Housing Envy: Soaring Prices Create Divide

"They talk about their $700 mortgage payment, and I feel the green monster begin to stir," said Bowman-Mengel, who rents a one-bedroom apartment in Clarendon with her husband for $1,200 a month. Although co-workers are helpful and quick to offer advice, she knows that mortgage payments on a house or apartment in a desirable neighborhood would be much higher than her rent. "All my co-workers are sitting on just a boatload of equity," she said.

That includes Bowman-Mengel's colleague, Ramon Jacobson, 39. He and his wife bought a three-bedroom rowhouse in the Mount Pleasant area of the city in 2000 for $300,000. Recently, a single-family house across the street was divided into seven condos, and a small basement studio there is priced at amount Jacobson paid for an entire house on the same street.

"When we bought, all our friends said, 'You're near the liquor store, the homeless shelter, the bus. It's just too much money,' " Jacobson said. "I guess we gambled right."

Stewart Ellis, 31, and Harry Yeung, 29, work in identical side-by-side offices at a software firm in Reston.

Yeung, who emigrated from Hong Kong with his parents when he was 16, bought a modest townhouse in Sterling in 2000 for $230,000, when he was first hired at the Northern Virginia computer firm. He rented out rooms to help with the mortgage payments. Recently a similar townhouse sold for $435,000. Assuming a 20 percent down payment and a 30-year 5.63 percent mortgage (this week's average rate), five years of price appreciation mean payments of $2,004 a month versus $1,059.

"I feel incredibly lucky," Yeung said. "But it's not something you could have foreseen five years ago."

Ellis moved here from Louisiana in 1998 and has rented since then, most of the time in a townhouse development in Springfield.

"I saw people next door to me buying, and then selling and making a nice profit," Ellis said. "The whole time I just sat there watching." Ellis said the main reason he never bought was because he always thought he would be going back to Louisiana.

"The irony is that if I had bought, I could have moved back there sooner, and with a sizable nest egg," he said. "If I had just bit the bullet, I'd have so much equity built up by now, I wouldn't have to wait on any -- maybe -- financial rewards from the job."

In other situations co-workers who are both homeowners live with disparity of a different sort.

When Kathy Hendrickson and her husband moved to the Washington area a year ago from Connecticut, they wanted to buy. Apartment living was not their style. Hendrickson's co-worker, Meagan Jeronimo, 26, persuaded her to check out parts of Anacostia and the Hillcrest neighborhood in Southeast Washington, one of the few relatively affordable, close-in areas left in which to buy a home. Jeronimo and her husband had bought a three-story, four-bedroom rowhouse for $135,000 in Anacostia two years ago.

It took some persuading to even get their real estate agent to show them homes in the area, but it seemed a logical choice. "It's a nice area. We like little more space, which is a premium in those shoebox apartments you get," said Hendrickson, 22, a legal secretary in the District.