The Economy

I get that, but in a way it's like driving that BMW 5-Series. Eventually you may buy one, but you don't get to drive that as a college graduate with a mountain of debt. You drive a 12-year-old Nissan Sentra. Likewise, you shouldn't expect to live in San Francisco or Seattle or Portland, either, right off the bat.

 

So if you grow up in San Francisco or Seattle or Portland, you should have to leave home? You shouldn’t have the choice to grow where you’re planted, if that’s what you want to do?

 

Not only that, but places like Seattle, San Francisco, Phoenix, etc are where a lot of the jobs are.

 

Not if you can't afford it.

You can't always have what you want. Because the things everyone wants most tend to be expensive.

I can't fucking live in Seattle with 40 years of responsible saving, $400K of house equity and no debt. Why should a 22-year-old with a run-of-the-mill degree and $100K in debt be able to?

You want to live there straight out of college? Earn it with a high-paying degree.

 

Got it.

EARN the right to live in your hometown.

EARN the right to stay close to your family.

EARN the right to stay in the only place you’ve known your whole life, if that place happens to be a place that lots of other people want to live also.

Otherwise, get the fuck outta here and go live in some backwater to earn the right to come back.

Nah. I don’t see it that way.

Basic food, clothing and shelter aren’t things that should have to be earned. They aren’t things that a 21st-century American human should be forced to leave their homeland to find. Society should have advanced to a point that, if you work full time, you can have access to food, clothing and shelter in the place you choose to live, wherever that place is.

We shouldn’t just accept that that isn’t the case. We should view that as a failure and try, collectively, to figure out how we can do better for future generations.

The value proposition of capitalism is simple. You put value in (full-time work, or creating a product people want), you get to share in the value that your labor creates.

If that isn’t the case, we are indeed a failed nation.

And no — I’m not saying that a recent graduate of the University of Washington who has lived in Seattle her whole life should automatically be land-granted a top-floor apartment with a great view of Puget Sound and the Space Needle. Wagyu beef is not a “basic human right.” Neither is a 5-series BMW or a Gucci bag. Especially if we grew up affluent, we have to accept that there will be some reduction in our standard of living when we are just starting out.

I am saying that it is a reasonable expectation that a college graduate with a full-time job should be able to afford safe, comfortable housing within a mile or two of a city center which they are helping to build and maintain through their labor and their taxes. It is a reasonable expectation that a high-school dropout who works 48 hours a week cleaning toilets be able to live safely within a reasonable distance of those toilets. If you put in, you should get back. It’s pretty simple.

And you know what, @BTExpress? If you want to live in Seattle after leading a life where it pretty much seems you followed all the rules, you should be able to do so. The fact that you feel like you can’t is, in fact, a failure of policy and a failure of the market, not something that should be brushed off as “just the way it is.”

 

San Francisco banned its city government from traveling to or doing business with 30 states because of their laws on LGBTQ issues and abortion.
It didn't have quite the effect they intended.

SF re-examines its procurement process after business ban on 30 states backfires

 

Well, it's not so much that I "can't" do it.

I can't do it in a way that meets my minimum requirements entering retirement (single family house, 2,000 square feet, one-third of an acre of land, nice neighborhood).

 

The average asking home price in Beverly Hills is $6M. Good luck, Jethro.

The average lot size is between 10,00o and 11,000 square feet, which means basically no lot lines for the typical mansion. The stated lot size minimum is one acre but that is clearly a joke. That's big enough for a zoo for Elly May.

 

The best way to get ahead and be able to afford living in a big city is to collect the wages on offer in Possum Droppings, Louisiana. Everybody knows that.

 

Save up!

 

That part made an impact on me. Yeah, it is sad if that's the case.

But is not being able to live there always the case? Fresh outta college and want to start adulting in the hip, slick and cool parts of Seattle? Settle for a place that makes your last college dorm seem five-star. Find roommate(s). Jettison your car. Cut down on the YOLO vacations for a couple of years. And so on.

I don't think I could have bought my first house (under $100,000) on my newspaper salary if I weren't officiating as many high school sports as I could from late fall to late summer - year after year after year.

 

I think two things can be true. More people should investigate moving to affordable areas, especially if they work from home or are willing to commute 45 minutes to an hour. There are incredible financial incentives, and just ecologically piling up everyone in five spots on a giant landmass — in the South and West where temperatures will rise, infrastructures will bend under the weight of the populations and water will be at a premium — ain’t gonna work. We need more young people with a pioneering spirit of renewal in places that aren’t currently the coolest places to live on TikTok. Miami is full, folks. The internet has hive-minded people into thinking they can only live in five places. Fuck that.

That shouldn’t stop us from trying to make affordable housing in cities and building cities where people who do the services for everyone can afford to live in those cities, however modestly.