Is Gen Z ‘grave robbing’ or saving the past?
On a recent weekend, I found myself in the northern suburb of Spring, rifling through a stranger’s cassette collection in a hallway closet. Failing to recognize any of the artists, I moved on to the master bathroom, with its low cream sinks and assortment of hair dye kits. The muffled sounds of the radio playing from a boombox in the adjacent bedroom perfectly captured this home that seemed stuck in time.
To shop at an estate sale, in many ways, is like traveling back in time. And like Marty McFly, you feel a little out of place. Partly it has to do with knowing that the sale was for one of four, often tragic reasons — the “four D’s,” as Michael Dentel, the owner of Springbased Elite Estate Sales Inc. explained. That is, death, downsizing, divorce or debt.
There’s something bizarre about a twenty-something rummaging through the Silent Generation’s collectibles or a Baby Boomer’s fine china. Those are the very generations accusing Gen Z of being trendobsessed phone addicts, prone to purchasing the mass-produced — to which a young person might respond with the devastatingly blasé, “OK, Boomer.” But maybe estate sales are the intergenerational salve we always needed — a way for one generation to find new meaning in another’s old stuff.
The items, often left in their original state, tell the story of what once was. Size 6 Louboutin slingbacks and slim elbowhigh gloves, for example, tell me the River Oaks homeowner was a delicate woman.
The books are my favorite part. The story of the nativity, with the Virgin Mary on the cover, next to a boxed set of the “Fifty Shades” trilogy, next to a clinician’s guide to mental disorder diagnosis tells me the owners contain multitudes.
It’s hard not to think about what my own things would say about me. But I also wonder, will there even be estate sales for people of my generation, for today’s millennials and Gen Z’s?
Estate sales have been touted as a more sustainable alternative to buying “fast furniture,” the cheap, flat-pack or readyto-assemble furniture that lasts a couple of years and inevitably ends up in a landfill. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, Americans throw out 12 million tons of furniture annually — an appalling number that’s up 450 percent since 1960.
It’s not just colossally bad for the environment. “I relate to fast furniture like I do to fast food. It’s empty of culture, and it’s not carrying any history with it,” Deana McDonagh, a professor of industrial design at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign told the New York Times.
That may be so, but things have changed since the days of owning a house for decades and filling it with furniture made to last. Over half of millennials and Gen Z are reported to live paycheck to paycheck at the same time home prices have soared to record heights. As the editorial board wrote last week, subsidized housing projects proposed for in-demand areas are often booed by well-off residents and voted down by City Council.
High-quality, “real” furniture is not only inaccessible, but it makes less sense to lug those pieces from rental to rental when it’s cheaper to buy new from Ikea or Amazon and have it delivered.
As Houston reader Dan Fox pointed out in a recent letter, “We … need to consider the millions of new urban Texans from other counties, states and countries: Where will they live? How far will they have to commute? What is the balance between progress and preservation of the past?”
Part of today’s progress seems to be a return to the past. Perhaps in response to our hyper-commercialized, online world, my generation is obsessed with all things “vintage” and “retro” (words that pain my mom to hear when I raid her closet). Thrift shops and estate sales have found a new audience on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, where users show off their “hauls” and upcycle or resell their finds — from ’80s mom jeans to Star Wars figures to Elvis Presley vinyls. This brings up its own ethical quandaries, with some users accused of being “overexcited grave robbers” or of driving up prices for people who buy secondhand for necessities.
But with accessible stores like Tuesday Morning going bankrupt, what are our options?
Estate sales could be a saving grace for my generation — a way to preserve the past while building our future.
Michael Dentel started his family-owned estate sale company about a year and a half ago. He told me that after his house completely flooded in 2016, he refurbished it with Rooms To Go items that fell apart within a few years. “If I had known what I know now, I would have bought everything at estate sales,” he said.
It was my dad who introduced me to the estate sale world. He started woodworking during the pandemic and shopped for cheap tools online. Picking up the items took him from The Woodlands to Sugar Land to the Heights to a ranch way out near Austin. The rush of a good find, he told me, was like gambling. And there was no shortage of quality things to buy. In Mexico, my dad observed, people often keep things until they break or don’t work. Americans seemed to buy more, and thus to throw things out that still had some utility.
When I moved into my apartment in Houston, he helped me furnish it through estate sale and liquidation auction finds: an almost fully functional air fryer, a rickety poker table, my bed frame, pots and pans, a clothing iron. I wonder what life those items once led, and what story they might someday tell of me.
Regina Lankenau is assistant op-ed editor at the Houston Chronicle. This piece originally appeared in Thursday’s SaysHou newsletter, a subscriber exclusive dedicated to your letters to the editor. To join the conversation, sign up at: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/newsletters/opinion/