Austin Real Estate Blog

I was reading my email today and came across a discussion from one of the cohousing lists that I subscribe to. (Cohousing, if you’re not familiar, is an alternative way of living within a community of folks who are like minded and want to live more like people used to live, neighborly that is. Co housing also let’s the participants design, build, and run their community more freely than in the current trend of master planned communities.) Anyway, the discussion was about a family here in Austin that is giving away all their possessions to seek a simpler, healthier, happier, more fulfilling life as homesteaders in Vermont.

The Harris family had felt that the things that they owned had begun to own them. While I see the truth in that, I have never been able to make a decision like they did. I have to give them that. They are donating their possessions to charity and setting off to start a new life. I’m jealous. It would be interesting to make such a leap towards something I believed in, but the last time I did that I would up as a REALTOR! While I’m generally pleased with my decision, it it not what I thought it would be. It’s some of what I thought and some of what I didn’t think. If it were terrible, it would have been relatively easy to just go back to program management in hi-tech. Now look at the Harris’. If what they are doing isn’t what they think it is and they want to do something else, it could be very hard. I admire that they are willing to take that chance and go for their dreams.

I wish them and their family the best. I’ll be following along as long as they are writing their blogs.

You can follow along as well at the Cage Free Family Blog.

If you are interested in reading the full story you can get it and photos at the NYT.

Hope you had a great weekend.

Joe

Below is an excerpt from the NYT article.

May 17, 2008
Chasing Utopia, Family Imagines No Possessions
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL and RACHEL MOSTELLER

AUSTIN, Tex. — Like many other young couples, Aimee and Jeff Harris spent the first years of their marriage eagerly accumulating stuff: cars, furniture, clothes, appliances and, after a son and a daughter came along, toys, toys, toys.

Now they are trying to get rid of it all, down to their fancy wedding bands. Chasing a utopian vision of a self-sustaining life on the land as partisans of a movement some call voluntary simplicity, they are donating virtually all their possessions to charity and hitting the road at the end of May.

“It’s amazing the amount of things a family can acquire,” said Mrs. Harris, 28, attributing their good life to “the ridiculous amount of money” her husband earned as a computer network engineer in this early Wi-Fi mecca.

The Harrises now hope to end up as organic homesteaders in Vermont.

“We’re not attached to any outcome,” said Mrs. Harris, a would-be doctor before dropping out of college, who grew up poverty-stricken in a family that traces its lineage back through the Delanos and President Franklin D. Roosevelt to a Mayflower settler, Isaac Allerton.

Mr. Harris, 30, who dropped out of high school and “rode the Internet wave,” agreed, saying they were “letting the universe take us for a ride.”

They are not alone.

Matt and Sara Janssen, who traded down from their house in Iowa to a studio apartment in Montana and finally an R.V. powered by vegetable oil, now crisscross the country with their 4-year-old daughter, highway nomads living on $1,500 a month.

Not that simplicity need be that spartan. Cindy Wallach and her husband, Doug Vibbert, of Annapolis, Md., moved out of their apartment with an “everything must go” party and, along with their 3-year-old son, now sail and make their home on a 44-by-24-foot catamaran.

“We never wanted four walls and beige carpet,” Ms. Wallach said.

Though it may not be the stuff of the typical American dream, the voluntary simplicity movement, which traces its inception to 1980s Seattle, is drawing a great deal of renewed interest, some experts say.

“If you think about some of the shifts we’re having economically — shifts in oil and energy — it may be the right time,” said Mary E. Grigsby, associate professor of rural sociology at the University of Missouri and the author of “Buying Time and Getting By: The Voluntary Simplicity Movement.”

“The idea in the movement was ‘everything you own owns you,’ ” said Dr. Grigsby, who sees roots of the philosophy in the lives of the Puritans. “You have to care for it, store it. It becomes an appendage, I think. If it enhances your life and helps you do the things you want to do, great. If you are burdened by these things and they become the center of what you have to do to live, is that really positive?”

Juliet B. Schor, a sociology professor at Boston College and author of “The Overspent American,” said the modern “downshifters,” as she called them, owed debts to the hippies and the travel romance of Jack Kerouac.

“Their previous lives have become too stressful,” Dr. Schor said. “They have a lack of meaning because their jobs are too demanding.”

Mrs. Harris, who with her husband home-schools their son, Quinn, 5, and plans to do the same with their 15-month-old daughter, Nichola, agreed that there was something of the hippies in their quest: “the ideals, the peace and love, the giving and freedom.”

…