Cohen

This is the house in Newton, Massachusetts, where I lived from birth until I went to college. When my parents bought this house in the late 1970s, Newton was a middle class suburb of Boston. In recent years, property values have skyrocketed making it a more affluent suburb. The house was a good size for our family because both my brother and I got our own bedrooms, and my parents added on a family room in the early 1980s where we spent most of our leisure/TV watching time. We owned the house and it was affordable as both my parents worked good white collar jobs (finance and public relations), and Newton was not as expensive then as it is now. My family moved there because:

1. my mother lived there in her late teenage years and her parents still lived in the area
2. it was on the Boston subway and close to major highways
3. there was a large Jewish population
4. the public schools are some of the best in the country

I moved out when I went to college at age 18, but my mother still lives in the house today. She's very proud of the color of those blue shutters. I painted that fence one summer.

This is the area of Tufts University, where I attended for my undergraduate degree. I lived in dorms or off-campus housing in the area during my four years.

This was my first apartment in Seattle. I moved there in 2006 to attend the University of Washington and earn a master's degree in musicology. We had killer views and it was surprisingly inexpensive.

This was the second apartment we had when we lived in Seattle. We moved because we wanted to get a dog and our previous landlord did not allow pets and was planning to raise our rent. 

This is the first apartment we lived in in NYC, we rented.

This was an apartment in a co-op building that we purchased in 2010.

This is our current apartment, which we rent from my wife's employer. It is across the street from her workplace, and very close to the train station which takes us into NYC in under an hour.

This was my first apartment after college, my family owns the building so our rent was reduced. The apartment is in the Boston neighborhood of Brighton, which has a lot of college students and people in their early 20s, as well as a large immigrant population. This building was very popular with Boston College students, many of whom live off-campus their junior year, so the building was often quite loud with parties and noise. I loved living there my first year after college, but my second year after college I felt like an old guy yelling "turn it down!" to the "kids." The building was right on the "T," which is the Boston public transportation, making it easy for us to get around the city. I lived here with 3 other high school friends.

I moved into the first floor of a triple decker house in Somerville with my girlfriend who is now my wife, not far from where we went to college. My in-laws owned the building so our rent was low, and my brother-in-law and his wife lived on the second floor; it was kind of a family house. Both my jobs were in nearby Cambridge, and I could easily bike to work. At the time, Somerville was still mostly working class residents, young people, and artists, but now the real estate is very expensive there.