A cozy three-bedroom home. A clean, white SUV. A husband, kid and a dog. It’s easy to look at photographer Amanda Dahlgren—with her wavy blond hair, shiny wedding ring and hip glasses with little half-moon ivory details on the rims—and think she’s living the American Dream. But Dahlgren can’t keep herself from focusing on the dreams of others—and doing a little dreaming herself.
“I have this, sort of”—Dahlgren pauses as she checks her GPS coordinates on her phone and turns her steering wheel in the right direction—“twisted love affair with real estate. Driving around a neighborhood at night, and it’s cool outside and the lights are on and it’s all warm in the houses, and you just think, I wish I lived there. I don’t know, there’s just something—.”
Dahlgren pauses again, glances at the GPS and speeds up. She spent a week researching her next shot location, and now she’s racing to get to the spot when the light is right—just after sunset is perfect. We head northeast from Dahlgren’s neighborhood in Bay Park to Scripps Ranch as the sun quickly sinks lower in the sky.
A few weeks ago, Dahlgren stopped by a home show in Carmel Valley. The development company markets houses one at a time, then invites the prospective buyers to a “viewing party” in hopes of creating competition.
“They say they don’t have anything available,” Dahlgren explains. “And, instead, they hold these parties and they lock the doors behind you and create this fake urgency. They’re sick, they really are.”
A small part of Dahlgren is still interested in buying a new home, but, mostly, she’s just feeding her inner real-estate geek. Dahlgren admits to spending her free time touring model homes for fun. She’s been known to surf the Internet for long stretches of time, too, looking through hundreds of listings and fantasizing about moving into a bigger home in the perfect neighborhood. And while the rest of her family is content where they are, a few years ago, her desire for a better life got so strong that she started pushing her husband to get serious about buying a house.
That was right before the real-estate bubble burst, and now she thanks her husband for being so stubborn. Click here to read the full story.
Kinsee Morlan | Words 
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