Archive for May, 2008
May 28th, 2008 - David Leonardt buys a House
Of course, owning also brings benefits that have nothing to do with money. You can settle into your home, confident that no landlord will kick you out. You can repaint the walls and redo the kitchen. All else being equal, owning seems far preferable to renting.
Where I am moving, Los Angeles, still has a high rent-to-price ratio (about 50 percent higher than DC), yet when I find a house I like, I will buy one. Rent-to-house price ratios are always relatively high in LA, because high nominal incomes and the California tax code make tax preferences for owner housing in California higher than in other places. At the same time, housing affordability in SoCal has improved dramatically, meaning that more people can buy a house using standard mortgage products.
I still don’t know when the bottom of the market is coming–until inventories begin to taper off (in terms of months of unsold property) it will be difficult to know. Even the inventory figure is difficult to parse; to the extent defaulted homes were stripped by their erstwhile owners, they no longer remain competitive in the market. On the other hand, there may be many potential sellers who refuse to test such a cold market.
But for me, if I can find a house I like in a neighborhood where I wish to live at a price I can afford, the security of tenure (and the knowledge that my rent can’t go us) is sufficient reason to buy.
May 27th, 2008 - Lifted from Comments: My Friend Leslie Appleton-Young writes:
In 1996 E. Digby Baltzell published a book that addresses some of the differences between the two cities going way back — Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia. Here is an excerpt of a review.
Digby Baltzell uses the history of Philadelphia and Boston as very real examples of two types of leadership. In Boston, the “Boston Brahmin” elites formed a strong upper class that was not tolerant, certainly, but took responsibility for community life and exercised a tremendous influence on American culture, politics, arts, and science. In Philadelphia, the “Proper Philadelphians” were charming, tolerant–and deeply irresponsible, abandoning any role in governing the city and making it by common agreement the worst run city in the United States. When Philadelphia needed a mover and shaker, it imported some one from outside, like Ben Franklin.
Baltzell takes these difference back to the colonial period and the dramatic differences in the viewpoints of the Puritans who founded Boston and the Quakers who founded Philadelphia. He also sees these changes working forward as the old upper-class socialize immigrant elites into their respective patterns, producing the Kennedy clan out of Boston, and Grace Kelly out of Philadelphia. Many of the points here can also be seen in David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed.
Then again, given a choice between getting to have dinner with Grace Kelly and getting to have dinner with Joe Kennedy, I don’t think it would be a tough choice…
May 26th, 2008 - Differences in Urban Development: A Mystery
I spent the past weekend in two of my favorite cities: Philadelphia, where I taught Wharton Executive MBAs, and Boston, where I attended a wedding.
Over the past 25 years or so, the Boston MSA has done quite well, while the Philadelphia MSA has not. Among the 25 largest MSAs, Boston ranked 3rd in per capita income in the 2000 census, while Philadelphia ranked 11th. While neither area has rapid population growth by US standards, Boston has been growing more rapidly than Philadelphia. And while more than 40 percent of those over the age of 25 who lived in the Boston PMSA in 2002 had completed a bachelor’s degree, only slight more than 30 percent of those in the Philadelphia PMSA had done so.
Yet the two cities have much in common: rich histories, great colleges and universities, large manufacturing bases that largely disappeared, some very beautiful architecture. The weather in Philadelphia is, if anything, better than in Boston; Boston has slightly better air service. Both cities live in the shadow of New York, although the shadow is probably darker in Philadelphia. I personally prefer the restaurants in Philadelphia.
But Philadelphia’s impoverished neighborhoods have continued to deteriorate, while
Boston’s have been gentrifying. The poverty rate in Philadelphia is also substantially higher than it is in Boston. My informal polling of students suggests that while those who go to school in Philadelphia enjoy doing so, they are looking to leave upon graduation. Those in Boston seek to stay.
Exploring how these differences came to be would make for an excellent book. Someone should write it.
May 23rd, 2008 - My new Governor may be OK
From Thinkprogress:
Speaking in San Francisco yesterday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) said he hopes that the state Supreme Court’s recent ruling allowing gay marriage will lead more couples to come to the state to be wed:
You know, I’m wishing everyone good luck with their marriages and I hope that California’s economy is booming because everyone is going to come here and get married.
The San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau also expects a tourism boom this summer, and its website now “promotes a gay travel section” and “explains that same-sex couples are ‘officially allowed to marry in the state of California.’” Schwarzenegger has promised to oppose any amendments banning gay marriage.
May 20th, 2008 - One reason I’m so looking forward to USC
Ignore the lyrics about Chicago and New York though. In fact, Daughter H is going to college in Chicago; Daughter M in NYC. The family will have America’s three largest cities covered!
May 20th, 2008 - One reason I’m so looking forward to USC
Ignore the lyrics about Chicago and New York though. In fact, Daughter H is going to college in Chicago; Daughter M in NYC. The family will have America’s three largest cities covered!
May 20th, 2008 - Get Well, Senator Kennedy
His politics are to the left of mine, but I still think him to be among the greatest Senators of my lifetime. It is too soon to lose him.
May 20th, 2008 - Home News
As of August 16, I will have a new job.
May 20th, 2008 - Urban Densities Around the World
Paul Krugman this morning was contrasting Atlanta and Berlin for Urban Density. That ain’t nothing: check out Atlanta vs. Mumbai. The graph comes from Alain Bertaud.
May 20th, 2008 - A Former Student of mine writes from Sichuan
From Yanmei Xie
INTO THE MOUNTAINS
It seemed luck was compensating me after a sleepless night stranded in Shanghai. The cab driver who picked me up at the Chengdu Shuangliu Airport told me he had been driving into earthquake stricken towns a lot and that he knew ways to by pass the government’s traffic control.
We set off immediately after I dropped off my luggage.
The cabbie’s name is Lai Si, and I call him uncle Lai. He told me he had been working as a volunteer, sending rescue supplies to disaster zones and shuttling victims out in the fast few days.
We drove into the mountains. The road became narrower and steeper, some portions partially blocked by boulders or giant piles of mud. The force of the quake had stripped some of the cement surface, pushed some parts up and pressed others down. A four-inch crack split the road in the middle. Uncle Lai deftly navigated on this terrain and tried to stable the vehicle to accommodate my attempt to videotape the scene.
We picked up a villager on our way. A few more miles up in the mountain, he said we had arrived in Hongbai village, or what’s left of if—piles of smashed bricks, broken wood columns, pieces of clothes, dangling concrete frames. Abandoned chickens and pigs were roaming in the debris looking for food. For miles and miles, not a single building was standing. The village used to sit in a valley. The villager pointed across the valley and showed us a mountainside covered by a yellow blanket of mud and rocks. “More than a dozen families,” the villager said, “were buried by the landslide over there.”
Some survivors moved to government supplied tents, but there were not enough for everyone. On the roadside stood a makeshift tent haphazardly cobbled together with wood columns and tarp. A woman stooped outside of the tent, washing some odd pieces of frying pans and bowls. I walked over and said: “Hi, sorry for interrupting.” She looked up, eyes swollen, and stared at me blankly.
“Could you, could you tell me what happened?” I stuttered.
“My house was here.” She murmured, raised one arm slightly and gestured towards the tent. The gesture seemed to be too much for her. Her arm collapsed into her body, her head dropped, lower than before, and started to scrub a pan again and again. It was too much for me, too. I turned my video camera away and walked back to my car.
Many soldiers and volunteers had arrived. They were busy distributing food and water and spray the debris with disinfectant. No one could tell how many died in the village.
Some told me more than a thousand had perished. One villager said the death toll was much higher than that. All said that the local government tried to understate the casualties to higher ups initially. They believed it delayed rescue and relief for them as attention was turned to other hard-hit counties and villages.
Uncle Lai called me back to the car and told me that we’d better head back before it turned dark. Deeper in the mountains, there are still towns that haven’t been heard since the earthquake.
On our way back, a medical team stopped us and sprayed our car and ourselves with disinfectant.