Before I get back to posting more “thrilling-to-us” photos of the work being done on the kitchen, I think it’s worth saying a few words about the curious context of this project. Kitchens are expensive! If, as we did, you start with an architect and then find a reasonable and reliable contractor for the demolition and installation, pick out contemporary cabinets, tile and countertops, sign up for new appliances, fiddle about with lighting and floor refinishing and choose a new sink and faucet, you will end up on the wrong side of $50K at a speed that shatters your normal money frame of reference. Typically, other purchases on this scale – car, house, etc. – are financed by debt rather than income or savings. Since a new kitchen was never such a priority that we would contemplate taking out a home equity line of credit, we lived with a state of affairs that was ever less genteel and ever more decline until we reached the point where “use, decay and obsolescence” forced our hand.

And herein we get to the title of this post. The cataclysm of abrupt financial climate change left houses underwater and dried up access to refinancing. Although some sectors of the economy and the housing market have since improved, in much of the country 2013 was not a great time to be thinking about refinancing your house to pay for a major kitchen renovation. Unless that is you happened to live in Washington DC and bought your house during the time the Financial Control Board ruled the city’s fiscal affairs. If that was the case, you were welcomed back to the casino like a whale.

Since 2001, when DC regained its (congressionally limited) financial autonomy, the city benefited from the same social and economic forces that spurred an urban revival across the country in the run-up to the Great Recession – a drop in the crime rate (likely due to reduced childhood exposure to lead beginning in the early 1970s), a generational attitudinal shift in favor of urban living and the easy money real estate bubble. But when the latter burst, DC retained significant advantages that other locales did not.

The signal accomplishments of Clintonian neoliberalism – financial deregulation and the embrace of leveraging, a return to budgetary surplus and “ending welfare as we know it” – set the stage for an epic Republican bacchanal of fraud and chicanery, reckless deficit spending and a “kicking the poors” mentality. The Afghanistan and Iraq wars might have had limited effects on the rest of the country, but they kickstarted DC into high gear. Just as the finance, real estate and insurance industries were redefining their role in the real economy, the Global War on Terror reasserted Washington’s primacy within the nation. Taken together, these developments wrought the largest-scale transformation of the nation’s capital since WWII.

So when the party ended for the rest of the country and the hangover set in,  “federal” DC put the tab for the top-shelf booze on the nation’s credit card and kept right on going. As a result, construction is going on all over the city, downtown residences must be at a modern historic high and housing prices have pushed first-time buyers out to neighborhoods whose names (when not just made up) and boundaries were not widely known just a few years ago. The flip side of conservative antipathy to government and liberal elites turns out to be a revolving-door embrace of government contractors, lobbyists and ideological hustlers and grifters. (The election and reelection of America’s first black president has only intensified the fervor in the true believers’ redoubt; in the absence of political courage, it seems we must rely on demography  to set a new course.)

The largely recession-proof local economy (excepting the underclass as always) fostered by Republican rule through most of the 2000s reflected a Bizarro world reality in which the Washington that was skimming its take off the nation’s taxpayers was not the meddling government and its bureaucratic henchmen but the new buccaneers of privatization and deregulation stuffing their coffers with government contracts. Retooling DC for the emerging rentier class had positive spillover effects in keeping housing values sound and creating the basis for a more diversified economy of restaurants, bars and retail in previously neglected parts of the city.

The final contribution that Republicans made to ensuring that we could embark upon our kitchen renovation came from the party’s opposition to stimulating economic growth after Obama was elected. Urban revival and real estate fraud had pushed up housing prices and driven home equity appreciation to heights that were unsustainable in other parts of the country, but Republican rule during the 2000s set a floor in DC that was unparalleled. Recalcitrance to stimulus ensured the continuation of low interest rates as the nation’s economy struggled fitfully to escape its liquidity trap. All of which meant that by the time our kitchen was ready for the dustbin, we had ample equity to draw upon through a lower-interest rate refinance.

Next installment in this series: kitchen cabinets wtf?