I’m making ~108k/y here in Huntsville, AL. Wife doesn’t work. My mortgage is ~$750 a month for a $160k house (1750 sqft, 4 bedroom, nice neighborhood, and ~10 minutes from work). I put a huge down payment on it, which is why the monthly is so low. I pay a little extra a month as well because I don’t like debt. Even then, that mortgage is a small port of the monthly income, leaving plenty left over. If I lose my job tomorrow, I’m good for years and I could keep the house an practically any income. I guess I’m a risk averse person overall. The double+ scale financial scare over there looks practically terrifying to me at times. I like housing being affordable.
I do admire the CA lifestyle from a distance, but I doubt I could ever bring myself to jump for that. Too much family on this side of the US anyway. I have drive 3.5 hours for DragonCon in Atlanta instead of enjoying ComicCon and other such wild events. I like Nashville well enough. I doubt anything could compare to the cultural powerhouse you get over in LA though. I came up for Blizzcon in 2008 and got to visit a lot of LA then. It was amazing!
In the mid-90s, my parents bought a 4-bedroom house in Theodosia, MO, on the shores of Bull Shoals Lake deep in the Ozarks. It was a pretty nice house, almost a 2-story duplex in that the second floor mirrored the first floor’s plan (2 bedrooms, 1 bath, 1 kitchen, 1 living room on each floor, connected by an internal staircase), and since it was built on a hill, each floor had its own entrance on opposite sides. And they got it for $60k, including half a dozen wooded acres of lakefront land. They lived there for a decade pretty happily (my dad particularly liked hanging around the volunteer firehouse), but eventually had to move back west, since they simply could no longer take the provincial redneck attitudes.
It was a quiet, bucolic, verdant, and friendly (to the “right” people) place to live, and certainly the cost of living was cheap. But man, I always liked to keep my visits there short.
I may never move out of SoCal, as long as I can still afford it.
What’s funny is that we’re building beds for hipsters (there’s stuff like this in Brooklyn, too) but not for people that truly need a place to sleep at night. Fucking sad.
So apparently there are sufficiently extroverted people who actually enjoy, even prefer, this kind of close communal living. And that’s fine. Different strokes, etc. The flophouse comparison isn’t quite apt–these guys prescreen people a bit, require them to register a few days in advance, provide some staple food items and (I presume) a generally more pleasant atmosphere. If you’re the kind of person who really likes having other people around all the time, this setup actually makes sense.
But please don’t try to push this as some sort of utopian future solution for everyone. It really isn’t.
Great for LA, which lives off of impoverished young dreamers the way vampires live off of glamoured victims. At least in the vampires’ case, they had to work hard to provide the glamouring.
Maybe this will provide some community that can help some art and dreams happen. What would be better is if LA unfucked itself.
all it needs is a camera crew and we have a reality show. huh? They have already done that?
You know what would really good… a series of rooms, separate rooms. Each with it’s own bathroom, door, tv set, etc. They’d have locking doors. And here’s the cool part, you could rent them out for the night. They could even have a bar or something in the …hmmmm. what should we call it…ahhh…lobby. Yeah we’ll call it a lobby. You could down to the lobby and get drink in the bar and meet people if you are so inclined.
Am I the only one who still calls it Lemon Groove? I went to El Capitan High School and Grossmont College. My dad grew up in Jamul and attended Grossmont High School.
My Dad grew up in Jamul. The ancestral ranch is on Pioneer Way just north of Proctor Valley Road. I plan to scatter some of his ashes there when nobody’s looking.
I never called it Lemon Groove, but I am real old (well–middle-aged). Mt. Miguel High School for me, and I have many many transfer units from Grossmont College
I don’t particularly miss San Diego, myself. It was a fine place to grow up, and I enjoy going back to visit (it’s crazy to see how things have changed!), but I was born up here in the Pacific Northwest, and I guess my brother and I both imprinted before our folks got us out of here–we are both back up here now. God damn is Southern California expensive, and I never felt like I fit in. Oregon could use some more diversity, but I like rain and I like that weird is normal
I went to El Capitan High School and Grossmont College. My dad grew up in Jamul and attended Grossmont High School.
