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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
If there is a loss on your house you could probably just about make up for it by moving to an area with public transit, biking/walking, and selling one (or both) of your cars. Check this: http://www.kenkifer.com/bikepages/advocacy/autocost.htm.
by the fact that your wife doesn't mind the situation as much as you do. While I agree with you that $50,000 is a small price to pay for your mental health, I wonder if you could find a "third way" between selling at a loss and lobotomizing yourself into loving the suburbs? You must have some sort of back yard, for example. Spring is coming. Can you plant a bunch of nice and fast-growing plants back there, turn it into your own little jungle? Can you find a nearby nature area you can drive to, and walk around every morning a bit? Can you remodel a room of your big ol' house to be a sort of Serenity Room, maybe with a pretty and colorful paint job (no beige!), some warm lighting, and one of those trickly water-garden fountain things?
February is a miserable month for everyone. Don't make a decision in February. Spring is coming, baby! See if you can make life worth living where you are. You've undergone a lot of big changes lately -- graduation, new job, marriage. It would be unusual if you WEREN'T a little freaked. Try to carve out some space to just "be you."
How can you live a life you dislike so much? Money can be replaced, but your integrity and personality can't once you allow them to erode (it's kinda like topsoil).
Think about it! You've got opportunities, resources, use em! What else are you gonna do? Sit around, drink, get depressed, and fade away? You're still alive, still young, and you're realizing you've made some mistakes.
Get out now while you can still make authentic decisions... or suck it up, drink the kool aid, and accept your future as a soulless suburban drone.
It really nurtures my spirit and everything that I could want in terms of services is available professionally.
My house is a renovated 1960s house. A tenant lives in the downstairs suite with separate laundry room, kitchen and separate entrace. The rent pays my mortgage.
I feel lucky to live here. I often tell people, what we offer is simplicity and nature appreciation. You won't like it if that's not your bag.
I am soooooo tired of hearing how the so-called “new urbanism” is going to solve all of our unlivable landscape problems that I could just retch. I watched a small city (100K, counting college students) use this planning fad to transform itself from a city where pedestrians, bus riders and, especially, bicyclists outnumbered fossil-fool powered wheelchairs by at least ten to one to a bedroom community almost totally devoid of human powered transportation.
How did this happen? It works like this: new urbanism requires commercial centers to be very close to each other because it assumes that people’s transportation choices are driven exclusively by distance, with fossil-fool powered wheelchairs required for any distance exceeding two miles. Where you have these commercial centers, you have high densities of cars. Add the high density housing next to or over these centers (a main feature of “new urbanism”) and you get densities of fossil-fool powered wheelchairs that cause almost everyone to refuse to walk/cycle in these areas. Since these high-density zones are everywhere, no one can get anywhere with any degree of safety without a ton or two of steel around them.
A secondary tragedy of “new urbanism” is that very few of these developments “pencil out” on brownfields. This results in any and all open space being pressed into service to save us from sprawl. Of course, since people have a natural desire to spend time in open space away from other people’s cars, communities that adopt “new urbanism” soon find that everyone is driving out of town every chance they get just to enjoy a walk or bike ride (as was already suggested by one responder).
Sigh, here we go with umpteen and twenty letters about The Soulless Suburbs and how anyone who lives there is a spiritually dead, Land Rover-driving bore with no sense of culture. I definitely think the LW should get out if that's what he feels-- we should all follow our hearts in these matters. But can we not all assume that bread-box living in urban cores is the only ethical and culturally-correct form of domesticity? Lots of people work in the suburbs or outer areas, have bigger or extended families, or one of a thousand other reasons why suburban living makes more sense. Can we not demonize these folks? I moved to the suburbs to shave an hour off my commute. It gave me my life back. It was worth the tradeoff of walking to coffee. I don't recall signing my soul over in the mortgage papers. Cary, I'm surprised your attitude about this isn't a little more nuanced.
You know exactly what dissatisfies you about your current living situation. More importantly, you know some things that would improve how you feel during your daily life. If I were you, I work toward a more palatable living situation as long as your wife can be happy too.
The danger of trying to live with such a situation is that you will adjust to it. You will no longer try to do the things that were once convenient to enjoy. You may lose the qualities you like about yourself, feel bitter and perhaps eventually forget what you wanted to change in the first place.
Some people are cut out for a focus on their own homes, gardening, driving everywhere, etc. Some people live for the museum's late nights and the local,non-diner restaurant that serves until 4:00 am, just in case. If you're the latter, don't try to turn yourself into the former just because it seems like the sensible thing to do.
Take whatever you think your house is worth and forget about another 10 to 15%. And that's right this minute.
Although all real estate is local, so figure it out yourself. Do some serious research on price history, inventory, NOD's, foreclosures, permits, etc. What you paid is just a 'sunk cost.' And a fantasy to think it will come back in the next decade in real (inflation adjusted) dollars.
And I would forget the new urbanism. Not a chance. The old urbanism made sense, so maybe that will work for you.
It only gets worse. All of it.
Best bet....get an assignment in Europe that includes a relo.
I seldom see any letters where I think the person is totally f*ed. But that's where I see you. Sorry.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
