Beautiful morning! Edging on to 10:15 as we scribble: a warm mid-morning, “hot”by some standards. Hmmmm…. Wonder what the mechanical opinion is?
{tap tap tap…Enter...}
Gosh! It’s only 82 degrees out there! Feels a LOT warmer than that.
Which implies some humidity is lurking around… Oh, yeah: 20 percent!
Whew: A fifth of the atmosphere you breathe in as you stumble around the streets is…water!
What a kick, though: roaming through the reaches of the ‘Hood! I’ve lived here for one helluva long time. I think SDXB and I had been here around 10 years by the time he decided to move out to (un)lovely Sun City. Having lived there before, with my parents, I refused to go. To my mind SC defines “miserable place”….
And it defines “static”: as in unchanging and unchangeable.
The ‘Hood, however, has evolved.
When SDXB and I moved here…what?15 or 20 years ago, maybe? — this was a mid-middle class collection of look-alike ticky-tacky tract houses.
Today?
My goodness...what a difference!
Over the past decade, the homes here have been gentrified, re-gentrified, and mega-gentrified. These 1960s plugs of boredom have been updated, fancified, and turned into”classic” — even “historic”– houses. Lawns and trees have spread across the gravel landscape. Ticky-tacky Nineteenth Avenue has taken on the spiffy, ultra-modern light-rail trains.
And now…what a place it is! I dunno what these houses are worth today, but you can be sure none of them will go for the hundred grand SDXB and I paid!
Well, hell! We have the freakin’ Internet to tell us what the thing is worth now. Let us look up the Shack’s address…
holeeee mackerel!
The “Zestimate” for the Funny Farm is $522,700.
Seriously?
And my old house, a block east of Conduit of Blight Blvd???
Gasp! Zillow thinks one of ém is worth $568,700. It’s the SAME MODEL, the SAME SIZE as our first house here!
And how much does Zillow think that place,located handsomely where you can be serenaded by car, bus, and train noise 24/7, is worth? $522,700.
Most recently sold for a mere $389,000.
Good grief.
And yet, it must be admitted: as the area has matured, it has grown more handsome. Hiking up and down the old avenues was a pleasure. The houses have been well maintained. The city has kept up the streets.
And that fact alone: the place has gone uphill, not downhill; at the worst stayed steady in quality and value — that has gotta be worth A LOT.
My father would faint dead away, if he could see these prices.
Y’know, when he retired (for the first time…) in the early 1960s, he figured a savings pot of $100,000 would see him and my mother through the rest of their lives in solid, middle-class comfort.
By the time I graduated from college — just four years later — he had to go back to sea. That’s how much the dollar’s value fell in just four years!
Makes it damn hard to plan for retirement. Or to figure you’ll ever really be able to afford any retirement.
How, really, do younger people manage to afford any kind of life at all, long-term? Really, today in calculating for retirement, you’d have to figure you just weren’t gonna retire. Not until you were hopelessly infirm, anyway.
Welp! I can’t stand it another minute! Gotta pick up the Funny Farm’s litter collection. Then fall face-first into the sack for a stupefied nap.
Ruby and I take our morning stroll,