and cleaning costs?
It’s probably not particularly unusual to have students renting houses year after year in a college town. But there is one aspect of the arrangement that probably is unique. These pass-down houses are rented furnished. And not only that, the incoming tenants are required, according to time-honored pass-down house tradition, to “buy into” the house by paying the outgoing tenants the depreciated value of their furniture. The leaseholders (remember, these are business students) prepare detailed spreadsheets with amortization tables showing the current value of each item, and the incoming lessees pay in accordingly.
Given that, you might think these students, most of whom drive nicer cars than ours, are furnishing the pass-down houses with furniture from Roche Bobois. But you would be wrong. No, so far as I can tell the furnishings are vintage Ikea. Now in my layperson’s opinion Ikea furniture is fully depreciated by the time it is assembled, but no matter. It’s tradition. So Alexandra and company signed the lease, starting July 1, and also managed to find sublessees willing to pony up the confiscatory rent over the summer while the business students flit off to remunerative management consulting gigs in places with equally eye-watering rents. In Alexandra’s case, that meant Boston.
But there is a twist to the story of the pass-down house. The particular house Alexandra and company are renting is NOT YET a pass-down house; it is just going to become one when they are through. So she and her cohorts are the beneficiaries of the little-known, one-off pass-down house windfall. As the progenitors of this particular pass-down house, they don’t have to buy in. Instead, they get to furnish the place with their own crappy, broken-down graduate student furniture and set up the depreciation schedules, and then get paid unconscionable sums when they move out. It is sort of like how our grandparents got social security passed and then got to reap the benefits of the plan without ever paying in, with successive generations (mostly mine) footing the bill.
Anyway. Did you notice that the lease starts July 1? And do you remember where Alexandra’s furniture has been staying since she moved into the dorm? Yep, when it was time for the move to the pass-down house, Alexandra’s furniture was in the garage and Alexandra herself was conveniently located in Boston. So as surely as night follows day and the plastic bag follows the dog poop, the move to the pass-down house fell to us.
That’s a good thing for Alexandra, but there is a bonus for me and Karen, too. Because when I waved goodbye to the nice movers as they drove off to the pass-down house with a garage-load of Alexandra’s furniture, I knew . . . IT’S NOT COMING BACK!
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