What's interesting to me is that he's articulating what is actually a very common and openly expressed attitude. I am consistently surprised by the discomfort with which many people I know approach public transportation.
They aren't weirded out by regional rail, which is mostly business-class commuters. Rather, they are upset by the prospect of sharing physical space with poor and disabled people.
I've ridden transit pretty extensively in New York, Washington, Boston, Baltimore, and Chicago, as well as Philadelphia, and it is certainly true that Philadelphia's system is dirtier than other cities'.
It's also true that the sheer breadth of poverty and associated ills in Philadelphia is extraordinary compared to those cities, and that unlike those cities, middle and UMC people here overwhelmingly do not commute by non-rail transit lines.
Even so, it is notable to me how many middle and UMC people are willing to throw around words like "disgusting" and "horrible" when what they mean is "People are sneezing and coughing," or "People are loudly cursing each other out."
[Granted that using mass transit here ALSO means being regularly exposed to open drug use and physical altercations, and the occasional highly dangerous incident involving guns.]
Shorter me: The stigma is enormous, even if partially justifiable.
More specifically on topic, I'm kinda curious whether anyone will start a movement to pressure the rich folks into using the so-called 'poor door' in solidarity.
And, of course, they didn't build these affordable housing units out of the goodness of their hearts. They got massive tax breaks or zoning variances to build much taller/larger than they otherwise would have been allowed in exchange for a relatively small number of units reserved for households that are income-capped. And the caps are solidly middle class. These rich people will be forced to mingle with teachers and nurses, not actual poor people.
They're doing this in London too, which was predictable, since affordable housing in London is an oxymoron.
"When both the lifts weren't working they did say that if you were pregnant, had a health problem or a baby in a buggy you could use the main entrance,"
I am consistently surprised by the discomfort with which many people I know approach public transportation.
I laughed when you followed this with "it's the dirtiest fucking transit in the land filled with crackheads coughing up tuberculosis and getting in fights that sometimes involve a firearm".
Rather, they are upset by the prospect of sharing physical space with poor and disabled people.
Well, yes, and they're encouraged in that feeling by so much rhetoric coming chiefly out of the Republican party according to which that's an entirely understandable response. (Though Dems are not exactly shining monuments here either.)
Anyway: public transportation I've always thought is an equalizer. It's always struck me that the *lack* of a robust public transportation system in Baltimore contributes to its class divisions and consequent shitting-upon-the-poor. Boston: a lot of people take public transportation: they see one another on a regular basis. New York I'd have thought the same. Chicago I do not know well enough to say.
But I'm surprised, Witt, that you say that It's also true that the sheer breadth of poverty and associated ills in Philadelphia is extraordinary compared to those cities, just because I figure Baltimore is about the same as Philly.
Not that I want to have a Philly-Balto-off.
just because I figure Baltimore is about the same as Philly.
The proportion is somewhat similar, but the scale is not even close. Baltimore is about 600K population, about 25% in poverty. Philadelphia is about 1.5 million, about 28% in poverty.
More to the point, among poor and near-poor Philadelphia residents age 16-64 (265,000 people), only 30% are employed.
That means that 17% are unemployed and 53%, or 141,000 people, are not in the labor force at all -- not working, and not looking for work.
It's an absolutely staggering number, and it can't be fully explained by full-time college students or unpaid family caregivers.
5: Well, yeah. I was right with Witt, until she made Philly mass transit sound unappealing by my standards.
Pittsburgh buses are not nearly the disease-riddled, violent hellscape that Witt depicts Philadelphia buses as being. But still, although most college students take the bus all the time, they see it as a phase of their lives that will end when they get an adult job. Like living in rentals with 4 random friends.
Still an equalizer in some ways, in that taking public transit is not seen as utterly unthinkable once you've done it for a while.
My father used to work for Toll Brothers, and they were a horrible bunch of crooks -- when he was working for them they were rehabbing buildings in Harlem in the cheapest and shoddiest possible way. This was a sort of post-retirement job for him, and he didn't need the money, which allowed him to quit when they started asking him to lie on official forms (like, representing that asbestos abatement had been done properly when it hadn't).
As for the quote in the OP, it never goes well when someone with "Von" in his name is the public face of an organization seeking to avoid accusations of elitism.
8: Baltimore is about 600K population, about 25% in poverty. Philadelphia is about 1.5 million, about 28% in poverty.
Okay, understood, but I thought there was something abut the official city lines which dictate the official population: isn't Baltimore smallish in official population size because the city lines are drawn rather small? What you might call greater Baltimore is larger. Just a question of where the lines are drawn.
Nonetheless, this is a non-argument. Philadelphia is in dire straits, no doubt about it.
Rich people in New York can seem uniquely awful, until you go to LA.
Anyhow, riding the bus is not always a picnic here either, despite having a fairly good system, and not nearly the same level of poverty and despair as those failed cities back east. I really do wish people would make an effort to bathe more effectively. And not be drunk at 11 am. And not shout profanity and racial epithets. And not not fold up their gigantic strollers. It's really depressing.
10: Over half of my co-workers take the bus at least some of the time. Parking has gotten more expensive (all the cheap meters are now $2/hour and they require a plate number so you have to obey the 2 hour limit) and transit passes are free for university employees.
OT: A certain person is performing with Kenny Rogers this weekend, but had never heard "The Gambler" until last night.
I'm finding this incredibly depressing.
Witt: what do you think could or should be done to try to fix your state? Or perhaps just your city's state of affairs?
(Disclosure: my bookshop has recently acquired an extensive collection of books on early -- 17th, 18th, 19th century -- Pennsylvania history, particular emphasis on western PA, so I've been a bit immersed in that early history, which probably has nothing to do with the current state of affairs.)
On riding the bus or public transit in other forms: mostly about race, is it not?
16: What about chicken? Has the person heard of chicken?
18: Not of KR's Roasters. I know, right?
17.last: Yes and no, it's about street culture. Working-class white kids overcompensating are some of the worst.
I'm UMC and ride the el in Chicago every day. It's widely used by all strata of society except the very top, who still drive even downtown. Most big-firm partners I know drive and have nearby parking sometimes in their own building.
I've seen everything Witt referred to except the gun, and standard stuff, the drunk or stoned, the shouted profanity, the self-fouled, occurs regularly but not every day. Ride regularly and you'll see it.
Metra, the commuter railroads going farther out in every direction on regular railroads from the stations on the west bank of the Chicago river, was actually cheaper until a couple of years ago, and has a decidedly better-off ridership. I would take it to my far North side stop but most were going to the North Shore suburbs. But that's mostly a rush hour phenomenon. At other times, on the all-stop runs in the middle of the day for instance, there are many more poor people, often going to Highwood, N. Chicago, Waukegan or Zion.
20: Kids? I wouldn't have thought they were the tubercular ones or the ones shouting epithets into their cellphones. The latter people you see around Baltimore all the time: they are having a really hard time with child support or joint custody, and are trying to arrange matters in a really angry way. I know that because they're shouting it out to anyone within earshot. On the phone.
Get ready to ride the Metra to Zion
They got a private developer to build new affordable units in manhattan? What a win!
Seriously lucky for the people in the affordable units that they don't have to mingle with the assholes. Why is making rich assholes not assholes important? Who gives a fuck about them? The important thing is that the affordable units got built. Standing on some moral principle that the rich assholes should like it is just going to lead to less units getting built.
There was an abusive, psychotic (I'm guessing) guy trying to get on the bus and the driver wasn't having it but couldn't drive away because somebody with a wheel chair was getting on. Some young man started making jokes to the guys in security uniforms. He was pretty good at it. "I don't feel safe" and "If you aren't going to provide some security, at least turn your shirts around." So the security guards got up and stood by the driver. One of them called the guy being denied boarding a motherfucker very loudly. Twice. A little girl, maybe four, said tells her dad, "That man said a bad word twice."
25: And today Tweety will be standing in for Mr. Halford.
The public shouting thing is cultural: that's what I meant by it being race-related. So it is in Baltimore, anyway.
I heard a great shouted phone conversation the other day. As far as I could ascertain, what had happened was that someone, an acquaintance of both the caller and her interlocutor, who was the baby mama of baby daddy's older kid, had taken baby daddy's *other* baby, from a different relationship, out and about, and had gotten her some fairly radical haircut, without obtaining baby mama the second's permission. The caller was just about as flabbergasted as she was incensed by this. And I have to say, that does seem like the sort of move that can't help but result in totally unnecessary drama for everyone involved.
not be drunk at 11 am... not not fold up their gigantic strollers
Look, assface, it's really tough to fold those things when you're wake-up drunk.
I commute in Philly (Market-Frankfort El, sometimes the bus) and when you are riding the transit system makes a big difference. In normal commuting hours, you see plenty of middle class people, but just an hour before or after that the ridership completely changes. In DC, NYC, and Boston, where I have mostly been on transit on weekends and off hours, it seems like there is a broader spectrum of people riding.
You'd think more people would commute by transit here considering what a PITA it is to commute by car. I hated driving in from the suburbs, and I can't imagine it's any better driving if you live in the city.
16, 19: I don't even have a lower middle/working-class childhood.
I used to occasionally go for the previews of the big Sotheby's and Christie's auctions. Most of the people there were like me, just for looking at the pretty things. Some, however, were buyers. Once I saw an older couple, straight from UES central casting, looking on with polite amusement as the obsequious handsome young staffer tried to sell them on this or that multimillion dollar painting. A couple hours later I saw them at the bus stop waiting for the crosstown. They got off at Fifth. Apparently even some of the .01% take mass transit here. But I've never seen guns, self fouling seems incredibly rare, and nasty profanity filled arguments are uncommon. NY'ers are a polite and well behaved people.
29: Oh yeah, half the time, if you listen to and make sense of the shouted conversation, it totally makes sense. What's different from the way genteel white people would do it is that it's conducted in public, on the bus or in line at the bank or at the pharmacy, or walking down the street ... with much pausing and gesticulating and repetition (and shouting, and epithets) for full dramatic effect. White people would just do that stuff more quietly, that's all. Cultural difference.
I always wonder about folks on the train about 7am conducting long conversations on the phone. I guess they must be talking to folks eastward, because otherwise, WTF? Who wants to talk on the phone at 7am? I don't want to talk on the phone until at least 10.
And even after then I still don't want to do that.
self fouling seems incredibly rare
Maybe some more fiber in the diet?
I need to make an apology here: I've been speaking of white people as though they're obviously genteel, while black people are not genteel.
That is not right, not just because it's politically incorrect, but because it's flatly, factually incorrect. I apologize. I should have spoken in terms of class or cultural affiliation.
I've more or less abandoned my car since moving to Baltimore, and while I can walk most places, I use public transportation on a reasonably regular basis. My favorite overheard conversation so far is young white Guns & Ammo/Soldier of Fortune dude loudly explaining to his friend how to assassinate someone and get away with it (no, I didn't take notes).
33: I always wonder in conversations like this if NY is very civilized, or if people in other cities are highly sensitive to antisocial behavior, and I'm just not noticing the things they're talking about.
It's because we lacked the formative social discipline of crowded sidewalks growing up.
It's because we lacked the formative social discipline of crowded sidewalks growing up.
Oooohhmigod. I'm from ruralland, and it still pisses me off. WTF, peeples?
There's definitely something to the idea that you need a mix of income levels of riders to make mass transit attractive to middle income or above folks. It's a major issue here -- the physical condition of the buses is great, they have a really great, extensive network, generally come on time, etc. For me, for example, it would only add about 20 minutes to the commute to take the bus. Yet it is substantially less pleasant than being in the car; part of it is that the car has comfortable leather seats, a nice stereo, bluetooth, etc, but part of it also is that there is just such a sense of desperation on the bus, since it's clear that almost no one is riding by choice.
When I lived in San Francisco, I took BART over driving my car whenever it was practical to do so. I was not disinclined to take BART, but I was disinclined to sit in the seats because they seemed imbued with no-longer-fresh ethnic hair products. Being very aware of this aversion made me feel racist.
I haven't used the bus a lot since we moved, but there is a very convenient bus that goes straight downtown, and the one time I took it I got to say hi to an immigrant hotel worker I knew from my union organizing days and hadn't spoken to in 15 years, so that refueled my man-of-the-gente tank for another sixteen months.
16 months? That's an oddly specific timeframe.
I was disinclined to sit in the seats because they seemed imbued with no-longer-fresh ethnic hair product
That _is_ a pretty odd thing to think. I can't imagine that hair products, and specfically ethnic ones, have ever entered my mind in connection with transport.
I'm not going to dig up my Oil Sheen story, but I know what he means.
46: Perhaps they would if you could smell them and see their greasy residue on the fabric of the seats. (And describing it as "greasy" makes me feel racist again.) But I still advocate taking public transit.
I see a lot of greasy hairprints on the windows of the train.
From Witt's comment, I can only assume that the tipping point for Philly's public transportation is that I moved away. I rode it for years, at all times of day and night, and I never saw open drug use or guns. I did see somebody stabbed with a box cutter once. (The stabbee, who was wearing a leather coat and was unhurt, just turned around and punched the guy in the face.)
Witt is totally right about the attitude toward public transportation among UMC white Philadelphians. I've never encountered anything quite like it in other large cities, so I think it's a local peculiarity probably connected to some of the specific ways that Philly dealt with the challenges of the white-flight era.
I'm thinking here primarily of my mom's siblings, UMC liberal professional-types who have lived in the city virtually their entire lives, and drive absolutely everywhere even though both driving and parking is a huge pain. From my mom's accounts of her childhood, they took public transportation all the time when they were growing up, so something changed between then and now in the mindset of the siblings who stayed.
My sister, on the other hand, takes the bus all the time, and when my mom and I have visited her in the past few years we have too. I've seen some of the stuff Witt mentioned, but not much. I think it depends a lot on which routes you take and at what times. In general it's a pretty good system in terms of coverage and frequency of service.
51: Do they actually live in the city? My brother has a pathological fear of public transportation, but he cowers in the Jersey suburbs.
Hair prints. Misty water colored hair prints. Of the way... we were.
48: "Grease" is in the name of a lot of the products as well as being a generic descriptor, so I think you're safe.
The worst conversation I've seen on public transport involved me, when I was taking Mara and her siblings to a park and they were recognized by someone who knows one of the parents and wanted to weigh in on that parent's recent appearance in the monthly magazine publishing mugshots and it was incredibly awkward, but I kept whispering that the children didn't have to answer if they didn't want to, but they insisted they didn't mind and the older few vaguely remembered this person, but then wanted to talk about a fight this person's relative had had with a cousin of theirs. I'd already been getting glares from several corners for being white with five black kids and didn't improve things by saying "Come on, you don't ask children about their parents' mug shots!" though I didn't otherwise intervene.
52: Yes, and in very densely developed neighborhoods with limited on-street parking. That's the weird part; it's sort of crazy to even own a car in the places they live, and yet they not only own cars but drive everywhere. And I get the impression that this sort of thing is quite common among people of their generation and socioeconomic status who stayed in the city when most people like them moved to the suburbs.
teo, the girls asked today if I had any friends who lived in the desert, so I said that I had one who had but now lived in Alaska, and I think Nia wants to get your full life story including all the details on the job you do now. They were completely fascinated, though her next question was whether I have any friends in Indiana, after which she decided I must know people EVERYWHERE.
Heh. You can tell her my job mostly involves attending meetings, although some of them are in remote parts of Alaska that I have to fly into on small planes.
Lots of meetings? Occasional flights on small planes? So you have the worst job in the history of ever, then?
Even worse than being a music promoter in Vancouver, as hard as that is to believe.
I did mention the meetings! She thinks they sound great, and that the downside to being a hairstylist or chef as she'd so far planned is that there would be no meetings.
She also plans to foster babies and announced that Mara could just watch them for her if she has to travel for a lot of meetings. She didn't see the face Mara made in response, but she also has plenty of time to make alternate childcare plans. And I forgot last night's future planning, which was that she wants to be the kind of scientist who names new animals ("Pavicci," I believe was her first suggestion) but isn't sure she wants to do the discovery part, so if anyone knows of a marketing firm for species names that's hiring kids under 10, she's interested. Meetings would be a plus!
(To tie this into the earlier comment in the thread, this conversation about teo took place as we walked home from the bus stop and right after running into the relative mentioned in the previous story. That relative in fact talked about a more recent incarceration, but in ways that fit my middle-class mores like "You know I only been back since March, so...." and I nodded that I did know and we went on being adults.)
Oops, only now coming back to the thread.
Actually, I think pasdquoi makes a good point. A lot of the crazy stuff I have seen on transit has been during daylight, but non-commuting, times.
I also think that some of it is gendered and numerical -- some people will get up to more crazy stuff with a few women in the trolley/subway car than they will with a larger group of fellow passengers, or even a couple of men. It's possible that would explain Walt's experience. There are certainly times when I've decided it was more desirable to get yelled at by the conductor for changing cars than to stay in the car I was in.
I'm trying to think about the most recent examples. I was on the trolley down to SW Phila the other day and there was a lengthy, noisy conversation between the guy behind me and the guy in front about guy #1's job and life situation. He was actually a pretty gutsy, interesting guy, and didn't set off any of my warning flags.
Representative quote: "Full benefits, vacation. It's a good money for someone who ayn gone high school. I mean, I got nine-teen felonies."
That's the kind of thing that would scare my sisters off from taking the trolley for the next 10 years. Never mind that he was on his way to said job.
My sister is only afraid of people with twenty or more felonies.
So does that mean you can or can't bring her with you to The Squirrel Cage when she visits?
She won't go in because of smoking.
This reminds me that somebody told me that somebody told him that this very obviously mentally ill guy we used to see in various bars hasn't been around because a cop saw him in a bar and old everyone that he (the obviously mentally ill guy) had raped a child. Then he (the guy I was talk to) told me not to repeat it because he wasn't sure if he believed the other guy. Then I looked up the sex registry and didn't find him.
My personal guess is that every bartender in the area stopped serving him for more standard reasons and somebody invented a story.
I know that guy, and was very surprised to see that he's not a smart person. But 25 gets it right. If you can't sell your market rate units to the assholes, you can't build the affordable ones. An affordable housing policy that doesn't depend on the assholes is the next step.
Alas, 73 is not to 72. (And to my life, why doesn't port get marketed as fortified wine? Then people would think it had vitamins and minerals and there'd be a fantastic halo effect and whatnot. Lee bought me some white port today b/c she's racist and so now I have to drink it to be polite. And also because it's port.)
And to my life, why doesn't port get marketed as fortified wine?
Isn't the term at least a little associated with Thunderbird and the like?
Oh, I was just joking. Sorry! Lee did say the guy who sold her this bottle also served her white port and tonic and that she really liked it, so I suppose I'll have to try that. I guess that sold her on it, since I like port and I like other things and tonic. And I'm not complaining about gifts of alcohol, especially given how much pain I'm in tonight.
Store brand French Onion dip sort of sucks.
But at least I got to go in by the main door of the store.
79 reminds me that the other awkward public transit moment was this afternoon when I realized that all the black people had gone to the back of the bus. But I can blame the girls for wanting to sit in the back seat; the other people were just filling in what was left after the white folks sat at the front. And yet!
Do servants quarters, maid apartments, au pair rooms count as housing for the working poor ?
51: Opinionated Atrios could elaborate a lot on how busses are for the poors.
ObData: income by NYC subway stop
http://projects.newyorker.com/story/subway/
In Portland, mass transit is popular in large part because UMC white people ride the bus. If you take the bus to certain neighborhoods at certain times of the day, the bus will be filled with middle aged men in suits talking about golf and planning their next Caribbean vacation. I know mass transit is used by UMC white people in all large cities, but Portland is the only US city I know of where they actually all take the bus (as opposed to a subway).
I know mass transit is used by UMC white people in all large cities
Except Philadelphia!
17 hours of travelling today, so we got here a day early, sort of. I really feel like I've earned this vacation.
On the way to the airport on light rail last Monday, I overheard a conversation a guy had on his phone in which he informed a friend of his of a job that would be paid regularly in cash and would be tax free, under the table. In response to a question, he said something like "drugs are for losers." I meant to note the exact language, since it was kind of a fun one-sided conversation to hear, but I forgot about it until now.
87
Can this thread be about fun or inappropriate bus conversations? I have had/heard many of them. One was this woman asked me how to spell 'biological.' I spelled it for her, and then she typed something into her phone and dialed what was a paternity testing center. She had this loud conversation how she had no idea who the father was but she'd narrowed it down to about 10, and starts reading off this list of names she has in a notebook, with pauses to repeat and spell out the names. I understand her desire to make use of bus time, but wondered if she might not want to pick a more discreet place to share the potential fathers of her baby.
Tawny port is better.
Tawny Port would be an excellent stage name at a wine-oriented strip joint.
Re: 89
I am hearing 80s Whitesnake now.
89: Beaujulie? Pussy-Fuissé? Syrah Plain and Tall?
A first cat named Tawny and a childhood on Port St. and you're there.
Mass transit subthread is timely for me as for the last month or so I have been using the bus for work about 2/3rds of the time in response to a period of reduced car supply. Had been about 30 years since I had used the bus with any regularity (and that in Houston, not Pittsburgh). It's not super-convenient for me, stop about a mile and 350 ft. of elevation away from the house--but it is actually just one portion of steep. narrow no shoulder road that I don't really like (and if I'm in a hurry or late, usually my wife can drop me off/pick me up). A very infrequent bus used to come much closer (and I'd have still needed to walk the death stretch), but it was dropped in one of the PAT service cuts.
Experience has been good (and I'm annoyed I did not think to use it more earlier), and provides some walking exercise. Two buses I can get, one stays on small depressed river town side of the river and has only a semi-commuter feel during rush, and a complete "my life is on the bus" feel at other times*. The other crosses the river to gentrifying Lawrenceville and is full of the gentrifiers during commute times, and then a big switch to "life on the bus" at other times.
The phone stuff was the most striking thing to me. The several overheard conversations that have struck me have been litanies of sad educational experience--for-profits going broke, non-transferable credits, etc.
*I partake fully of my semi-official ability to come and go as I please at work.
The upper income limit for 'affordable' housing in London is currently set at £80,000 pa. Just thought I'd throw that in there.
That's barely enough income to get two complete houses here, unless you want a bit of a run down neighborhood or houses small than 1,500 square feet.
82: Bizarrely Portland gets a reputation of having "good public transit" solely on this basis. It's not actually better, it just whiter.
Re: 94
Yeah, and daft as that sum seems, are there many (any?) places in London where £80k will get you a mortgage that'll buy a livable flat? Now, I mean. Not a few years back, pre-tightening.
I too agree with 25. I mean, sure, boo rich snobs being snooty, but I'm guessing the people in the affordable units are still better off, no one would have noticed a problem with this if they'd built a separate "affordable" building, so why is it suddenly worse once they decide to locate them in the same tower?
The only problem is there aren't 10x as many projects like this.
Because in egalitarin, pull yourself up by the bootstraps America it's impolite to be so direct in your abhorrence of the poor?
97: the Santander mortgage calculator says that, if you are earning £80k, they'll lend you £400k, which is easily enough to buy a livable flat in some fairly nice bits of London...
96: it's probably better if UMC people (who are rich enough to have alternatives) still take public transport.
22 et seq: If you're having a shouted mobile phone conversation on public transport, then, black or white, you're being a dick. (In London shouty mobile phone use is colour blind, at least on public transport.)
The only drug use I've ever seen on London public transport is the guy I may have mentioned before who sat next to me on a night bus and proceeded to alternately puff on a cigarette and inhale lighter fluid. Not only antisocial, but foolhardy.
The only problem is there aren't 10x as many projects like this
Is it not standard then? In London, every large development has to have an affordable housing contribution. Often this is negotiated away/down by the developer in return for funding something else, but it has to be there to start with.
alternately puff on a cigarette and inhale lighter fluid
A new meaning to the phrase, "It will blow your mind."
re: 100
Really? I didn't think they were lending that sort of multiple anymore. I was thinking that you might get 3 - 4 x gross income. Which would be 250-300K ish. £400K would buy the flat we rent. Just.
104: assuming an 80k deposit, yes. Try it out: santander.co.uk.
105: How are you guys supposed to keep a real estate bubble going on the backs of only those who already have £80,000.
Wouldn't fancy my chances of getting a £320K loan on £80K but you never know.
The better comparison, surely, is £80K v. average (London) earnings. Do it that way, and it's clear that 'affordable' really means housing for professionals, with a modest subsidy.
The two doors thing is demeaning in part because it's so unnecessary: it's less efficient, you have to double up lifts, etc. There's a deliberate extra effort to exclude. By contrast, two buildings on a street (one affordable) will naturally share the public space: nothing's being done in terms of partitionng that wouldn't be done anyway.
re: 104
Ah, assuming an 80k deposit? That's like 'assume magic happens'.
That means [assuming you are starting at near zero] saving something like 50% of net income for 3 years. Which, I think, for most people, is not realistic. And, as per a post in the other thread, property is appreciating fast enough that if you save 50% of net income for 3 years, you'll then be short by about 50K. I'm pretty sure to actually be able to afford to buy in London, you'd need to be earning enough that the savings hit for the deposit would be _significantly_ less than 50% net income.
With a £20,000 deposit and £80k annual income they'll lend you £320,000.
That means [assuming you are starting at near zero] saving something like 50% of net income for 3 years. Which, I think, for most people, is not realistic.
You're right, saving 50% of net income isn't realistic for most people, but most people aren't on £80k a year. If I had been living my current lifestyle on £80k a year for the last three years, I could easily have saved £80,000 by now, which is why I took £80k as a realistic deposit.
Average London earnings are about £34,000 a year, by the way (ONS).
re: 110.last
I'd like to know how you could make that work because it doesn't seem workable to me. Based on a savings target of 80K in 3 years, that means a monthly save of around £2150, per month. Net income based on a gross income £80K a year, works at around £4450 per month.
So, that means total expenses, per month, including food, transport, rent, all utility bills, pension, etc of around £2300 a month. That's pretty good going in London. Rent on a flat, plus utility bills, Oyster card, and a minimal food spend, would easily eat that, and more.
I mean, I'm sure it's do-able, if you are a single person with frugal tastes, and don't have any dependents. But it's not going to be very easy, I'd have thought.
113: Coincidentally my monthly outgoings are about that, at the moment, and it's limiting. Basically, you give up on eating out, theatre tickets and the like, all travel, car ownership and any significant consumer purchases. Basic clothing only. Now do it for years on end, in the knowledge that you're on a salary that's over twice the going average: going to take a special discipline, I reckon. I'm sure some can do it. But any notion of balance and moderation seems to have gone out the window: does a society really want to arrange things this way?
And a bank's underwriters will simply not lend you four times your salary, despite what their online calculators may say. Not on a 20% deposit.
re: 114
When my wife was on maternity leave last year, because of her shitty maternity pay, we had to live more or less within that budget. We basically couldn't. Or rather we could, for about 6 months, but then when you get hit with things like car maintenance bills, or other one off costs, we couldn't. Admittedly, that was food and bills for 2 adults, plus baby, and I have a more expensive than normal commute.* But that was living way outside on the far edge of London, in a less than lovely run-down terrace, with a shitty landlord, and with pretty much all luxuries, as you say, gone. No holidays, no non-work travel, very little in the way of clothes expenditure, shopping at very cheap supermarkets, going out of the way all the time to minimise expenditure, worrying continuously that an unexpected expense was going to push us over the edge. And we aren't extravagant anyway. Both of us grew up relatively poor.
* with the plus side that I have very flexible working hours [which certainly saves significantly on child care costs]
112: So you're saying it's not workable to live in London on a monthly net income of (4450-2150=) £2300 a month?
Just to be clear, that is the same as saying that you can't live in London on a gross salary less than £35,000 a year? (http://www.netsalarycalculator.net/) Note that the median London salary for full-time workers is £34,200.
It is therefore, you are saying, not workable for half the population of London to be living in London.
I don't know how else to say this but - yes, it is workable. I've done it. I know plenty of people who are still doing it. No, you don't give up on eating out or going to the theatre or travel or any non-Primark clothes; you have a pretty good life, I would like to think.
This is all too gloomy. Let us contemplate instead the splendour of 87
re: 117
Most people are not in single income families. Which is why lots of people can get by just fine, when the average median income is £34,200. And if you are a single person, living in shared accommodation, or in a bedsit type flat, I'm sure it's also fine, and you can have a decent enough life, too.
However, I just added up non-negotiable expenses, for us, and it comes to around £3500 quid. That's just rent, transport, utilities, child care, phone(s). And we only have child-care for 3 days a week. If we had to have 5 days a week child care [which if we both worked normal hours we would] you'd be talking £4000. Then add food, clothes, and other slightly more flexible expenses on top of that. Again, do-able on 2 incomes of around the median London wage. People can afford to LIVE, they can't afford to live and save up multiple tens of thousands to put a deposit down on a house or flat.
Which was ... my original point.
And, I should stress, I have a shitty little car which I've had for years. So I have no car payments beyond cheap-ish annual maintenance and insurance. Haven't been on a holiday in 3 years. And live in a flat that's cheaper than the average rental for a 2 bed flat in the part of London I live in, which is one of the cheaper parts of London which is still accessible [within 90 minutes travel] from work. So that 3500-4000 [not including food or clothes] expense is not, I think, unrepresentative.
I thought your original point was that it was unrealistic for someone on £80k to be able to afford a mortgage on a London flat. Not that it was unrealistic for an average Londoner to do so.
I'm entirely in agreement with the second point, in fact I said so in 110.2. But someone on £80k is perfectly capable of doing so; all he has to do is live like the median Londoner for three years and save the difference, and there's your deposit.
You guys have a government that isn't hampered by things like checks and balances or a written constitution or the fact that all the crazy people have huge numbers of guns. Why not just move a bunch of jobs to Yorkshire or Preston or something?
re: 121
Well, it's realistic for an individual on an individual income of £80k, with no dependents or other expenses, and who is able to live within very tight financial boundaries to just about save up 80K, yeah. Leaving aside the whole 'accelerating/shifting deposit' thing, and assuming a very high level of spending discipline.
I'd still argue that it's completely unrealistic for actual _households_ on 80K a year, to actually afford to buy somewhere to live. Which was the root of the discussion -- as the affordable housing criteria is set at £80K.
re: 122
Yeah, you'd think. Except ... fuck knows. Dsquared always brings up the absence of a regional policy in the UK. Where the real problem isn't so much that London is incredibly expensive, but that for huge swathes of the job market, you have little choice but to live in or near it.
Is affordable housing defined as £80k per person or per household? £80k per household isn't that much - just over two median full-time incomes.
Well, it's realistic for an individual on an individual income of £80k, with no dependents or other expenses, and who is able to live within very tight financial boundaries to just about save up 80K, yeah
Like I say, I have actually been living within these boundaries for quite a few years, and, for an individual _they really aren't that tight_.
And a bank's underwriters will simply not lend you four times your salary, despite what their online calculators may say. Not on a 20% deposit.
FWIW, according to the Bank of England, about 22% of mortgage lending is above 4x LTI. And those are disproportionately in London. But, yes, you're likely to need a much bigger deposit.
re: 125
And that only applies to 3-bed properties. For 2-bed or smaller it's less.
https://www.sharetobuy.com/firststeps/amieligible
re: 125 [again!]
Which was why Charlie used the 80K figure in 94.
126 makes it make sense. I was a bit worried that the bar for needing affordable housing was set so much higher.
You guys have a government that isn't hampered by things like checks and balances or a written constitution or the fact that all the crazy people have huge numbers of guns. Why not just move a bunch of jobs to Yorkshire or Preston or something?
The government, appropriately defined, does occasionally do this. Most notably, a bunch of BBC staff (see caveat above) were moved to Salford (and much more production is done in Cardiff than before). And there's been moves to distribute some civil service jobs to the regions, but:
a) The Tories hate anyone in the regions who isn't a farmer/landowner, because they don't vote Tory. So an inordinate amount of Tory policy is seemingly designed to spite non-London citydwellers.
b) There's enormous inertia driving investment into London, and obviously Westminster-based MPs benefit directly from, eg, transport infrastructure being improved. So given the choice between spending money on London and spending it elsewhere, they'll usually spend it on London.
122. What's in moving to Preston if you're CEO of a major company. Plus- you can get labour cheaper, and keep them longer; minus- you can't get the sort of bright young things who believe that you have to live in London if you can't do Manhattan or Berlin and who will work all the hours god sends because they can't afford a family. Plus- premises are about a quarter the price; minus- you're 200 miles from the people you personally want to schmooze. Plus- the local government will pay you to move there and treat you like royalty; minus- foreigners (suppliers and customers) won't understand why you're not in London.
I was thinking of government offices, like mentioned in 131.
So given the choice between spending money on London and spending it elsewhere, they'll usually spend it on London.
Yeah, I remember a [not entirely unbiased] BBC Scotland documentary in the early 90s pointing out that the cost of one of the access roads to the Docklands was more than the entire development budget for Scotland, for the year.
Cardiff seemed fun in Human Traffic.
132: Berlin is something of a massive outlier there in terms of living expense, no?
Up the road, there was a long serving House member who was big on the defense committee. He moved whole government offices out into the middle of nowhere, awarded defense contracts to companies that put offices out there, and then subsidized an airport so people could get to it. Then he died and I assume the whole thing fell to shit, but I haven't checked.
re: 135
Heh, well, that's why I said a non entirely unbiased documentary. IIRC, the journalist presenting it was partly making the case for devolution. Financially, though, it was pretty compelling at the time. This was the fag end of the Thatcher government, and I think the development spend regionally across the UK was even more unfair than usual.
standard stuff, the drunk or stoned, the shouted profanity, the self-fouled, occurs regularly but not every day. Ride regularly and you'll see it.
I've been riding the bus to work in Columbus for over 15 years, and over that time I've seen all those things, but it's a rare occurrence. 95-98% of the time, I get on the bus, sit down and read for the whole ride without any disturbancees. So much preferable to driving!
Not sure whether to link this here or in the Piketty thread.
According to a study released this week by geneticists at Cornell University, substantial evidence indicates that rich people and poor people--disparate populations long thought to be entirely unrelated--may have once shared a single common ancestor.
I used to take the 18 downtown. I never had to stand like I do here. Plus, one time I was riding the bus and saw the Stanley Cup.
Berlin is something of a massive outlier there in terms of living expense, no?
Yes, but you need to learn German.
95-98% of the time, I get on the bus, sit down and read for the whole ride without any disturbancees.
2-5% of the time still means once every ten days to once every month, if you're taking the bus twice a day. If I commuted by bus and a couple of times a month someone screamed profanity and shat themselves when I got on the bus, I'd probably stop taking the bus.
144: ajay -- this is just more proof that American math education sucks.
sit down and read for the whole ride
That's the part had been undervaluing. Or at least doing "visual" things rather than just listening to music like in the car. In practice that has generally meant either catching up on things via Twitter or playing DIVE. (And theoretically reducing my urge to do so at work. Theoretically.)
145: alternatively, I might just start feeling smug that I was obviously such a terrifying presence that people screamed profanity and shat themselves at the mere sight of me. I bet that's the real reason Halford doesn't take the bus to work.
re: 143
I keep thinking, semi-seriously, that I should move the Hague, or Norway, or somewhere. I know people who do what I do in those places [we work together on projects], and life seems easier/cheaper, and they don't get paid less. And they mostly seem to work in English.
148: The Hague, yes. Norway, cheap, not so much. Though incomparably nicer than Slough, and you can always visit Sweden
re: 149
Well, I suspect the people I know are being paid quite well. They all have summer cabins, with wood-fired hot-tubs, and the like. They do also live in the frozen north, not Oslo.
Life is cheaper in NORWAY?
JA, FOR SURE.
Maybe the Svalbard Repository needs an archivist. I mean, it's basically a library, except instead of books it has grain.
151: ttaM the frozen north is quite amazingly fucking frozen. And dark. And oddly full of Vietnamese Catholics.
with wood-fired hot-tubs
That was soup, you asshole.
Although the nb.no people are here:
which is no-shitting North.
re: 154
Yeah. They make a lot of dark jokes along the lines of:
'How can you tell it is July?'
...
'Because the children are wearing their summer mittens.'
The summer looks cooler, but it doesn't look like Oslo gets that much colder than here in the winter.
That actually looks like a nice climate for me. I want to start wearing jackets more often, but it's just too hot for the whole summer.
How can you weirdos read on a bus? If I tried I would soon join the ranks of the vomiting-on-the-bus 2%. Train, sure you can read.
I fell in love with Norway on my very brief, uninformative vacation to Trondheim. I say go for it.
146: This is why I love the bus. I get places! I do things! I don't have to worry about steering a giant death machine. I get exposed to different sorts of people than I would otherwise. It's cheaper than parking downtown.
To that point, I have a lot of trouble understanding people who don't prefer that. I had a coworker who was a recent CMU grad and lived on For/bes & Wi/ghtm/an in Squ/irrel Hi/ll and didn't even know what bus went downtown; the idea that there was a way he could drink at happy hours and get home safely was alien to him. ("You could take the bus home" "Nope, the lot downtown won't let you keep your car there overnight.") The buses here are somewhat erratic in showing up, admittedly, but not so bad that they're not a good way to get around. I can only assume classism.
Alas, I've mostly been catching up on podcasts, and since I can only handle one language stream at a time that generally means my eyes are occupied--shamefully--2048.
I had a college friendquaintance who did a year abroad at the University of Tromso because he wanted to go study at the world's northernmost university for some reason. He was an Islami Studies major as well, which made the whole thing even more rational. He said it was very very dark.
And this was over New Year's Eve, so full fledged cold and dark. The cold was on par with michigan or Wisconsin.
The dark would have been much longer than in Michigan.
"The dark would have been much longer than in Michigan. "
Because the trees would have been the wrong height.
Ah, but in Mo i Rana, you also have sea-running Actic char. Move there at once!
When I recently helped my daughter move, I noticed she had small paper labels attached to a number of things in her apartment. Turned out they were the name of the thing in Norwegian--somehow linked to an interest in Norway and desire to become familiar with/learn the language.
This was the fag end of the Thatcher government, and I think the development spend regionally across the UK was even more unfair than usual.
Yeah, the answer to the question is slightly different now. Back then, it was basically government policy to depopulate and de-industrialise the regions.
How can you weirdos read on a bus? If I tried I would soon join the ranks of the vomiting-on-the-bus 2%. Train, sure you can read.
I'm immune to motion sickness. Never been sea-sick or car-sick in my life. Even if I could drive and had a car, I'd rather take public transport so I could read.
I genuinely love using public transport,* for exactly that reason -- I can read -- and would use it all the time for longer journeys, if I could. I also have no problem reading on buses. No idea about motion sickness, although I have never been car or sea-sick.
* although I moan about the unreliability of my train route on Twitter a lot because, well, it is really really fucking unreliable.
160: That reminded me that when I first started riding the bus I thought that reading would make me sick. For a few weeks I just sat and observed.
Then one day I decided to try to read on the bus. I didn't get sick.
150: yeah, I've heard complaints about the price of booze on Norway from Swedes. Which tells you something.
Speaking of moving to places where everybody speaks English, I just came across a map. Norway isn't listed, but probably about the same as Sweden and Denmark.
I would assume Switzerland is pretty high as well, but apparently they're neutral in response to the survey.
I would assume Switzerland is pretty high as well, but apparently they're neutral in response to the survey.
It's EU only - hence Norway's absence too. Regardless, I'd be surprised if it's as high as in Scandinavia. Among the urban elite, sure, but among the ordinary population, especially in the countryside, not so much. Far more useful to learn one of the other official languages. I'm a bit surprised Austria is so much higher than Germany - maybe because of having so many trade links with Eastern Europe they have more need of a lingua franca.
170: this is exactly right, the luxury of not having to drive! Wonderful. Reading, listening to music, poetry or a play, knitting, people watching, visiting with charming companions. Just about the only thing I really dislike is talking on the phone.
Some data for Switzerland here. Higher than I'd have thought overall, but I don't know how the numbers would map to the EU survey.
101
For drug use, I once sat next to a guy mixing a screwdriver with orange juice and vodka in a paper bag. He was kind enough to offer some to me before taking the first sip.
151
Re. Norwegian cabins. It might have changed since the 80s, but it used to be your cabin could either have electricity or plumbing but not both. The idea was that cabins were supposed to be for roughing it and you ought not to be too comfortable. Our family & friends generally went the electricity route and put in an outhouse. Also, pretty much everyone in Norway has a cabin, it's pretty much a national requirement.
Also Norway got way more expensive with the oil boom. It wasn't that long ago Norway was cheaper than Sweden. (And for most of history, Norway was much poorer than Sweden. I hear there's some resentment about the role reversal now.)
The buses in Austin are clean, frequent, and wide-ranging. But when I'm on them I'm frequently the only person on them. I don't get it (and will be out of Austin before I do).
I never took the buses in Austin much, mostly because my schedule didn't regularly demand it and so it was enough of an obstacle to figure out the buses for a one-off trip that I never bothered. It seemed like students used the buses to commute pretty heavily.
Obviously you go with the plumbing because then you can use the water for very inefficient hydroelectric power
||
Robert Halford, call your office, in the most literal, Robert-Halford-est way imaginable, except that it doesn't have any reference to killing and eating an animal
|>
I'm glad this thread is still ticking because now I can report on the lengthy pep talk/friendly bullying that I overheard between mother and daughter on the trolley to SW yesterday.
Scene: Daughter (braids, chunky, monosyllabic, sullen, 12ish)
Mother (animated, polished, vehement, youthful)
You have to imagine the whole thing in a strong Philadelphia working class accent, conducted at a high enough volume that most of the trolley could hear every word.
Mother: Everybody learns differently. Just because you have a learning DIFFERENCE doesn't mean you have a learning DISABILITY.
(Daughter: [unintelligible])
There are places, schools that cater to, to, to people with learning differences. It's a learning DIFFERENCE. It's like me and math.
(unintelligible)
You can't assume that just because it's like this now -- look, I am not happy with degree that I have. I, still want to to continue my education, because my one degree, is not enough.
(unintelligible)
It's not like this in college! College is different. You can't assume that because this one class -- I went to the center and asked for help. And my math grade, my math grade went up. I got the best grade in class.
You know why? Because I listened, and I paid attention, and every-body-else, they just wanted to goof off, and not pay attention, and make fun of the teacher because he was Russian. And I didn't like that, because your grandmother, Grandma Susan? She's half-Russian.
(unintelligible)
She is. So next time you see her, you give her a big hug, but not too hard, because you don't want to hurt her.
...
You can't say you don't like biology! It's only based on one class. You have no idea what it is going to be like in college. You might LOVE biology.
(unintelligible)
Have you ever had a class with a LAB? Have you ever had a class with EXPERIMENTS? Biology is not always like this! In college it's different. You don't even know. You do not even know what it's going to be like.
That's why I want more. Because my one degree, my vo-ca-tion-al certificate, is not enough for me.
(Mother and daughter exit the trolley, mother continuing the monologue.)
My kid chose a 47, heading north, to let me know the game was up with the whole Santa Claus thing. He knew I was trapped. I got pitying looks from the adults within earshot as I tried to salvage the situation, but he wasn't having any of it. A school playground populated by 7 year olds can be a harsh place.
184
That is great and reads quite a lot like some of the early sociolinguistics data coming out of Penn in the 60s & 70s.
your cabin could either have electricity or plumbing but not both
Isn't the obvious choice to go with plumbing? I'm looking into renting cabins as a compromise because my SO wants to go camping and I am not very enthusiastic. I don't mind no electricity, but I draw the line at no indoor plumbing.
When I lived in San Francisco, I took BART over driving my car whenever it was practical to do so.
Unless you also mean MUNI I would assume this would mean essentially never. It's a train system with eight stops in an entire (small) city.
BART goes to the east bay and partway down the peninsula, to SFO and beyond the caldicott tunnel, heck it even goes to Antioch! but yes not very useful within the city except for getting from downtown to 16th street efficiently.
Is the light rail system in Austin still limping toward death? So depressing!
That's a good question. Traffic is amazingly more awful there than it was when I moved away in 2006. I have to imagine that keeps the pressure on finding a workable rail system, so maybe it's getting more use.
There's a semi-imminent plan to connect San Antonio to Austin with a regular commuter train. That would be great for us.
190: Yes, BART is a serviceable commuter rail. As urban mass transit, it's a joke. Stops in Oakland (56 square miles), 9. Beyond that, it's one per town.
193: well yeah, but (even before it was crippled by Marin and San Mateo Counties) it was never really intended to be urban mass transit. That's what the Key Route/AC Transit/Muni etc. systems were/are for.
Assume Oakland is square with sides of 7.5 miles that is divided into nine smaller squares with sides of 2.5 miles. Second, let's assume that at the center of each of the nine smaller squares is a station. In that case, no part of Oakland is more than 1.77 miles from a station. Which seems a reasonable walking distance for a place with nice weather.
Maybe not. We don't even have a commuter rail that goes any place useful.
3 stops in Berkeley, but yes strictly regional rail. If you get the chance to go a Lost Landscapes they often play portions of a hilarious BART promo depicting the dystopian hell of San Francisco in the 70's (appx), transformed! by the miracle! of regional rail! And then the clips from the construction update promo with the folk dude soundtrack, "we're building a bridge to the future" repeated endlessly as if the budget for lyrics got shorted and they could only pay for one line. Highly recommended.
194: that might be part of the problem!
the dystopian hell of San Francisco in the 70's
I saw a documentary about that. A cop had to go outside channels to stop a killer who hijacked a bus full of kids.
It's on youtube! Look for "Bart construction along the way" and I misremembered the lyric, "were building a dream for tomorrow..."
If you get the chance to go a Lost Landscapes
Oh yeah, those are a great time. Unfortunately the last one sold out in no time at all, so I'm not optimistic about getting to see another one. (I don't think I'm quite ready to throw down for a Long Now membership just for that.)
196: It goes to a place called "Library", which is apparently not a library.
Wow 1967 aerial footage for construction update, oh god productivity is taking it in the neck...awesome editing effects involving a giant auger...
It's actually not bad for around downtown, but I can't figure out why it takes so long to get from the casino to Market Square. It's about walking speed.
I've never used it in the free zone since Downtown is so walkable. I could understand going to the North Shore, but if it's that slow...
It just seemed strange. Maybe I was there when they were still testing the limits. Anyway, it's certainly faster to take the T to station square than to walk.
Really? That's a pretty short walk, at least where I am downtown (near the courthouse). Maybe people just hate walking more than I can comprehend? I get the bus at Boulevard and Smithfield and able-bodied people take (sometimes will even run after) a park & ride bus from there to...Station Square. Sometimes they'll wait more than fifteen minutes for it. The mind boggles. I hope there's some secret far-away lot I don't know about.
Oh is Ashby in Berkeley? I guess that means 8 stations in Oakland (3 of which are downtown.)
Earlier this month, I went from Steel Plaza to Station Square on the T twice. It took like three minutes both times. Maybe I just got lucky.
209 to 207.
208: That's much harder math than the original problem.
Also there are 2 stops in San Leandro (Bay Fair), 2 in El Cerrito, 2 in Walnut Creek (Pleasant Hill), and 2 in Hayward, but who's counting.
No toilet is no big deal; as I have mentioned before my dad didn't have one for years.
However, I don't think I could pass on uunning water....I don't think I'd want to manually pump all my own. And if you had electricity it wouldn't be a big deal.
It depends if there's an outside fire pit with a spigot nearby, or not. Or presumably your car is close enough that you can pack in a big plastic tub of water. Actually packing in water sounds miserable.
I was assuming an outdoor hand pump.
Or at least a tank filled from a buffalo.
I assumed manual hand pump was meant, but I think hauling water for every use is a real pain.
Anyway, my dad didn't have a toilet for years also. I've noticed that he always uses a toilet now that he has the option.
I'm a bit surprised Austria is so much higher than Germany - maybe because of having so many trade links with Eastern Europe they have more need of a lingua franca.
Half of Germans over a certain age would have learned Russian as their first foreign language, and may or may not have ever picked up English.
We rented a house on a lake in Canada last summer and apparently it's pretty standard for all cottages in the area that there's no drinking water- they pump and filter water from the lake for dishes/toilets/bathing but you shouldn't drink it. So we had to buy our own bottled water / fill up jugs from a drinking pump. OTOH Costco in the area seems to have adapted to this requirement and they sell insanely cheap generic bottled water, like 8 cents / 500 mL bottle.
I didn't realize you could wash dishes with water that you couldn't drink.
The answer to many questions of the form "Why doesn't BART do X?" is "BART was never intended to do X, it was intended specifically to reduce rush hour congestion along the traffic patterns of the 1950s and 1960s".
We have the set up in 220 for a family cabin. It's nbd for a week long vacation stay, and so far no one has died from polluted dishes.
Apparently even brushing your teeth is ok. We used to do that on canoe trips where we would otherwise treat water meant for drinking. Doesn't matter so much for cooking since you're usually boiling that anyway.
I think of it as the difference between water approved for boating/swimming/fishing/drinking. The Charles River was recently reopened for swimming in some parts even though it's still not approved for drinking, but you ingest a certain amount in the course of swimming, so I guess there's some threshold of ok to have a little but not everything you drink.
Fortunately BART didn't need to do anything else because of the awesome public system already provided by AC Transit and MUNI.
Do they ever approve a river for drinking?
I've drunk from rivers and lakes, I assume there's some standard to say that's ok. Probably never one that runs through a major urban area.
Sadly I can't seem to find the dystopian hell film online, just the upbeat folky one and the auger-in-action one, the latter also includes a totally cool sequence on the join up of the Berkeley hills tunnel, demo shot of a water tower, insertion of transbay tube sections, lots of cut-and-cover footage in downtown Oakland and SF...such great footage. Sad reflections on our inability to accomplish anything this grand today, complex weapons systems aside.
I'm sure there's a standard, but I was wondering if they ever put up a sign saying, "Go ahead and drink the water" or something.
I've never been to a Lost Landscapes but aren't all the clips in the Internet Archive.
awesome public system already provided by AC Transit
Rly?
I mean, I don't care, really. I'm re-embracing car culture...
That was just trolling. Of course AC Transit is (or at least was, I'm assuming it hasn't gotten better in the past 15 years) incredibly bad. Also what car did you get?
I thought maybe it was trolling but I'm also crabby because I've been dealing with Comcast.
We got a 2007 Fit. It seems to meet our insubstantial car needs.
I thought maybe it was trolling but I'm also crabby because I've been dealing with Comcast.
We got a 2007 Fit. It seems to meet our insubstantial car needs.
We like it so much we got two, apparently.
On the Norway subthread, I once spent a night in Tromso without a place to stay. It was light the whole time.
I mean for that matter BART is fine. I'm just incredibly crabby.
231: Yes, but some (likely lame on my part) searching didn't yield the clip. The Prelinger archive section doesn't have a tag for Bart - ?
Definitely go to a Lost Landscapes if you can! Although there was some interesting tensions in the last one I went to, it was pretty apparent there were some major cleavages between tech industry friendly people in the audience and, hmmm, *others* shall we say ...
Also, I think Narvik, south of Tromso, is the northernmost point reachable by rail in western Europe. It's something like 19 hours north of Stockholm, and the route is one of the few train rides I've been on in Europe that's felt like taking the train in the western US.
82: Bizarrely Portland gets a reputation of having "good public transit" solely on this basis. It's not actually better, it just whiter.
Totes untrue! Portland's public transit is beloved of planning and transportation wonks everywhere, and in some parts of town it's not even lily-white.
No toilet is no big deal
Sure, as long as your outhouse has a bidet.
Couldn't you just pee in the bidet?
You can pee anywhere there's a mountain laurel.
Correction to 11: on checking with my father, he did not work for Toll Brothers, but for another developer with a very similar name. Any insinuation that Toll Brothers is sketchy should rest only on information published in the regular news media.
Somebody tried to convince me that peeing in the bidet would somehow damage it (the bidet). I don't remember how that was supposed to happen.
247: It's the same bastards who tell you that peeing in the sink (or as I like to call it, the 1/8 bath) is wrong. (1/16 bath: floord drain. 1/32 bath: sump pump hole.)
130: Not sure. Median _household_ income for London seems to be quite a bit lower than people are suggesting, at around £30K. Source. The median salary may well be not much less than that, but I would suggest that households are very often _not_ composed of two full time earners on equal salaries. Part time work for one partner might be a fairly common scenario for families with children. In any case, I think most people would think 'affordable' - and let's say this is defined more by the £66K maximum that applies to two-bed units than the £80K that applies to the comparatively rare three-beds - should address incomes at or below the median, not significantly above it.
Source:
http://www.towerhamlets.gov.uk/idoc.ashx?docid=b1e38174-452f-4488-b02f-1bd81d3bbbe2&version=1
Alternate source (GLA data):
http://data.london.gov.uk/documents/update-06-2014-results.pdf
The median for London household income is here given as £35K. (Note that, unlike the Tower Hamlets figures, this is 'unequivalised'.) Anyway, if you're a Londoner commenter, you're probably better off than you thought. Just not able to afford a house.
Finally, for the sake of full disclosure, we in our household recently applied for shared ownership housing in Lambeth, and were accepted. Assuming the mortgage goes through, we should get to move in before the end of the summer. Tbh, for us there were no other buying options. Not only that, the administrative hoop you have to jump through when qualifying for affordable housing is pretty small. Not too much income, not too little either.
What's 'shared ownership housing'?
248: You monster. I'm always having to reach down in the sump to change or maintain the pump.
243's comments about Portland transport aren't necessarily inconsistent with it not being better, just whiter. Lots of PT enthusiasts are pretty snobbish/racist.
My understanding, never having ridden it, is that Portland light rail beats Santa Clara County light rail on such criteria as "used on a regular basis for commuting", "not traveling through vast expanses surrounded by parking lots and low office buildings", and "land use near stops suggests that planners are willing to acknowledge that light rail exists".
253: you buy a share of the freehold (i.e. 30%) and pay rent on the remainder, subject to rent control. You have the option to 'staircase' to 100% ownership later on. You have most of the rights of a freeholder, but there are some restrictions. You can't sublet the property, or make major alterations to it. When you sell, you have to allow the housing association to have a go at finding a buyer first, before you can advertise on the open market, and the price is set by a valuer.
I should have added - although I guess it's implied - no no one can _just decide_ to give you notice and evict you (unless of course you just stop paying the rent). In the context of UK rental law, this is a very attractive feature.
Who owns the other 70%? The government?
Also, I think Narvik, south of Tromso, is the northernmost point reachable by rail in western Europe. It's something like 19 hours north of Stockholm, and the route is one of the few train rides I've been on in Europe that's felt like taking the train in the western US.
Norwegian movie O'Horten is about a train driver on routes like that. It's one of those Kaurismakian deadpan quirkfests but highly recommended.
259: the housing association. You also pay a service charge and they maintain the common areas (no different from many private 'for sale' developments).
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Grover Norquist is trolling Sifu.
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Might be, if people figure out who he is. I mean, I'm sure it'd be a creative riot.
I'm sure he'll pick a non-identifying playa name.
For an art project he's bringing a bathtub and people can bring thing they really dislike to drown in it.
Won't his "Taxation is theft" tat be identifying?
You know, I hear that sometimes it's really hard to keep people from running into the burning Man. IYKWIMAITTII*.
re: 252
Congratulations on getting a place.
We looked seriously at it ourselves, as we sort of qualify, and we certainly qualified a year ago when J' was on maternity leave. There was literally nothing within a reasonable commuting route for work when we looked 7 months ago, so we signed a 2 year lease on a rented place. Looking now, somewhat annoyingly, there are now several places up for grabs where we'd just meet the criteria, and where the places are handy for the kid's nursery, and our respective commutes.
I have no idea what our situation is going to be like in 18 months. We certainly won't be able to buy on the normal non-affordable open market. But we will probably have slipped outside the relevant affordable housing window unless my wife goes part time. It's slightly sad that our best shot at an affordable home, with some rights, might involve becoming a fairly classic 'husband works, wife works part-time and does childcare' arrangement. Which isn't where we are at the moment. I actually do fractionally more childcare, and we earn pretty much exactly equivalent salaries.
The building we live in now has some 'affordable' units. But they are long gone.
Worth bearing in mind that you only have to be on the 'correct' income for as long as the qualifying assessment takes. You can go out and start working more hours (or get a very highly paid job) immediately afterwards. The bigger problem, I reckon, is the sheer lottery of getting an offer. You have choice, in that you can apply only for apartments (houses?) you actually like, but there are many more applicants than there are homes. Having children gets you a higher priority, as does living or working in the borough in which you're applying.
Anyway, we are not done yet. The mortgage offer is tantalisingly close (the bank did the valuation, which is a good sign) but could go tits up still.
And Islington, Hackney and Southwark seem to build the most affordable. Lambeth not bad. Peabody has just started a big development in St John's Hill (i.e. Battersea), but Wandsworth is generally abysmal. Tower Hamlets probably has a decent amount, but the general living environment in the east is still fairly lousy, I reckon. Lots of developers try to put the affordable next to something nasty, so extreme caution and plenty of research is needed. Nothing easy about it, although tbh I suspect any sort of house buying is stressful.
re: 273
Yeah, sadly none of those areas are remotely accessible for my commute. Maybe Islington, I suppose. But I'd still be looking at 4 hours+ a day.
Still, I suppose it'd good [in general] that there are areas that are building a decent amount.
270: could you sublet for the remainder of the term where you are now?
No. In fact, subletting in general is not a thing here, and I'm certain it's against the terms of our lease.
On the plus side, to alleviate the doom and gloom, our current place is perfectly OK, and friends live within walking distance. So it's not Dickensian squalor.
it's not Dickensian squalor.
That's extra, but still quite affordable at Dickensworld, Brough To You By Goliath Corporation.