2006-08-09 - 5:29 p.m.
Came back from a little half-a-day trip to an area of near-by California I had never seen before. You know I had challenged myself at the beginning of this vacation to attempt to solve the �find housing or move� problem. It�s not as easy of a task as it may sound, because the truth really may be that moving out of state wouldn�t solve the problem. I have been reading article after article about how the American housing bubble has burst (although �burst� is not the right word, �developed a slow leak� is probably more accurate). When I have been hearing about the �housing bubble,� I had been thinking specifically of �California� or �Massachusetts,�--the California coastal counties from Sonoma County on down to San Diego, and Boston�THOSE are where the unaffordability of housing is truly insane. You know, people buying studio condos for a million and a half. �But it�s in such a great location!� (For those whose real estate lingo may be different, a �studio� is one combined room, the absolutely smallest living space you could get short of a camping tent.)
But the housing bubble is bursting in places like Cincinnati, Miami, Houston, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, as WELL as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston. So things must be bad all over. This housing problem is nation-wide.
It doesn�t seem to be so much of a situation of �the most desirable urban areas� versus �the rest of the nation�s urban areas,� but �urban areas� vs �depressed areas�.
A friend of mine just got back from a little trip where he was visiting some relatives in North Carolina and accompanying his sister and her family on a house-shopping excursion in Tennessee. He told me that the desirable areas of North Carolina, such as Charlotte, Raleigh, and Asheville, the sophisticated, educated, and creative areas, were beautiful and felt like the 21st century. (Asheville is still the only place I have ever lived that I still miss, Raleigh has more Ph.D.s than any other metropolitan area in the country, and Charlotte is a major banking center). But all the other areas were populated by a type of people that were, well, there�s a word for them, but I have forgotten it for the moment in this era of �politically correct.� Let�s just say �very Jerry Springer show� and leave it at that. I know that kind very well, and when visiting such a place filled with people like that it is best to get out of there as soon as possible, just stopping long enough to fill up the gas tank. (My bones shiver just thinking of the communities along I-95 down the fattest part of North Carolina, places like Fayetteville or Lumberton. There�s just something wrong with these people. My friend mentioned feeling like the people in some of the places he went were like the people from the movie Deliverance, so I am sure there are communities beyond this strip of Interstate that are even worse, much worse.)
My friend�s sister�s husband is being transferred from the San Francisco Bay Area to Knoxville, Tennessee, and they figured finally, now they could buy themselves a house, but Knoxville didn�t impress my friend (his sister wasn�t saying how she felt about it). �But according to California standards, you get a lot of house for the money,� he said�house-wise, you live like kings, but community-wise, well�.
By the way, I don�t get this �husband transferred to Knoxville� business. There was a man who lived in my apartment building, his parking space was a couple over from mine. He arrived back home one evening with his top down and I greeted him, saying, �Perfect evening for a ride in a convertible.�
But he said, �I�m enjoying it while I still can�my company is transferring me to [four season climate] Tennessee next month, so I won�t have many more months when I can enjoy a convertible.�
�Tennessee, where in Tennessee?� I asked.
�Nashville,� he said.
I couldn�t think of much good to say, so I just said, �Maybe you�ll find something to like about it.�
�I doubt it,� he said, as he walked away.
All I read about is how we are losing jobs right and left, outsourcing everything overseas, yet things seem to be cooking in Tennessee! I mean, they�re making BMWs in South Carolina and Hondas in Ohio. And Harley Davidsons are still being made in the U.S., right? In York, Pennsylvania, I think. So it�s not like ALL our industry is going overseas�in fact, some foreign countries have sent their industry HERE. Maybe it�s only California that everybody is trying to get away from. Well, with these house prices, who can blame them? And remember what that guy (waiting with me to tour the Frank Lloyd Wright Hollyhock House) was telling me about UCLA�it's so hard to recruit any of the best professors now, because who wants to move to a city where they can�t afford to live?
But we�re back to that same problem�houses might be cheap in other places according to California standards, but in the standard of the economies of those other places, they�re over-priced there, too. Most savvy financial advisors seem to recommend NOT buying real estate for the next 12 years or so. What, wait until I am 70 before I get my first house? I hardly think so. So it�s either make a poor financial choice, or buy in an area where no one could stand to even stop and eat lunch. I�m sure there�s a third choice, though�the hidden answer. When things don�t add up, I decide that they�re just wrong. However, the issue is now made even more complicated.
So I figure it�s always best to start with what I really want, to hell with the economics of it. Figure out that part later. Most of what is driving up these high housing prices isn�t something I want anyway--suburban houses squeezed into the tiniest acceptable lots in crowded housing developments. Some of these communities in California where they are building �middle class houses� priced in the high $900,000s look like boxes of house tokens in a just-opened Monopoly set. The more expensive houses, in the �over a million� range, look like a box of hotel tokens in a just-opened Monopoly set�still crowded, still squeezed into a tiny lot, just bigger �McMansions�. The kids wouldn�t even have to use their cell phones to talk to their friends next door�they could just pass notes back and forth through the facing bedroom windows.
I want land you can use for something more than a weekend barbecue (although having that would nice, too)�plant some vegetables, build some chicken coops, maybe have a duck pond stocked with fish. And an orchard.
Now that last element is a key�an orchard. Whereas vegetables can be grown virtually everywhere if the soil is relatively good (although I think it is best to have natural rainfall instead of having to irrigate, which essentially means that except for the western half of the Pacific Northwest, your land has to be on the eastern half of the United States�to the right of the 20-annual-inches-of-rainfall line), fruit is more picky. Citrus fruit, such as is grown in Southern California, Arizona, and Florida, requires a certain warm climate. Citrus fruit can�t stand periods of frost or cold snaps, which is why some of those orange groves have heaters in them.
But deciduous fruits, the kind I imagine I would be more interested in having (I'd like to be as self-sufficient as possible in the things I actually consume), peaches, plums, pears, apples, actually require a period of cold. In California, the best climate zone for deciduous fruits is what the Sunset Magazine Garden Book describes as �Zone 9: Thermal Belts of California�s Central Valley�. Hum, I wonder if there is any �Zone 9� near Los Angeles?
I consulted the Garden Book zone map and discovered an interesting thing. Three regions that I had heretofore considered as possible places to buy land, known to me to be reasonably affordable (or affordable at all) although not really all that desirable, the Antelope Valley (such as Palmdale and Lancaster), the extremely-affordable region beyond the Antelope Valley such as Mojave and California City, and just up in the hills near the outer edge of Los Angeles County, such as Gorman and Frazier Park--all of these were �land� alright, I mean, you could plunk a house down on them, but were otherwise virtually useless for any kind of plant agriculture. The first two regions, the Antelope Valley and the area beyond out to California City are, point blank, desert, specifically, �Zone 11: Medium to High Desert of California and Southern Nevada�. This kind of desert has three major problems: (a) very hot temperatures in the summer, (b) very cold temperatures in the winter, and (c) little or no rainfall. All three make it bad for plants, and the first two make it bad for people, too. No wonder a person can buy five acres of land in California City for $10,000.
Gorman and Frazier Park, on the other hand, were in Zones 1, 2, and 3, the first, second, and third-coldest winter regions in the west. This was a �ground freezes in the winter,� �put chains on your tires� section of Southern California, utterly useless as a place to (a) commute in and out of to a school in Los Angeles, and (b) growing edible things. BUT, one can kind of afford it! (Kind of.)
Okay, so is there any Zone 9? Well yes, there are, two bands of Zone 9, one west of the Central Valley, and one east. The one west was closer to L.A. (but not all that close�one way from the school where I work to the brink of that region was 111 miles and used up 5 gallons of gasoline to get there). �Commuting� in from there (which I wouldn�t be able to stand to do day in and day out) would not only use up a minimum of four hours a day, but, much worse, cost (at today�s gasoline prices) $35.00 a day. If I bought some place to live out there, it would be cheaper to KEEP my apartment in town and only use the property and house out there for weekends and holidays. That might have been something to do, though, if I discovered the area to be wonderful.
Where it is, you go north on I-5 until you go completely up and over the Grapevine and then drop down into the Central Valley. The highway will split off into I-5 and highway 99. You choose I-5, but right about there, you take California highway 166 west to a tiny town called Maricopa, and then from there take California highway 33 north to towns like Taft, Derby Acres, and McKittrick, and this Zone 9 continues on up as far as Coalinga which, from a coastal town perspective, is halfway between San Luis Obispo and Monterey.
You are in Zone 9 as soon as you leave I-5 to head for Maricopa, and, sure enough, the place is full of fruit orchards. However, it is all entirely industrialized, with HUGE orchards, these are not small family farms (if any such thing exists anywhere in California anymore). You can see for hundreds of miles across the valley, but never see any houses.
Finally the town of Taft is kind of appealing in a very small town way. There are houses in town, and schools and parks and motels and cafes.
However, what is really there, and what this strip of land is all about has nothing to do with agriculture at all. I mean, it may have the right climate, but mostly the ground through here looked like sand. What this area is about is oil. I don�t know how much oil is pumped out of this ground, but I have never before seen anywhere else in the United States (including Texas and Oklahoma) such a proliferation of grasshopper-oil-pumps, pipes, tanks, smoking refineries, and everything else that comes with the oil industry. I knew California had oil, but I had never really seen it in all the years that I have lived here. None of the major highways go through this area, you really have to go out of your way to take a dumpy little country road before you�d ever even have a clue to any of this being there. It was quite fascinating really.
I am impressed by things that are so complicated like this�all these pipes and valves and things, it reminded me of the engine room of the S.S. Lane Victory, except spread out all over the hills and valleys for hundreds and hundreds of miles. And those grasshopper oil pumps come in so many shapes and designs. I have been fascinated by those things ever since I was kid.
It�s places like this (and the engine room of the S.S. Lane Victory) that make me think I have worked in an office too long. I know all about �policy� and �procedure� and �compliance�; I know how to obtain and keep track of �data� and how to analyze formulas and make business decisions and how to write reports and make charts and presentations and even how to motivate people. But how much do I know about how to really DO things?
There is a lot of worry about the future of the United States for many reasons, such as war, race relations, the dumbing down of the populace, the loss of values, the corruption of government, the agenda of the media to distort and manipulate truth, the control by huge multi-national corporations, the systemizing of everything by systems that the average person doesn�t understand, and the general feeling of unhappiness, malaise, or hostility of the people. But what I worry most about is the unsure economic picture. What is the United States now?
In its infancy, it was agricultural, and I understand about that. That seems basic�you need fertile ground and you need to feed your people. Up until recently, the United States was a net exporter of food to the world. But now the country imports more of its food, so in order to feed our nation, we are dependent upon foreign countries.
After a time, the country became industrialized. And I understand about that. That, too, seems basic�you need to manufacture the things you need in order to expand the productivity of the people. Now you can grow way more food and accomplish way more work because of all these machines that you make. This increase in productivity also makes you richer than you could be just from growing and selling food (why, I�m really not sure, but I guess it has to do with leverage). Since there was more money in industry than in agriculture, farming became more industrialized, and more and more former farmers were working in industry. Farming became a �poor� person�s occupation and if we imported our food from even poorer, non-industrialized foreign cultures, then so much the better for us. Up until recently, the United States was a net exporter of manufactured goods in the world. But now the country imports more of its material goods, so in order to supply our nation, we are dependent upon foreign countries.
Then at about the time I became a working adult, �the information revolution� took over, and now more money could be made in dealing with data than could be made from making things, so the computer became king, so now the richest man in the world is Bill Gates and the richest community in the country is in the middle of Silicon Valley. Up until recently, the United States was the supplier of high tech to the world, but now the country is beginning to import even our high tech, not only equipment, but the very designs themselves. It is cheaper to import R&D from India and Korea than it is to produce it here, and so even for high tech, we are now dependent upon foreign countries.
The only thing the U.S. still seems to be is a military might. But I read just the other day that we will be buying battleships and submarines for the U.S. Navy from CHINA. Pretty soon, I may discover that we�ve made a deal to buy nuclear weapons from India, or some other foreign country that happens to have the technology. So even our own defense would be dependent upon foreign countries.
You�d think that if we were such a big country on importing things, that we�d at least have some kind of a huge �import� industry. But you already know the answer to that�the ships are made in foreign countries, the ship owners are foreign, the port facility equipment is made in foreign countries, and the port handling facilities themselves are owned by foreign companies. Remember the whole big Dubai port facility scandal? �No Arabic country was going to run our ports!�
Well guess what, I just read an article today that revealed that Dubai is making a deal with Panama to widen and modernize the Panama Canal! During the era of our former glory, WE built the Panama Canal. But today? It�s being taken care of by a country that isn�t really a country at all, but a city, like Hong Kong or Singapore.
What is happening, and, more to the point what is GOING to happen?
Meanwhile, we can�t even be secure even buying the country�s land. Either we can�t afford to buy our own country�s land, or it is considered to be a poor investment. But people still have to live, and they want to live the best and most full way they can. I don�t think a studio apartment or even a McMansion squeezed into a compacted housing development supports that.
Well, Maricopa and Taft weren�t the answer, not what I was looking for�too far away from L.A. and already owned by oil companies and farming corporations. We�ll just have to see what I decide to check out next.
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