I happened to drive through the neighbourhood where we bought our first house, back in 1988. It's actually the same neighbourhood we live in now, just over on the other side of the high street and down a few tax brackets. The house was (and still is) a Victorian rowhouse, built in 1888. At the time, it had been badly renovated several times over, and turned into a duplex. Our neighbours included, on one side, a nice Polish family who kept a couch on their front porch, and on the other, a motorcycle gang. Across the street lived a retired couple; the husband would stand outside every day and smoke. We of course called him The Smoker. There was a dusty little parkette around the corner and a convenience store across the street that smelled like feet. We had two mortgages, put every spare penny into the place, had a baby, and considered ourselves lucky. However, thanks to bad timing and worse luck, when we moved out ten years later it was worth slightly less than we paid for it.
Flash forward to two decades later. That dingy old working class neighbourhood is now ... hipsterville. The houses are structurally the same, but the brick is all cleaned, the porches are freshly painted, and instead of couches there are dauntingly snazzy baby strollers with names like Bugaboo and Joovi. There's a big park with tennis courts and an organic market every week, and cool little cafes where groovy people meet for brunch. A couple of motorcycles, but even more Vespas. The Smoker is, I would imagine, dust. Gentrification, thy name is Sorauren Park. I wish it could have been like that for us then, but I doubt we could have afforded it. In real estate, as in comedy, timing is everything. Our luck was better the second time: the house we bought easily doubled its value, and now we have a dream house (with a nightmare mortgage) on the top of the hill. Which is why I have no business feeling nostalgic and haunting the old nabe, with its yummy mummies and farmers' markets and hybrid cars. Maybe it's not the old house I miss, but the young (er) me.