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Head-banging in the corporate bureaucracy

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Godlmighty! Yesterday I realized that Fidelity never sent my April 403(b) drawdown. So now on Monday I have to try AGAIN to get those people off the dime.

What torture! I just hate bureaucratic runarounds. I hate them even more when the bureaucracy is private instead of governmental. At least with the government the employees are usually trying to accommodate you.

I have talked to CSR after CSR after CSR—every time you call, you get a different person, and you never can get through to Person 1 who told you X or Person 2 who told you Y. I have asked and been assured now three times by three different people that the drawdown required by the State of Arizona would be made correctly and would be direct-deposited in my checking account. The result is that since last December I’ve gotten two checks sent in the mail. And this month I’ve received nothing.

It just makes me so angry. We originally had the option to invest with Vanguard in its 403(b) plan. As soon as that became possible, I moved most of my 403(b) funds over there, because all my nondeferred savings were at Vanguard, whose fees are low, whose profits are handsome, and whose customer service is excellent. That lasted all of a year—I guess Vanguard must have been too competent to work with Arizona State University.

If I weren’t afraid the state would deny me the rest of my RASL, I’d roll the money over into my big IRA now. In fact, my financial advisor and I hatched a plan to have them roll a portion of the drawdown over to the IRA, but I hadn’t gotten around to doing battle with the bureaucrats about that, mostly because I wanted to see how I would get by in the summer before cutting the drawdown from $500 to $100.

Presumably, though, that wouldn’t have happened, either. The only way I’m going to get the money where it belongs is going to be to roll the entire amount over. And I’m really afraid that’s going to get me in trouble, since the woman who administers the RASL program insists that to be eligible you have to be drawing what she calls a “pension”—i.e., a monthly drawdown from the state’s 403(b) plan.

I’ve concocted a new plan, though. To wit: leave enough cash in the 403(b) fund to cover the time between now and the date the last RASL check is issued, but roll the rest of it over. There are only 22 months remaining, and so the most I’d have to leave in there—assuming I continue the drawdown I’m currently making, which I’d actually like to cut—is $11,000.

Whatever I decide to do, though, next week I’m going to have to bang my head against the bureaucratic wall again. I’m royally sick of that!

Only a slightly nightmarish day…

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Over at A Gai Shan Life, proprietor Revanche features a very beautiful chicken soup, comfort food she cooked up after an extraordinarily rough week.  Meanwhile, Frugal Scholar, feeling a little anxious after links to her site in Funny’s recently gone-viral post pulled traffic upward there, too, also covets comfort food, in her case a lush-sounding broccoli soup with an egg-parmesan swirl-in…glorioski!

Cassie and I could use a little comfort food ourselves, and as a matter of fact we have some chicken that I could cook up into a lovely soup. What a wacky day!

I’m sitting here in the counting house along about 2:30 this afternoon, trying to figure out how to finesse payment for the mountain of clothes I bought this week, when all of a sudden I smell…mothballs. Really, really strong stink of mothballs.

Mothballs? What? That would be 1,4-dichlorobenzene these days, a slightly less toxic product than the stuff that used to grace this common household insecticide, naphthalene, replaced because of its flammability. The newer ingredient is known to be carcinogenic, and god only knows what it does to 25-pound dogs.

No mothballs reside in my house, and the strong stench is fast getting stronger. I get up to see what the heck, wondering if there’s some sort of fire in the attic or something that’s releasing fumes. The closer I get to the center of the house, the stronger the stink is.

I’ve left all front, side, and back doors open because it’s a spectacular day and, after the recent cool snap, probably the last comfortable day before summer sets in. Outdoors I either can’t smell it or the odor is much fainter than inside the house, where the fumes are so strong they make my eyes water.

Leash up the dog and get outside. It occurs to me that maybe the workmen at Biker Boob’s former abode are using some sort of chemicals, so I go over and ask—nope, they’re not doing anything with any chemicals, not even Dap or paint. Walk back toward the alley behind the house, where the stench is now very powerful. I again wonder if it’s originating inside my house.

The young mom across the street is hauling soccer balls out of her SUV. She also smells the odor and wonders what it is. After some speculation, we decide to call the fire department.

Fire dudes show up in due course. They explore the alley. At first they think it’s coming from the big garbage bin between my house and Sally’s–possibly illegal dumping. Proceeding up the alley, they find oily stuff on the ground. Now they’re thinking maybe it’s dioxin. (Firemen must love these little adventures!) 🙄

By now Sally has come out, and Manny across the street from her has joined the party. Fire dudes ask Sally if she’s sprayed or used any chemicals. She says not. But the guy two houses up the street is installing a swimming pool…could there be any industrial chemicals involved in that?

The firemen proceed up the road and interrogate the suspect homeowner.

Turns out this moron has sprayed Ortho’s Groundclear all over his entire backyard and up and down the alley! He claims he’s mixed it according to the package instructions, but it seems highly unlikely that applying it according to the instructions would fill a distant neighbor’s home with choking fumes and stink up the air for four city lots in all directions. Though this stuff is supposed to be relatively benign, IMHO nothing that smells that foul can be good for you.

So I load the dog into the car and drive down to M’hijito’s house. Takes an hour for the nasty aftertaste to clear out of the throat and nose. Ugh!

We leave the dog in his house and make a Costco run. Now that I’ve decided to go back on Atkins to pare down about 10 pounds, I need a lot of lettuce and other low-carb veggies, plus a ton of meat. And meat for Cassie the Corgi. This occupies a couple of hours. We loaf around for a while. When it becomes clear that M’hijito wishes to go hang out with his friends, Cassie and I return to the war zone. By now the fumes have died down. A steady wind is blowing away from the house and has probably dried the oily liquid this clown has dumped all over a quarter-acre and 100 feet of alleyway.

Moving on: now it’s almost 7:00 p.m. I’m hungry; Cassie has no food prepared and neither do I. The bookkeeping isn’t done, the house is an even more incredible mess than it was last weekend when I hadn’t cleaned for four weeks.

M’hijito having fed me a bottle of ginger ale by way of clearing the vile taste, I guess I’m off Atkins today. That is, I expect, a good reason to serve up either the dregs of the wine or a bottle of beer. And so, to work…

Buyer Beware: A close look at the bill

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So this bill for $587 came in the mail from the air-conditioning company. This outfit is a small, locally owned company with whom I’ve done business for upwards of 12 years. To my knowledge, they’ve never cheated me. Or so I thought.

The company that used to service my AC would send a guy twice a year for a routine check-up and service job: once in the spring to work on the air-conditioner and once in the fall to work on the heater. Every single time their guy would go up on the roof, he would come down with some part in his hand claiming it needed to be replaced. This would turn a $40 bill into a $200 bill.

SDXB, who was living with me at the time, became suspicious. Our neighbor told me about Mast, and I discovered that for a single annual fee they’d do the semiannual service job…and not once did the serviceman ever claim anything up there needed to be fixed.

Well, time has passed. We have had a recession that has affected Arizona worse than any economic slowdown since the Great Depression. In addition to jacking up the price for the regular check-up, Mast has laid off many of its servicemen, and our guy—who I suspect is the only craftsman they have working for them—is working 50% time. He is not a happy camper.

When I told M’hijito about the six-hundred-dollar repair bill, he remarked that he could have bought a new swamp cooler for that price. Not quite—they cost about $2,200—but in fact, six hundred dollars would run his regular air conditioning through the summer. The whole idea of running a swamp cooler during the two or three hot months before the air gets too humid for the system to work is to save on air-conditioning bills.

Part of this bill is for a new 3/4 hp motor. Another part is apparently a renewal for the annual check-up.

I thought I’d bought a new motor for that unit. Also, because M’hijito bought a new central air conditioning unit last year, we paid for the annual check-up in the fall, so that his bill comes due in the fall and mine comes due in the spring.

Being a pathological saver of receipts, I happen to have all the receipts for all the work we’ve had done on the downtown house. And lo! Here’s one for Mast, dated 2007…

On March 15, 2007, Mast replaced the 3/4 hp motor in that unit. They charged $193 then; this time they billed $393. They replaced a belt for $10.50; this time they charged $20. They replaced three cooler pads for a total of $25.20 at $8.40 apiece; this time they charged $54 at $18 apiece.

Now, supposedly we’re in a period of zero inflation. We all know that’s not so, but we know prices haven’t gone up much in the past couple of years. If the cost of that unit went up 3 percent over the past three years, it should cost $211 today.

Get online and you find that yea, verily: swamp cooler motors range in price from about $60 to about $235.

So I guess we’ll be looking for a new air-conditioning contractor. How disappointing.

It’s easy to understand that when a company is struggling for survival it might raise prices to try to stay in business on the customer’s back. But it seems counter-productive: rip off the customers and pretty soon you don’t have customers.

Two hectic—and expensive!—days

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Good grief, these past two days have been hectic! And expensive: I’ve mortgaged my patrimony to renew my wardrobe.

The state sent me a notice saying I had to get a new photo for my driver’s license. Some time back, the State of Arizona decided testing and retesting people for driver’s licenses was just too much government intrusion, and so they instituted long, long renewal periods. Now instead of making your renew your license every few years, they make you get a new photo once every twelve years. No driver’s test: just a photo. When you reach the age of 65, you have to take a vision test and renew your license, after which you have to renew every five years.

The state has laid off workers in every department, including DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles). Some of my students reported waits as long as four hours.

So I carried the 439 pages of proofs I’ve been editing with me to the closest DMV office, 11.3 miles from my house, and prepared to settle in for the long haul.

The wait and the process of jumping through hoops wasn’t as time-consuming as expected. After sitting for a few minutes—not long enough to get a running start on editing copy—I was called to a desk where I was made to fart around with a form. Fortunately, they didn’t give me any argument: we’re told that if they can’t find your photo in their system, you’ll have to prove you’re a U.S. citizen, and so I had to dig out my birth certificate and carry it with me. Then it was off to sit in line to get a new photo—here, too, I barely got started reading copy before they hauled me up to the camera. Sit and wait again while they processed the new piece of plastic.

Took a good look at it and saw the expiration date was still May 7, 2010. Back to the front desk: “How do I get this thing renewed?” They had failed to do the eye test when I showed up, and so I had to start over and jump through all those hoops again!!!

It took two hours to go through the whole damn process twice.

I had already decided that since I was going to be on the west side, I would go up to the strip mall near Arrowhead (home of the highest per-capita proportion of millionaires in the Phoenix urban area) that houses a Talbot’s, a Chico’s, and a B’Gauze, two of which normally have clothes that fit me. My clothes are all falling apart, because I haven’t bought anything other than an occasional pair of Costco jeans since last March, and at that time it was only a couple of shirts and a pair of socks. Otherwise, the last time I bought decent clothes was in 2007.

At Talbot’s and Chico’s, every stitch I put on made me look like a potato sack tied in the middle. Talbot’s was particularly discouraging, because their clothes used to fit me. I’ve put on weight, no question of it: about five pounds since 2007. And I’m getting saggy because I spend way too much time parked in front of the computer. But it doesn’t seem like a five-pound gain should cause every skirt, every blouse, and every pair of pants to look dumpy on me. After all, I haven’t gone up a size in jeans.

Chico’s clothes have never fit me, so I wasn’t surprised. I found one shirt, for which they charged me $64. Talbot’s used to carry great clothing—understated, classic, and perfectly fitting—but when the company changed its look, the wonderful fit went away. So, IMHO, did the good looks of the outfits Talbot’s used to sell. Which, I suppose, explains why I haven’t bought anything there in a while. I did pick up a knit shirt on sale: $24. When I wore it today, the dye rubbed off on my white pants.

B’Gauze carries light cotton gauze outfits that are great in the summer. But because they’re shapeless and loose, they look like what they are: fat lady clothes. That notwithstanding, I bought a decent blue skirt, very flowing and airy, plus two white shirts, one that looked great with the skirt and one in the same artist’s-smock style as a turquoise shirt I already own and love, which is wearing out. The bill: $194.

These two expeditions consumed half the day.

Then it was back to the house to read copy until 5:30, when I had to race up to the college to attend a workshop in the new BlackBoard version 9. As we’ve observed, BlackBoard is one of life’s prime time-wasters, and the new version is changed enough to require one to diddle away a great deal of time figuring out how to operate it. So that sucked up the whole evening.

By the time I got home, Cassie had hunger-barfed all over the living room floor, a fine ending to a tedious day. Well, not quite: I worked into the night to finish reading proofs—the copy was a tangled mess that apparently was never edited, the content tedious drivel that left one wondering who at the press has the author as his sister-in-law. Because I had to return the copy to the client today, I plowed through to the end of that, finishing around 1:00 a.m.

This morning it was off to the Friday classes, which mercifully end at 11:30 because the 101 section meets only on Mondays and Wednesdays. From the college, I had to drive into Tempe to meet Tina and pick up a batch of completed work. From there, it was up to mid-town Scottsdale to return her project and mine to the client.

On the way home, I had to pass Scottsdale Fashion Square. M’hijito has been wanting a sideboard, so I thought I’d drop by Crate and Barrel to see if they had anything. Or, more to the point, if anything was on sale.

No, and no on those two counts.

However, Dillard’s was having a bra-fitting event. The wait was half an hour, so I tracked down a much-needed bra and underpants on my own.

In my old age, I’ve come to find underwire brassieres singularly uncomfortable. The decrepit wireless numbers I have are worn out and leave me sagging and bouncing. Cheap bras are even more uncomfortable than good bras—the ones I bought in a package of three from Costco ride up, gouge, itch, and hurt. I tried on three bras in the $25 range and ended up buying a $60 Wacoal, another of the few clothing brands that now fit me. By the time the bargain panties were added in, the bill came to $93.

I wasn’t happy at having to pay sixty bucks for one bra, when I really need two or three bras. Oh well.

I found a pretty belt in Dillard’s notions department, another item that I’ve been needing: $17.

Then I decided to visit J. Jill, which sometimes carries linen clothes that sort of fit me. After Thursday’s miserable experiences at Talbot’s and Chico’s, I was pretty discouraged with trying on clothes. Nevertheless, I wrestled myself into a few things—the arm is still quite sore, and pulling things on and off can elicit quite the jab of pain. I found…

• An ankle-length knit dress with pleated front and near-empire waist that does a nice job of hiding the flab, lumps, and bumps. Matter of fact, it looks very nice.

• A plain black knee-length knit dress that also reveals no cellulite and hides the fat very nicely. Comfortable and socially acceptable. Perfect for church and general out and about.

• A black linen maxi-skirt that despite being a size 10 fits well around the flabby waist as well as around the capacious rear end. Astonishing!

• A white knee-length linen dress that feels like it has its own air-conditioning built in. Good for summer; also disguises the fat effectively.

• A pair of linen cropped pants that fit adequately and are not jeans, a style of which I am becoming royally sick.

• A white knot-button linen shirt with the same air-conditioning qualities, very nice with the black skirt and with the linen pants.

• A tie-died knit cotton maxi dress that also does a pretty good job of disguising the fat and the sags.

• A linen jean jacket which looks cute with the tie-died dress, works OK with the capris, and will look great with the endless collection of Costco jeans. And in the sort of shabby-chic style currently in vogue, it sort of works with the pleated maxi dress and the black skirt.

I needed these things very much, except for the jean jacket. I’ve been wearing the same two pairs of old washable wool slacks to church, week after week after week, and the Costco jeans have become so ubiquitous I wear them to teach in and sometimes sneak them into church. I had one rather gaudy casual skirt—a survivor of some long-ago trip to B’Gauze—and two ancient Eileen Fisher outfits, one of which has been resewn and has to be pinned together to accommodate the crumbling elastic in the waistband.

The bill for all this stuff? $730.

The J. Jill ladies gave me a coupon discount plus $73 off for opening a J. Jill charge account.

I really didn’t want to open an account there. However, these maneuvers cut the bill to $613; taxes raised the bottom line to a breathtaking $662.

Holy mackerel. I’ve never spent that much on clothes in my life. On the other hand, it is objectively true that just about everything in my closet is shot except for the dozen pairs of Costco jeans, one of which was now smeared with red dye from the Talbot’s pullover.

Well, I figured, I can afford it. There’s $3,300 in the savings account set aside for just such purchases as these, plus FaM cranked $450 on the late, great traffic spike: AdSense owes me more than enough to cover the bill.

Yesh. That’s what I thought.

Then I pulled in the driveway and got the mail.

The air-conditioning company sent a bill for the work they did at the downtown house: five hundred and eighty-seven bucks!!!!

Damnation!

Well, M’hijito says he will pay for it. The rent he gets from his roommate will cover it. But we were both furious: normally the office will call when a bill of that size is proposed. I did not like being blindsided with a $600 bill for what I expected would be, at most, a $200 job.

So I think I’ll return the Chico’s shirt, which on reflection is kind of garish. And $65 is way, way, way too much for a knit pullover. The belt that looked like it fit at Dillard’s is actually too large, so I’ll take that back on Monday when I’m relatively close to the Paradise Valley store. And I’m annoyed enough about the Talbot’s shirt rubbing red dye all over my white jeans that I may demand my money back for that, even though I wore it all day Friday. One thing is for sure on that count: I never will buy anything from Talbot’s again.

Returning the overpriced shirt and the belt alone will knock about $100 off the total two-day damage. I don’t know whether I’ve got enough chutzpah to take the dye-leaking shirt back to Talbot’s. On the other hand, since I’m never going to shop there again, why not? Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

My plan, at least before the AC bill showed up and shocked me back to reality, was to use this mound of clothes to build the basis of a new wardrobe. Throw out all the worn-out, tattered old junk, and the cotton jeans that have shrunk so much I have to lie down to zip them up, and get rid of everything that I’m not wearing.

Then, once the diddle-it-away savings recover, I’ll plan to spend about $60 to $100 about once every three months to build on this new foundation. Over the course of a year or two, I should end up with enough decent clothes in the closet that, even as things wear out, I won’t be stumbling around looking like a bag lady or a latter-day hippie. That’s affordable. And maybe I can even buy another bra sometime in the next year or so.

Summertime, and…what am I gonna do, anyway?

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Only another half-dozen class meetings until the end of the semester. Then a blitz of monster student papers, and then…and then…white-hot silence.

For the first time in many a year, I’m looking at an entire three-month summer break with nothing to do. Even when I was in graduate school and couldn’t take summer classes because they didn’t give enough time to write graduate-level research papers, I had things going on in the summer: research projects, society-wife machinations, trips to Hawaii, West Virginia, Atlanta, England, and waypoints. When I was teaching at the Great Desert University, I usually taught in at least one and sometimes both summer sessions by way of generating a living wage. And of course, over the past five or six years I held a twelve-month administrative position. Though it had normal vacations time, I rarely took any because I had nothing better to do.

So. In the “nothing better to do” department, the question is what on earth am I going to do this summer? Choir ends on May 30, by which time I probably will have both my fall classes set up and ready to go. And in a 115-degree summer, there’s never much going on in Phoenix.

I’m thinking this will be a good opportunity to try to wring a book out of Funny. That’s been on the agenda since shortly after I started the blog. I haven’t done it mostly because I’ve been busy. Mining almost three years’ worth of posts for material that will hang together in a reasonable way will be a big job in itself. With that done, there’ll be the matter of rewriting the stuff to obliterate the blogginess and make it act like print book copy.

Another possibility is to focus on the blog itself and on trying to expand readership. In the past couple of days, Funny has experienced an amazing spike in traffic, apparently because an MSN Money Talks story that mentioned the Great No-Detergent Laundry Experiment was featured on Yahoo.com. The result was huge: in one day, Adsense earned more than it normally does in an entire month.

If daily traffic averaged half that much, 325 days a year, that plus the Social Security plus the normal flow of editorial projects would return my net income to about what I was earning at the Great Desert University. And I’d never have to read another freshman paper again.

It being unlikely that I’d earn that much on a book and certain that book revenues would not stretch out over a period of years, I incline toward spending six to eight hours a day on the blog: writing, marketing, and publicizing. If I actually sat down and organized my time intelligently, three months of that could at least set Funny on the right trajectory.

Or, in the “now for something entirely different” department, I could try to write a genre mystery novel. That’s also an idea that’s been percolating. But I dunno…it’s hard to work up much enthusiasm. I think I’d rather edit them than write them.

Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. Sidney Paget. Public domain.

Cost of commuting

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Here’s a trade-off for you: Buy a house in the far-flung suburbs to save a few bucks and end up spending half your income on the combined costs of housing and transportation.

In a recent Play-Nooz story, ABC’s Phoenix television station reports that people who think they’re saving money by purchasing in remote suburbs have to pay so much more on automobiles and gasoline that the combined costs of housing and transportation consume about 45 percent of their family income, an amount generally considered unaffordable. Anything this outfit says has to be taken with a large grain of salt, because the reporting can be…well, pretty laughable.

So I checked out this interactive map by the Center for Neighborhood Technology, a nonprofit that promotes urban sustainability. Indeed, it appears that when you combine housing and transportation costs, a large part of the Phoenix Metropolitan Area becomes unaffordable. Factoring in housing costs alone does cause a larger region to consume less than 30 percent of the family income. Add transport to the mix, and you see that more people spend 45 percent or more of family income on driving plus housing.

At first glance, this sounds credible, given the astonishing cost of gasoline. I have no car payment, yet in the past month I’ve paid almost $110 just for gas—and I haven’t gone anywhere except up to the college and to a few stores, most of them on my way to and from the college. If I had to pay $300 to $600 a month for a car, as many people do, transportation expenses would run 18 to 32 percent of my income—when I’m teaching three sections. In the summer, when I can’t get a job, such costs would consume 31 to 71 percent of net income.

Spend a few moments studying the housing-only map, though, and you’ll see that large parts of the “drive until you qualify” burbs never offered any bargains. The Southeast Valley—Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa, Tempe—is pricier than the close-in districts to start with. Granted, they’re new, shiny developments (so shoddily built that they won’t stay that way for long…), and granted, the city of Phoenix has done everything it can to thump centrally located neighborhoods. (The city and the county are run by developers—they take office on boards of supervisors and the city council. It’s in their interest ensure that the central city deteriorates, fostering white flight, so that people will buy their plaster-and-Styrofoam houses in the ever-expanding sprawl.) Scottsdale has always been ridiculously expensive; it’s an enclave of whiteness that has worked to develop a upscale reputation. The area to the northwest is largely occupied by retirement communities; cost of housing and taxes are lower there because of the downward pressure exerted by the demographic. The area to the south of the central city has been low-rent from the git-go; much of it is dangerous slum, schools are horrific, and few who can afford to live elsewhere willingly settle there.

So, I would argue in the first place that new suburban housing is more expensive than centrally located middle-class housing. It’s not true that people buy in the sticks to save money; they buy in the sticks for demographic reasons (if you don’t know whereof I speak, consider the latest bit of hilarity from the state house, which reflects the tenor of our elected leadership) and because they hope for schools that are more or less adequate. People who buy for those reasons don’t concern themselves with the cost of transportation—they regard it as just part of the cost of living.

When you add the cost of automobiles to the cost of housing, you do get a total that consumes way too much of net income. However, Drachman Institute Associate Director Marilyn Robinson’s claim that “If a household can get rid of one car, they can increase their available income by approximately $8,500 a year. They can do that if they have access to good and frequent transit service and if their neighborhoods include amenities like shops and recreation within walking distance” is an absurdity, at least where Arizona cities are concerned.

Few central or suburban neighborhoods are within walking distance of “shops and recreation.” The two  grocery stores closest to my house are in unsafe areas and are overpriced specifically because residents living nearby can’t afford cars and so form a kind of captive consumer base. These stores can charge anything they please, because too many of their customers can’t easily shop at the competition. The closest grocery store where I feel safe to get out of my car in the parking lot is three and a half miles from my house. Bicycling over the homicidal streets is out of the question, and you can be very sure I’m not walking seven miles in 110-degree heat to buy a few groceries.

There is no credible public transportation here. Buses are slow, unholy inconvenient, uncomfortable, and full of unwashed and often scary transients—the homeless mentally ill, of whom we have a large population, use the buses and lightrail as rolling air-conditioned space. They ride around and around to stay cool (or, in winter, warm) and to come out from under the oleanders for awhile. The lightrail system is a cute novelty but less than useful for commuting and shopping. Though a bus does run up to the college, the city is about to discontinue that line by way of cost-cutting, and it’s not a viable means to get there—even if the buses were comfortable and safe, I wouldn’t think of spending an hour or more to make a ten-minute drive.

Thus there really is no part of the city where a family with two adults, both of whom work, would not genuinely need to own two cars.

So the Housing and Transportation Affordability Index doesn’t tell you much, except that owning a car is expensive and that housing in the aging central part of the city is cheaper than housing in the shiny new suburbs.

Try the maps on a metro area that does have decent public transit, such as the San Francisco Bay Area, and you get a different picture. Housing costs there are so high it doesn’t much matter whether you have to drive. Another highly desirable area, one supposedly designed for sustainability, is Portland, Oregon: again, housing costs in the outlying suburbs appear to be far higher than those in the central city; add the cost of transportation, and few areas are affordable. In New York City, equipped with a large and much-used public transit system, mode of commuting seems to make little difference in affordability. Houston residents, however, pay a high premium for commuting. For people who live around New Orleans, commuting apparently is quite a burden; however, that may be a function of low incomes there. Change the demographic on the maps from “regional typical household” to “national typical household” and the cost of living looks pretty moderate, whether you drive to work or not.

So, I don’t know what all this means. It’s not cheap to drive a car. But on the other hand, riding public transportation isn’t cheap, either: riding buses and trains costs something, and cities with full-service systems have high taxes and a high cost of living. While I’m not pleased about having to pay $110 for gasoline—almost twice what I budgeted for—the cost is far from drastic enough to get me out of my car. Even if it were, there’s really no choice, and so the issue is moot.

How much does it cost you to get around your city? And if you add your typical cost of transportation to your cost of shelter, what proportion of your income does the total consume?