I had big plans for 2020. There was writing to be done, trips to be taken, professional opportunities to explore…

I’ll tell you what, they certainly didn’t include social distancing, lockdowns, unemployment, and a global pandemic.

Did you ever hear a story from an elder of how different a place the world was for them than whatever the present day is? Now, for the first time, some of us are experiencing that feeling for ourselves. With COVID-19’s wicked fast spread across the United States, we feel as if we are living in a different world than we were just a few short months ago. The economy is in a perpetual nosedive, supply chains are breaking down and leaving once-ample conveniences scarce, and statewide lockdowns are forcing residents to shelter in place and learn to live without regular social contact.

The once bustling streets of Chicago, now a ghost town. Image courtesy of Joe Martin.

It’s certainly not like anything I’ve personally experienced in my almost four decades of living.

This is understandably driving a lot of fear and uncertainty. Outside of the potential long-term health and economic ramifications of what is happening now, people simply don’t know what’s waiting around the next corner, and that kind of uncertainty can be devastating.

Yet somehow, amidst all of that uncertainty, I’ve discovered that I’m not experiencing fear or panic. Instead, I am realizing that this may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us – an opportunity to embark on a journey of discovery, to find pleasure in all this new space in life that I’ve suddenly been blessed with, and to reflect amidst the relative stillness of an outside world that is being forced to slow way down.

As it turns out, learning to slow it down seems to be just one of many lessons this pandemic is forcibly laying upon us, lessons that – if social media can stop the blame/complain/let’s-argue-about-it cycle for a moment and leave us a little breathing space for personal contemplation – may lead us to a future we’ve never envisioned before, a lifestyle that’s a totally fresh idea.

Of all the important things I’m learning through this pandemic, these are the 5 lessons I’m taking most to heart and putting in my pocket to keep with me for whatever the future may bring.

Save it for a rainy day

Who else had parents that told you to always put away 20% of your paycheck? I did. But as a young adult who didn’t make very much and had oodles of [pointless] things she felt she needed to have, this idea didn’t make a lot of sense to me when I was in my teens and 20’s.

Fast forward to my 30’s, and now with 10+ years of the unexpected in my past (and undoubtedly still in my future) – everything from layoffs to spur-of-the-moment travels – I’ve learned to admit that, as with many things, *sigh* my parents were right. Having some kind of a savings (or a play day fund, whatever you want to call it) has saved my ass more than a few times in my life. Some years those savings accounts are healthier than others, but there’s always something there, usually at least enough to live off for a couple months.

Today COVID-19 has plummeted the entire world into economic crisis. Businesses are shutting their doors, people are being laid off in unprecedented numbers, and markets are crashing (then rebounding a bit, then crashing again…), taking lots of investment and retirement accounts down with it.

Luckily both my husband and myself have been good little savers for the past couple of years and are now fully comprehending the benefits of this way of thinking. The screeching halt of income and the disappearance of employment possibilities that have become a reality for so many (including us) haven’t hit us nearly as hard as it would have had we not had some savings set aside.

This time is a hell of a lesson in lifestyle choices as well. While the choice to live paycheck to paycheck isn’t necessarily a choice for some, it is most certainly a choice for others due to the way they live and their lifestyle choices. Which leads me to lesson #2…

Learn that less is more

I’ve had the occasional visit to homes of friends and family who have a whole lot of stuff. For sure, our home is by no means spartan, but these folks have serious stuff. Stuff in every nook and cranny, covering every surface, behind every door, and around every corner.

Just being in those kinds of places makes me anxious. I’m legitimately bothered by clutter. But I also can’t help but wonder, how much healthier would these people’s bank accounts be with half this stuff? How much less debt would they be struggling with? How much less would they need to work? How many more trips could they afford to take? How much less anxiety would they experience?

I can’t speak with certainty as to the practices of other cultures, but it seems America holds one of the top spots for heavy consumer culture. It’s all about the stuff in this country. There’s always something else to buy, whether it’s the next thing you “need” or the cartfuls of impulse purchases at Target that everyone seems to find so amusing.

Now suddenly many of us who’ve had some measure of “disposable” income find it vanishing and we’re learning that we don’t need all that stuff after all. I can be as guilty of unnecessary spending as the next person, although luckily coming from a somewhat frugal childhood that unnecessary spending lives on the low end of the money spectrum (ooh, I don’t have a $10 t-shirt in that color yet!).

Still, it all adds up to a bunch of stuff that ultimately bogs us down. It depletes our bank accounts, weighs on our spirits, and, ultimately, eats away at our freedom bit by bit.

I’ve always said that the key is not in having more but in needing less, and now with our household income drastically altered I find myself becoming more aggressively (and intuitively) faithful to that mantra than ever before. And, I must say, it’s an incredibly refreshing change.

Love (who, what, where) you got

Gratitude practices are all the rage these days, and while I don’t have a “practice,” I’ve been making a big effort to pay more attention to all the little pieces that make up this wonderful life.

I’ve heard an awful lot of complaining since we went into this lockdown in the US, mostly along the lines of, “I can’t go to this place, I can’t see this person, I have so much anxiety because I can’t live my “normal” life.” And my thoughts are that I’d mostly like to ship those folks over to Sub-Saharan Africa where there’s no running water and rampant poverty, or to the Middle East where a good chunk of people live in terror every day, and see how their “anxiety” fares in those environments.

In reality, we don’t even have have to leave our home soil to find pretty crappy living conditions; there’s plenty of people right here in the US that would probably give a limb to have the luxuries of a safe home and a computer or TV at their disposal.

Our lives here aren’t perfect, and there are certainly struggles this pandemic lifestyle brings with it. But let’s be honest…most of us have SO MUCH and we don’t even pay attention to it. Roofs over our heads, running water, plenty of food on the table, endless options for entertainment, and piles upon piles of options for bettering ourselves (not to mention the time with which to pursue those things).

I’ve doubled down on making it a priority to wake up everyday with gratitude for my home, my family, and all the incredible blessings that make up my daily life. It’s become abundantly clear to me just how much we’ve twisted the word “need” in our culture and just how truly simple the things are in this life that bring happiness and contentment.

We’ve all become accustomed to a world of endless distractions, one where misdirection is revered, appearances and perception reign supreme, and social media masquerades as meaningful. The need to forget or ignore something was satisfied by the newest blockbuster or the corner bar, once always available for pacification, procrastination, or inebriation.

It may be only now with a fresh layer of silence that we can see the truth of environments we’ve created for ourselves. For those who aren’t loving the who, what, and where in their lives, this might be your wake up call.

Don’t count on tomorrow

We love to make plans don’t we?

Whether it’s a fun plan (vacation in six months!) or a way of procrastinating (I’ll finish cleaning out that room next weekend), there’s always this idea of the future. More than an idea…a dependency on the concept. It’s always the expectation that there’s more time ahead and that the things we’re used to in life will be a constant.

Flash forward to now, and someone who’s not only worked in the travel industry, but who immensely enjoys traveling herself, couldn’t tell you when that aspect of the world will restart, or what it will look like when it does. Within all of our cities and towns, grocery store shelves that have been fully stocked through most of our lifetimes are empty and we’re discovering that none of us know what to expect next month, or even next week.

The shopping list doesn’t matter when there’s nothing on the shelf.

When we first moved to our rural home that’s 30 minutes from town, my farmer-bred husband tried to break me of my suburban-raised habit of, “I’ll only buy what I need for this week,” or “I’ll just run to the store to grab this or that if I run out.” After some repeated failures (on my part) and some time, I finally started to get the idea of back stocking and staying prepared for longer periods between grocery runs.

As much self-sufficiency as possible has always been a priority goal in this household, so by the time COVID-19 came blazing into the picture we didn’t feel the need to go out and “hoard” anything; we’d already mostly adapted to a lifestyle that tomorrow is never a promise and that we never know when the world will turn on its head in an instant.

But being prepared isn’t just about having stuff – it’s also about knowledge and skills, about being in a physical condition that is healthy and sustainable, and about having the resources to make do when things go horribly awry. People can fill their safes with gold or their basements with toilet paper, but if the food supply chain breaks will you be able to grow your own? Would you have a water supply if the electric grid failed for an extended period of time? What kind of medications do you depend on and how could you improve your health to avoid that dependence?

At no time in recent history has the value of such questions become so readily apparent.

Understand the larger message

We humans have a tendency to be rather self-centered as a species – it’s all about us. But there’s a lot more happening in this big, beautiful world than our little dramas, a lot that has (or would like to have) absolutely nothing to do with us.

It can’t be denied we’re still a spreading problem on this abused planet, one that has yet to be remedied. If we can’t begin to grasp the massive damage we’re causing to our home and aggressively work towards culling the effects of our existence, then Mother Nature will probably find a way to do it for us.

As much damage as COVID-19 has already done, it’s just a test run for what’s to come if we don’t get things under control. This endless mentality of “me first”, of profit & power over morality & accountability, of excess over balance, is simply not sustainable. Not even a little.

In the first half of 2020 the world has already seen extraordinary positive changes across the globe due to the harsh restrictions of COVID-19, mostly centered around massive pollution reductions and a resurgence of wildlife cultures. Some people are beginning to recognize that our “normal” prior to all of this was not a good one, everything from the deterioration of the travel culture into a dirty tourism culture to the exposure of our desperately broken long-distance and “Just In Time” food supply chains.

This is the first time in my lifetime that there has been an exceptional opportunity for a global reset button. It’s an opportunity to re-examine values and lifestyles, and to make better, more intentional choices as we all move forward.

On a smaller scale, it’s also an opportunity to hit a personal reset button now that the parts of life that aren’t working have become glaring neon signs in the stillness. For me, instead of being in a hurry to return to “normal,” I’m trying to immerse myself as much as possible in this time of flux and allow for a redirection in those areas of my life that didn’t really fit before, areas that were simply passing as “good enough.”

Because really, how often do we get the opportunity to re-examine, re-analyze, and reboot? What an incredible gift. I, for one, won’t be taking this gift for granted, and I can’t wait to see what not only my, but the world’s new “normal” will look like.

There’s a lot to wish for, hopefully humanity can step up to the plate and swing for the fences.

Joining the Bears, Blackhawks, Bulls, Cubs and White Sox, the Fire now have their own face masks with team logos on them. The MLS will donate its royalties from the purchase by the vendor to Feeding America (for US sales) and Food Banks Canada (for Canadian sales).

Fire masks are available for purchase here.

Tribune Publishing may earn a commission if you purchase a product through one of our links.

I’ve been trying to process why grocery shopping leaves me feeling in turns anxious and hopeless. Each time I go out, and I feel a compulsion to go any time we get close to running out of something, I come home feeling beaten up by life.

My daughter has told me about the “uncanny valley,” a term introduced by Masahiro Mori that describes the feeling we have toward robots whose appearance is very close to human. Up to a point, he says, we are comforted by their human-like appearance. However, we reach a tipping point when they are too close to the human and become scary.

I suppose the uncanny valley is when the created world of robots interferes with our perception of reality. When a machine becomes too real, the threat grows because two worlds begin to merge, testing our basic sense of what the real is.

Grocery shopping for me, then, becomes a sort of uncanny valley, though it happens in reverse. The real, banal experience of buying food tips into the threatening when it diverges from the normal.

On a good day, six months ago, grocery shopping was never a favorite chore. I’m anxious in stores like these even when we’re not in a pandemic. The press of people, sometimes aggressively using carts like weapons, triggers in me a desire to retreat.

But now, dislike has morphed into a much more threatening feeling. The familiar grocery store is now an unfamiliar place of sanitized carts, signs on the aisles directing the one-way flow of traffic.

People, still aggressive and oblivious, wear masks and either observe social distancing or don’t. Either way, it’s odd. The observant see me coming and back up away from me, turning their heads. The oblivious forge ahead and I back up and turn away.

When I turn down the toilet paper aisle or the cleaning aisle or the baking aisle, I see yards of empty shelves. These very basic goods, what we need to stay healthy and well fed are gone, hoarded by folks perhaps even more anxious than I am. Or, worse, they are signs of the supply chain breaking down.

As I move haltingly through the store, my glasses fog up because my mask doesn’t fit quite right. I begin to heat up and get sweaty in a place where I’m usually shivering because of the refrigerated food cases.

The store is the same, but not quite. Doors are open on only one end. It’s unsettlingly quiet because it’s so hard to talk behind a mask.

The differences are likely not permanent, but I feel no assurance that we’ll go back to a true normal any time soon. I’m already beginning to feel like this is normal, the new way of life that pandemic has forced upon us.

It’s this last part that makes it so like the uncanny valley. Reality has morphed in a relatively short period of time that feels like years, into an unreal reality. In its wake I find that I feel differently about food itself. Grocery shopping is no longer a chore I dislike. It is now a chore I despise but rely on as if my life hangs in the balance.

My hard learned cognitive behavioral skills don’t hold up well in the uncanny grocery store. I can tell myself I’m catastrophizing. But a pandemic is a catastrophe, survivable for some, but not for all.

I can speak to my anxious self and tell her that we’re fine, that adult Kerri has child Kerri protected. But that’s a rationalization. I’m safer at home any day than I am in the grocery store, a place where many hands touch produce before I touch it. I feel guilty testing the avocados for ripeness, knowing that I’m leaving my germs behind on someone else’s soon-to-be avocado.

At night my dreams are filled with moving. I move offices and homes, constantly boxing up and putting away and then unpacking and putting away and then finding new rooms and abandoning old rooms. Each dream wakes me up and feels like a nightmare, rooms standing in for worlds that are no longer mine to live in.

Someone sent around the meme above over Facebook and it spoke to me. We have control over some things and none over lots of things. This has always been true, but the grocery store hammers the impossibility of control into my brain.

My goal now is to live as at ease as I can be in the world where I have some control, to create places and rituals of comfort. Meditation. Gratitude. Turning my eyes to what I love.

When a I return home from my uncanny valley, I unpack the food, wipe it down for safety, and organize the recipes that I’ll make with my spoils. I am grateful to be eating so well, to be able to chop onions and red peppers, to splash acidic touches such as vinegar or lemon on sautéed produce and to eat.

I remind myself that some are hungry and try to find joy in my meals instead of guilt. I make plans for new kinds of bread to make since I can no longer make the whole wheat loaves that I love. And I look forward to the time when I go to the store, as dangerous as it feels, to buy whole wheat flour when it’s back in stock.

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As we continue quarantine in our sacred spaces and while the streets have slowed, the parks and public spaces have closed, I can’t help but think of the built environment of Chicago and how there’s such a rich history in building types, layout, city-planning and home styles.

In every city, there’s usually an event that influences the style of real property which has a profound impact on construction and building within the city. In our city, this was The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 spanning three days in early October, destroying 18,000 edifices, killing roughly 300 people and displacing more than 100,000 residents from their homes. The fire was rumored to start in a barn just southwest of the city, and rapidly spread east and north due to a combination of dry, hot and windy conditions; additionally the primary building material during that time was wood, creating a condition ripe for the area’s catastrophic event. This crisis would change the city-planning strategy and building code to create a stronger and more resilient built environment that would certainly thwart a future fire of this magnitude.

After the fire smoldered and extinguished, primarily by rainfall and breaks in the built environment, the damage was found to span over 2,000 acres causing $222M in damage then, or $4.7B in today’s dollars. As Chicago recovered from this devastating fire, donations came in from all around the country, while a focused look on Chicago’s building codes created a better standard for fire protection. Prominent architects were drawn to the city to help the re-build of Chicago and included Dankmar Adler, a German-born architect known for his co-design of the Romanesque Auditorium Building that is now part of Roosevelt University and Daniel Burnham, an architect and urban planner from New York, most known for his work on the Montauk Block, a 10-story building erected in 1891, which utilized an innovative concrete-footing foundation to allow taller construction. John Wellborn Root, another architect of the re-build and Georgia-born civil engineer was cited for his work on this commercial marvel. This building, through its use of hollow-tile sub-floor and encasement of steel columns and wrought-iron floor beams, joined to create a fire-proof edifice, a building marvel at the time.

William Holabird, also a New York-born architect, was part of the Chicago School, a group of architects and engineers who promoted the commercial style; this modern technology pushed innovative skyscraper design. Holabird and designer William Le Baron Jenney worked together as members of the Chicago School to express this design of building. Jenney would design the Home Insurance Building erected in 1885, while Holabird implemented the steel skeleton superstructure. This building, although demolished in 1931, is argued by many real estate enthusiasts and scholars to be the world’s first skyscraper.

Finally, Louis Sullivan, an architect that hailed from Boston, created not only residential designs, but also was a major pioneer of the commercial style of architecture. Famed Chicago designer, Frank Lloyd Wright also was Sullivan’s understudy and spent 6 years as his apprentice. Wright would go on to make a name for himself and design structures that still have lasting impact today.

On the residential front, Chicago has several home styles that are prevalent in the built environment. During the city’s building boom of the early 20th century, the Chicago Bungalow was a home style that was popular due to its utilitarian arts and crafts focus, large living space and overall geometric layout that lends itself to the standard 25’ x 125’ land parcel. These homes are primarily made of decorative brick in the front of the dwelling and Chicago common brick on each side and sometimes rear of the home.

The American Four Square home is also a style frequented in Chicago’s urban landscape that is a nod to the Craftsman and Prairie School design style. The Prairie School design was focused on the horizontal nature of America’s native prairie scene, while the craftsman style honors the arts and crafts movement which began in 1880 and continued through the 1920s.

The Worker’s Cottage is another style of home that is plentiful in the city. Built from readily available materials, either brick or wood, these cottages have a first floor that is raised above grade while the structure is 1 ½ stories in height with an A-frame roof line. The raised 1st floor made space for a garden unit to be rented to another family and allowed maximization of economic prudence for the owner.

The Greystone was a style of home that gained popularity in the 1890s; Bedford limestone was readily available in the area and was a great option for those who wanted a home that touted more opulence and grandeur during the rebuild that followed The Great Chicago Fire. Built primarily in a Neoclassical or Romanesque style, these homes were large in square footage and appealed not only to the wealthy who utilized these structures as single family homes, but also other classes that utilized the homes to include two, three or even four families per structure.

The Queen Anne home was popular in Chicago’s urban landscape in the late 1800s and was a nod to the Victorian style popular among some in the middle class. These homes are rather ornamental and include towers, decorative spindles, gables, a myriad of textures and sometimes classically-columned porches. This exterior ornamental style continued into the home’s interior and included decorative wood, textured wallpaper, embellished tile and fine art.

The Two-Flat comprises roughly 30 percent of Chicago’s built environment and was primarily erected in the first quarter of the 20th century. Modest in appointment, the Two-Flat features an apartment on each level with one entry and had an exterior façade of brick, wood or stone. This building type was erected in response to the increasing population that began to inhabit Chicago at the time and was intended to increase the amount of families that could live within the standard Chicago lot. This type of structure was also built to benefit the future economics of the live-in owner. Similarly, the Three and Four-Flat had this same philosophy of construction and economic outlook.

Continue to enjoy being home and let’s appreciate Chicago’s built environment for what it is: a city of buildings, land and homes of varied sizes, styles, interpretations and influences. Take a look at your own home and ponder how one can honor the style and focus that was intended during Chicago’s building boom. Enjoy home, builders!

My sense is that the worst of the Covid-19 crisis might be behind the Chicago real estate market though it’s not totally going away any time soon. Looking back at my previous weekly updates it appears that weeks 5 and 6 might have been the bottom. Weeks 7 and 8 were harder to interpret because the Easter bunny came a week earlier this year but it did look like things were getting better. Week 9, which is the week ending May 2, seems to be showing a bit more improvement:

Detached Homes

• New listings were down 39% from last year to 305 homes
• Contract activity was down 38% to 177
• Inventory in absolute terms was down 17% to 2760 homes
• However, in relative terms inventory was actually up from 11.6 weeks of supply to 15.6 weeks

Attached Homes

• New listings were down 40% to 533 homes
• Contract activity was down 44% to 250
• Inventory in absolute terms was down 13% to 4947 homes
• Inventory in relative terms was up from 12.6 weeks of supply to 19.8 weeks

As ugly as they still are, these stats seem to confirm that the Chicago real estate market is somewhat improving. In addition, anecdotally, our phone stopped ringing there for a month or two but in the last week we started to get calls again. To avoid simply reporting on the progress of paint drying I’ll probably stop covering this every week, waiting instead for evidence that things have gotten a lot better.

#RealEstate #ChicagoRealEstate #Coronavirus

Gary Lucido is the President of Lucid Realty, the Chicago area’s full service real estate brokerage that offers home buyer rebates and discount commissions. If you want to keep up to date on the Chicago real estate market or get an insider’s view of the seamy underbelly of the real estate industry you can Subscribe to Getting Real by Email using the form below. Please be sure to verify your email address when you receive the verification notice.

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