In the early 1980s, my grandfather bought a big old Victorian house in Minneapolis as an investment in the family. His children were musicians, and he bought the property so they would have a place to live and be creative in the city. When I was a kid, I visited the house whenever I could. I loved the music studio in the basement, the old woodwork, and hanging out with my eclectic uncles.
As a young artist, I always wanted to live at what the family called The Big House. The opportunity came in early 2009. Although I was living in Brooklyn, a room opened up so I rented it to have a place to crash when I came back to visit. I left New York and began living there in the autumn of that year.
During this period, I was dealing with chronic cluster headaches, experiencing over a thousand incapacitating headache attacks a year. This made traditional employment impossible, so I painted pictures. Eventually, I got pretty good. My paintings started selling for hundreds of dollars, then thousands. This was never reliable as my primary source of income, but oil paintings last forever, so I filled the walls of the house with beautiful art, selling a piece or two a year, considering the value stored in this art secure.
At the same time, I was working on the house and fixing up the property in cooperation with one of my uncles. I fixed plaster, repainted, and did all kinds of minor repairs. I spent a few years turning the back yard from a toxic slab of trash and gravel into nice little garden. To do this, I dug a pit 3 feet deep around the perimeter of the yard and rebuilt the soil from the ground up, hauling in tons of biomass and compost to do so. Not only did this garden keep me eating greens for half the year, it was the only outdoor space I had access to where I could safely experience the horrors of a cluster headache and not be in public.
When I moved in, the garage was jam packed with garbage. I organized an area for garden tools, and another to use as a shop for working wood or metal. Soon a family friend and neighbor brought her tools over and we began sharing the shop. It was an arrangement that benefited everyone.
This entire time, the uncle who was managing the house treated me as a partner in the process. He told me to put as much art on the walls as I wanted and helped out when I'd host open house art events. We talked continually about the best ways to improve the house and tackled remodeling projects one after another. Between the garden, the spacious common areas, and the shop, the place felt comfortable even though the room I rented was tiny and the landing I was allotted for my design studio wasn't much larger.
The mortgage was paid off about 10 years ago. A different uncle moved in a few years later and immediately destroyed the garden and the shop. Then my grandfather and a couple of other uncles died. After inheriting the property, my dad and two remaining uncles proceeded to systematically eliminate the house's common areas. Almost as an afterthought, they dismantled the music studio and gutted the basement, which remains gutted.
Last year, my relatives forced me to take all of my art off of the walls and store it out of sight. Last week, my dad informed me that he was selling his share of the property to my uncle's girlfriend at a steep discount, and it looks like the place where my art is stored is going to be used for something else now, so I'll probably have to rent a storage locker for it. The other implications of this sale are even worse for me.
Having always planned to buy into the property myself, I found it unfortunate that my dad didn't call me first, as we probably could've worked something out that would keep the property in the family. And now that my dad's out of the picture, there's nothing stopping my uncles from continuing to squeeze me out of the place. Since I have a low income and special needs as a result of my chronic illness, I can't afford to move.
This has been my home for 15 years. By the end of this year, I'll have paid about $58,740 in rent to the house. My art collection is worth about $67,100, and will realistically yield about half that over the next 20 years if I can keep the work from being damaged or destroyed. My relatives have already destroyed most of the value I created in the house with their tacky and ill-considered renovations. They've also stolen and wrecked or thrown away thousands of dollars worth of my tools, cookware, and specialty materials over the years.
When I was leaving Brooklyn in 2009, moving into this house wasn't my only option. I had a friend in Colorado who had bought property outside of Steamboat Springs. We were close. I'd lived with her in 2006 and helped her scout properties. She wanted me to move onto her land and make it self-sustaining, which was entirely in my wheelhouse. I could've moved there, built my own little house up in the mountains, and spent my years doing sustainable development in exchange for a stake in that land.
Instead, I decided to put my energy into the family homestead in Minneapolis. By the time it became apparent that my family didn't value my contributions or even regard me as a stakeholder in the property, it was too late for me to do anything else. My resources were depleted or locked up in artworks that couldn't be easily moved. And now, 9 weeks into a cluster headache cycle and barely staying afloat, I have to come to terms with the fact that I'm slowly being forced out of my home and the countless hours I spent improving the property were completely wasted.
Both of my brothers are married and own property. They may not care that our grandfather's legacy will never pass to our generation. This would probably be my perspective as well if my lifetime earning capacity hadn't been utterly destroyed by chronic illness. Even with the illness, I would likely have some small piece of Colorado property right now if I'd chosen to go my own way instead of believing the lies my family told me about my house.
When my dad broke news of the sale to me, he made a point of saying that I wasn't being immediately evicted. "Don't worry, no one's kicking you out right now," he said. Then he told me I could make some extra money by selling his junky furniture, which has been sitting in an unused room of the house after being purchased on Facebook Marketplace. As if this were some kind of compensation for years of my work going up in smoke.
At least he recognizes that I have a serious incurable illness. My uncles definitely don't get this, even after all of these years. For a long time, they acted like I was making it up or exaggerating it. On this subject and anything related to the house, they've completely and consistently disregarded everything I say, breaking agreement after agreement, hiding behind some of the worst communication skills you can imagine.
The issue isn't that they're mean. The vast majority of our interactions have been civil. We generally get along fine. They'll give me a sandwich if I'm starving or give me a ride to the doctor if it's convenient. But I'm pretty sure neither one has ever so much as Googled cluster headaches. Last year, one uncle suggested that I throw away my medical oxygen because the tanks looked like clutter to him.
At this juncture, I feel like I'm out of options in the situation. For several years, I've been trying to talk to my family about the impacts of their actions on me and how we might better cooperate so everybody wins. I've done this verbally and in writing. A few times they've even agreed to start doing things in a way that works better for me, only to toss their promises out the window at the first opportunity. When I bring this up, they either ignore me, dodge the issue, or claim to have forgotten what we talked about.
Despite all of the nonsense, I still love this house. It's my home, in my neighborhood. It's the only family property that I visited as a kid that's still in the family. I've lived there for a third of my life. It would be great if I could figure out a way to stay in the place and salvage my relationships with my relatives. This seems pretty unlikely at this juncture, but I haven't given up completely yet.
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