patrick.net

So…you’re liberally conservative????
or
Conservatively liberal???

I definitely like to eat liberal food. :)

Assuming that article is accurate then 23 of the top 25 median priced home markets are in CA? Did I read that right?

And Cupertino is #5! Ha Ha.

1 Newport Beach, CA $1,362,500 - Nice beach and weather

2 Greenwich, CT $1,129,000 - Hedge funds

3 Santa Barbara, CA $979,500 - Nice beach and weather

4 Palo Alto, CA $929,000 - Stanford

5 Cupertino, CA $880,000 - Huh???

DinOR,

Yup, sad to say it is true. What this list doesn't even tell you is the value/quality of those median priced homes. I'll bet a median priced home in Bethesda, MD is a heck of a lot nicer to live in than the median priced home in Cupertino.

skibum,

The key is to carve out a place in the community. I don't mean a dwelling place, but a purposeful position in your community, be it public service or business or employment. One has to serve a function in the community.

Let us analyze the situation.

1. You are a middle-income worker who decides to take the money that you saved from your high-paying BA job and buy a house in PNW.

2. Suppose you cannot buy the house outright. You will have to work to pay off the mortgage. You will just be like an average worker in PNW, except your added savings will jack up the housing costs here and your daily commute will add to the worsening traffic jams. In other words, you don't really win and local people lose a little.

3. Suppose you have just enough money to buy an average single family house to retire. Then what? How are you going to spend the rest of your life? You are not rich enough to support the local community. All you can contribute is to pay property taxes and sales taxes. You, though taking up a single-family dwelling that should have belonged to a contributing adult, are irrelevant in the community that you move into. You are nobody, worse than the ones who are making minimum wages.

4. Now, suppose you are a hot-shot ballarina who happens to like PNW. You come here and help improve the cultural life in PNW. People love you, even though you don't rake in as much as a Silicon Valley software engineer. You enjoy your life here, becuase you are part of the community and are respected.

5. Now, suppose you are a successful enterpreneur and you love PNW. You move your company here from Alberqueuque, NM and create many, many jobs in this area.

Do you get my point?

You have to pick a place that you like, stay and fight for your existence.

You have to pick a place that you like, stay and fight for your existence.

Another option: telecommute from Vancouver WA, shop in Portland, OR and keep the BA salary. Maximum arbitrage.

GC,

Good points. I for one am tired of hearing that the retirees/boomers are "the goose that laid the golden egg"! Some will have a positive impact by making some form of contribution but no, your unshaven face, baggy shorts, a hat with droppings on it that says "Damn I hate seagulls", shirt that says "Don't ask me for Money I'm Retired" and the occasional purchases you make do not constitute a "contribution".

If I moved to Portland, then purchased a home in a beautiful area with a nearby lake and copses of trees, then builders came in and tore down the trees and emptied the lake for new construction, then I would be mad as hell. Who wouldn’t?

I am pro-development. If I buy a house next to a park I would always keep in mind the possibility that it may be developed someday.

Moreover, if you want to preserve your environment, you can always buy the lake, the trees, and the land around you.

GC,
I did get your point from the get-go. I'm not an idiot and your "Do you get my point?" comment is borderline condescending. Of course your examples make sense. In fact I agree with you. In the ideal world, every member of your local community should add to the community, making it a better place to live for everyone (your ballerina example). We would all love that.

However, you have yet to acknowledge my 2 points about this. First, you as a "local" can clamor all you want on message boards, but people who are merely going to be social/community ballasts are still going to move in to a place they perceive as "nirvana." In fact, the more you clamor, the more people will get the notion that this place is a "great place to live." Until you secede from the US and impose strict immigration standards (turn the PNW into Switzerland, for example), it is difficult to stem the tide of migration. Second, to reiterate again, my now obscured other point was merely that my observation is that many of the most vocal NIMBYists are the most recently moved to that area.

WoW, I sense a war has come my way.

I sense a war has come my way.

No war for you. It is all in the middle east now.

GC,
Not war, just clarification. You're just much more idealstic than I am about this whole thing.

Peter P Says:

5 Cupertino, CA $880,000 - Huh???

You are paying to live within the Google sphere of influence.

You are paying to live within the Google sphere of influence.

LOL :lol:

Skibum,

You are absolutely "spot on" with your observation regarding the latest converts to NIMBYism! The old joke goes that a logger is a guy that dreams of having a cabin in the woods one day. An environmentalist? He already has one!

That's why I pointed out that many of the folks that run for political office here in OR list a Cal school for the "credentials" hoping that either no one will actually read it OR that they will be viewed as a candidate that rejects what CA seems to stand for. A progressive if you will. Even to this day I STILL point out to prospective clients that I'm NOT a native! For God's sake if they find out later that you're not? You'll be prosecuted for impersonating a "Native Oregonian". It's that bad.

Actually, many natives don't like over development and large influx of new people. They are the ones who are generally priced out and marginalized. But many don't complain. They just resign and move further away from the center.

I once had a middle-aged handyman coming to do some work in my condo. He grew up here. We had to go to Home Depot to get a new toilet. On the way there, he pointed out the whole shopping mall, the highway next to it, and the traffic jam and commented to me, "You know, before you guys came, this was all woods and wilderness." His tone was not all that happy.

Regarding NE people welcoming new comers. I think they'll welcome you because you merely replace a former neighbor. NE is old enough that it'll assimilate the new comers. Besides, the size of immigration into NE towns is a lot smaller than on the west coast.

I propose a compromise:

Market NIMBYism - the city will produce a list of specifications (amount of open space, traffic, access, sunlight impact, etc) for the land and let owners develop freely so long as the specs are met. Or better yet, they can let owners remove certain restrictions for a price.

skibum, I didn't mean to be rude. I apologize. I was a little agitated, as agitated by my insights.

Governor Conan,
You made some good points above, but I think you left something fairly major out, which is why many people in California are moving out and into less pricey-more normal areas.
To many californians, simply working and having a purpose to work is a luxury. Working in Cali means you're going to be unable to afford a home here, so why work hard at all? Many californians simply want to work normal jobs and afford a normal lifestyle. What is passed as " normal" for most people in the country is passed off as the lifestyle of the rich in Cali.

GC,
No problem. Like I said, i think we're on the same page, just I'm noticeably more jaded.

You might enjoy this article from Sunday's NYT:
http://tinyurl.com/f4ckz

A small island off of Charleston, SC has been developed. The guy they feature as a resident there is Mr. Quimby:

There he meets about eight other men who gather most days. “It’s like the old cracker barrel or hardware store,” said Mr. Quinby, an advertising executive who moved here four years ago from Beverly Hills, Calif. “We get together and fix all the world’s problems.”

Great, your local yokel is a guy who just moved in from Beverly Hills. I'm sure the townfolk with family roots going back to the Confederacy love this guy. It's like "Green Acres" without the funny one-liners.

I would prefer PNW weather to BA. There's no need to water for 9 months out of the year and good hiking for the rest of the year. I'm more concerned about slugs and mosquitoes and man eating bears.

There are solutions to the lack of sunlight. Maybe install a high intensity growing light set up and put a lawn chair underneath, that should help combat depression.

As far as people in the West having a fear of newomers, I think the fear is less to do about physical property and more about intelligent property- quote-unquote. Many, many many people in California are from somewhere else, and of those people, many came here to " get away" from situations, conditions, and problems in other places in the country. Ever since the popularity of portraying the state as progressive and forward thinking in the media, people have flocked here thinking that somehow this area will solve all their problems, that they can get away from whatever they felt they were escaping, and heaven forbid allow anyone to come in and take it away from them.
I can't tell you how many people I've met here who speak of the " other states" as if theyr were in Siberia and full of snaggle-tooth hillbillies out to spend their every waking hour figuring out ways to trick and ensnare their kind. So when I see people around here throw up the NIMBY curtain, I see it as more of a defense mechanism these people put on to sort of protect themselves from a non-exsistent enemy.

I'm surprised that Bethesda made it onto the list more expensive nearby areas (Chevy Chase, Great Falls, and Potomac, MD did not).

Greenwich is very nice (at least in the summer when I visited). There's lots of really nice houses, proximity to sailing and fairly decent weather, good schools, and not too far from NYC. Bethesda is close to DC and NIH, so there's lots of doctors, lawyers, lobbyists, and senior civil servants in the neighborhood. It's been upper middle class for a very long time so the housing stock is middle class and not working class. I don't think the housing stock is all that nice though, most of the really big houses are in Great Falls and Potomac, and Chevy Chase, MD almost certainly beats Bethesda on prestige and on a cost by square footage basis.

I do remember when california was golden. Now it is the catalyst for social stratification. It will be remembered as the state that killed the middle class lifestyle. And the state that started illegal immigration migration. I was shocked to see illegals here in the deep south a fair amount at that. Soe things you can't escape even if you move clear across the country.

"It's like Green Acres without the funny one liners"

God I hated that show! Now imagine it's where you live and there's no escape!

astrid,

I keep meaning to get one of those lights that's supposed to help people like me w/SAD but I got so depressed I wound up drunk instead. Then you have TWO problems, your depressed AND you have a hangover!

DinOR Says:

God I hated that show! Now imagine it’s where you live and there’s no escape!

Or imagine being married to Eva Gabor and there's no escape!

Green acres was stupid. Do you remember the opening sequence? The guy bouncing on the tractor seat? When I was a kid, I'd watch all those stupid shows: Gilligan's Island, the Brady Bunch. Hee-Haw, and three's company. But whenever I heard the theme music for Green Acres, it was off with the TV!

Yes, Green Acres was pretty lame. However, I think that's the subconscious dream of a lot of these "equity locusts" who specifically move to more rural locales in search of the bucolic idealized lifestyle and to escape the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds of the BA or LA, or wherever. Aren't Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor a 50's version of exactly this phenomenon? A rich NY lawyer and his wife move to the sticks and have a grand ole' time in Hooterville?

Skibum,
As someone who grew up in the sticks, I think the worst thing that people from NY, CA and other places will find and be sad about is that they'll have to entertain themselves. After moving to the BA, I found that people here seem to always HAVE to be doing something, whether it be drinking, going to some festival, eating out, or whatever. Hardly a spare minute is spent in the home because that's just lame.
Back home, we used to entertain ourselves for days on end. If that meant fixing a lawn mower, digging post holes, or blowing up firecrackers and drinking beer, then so be it. It also meant having grandma over for hamnburgers or swimming at the nearby man made lake.
People from NY would probably find any of the above activities utterly boring.

I miss the winter, and snow, but I like California's endless sunshine.

RTTBA,
Me and my wife are pretty much the same. Most of our weekends are spent at the house. She does things like fix up old furniture and I work on mechanical things, lawn mowers, and stuff. We take bike rides to eat dinner from time to time. That's about it except the occasional trip to Auburn, CA. We're what many of our friends call boring, but we're also not broke either.
On the other hand, we don't have many friends either since most people we meet like to do stuff ALL THE TIME, so in many ways being a homebody has had a negative impact on our social lives. Oh well. One has to choose.

RTBA and Joe,
What, you don't like the sunshine? You two are not worthy to put yourselves into indentured servitude in order to "own" a glorified mobile home/crappy stucco s#%tbox, ie, "living the California lifestyle." Why don't you move out of the state and leave that privelege to us "natives?"

RTBA,
Check out Mt. Hood - the skiing's not bad there. Timberline Lodge is beautiful.

The issue that I have with Mrs. DinOR sounds similar. We have so few nice days from start to finish and they are precious to me but she's content milling about at Target or where ever. How much could it have changed in a week? Secondly, I must admit that we have AT LEAST 9 months of "perfect" shopping weather here in Oregon! You'd think she'd have her fill of that with a 3 to 1 ratio advantage wouldn't you? She's pretty sneaky about it too.

"I just have one thing at one store that I need to return" becomes 3 hours of shopping! When it's 40 degrees and raining sideways, well who cares! But when it's 80 and perfect?

On being "self entertained".

Why is it that we now need endless "festivals" all summer long? There isn't ONE solitary weekend where some damn town doesn't have a tulip, strawberry or hop festival! And they're all the damn same! Been to one you've been to them all.

Could we please have ONE weekend out of the whole damn summer where there isn't an "event"? I mean the calendar is SO crowded with everything from "Pet Parades" to "farmer's market" etc. etc. And Portland? The worst! From Cinco De Mayo up to and through damned October. And for every one that you actually attend (and burn through on avg. $60 to $100) there are four that you missed. It's like they're setting us up for dissapointment for crissakes. "You mean you DIDN'T go to the Cheese Curd Festival"? NO! I f'ing didn't! I heard they had a crash at the "Rose Festival" Airshow. Maybe if they didn't have a damn "airshow" that man would still be alive today! Stop the insanity!

Michael Anderson,

Thanks for the Bend update. Bend has so many freaking festivals it's ridiculous. The Source Weekly did a great piece about a year ago about "What is it exactly we're celebrating again". Totally funny, totally on target. I want to drop agent orange on the Dhalia Festival!

They still have homes in Bend for under 500K?

You know Michael I have a good friend that has a modest vacation home out in Joseph and he and always ask "Why Bend"? What makes Bend so attractive? Is it any nicer or better than any of the other dozens of towns scattered throughout central Oregon?

Here's my idea of self entertaining for people aged 30 and above: Fishing. It's a life-long karma training. I don't fish but expect to get into it.

My only concern, from reading washington's fly fishing board, is that one may meet some crazy people (i.e., meth heads) while fishing. There was a debate whether one should carry while fishing. Many actually confirm that they carry. I am for gun ownership. But having to carry while fishing is a little disconcerting.

Until you secede from the US and impose strict immigration standards (turn the PNW into Switzerland, for example), it is difficult to stem the tide of migration.

This observation reminded me of a conversation I had with my wife back in the mid-90s, right after Prop. 187 passed (the initiative to deny most non-emergency social services to illegals). We observed it passing with a 2/3rds popular majority, including hispanic voters (something the "objective" media here rarely mentions, btw). We then watched in disgust as an unholy coalition of liberal extremists, Aztlan/MEChA supporters and big-agriculture/big-construction/big-hotels united to "defeat" it by gutting it in court.

As I recall, I basically said something like this: "You know what? Nothing is ever going to be done about illegal immigration as long as two things are true: (1) non-border states view illegal immigration as a "border-state" issue that does not affect them personally, and (2) the MSM keeps framing it as a purely racial issue and not an economic one. If we ever get to the point where there is a significant out-migration of illegals to the other states, this may change on the national level. When California has an overwhelming hispanic majority that is equally fed up with being overrun and taxed to death for "free" hand-outs to illegals, things may even change here.

I think we're about at that point now.