Dan;

Part of my family (my mom’s side) arrived in Yerba Buena in 1846. We have some family documents with interesting information about daily life. In 1850 (the town had been renamed San Francisco) the price of a hen’s egg was $20 gold! An 8 by 12 foot tent rented for $395 a month. Consider that the average American made perhaps $10 a month. How did people survive during the gold rush days in my area?

I am fourth generation San Franciscan. I have seen the influx of people into the Bay Area after the Second World War. Along came Silicon Valley and the hardware generation and then the software generation and finally the .COM generation (get rich quick without a business plan or knowledge how to make a profit).

What will our next generation be? I am thinking going back to agriculture would be nice. By the way my family had a dairy ranch in San Francisco, not uncommon for the Irish at that time.

It seems like there has been nothing but greed and the promise of “get rich quick” in my area from the beginnings of when it was taken by the United States. Nice weather, coupled with greed makes an interesting combination.

Tell someone in other parts of the country that you have a $4600 monthly 30 year mortgage for a 1200 square foot 50 year old fixer upper house and they will not believe you! They think you are living like a Hollywood Star! If you hiccup and loose a days pay you cannot pay your monthly bills. All this to survive! Why do we have record unemployment and foreclosures? Could there be a connection?

They tell us we are about to loose 450 CHP officers, with 1100 more to go in September. Teachers, policemen, and firemen are being fired. Proposals to fire state and local government employees give numbers in the tens of thousands. Then we hear on the tele how we are being protected by “Homeland Security”, and what places are protected, and how to destroy the Golden Gate Bridge by simply cutting a few cables down at the anchor point, etc. Yes sir come live in California! We have every thing you could wish for!

Oh just to make this post oriented towards the original topic, all this falling apart in California’s economy may mean better prices for Devcon. Not really – all prices out here continue to raise as if nothing has happened.

Tom


>>The average is around 150,000-200,000.
>
>Where I live, ENTRY LEVEL houses are $350,000. If you can find one. If you see a house that inexpensive (!) you don't make an appointment to see it, you call and make an offer. And you'll probably be too late. From there, it skyrockets.
>
>(Not kidding!)
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>A co-worker recently bought a house. For a young couple with two kids, they had to raise the threshhold to almost 450K to find anything acceptable.
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>You're absolutely spot-on correct that geography plays in what's "acceptable" as an income level. In a small town in the midwest you can actually live on ~$30/hr. In suburban LA, NO FREAKING WAY! ;-)