The Conical Glass: The high cost of living

Friday, August 24, 2007

The high cost of living

Earlier today, my friend Neal e-mailed me a link to a wonderful article from the Albuquerque Tribune about his house concert series. After I read it, I checked out the box on the right-hand side of the page displaying the headlines of the paper's 10 most popular stories. One of them immediately caught my eye (and no, it wasn't "Rainbow Rodeo: Gays and lesbians living the Western way"). It was the one titled "It's getting harder to sell a house in Albuquerque," a look at the city's current real estate scene. According to the article, the median home price there is $214,900, but a Coldwell Banker spokesman commented that "homes in the low $100,000 range are easier to sell" than more expensive houses.

If you live in the Bay Area, let that sink in for a while. Homes in the low $100,000 range. Do you know what you could get for $100,000 around here? Nothing. The cheapest listing in Berkeley right now is a $329,000 condo that is less than 600 square feet. In Oakland, there's actually a detached home selling for $200,000, but it's in a sketchy neighborhood and is described as "a fixer... show to your contractor client or handy first time buyer." Oh, and it's really ugly.

To my mind, the chief reasons to live in the Bay Area are the weather and the culture, and I feel I do a good job of enjoying both of those assets. I enjoy not having to shovel snow or melt in 90-plus-degree temperatures, and Joe and I attend lots of theater and art-house movies that aren't available in smaller cities & towns. Of course, a lot of Bay Area folks do sell their wildly overpriced real estate and use the proceeds to buy veritable mansions in places like New Mexico, Colorado and Oregon. That's why everyone there hates us.

Perhaps because moving to a detached home is such an expensive proposition here, I've noticed that a lot of people just tend to stay put. We have lived in our condo for over 10 years now and there are lots of folks who have been in this building far longer than we have. Despite our long-term proximity, though, I haven't really made friends with anyone here (we are good friends with our downstairs neighbors, but since we knew them before they moved in, that doesn't really count). There are many people I chat with in the elevator or who always say hello to Hobie, but I know very few of them by name. After 10 years, it seems like it would be silly to ask them. Instead, I have come up with my own private names for them. There's Mrs. Miles, named after her now-deceased yellow lab; she has a new one now, but I still call her Mrs. Miles, and to me, the new dog (whose name I do know) will always be Miles 2. One of my favorite residents is the Pot Granny. She's a friendly lady in her 60s and is seldom seen in anything other than T-shirts decorated with marijuana leaf graphics; today, she was wearing an eye-popping, colorful shirt that urged the legalization of Maui Wowie. Then there's the Hat Guy, who always has a smile for Hobie and wears a knit cap that's as ubiquitous as the Pot Granny's weed-bedecked T's. However, I found out this morning that the Hat Guy has trained a squirrel to eat nuts out of his hand, so from now on, I'm going to call him the Squirrel Guy.

I have even come up with a name for myself -- the iPod Gal, because I am so frequently plugged into my iPod when I walk around the building. Or maybe people think of me as "the lady with that funny-looking little dog." Perhaps there's only so much room in my brain for real names; a few weeks ago, I got a piece of mail for the Squirrel Guy by mistake, and even though I was excited at the time to finally learn his name, by now it's completely slipped my mind.

posted by 125records @ 11:27 PM

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