July 3, 2008 9:37AM # A Home Fit for a President By [David Boaz](https://www.cato.org/people/david-boaz) --- SHARE According to the *Washington Post*, Barack and Michelle Obama > wanted to step up from their $415,000 condo. They chose a house with six bedrooms, four fireplaces, a four-car garage and 5 1/2 baths, including a double steam shower and a marble powder room. It had a wine cellar, a music room, a library, a solarium, beveled glass doors and a granite-floored kitchen. It sounds — and [looks](http://sedulia.blogs.com/photos/everywhere_else/barack_obamas_house.jpg) — like a home fit for a Roosevelt. Of course, the old-money Roosevelts *had* their homes, so they didn’t have to go through the costly and distasteful process of taking out a mortgage to buy them. Fortunately for the Obamas, the Chicago-based Northern Trust [made the process a lot less costly](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/01/AR2008070103008.html) than it might have been for other people. (See also a comment [here](http://blog.washingtonpost.com/washingtonpostinvestigations/2008/07/obamas_mortgage_discount_raise.html) from Clio1, who claims to know that the deal was even better than the *Post* suggested.) ##### Related Tags [General](https://www.cato.org/general), [Government and Politics](https://www.cato.org/government-politics) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).