- President Joe Biden would sometimes sneak onto empty estates with his sons when they were young.
- If the doors were locked, Biden would hoist them through a second-floor window, Hunter Biden once told the New Yorker.
President Joe Biden loves real estate and apparently enjoyed this hobby — along with a bit of acrobatics and trespassing — with his sons when they were young.
After church, Biden would sometimes drive his sons Hunter and Beau through "wealthy neighborhoods, where they would sneak onto empty estates that were either abandoned or on the market," Biden's youngest son Hunter once told The New Yorker while describing his Wilmington, Delaware, childhood.
If the front door was locked, Biden "would hoist them through a second-floor window, and they would run downstairs and let him in," Adam Entous wrote in his story, "The Untold History of the Biden Family." "If a real-estate agent arrived when they were there, Biden, who at this point was a senator, would charm the agent into giving them a tour."
Though Hunter Biden "insisted" his upbringing was middle class, Entous noted that he grew up in a 10,000-square-foot mansion with a ballroom. But he also pointed to Joe Biden's dramatic cost-saving measures.
Biden, "on a tight budget, would close off large sections with drywall to save on heating costs," Entous wrote.
Biden, who Entous noted likes to be known as "Middle-Class Joe," wrote in his 2007 memoir that his seduction by real estate went back to his high school years.
Republicans led by former President Donald Trump's son Eric have raised questions about a mansion Biden owned, but Reuters fact checkers found those claims were missing context: Biden bought the home in the 1970s for $185,000 when it was slated for demolition and sold it for $1.2 million in 1996.
In a 2019 story about Hunter Biden, Entous described the family's 1975 move into the Wilmington home, which was once owned by members of the du Pont family, and their work to restore it.
"Biden, on returning from Washington, often put on a hazmat suit and went into the basement to scrape asbestos off the pipes," Entous wrote. "He, Hunter, and Beau planted trees and painted the house. Hunter told me that his father would dangle him upside down from the third-floor windows so that he could reach the eaves with a brush."