One Size Fits All

I admit that I’ve been checking zillow.com and other sites to get a feel for what housing prices are like now that everything is apparently a mess (I don’t watch TV and I know no one in financial trouble, so this financial crunch news seems like a regular broadcast from Mars…). I check Los Angeles listings regularly, just in case I wind up liking the city and decide that I want to settle down there permanently. I learned that houses tend to stay longer on the market if they only have street parking in L.A. which means, the asking prices slowly goes down. Lack of parking is not going to be an issue with me and my public transit/bicycle using ways.

Anyway…I decided on a random year on when to buy property (either house or condo or land) and noted it on my ever growing goal list. Our most popular idea is to buy land and an RV and slowly build our house from scratch (assuming this is all a-okay with the various authorities). RV will be for housing purposes while we’re working on the land - to grow a small bit of food, although my husband wants to own a goat and chickens…something I am not so sure about. I have crazy ideas of building a cob house because this means that I could fashion my own furniture out of a hay-sand goop and thus have biodegradeable furniture I can then work on making earthen pots and just in general bring the entire third world over to America.

This means that I am going to start a currently non-existent fund to save money for a permanent living space.  

The husband and I have been thinking about moving from Philly to Los Angeles for a few years. My husband has always wanted to live there, and since I promised to move to the West Coast once I was done with my degree…now I have to fulfill the promise.

We’ll be moving toward the end of the year as soon as one of us gets a job.  Which will be at around October or November. Which means when we move in May/June this year we will be signing on a temporary lease or taking over someone else’s.

I think it will be interesting to live in L.A., mainly because I think it will be very entertaining (when you don’t have a TV, you look for alternatives). Also there is the beach which I don’t care too much about, but my husband does. However, the interesting part will be whether we can live there car free and rely on bicycling and public transit as we do here in Philly. There are a handful of individuals who do live car free in L.A. and have written about their experiences…that is, it can be done. Then there is the weather. Its apparently nice for most of the year. So I could possibly have locally grown, organic oranges.  Which will be nice.

But reading message boards about L.A. is not very informative. Most posters own cars…which skews one’s perspective on everything. Most of the posters who complain about how dangerous L.A. is lived in small towns and white-only areas prior to moving to L.A. How is the city dangerous? Are there shootings on the bus? Are there hoodlums hanging around the corner of certain neighborhoods harassing people? Are there rapes? I am more interested in the likelihood of getting hit by a car when crossing the street (like I could if I cross Roosevelt Blvd. at night here) than this vague dangerous descriptor used for everything. How wide are the shoulders and bike lanes? Since the city streets are so wide, will I get room to bike? Will I have to deal with an attitude problem if I lock my bike up to a pole? Will I be fined if I ride on the side walk because I am scared of riding on the street with cars driving over 40 miles per hour?

I’ve ridden through North Philly ghettos by myself, and while its spooky, its fine during the day. How does North Philly ghettos compare to L.A’s?

L.A. has everything the both of us need. So I am not worried about being bored. But its hard to narrow down potential neighborhoods we could live in when the noise about how horrible L.A. is, is really loud.

We have both opened up to the idea that if it is really impossible to be car free, we will get a car. We will probably sign up for a car sharing service rightaway to make the transition smooth, but I am hoping we won’t need a car. 

Anyway…I am researching the city. I am really ready for a change and I think L.A. will be as much of a change as I can imagine.

I found an ecovillage in PA, Hundredfold Farm. From their website:

The Hundredfold Farm Cohousing Community is an effort of several families to create a 14-household rural cohousing community in the Gettysburg, Pennsylvania area . The members of this multi-generational community are learning together as they explore the art of living in a sustainable way.

Hundredfold Farm is a collaborative housing project that offers an alternative to alienation and isolation exacerbated by most other housing alternatives. The cohousing model is characterized by private dwellings, clustered housing, pedestrian friendly design, and extensive common facilities. Additionally, cohousing communities are generally funded, designed and managed by the residents.

I’ve been somewhat obsessed with the finances and the concept of happiness for most of my adult life. I am always thinking about these two issues and spent alot of time thinking about it during the past few years’ housing bubble. Why were people so obsessed with the idea of “owing” four walls and a roof? What does owning a house really do to one’s self worth?

My husband recently sent me an article entitled “The Psychology of Subprime Mortgages.” Here is an excerpt:

The best evidence for this idea comes from the lab of Jonathan Cohen. Cohen’s clever experiment went like this: he stuck people in an fMRI machine and made them decide between a small Amazon gift certificate that they could have right away, or a larger gift certificate that they’d receive in 2 to 4 weeks. Contrary to rational models of decision-making, the two options activated very different neural systems. When subjects contemplated gift certificates in the distant future, brain areas associated with rational planning (the Promethean circuits of the prefrontal cortex) were more active. These cortical regions urge us to be patient, to wait a few extra weeks for the bigger gift certificate.

On the other hand, when subjects started thinking about getting a gift certificate right away, brain areas associated with emotion - like the midbrain dopamine system and NAcc - were turned on. These are the cells that tell us to take out a mortgage we can’t afford, or run up credit card debt when we should be saving for retirement. They are our impulsive pleasure seekers, the hedonists inside our head.

By manipulating the amount of money on offer in each situation, Cohen and his collaborators could watch this neural tug of war unfold. They saw the fierce argument between reason and feeling, as our mind was pulled in contradictory directions. Our ultimate decision–to save for the future or to indulge in the present–was determined by whichever region showed greater activation. More emotions meant more impulsivity.

And then Jim Kunstler pontificated a bit more:

At the other end of the storyline are the many sad people who were the initial dupes in the racket: the poor shlubs who signed “creative” mortgage contracts to become notional home-owners and thus achieve their spot on the first landing of the American Dream staircase. I say “notional” home-owners because somebody who “buys” a “product” such as chipboard-and-vinyl McHouse with no money down is not really an owner of anything but rather a kind of glorified renter stuck with the additional burdens of paying property tax and maintenance costs for something really owned by another party (a notional landlord). And, of course, we all know by now that the payment terms for these loan contracts were slippery sliding indexes which uniformly tended to slide upward as interest rates re-set above the ludicrously low levels of 2003 - 2006.

I like it when people put into words what I’m thinking, in a much better way than I ever could.

I am in my late 20s. Husband is in his early 30s. We plan on purchasing a house/permanent living space when I am in my mid to late 30s. Between now and then we plan on eliminating our debts (student loans) traveling and possibly living abroad and growing our savings and retirement accounts which at the moment is almost non-existent.

For the most part we have decided to live in NYC once we decide to settle down. We’re both fond of Queens, NY but we may find ourselves in Manhattan should we be able to afford to live and purchase property there.

As a future bean counter I have some unconventional ideas on investing, saving, and living. One of my plans prior to purchasing a house will be to become a building inspector so that I can do an initial inspection prior to purchasing our place. I also would like to know what I am paying for when I hire a building inspector.

But the main point of the post is not about my unconventional ideas. Its about FEMA maps.

At a previous job in another lifetime (prior to Hurricane Katrina), I became very familiar with FEMA flood maps. These maps depict areas that are prone to flooding. Since I dislike all natural disasters (as everyone should but I probably spend more time obsessing over them than anyone else), I am always thinking about them when thinking about living situations. For example, I will probably never (I say that because I’m always told to never say never, even though secretly I do because I know myself better than anyone else), move to the West Coast. Reason: the giant fault line. I am not crazy about earthquakes.

So in an attempt to educate myself further, I have been looking over New York’s flood maps at FEMA’s website. FEMA ID for NYC: 360497. You can zoom into the maps and see potential flooding areas and plan (like me) to avoid purchasing property in that area. So the non flooding areas will eventually play a role in the purchase of a house.

For me there is an even greater incentive to avoid living in a flooding zone: I can’t swim.