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Comments
Where is it written that artists have to be able to afford to live in the very most desirable and expensive part of town? That has never been the way it is - artists, musicians etc. have always tended to congregate in cheaper parts of tow. Capitol Hill is ridiculously expensive now. Not the place to live if you have chosen not to make any money.
Having said that, I liked this article a lot.
But the world just might be ready for the exciting tribulations of an entitled, middle-class, blonde white girl who thrusts the tribulations of a small Seattle apartment upon herself that she may truly suffer for Art. Maybe, if Ke$ha is your role model.
Who is subsidizing her? No way a self-proclaimed "writer" can afford a bus ride much less an $800 apartment. Methinks many of those roommate ad responses are the answer.
This kind of writing is why she lives in shoe-box on a "writer's income" = middle-class speak for "Daddy's cash".
But let's explore her engrossing technique: "If I put on my slippers, they become shoes! If I wrap a sheet around my body, it becomes clothes! If I put material on my head, it becomes a hat! It's like miracles!"
I like the idea of learning how to do more with less, so I appreciated the article. It is true that living in desirable or interesting neighborhoods does mean accepting sacrifices in some other areas. The article laid out those sacrifices quite nicely and why they're worth it. I'm glad the writer found a place that suits her.
I just hope for her sake she doesn't wake some morning and see a broke 40something who's wondering what the heck happened to her life. At 34, it's a bit late in the day to be running around pretending to be Carrie Bradshaw. If kids are in her plans, she's fast coming up on her 'best if used by' date.
She's clearly no dummy, and still pretty cute. She could prolly go over to Amazon and get a nice gig writing copy, snag a rich brogrammer, and move out to the Eastside and squeeze out a sprog or two. She'd still have plenty of time to wordsmith in the evenings and try to be the next J. K. Rowling.
Just don't spin your wheels forever. You don't want to be like the old Diana Ross Song:
"And all the stars
who never were,
are parking cars
and pumping gas".
Just sayin'...
Also, maybe there is an opportunity for other landlords with suitable buildings to rejigger some space to offer housing for people who want to stay in the city but don't have a ton of money.
She's not asking for anything, least of all your sympathy. Lighten up.
As I mentioned in a previous post, the only concern I have for her is if she sees kids in her future. If she does, she needs to get cracking and find a man (or at least a partner), and not some artsy-fartsy type who's as skint as she is. Time to be a little less Carrie Bradshaw and a little more Anastasia Steele (yes, I gagged at little bit at the thought of that too)?
I don't think any of the haters comments to be worth anything at all. This is not a cry for help. Who asked for all of the annoying unsolicited advice? What is the purpose of going on the offensive here? Why denigrate millennials as a whole? As it happens, I thought the bathroom picture was awesome and helped me to visualize it.
I lived in a circa 1940 studio (400 sq ft) for many years. I mostly did not mind the lack of space and primitive conditions. The location was central and I could walk to work. What I most liked was the low rent. Living there allowed me to buy a house many times larger than anything I ever needed or wanted. Now I live in a vast sparsely furnished home. At least I have more or less resolved the echo issues. Still pretty close to work too. Victory I guess!
GenXJayTallahassee
The downside for those in Seattle living in space that size is that, well, it's in Seattle.
Cheap? That's OBSCENE.
When I moved to Seattle in 1985 my rent for a share of a five bedroom house with three other people on Capitol Hill was $75 dollars a month. I made almost $30 an hour in 1986. So my Rent was covered working ONE DAY A WEEK. Except for a lucky few most wages have stagnated since then. So "saving" you way out this mess is non-starter for 80% of the people here.
PS. And that was a palace by todays standards. That house sold not three years ago for almost 900K.
So telling people to "save" who can't afford rents (let alone so-called "luxuries") only betrays grotesques suicidal entitlement and how out of touch people are to the struggle of young people in our cities.
And Seattle is't Manhattan or even Brooklyn. It has none of the infrastructure of other major cities to justify the living expense. The expense here is driven by pure greed.
It is untenable. I bought my first house in 1992. There is simply no way I could do that if I was 27 now. No fucking way. Even on an Amazon salary. There is no way I could've started a business like I did that now hires two dozen people at high salaries. And this city is losing the newer people who could become like me - business owners who carry cities through down turns when big corporations jump ship.
To every entitled shit bag in this thread screaming to the young people getting screwed in this city that same tired old straw man about how you have no "right" to live in expensive city can go fuck themselves. What an asshole thing to say.
This isn't about an innate right to live in the lap of luxury, you dipshits.
It's about how and why cities get expensive in the first place. It's not foregone. We can do something about it. And even for rich property owners like me the gross greed driven inflation of the cost of living in Seattle is bad for us in the long run.
And. Unless all these "I've got mine" fuck bags trolls in here are reeeally rich — and judging by the fact they bleat their gibbering in here ten times a day seven days a week, they clearly are not — their turn will come and they will howl like frightened gibbons. Most don't even live here and most whine and bitch about every $14 dollar burger and tax and price hike their free market fetishizing entitled asses endure.
Young people have every right to be pissed off.
We are in our fourth home now. It is a small three bedroom Tacoma home we bought 6 years ago for about $160K. When I got my tax statement this week, I see the property value has risen significantly. The only real effect of this increase is my taxes are also rising significantly.
Oh one more thing: in the early 70s, as a student, I rented a studio apt. at NE 50th and Brooklyn NE, with a shared bathroom. The apt. was much larger than the one in this article and it allowed me to walk to school, my bank and two grocery stores so I did not need a car. The rent was $50 a month. Now do a bit of research on general economic inflation between 1970 and 2017. Compare the two resulting numbers. I believe you will be dismayed at the difference between the two figures.
(And a little advice from a 55 year old: Save up for a better bed. You reaaallly won't like that Ikea bed by the time you reach 50.)
I do envy the author having her own fridge though. I sure appreciate having my own bathroom, but having that and my own fridge doesn't seem like it should be such an unrealistic dream. Oh well...
My advice: proximity is massively overrated. I too spent all my minimum-wage earnings on a place in Capitol Hill - literally 75% of my take home for a studio apartment. It wasn't even wired for phone service, I had to use the library to get on the internet. But I was young and wanted to be in the scene and do young people things. For everything I did, there were 3 more things I didn't do because I had no cash. I should have just stayed in Lake City.
I'm not sure how to take this. Have your dreams disappeared and ended here? Here's a bit of history for you. No one saw this coming. This super upturn in housing prices in the 80's and then the 90's. No one. Now it's ultra upturn, but our population has grown like 50% since then. What are going to do?
In the 70's I saw many vacant Tudor brick homes on the SouthWest side of Queen Anne, with incredible views, vacant and with Government posting of foreclosure on the front door. Nobody living there, just empty. You could have picked them up for a song as a dance. Some did.
This is an expensive area to live in now, I can't help it, it happened around me too, just because it was cheap at one time is no reason to bitch because it's not now. You were born too late. Deal with it. Find another city that is Seattle in the 70's.
And while you didn’t have the foresight to anticipate it - nearly everyone else who worked urban planning and in real estate did.
There were reams and reams and of urban studies done in the 80’s that outlined how Seattle needed to prepare for growth and what would happen when it came and we had plenty of time starting in the early 90’s to begin doing something. But we didn’t.
Well. I did. I bought real estate. Because I knew. Anybody with the ability to look at a map knew how constrained our geography is and how that would kick start prices at the first hint of growth.
And it wasn’t the 70’s. The t was the 80’s, 90’s and early 2000’s. There was nearly thirty years to change zoning laws, develop public housing, and pass market regulatory strategies.
But instead dipshits fetishize the mighty market and then pretend it’s an immutable law of nature. It isn’t.
And we could still do something. Albeit perhaps too little too late. But now everyone believes developers and investment banker market hype and are too chicken to upset the cart. And dipshits won’t raise taxes on the big tech businesses. So, yeah, nothing will get done.
And that is precisely why young people should be pissed. And precisely why our city is more vulnerable and less livable for everyone. We are not Manhattan. And we are not as inherently livable as other large expensive cities. So when the worm turns it’s going hit Seattle hard. The mighty market has failed most people in this country and that is nothing to brag about.
But. Fuck those whinny artists and young people... I guess.
There are no cities in this country that are both cheap AND provide infrastructure, culture, good tax base, climate, and income growth potential like Seattle in the 1990’s. Because fucking idiotic GOP trickle down economics is now stifling that kind of growth everywhere.
Sure. You can move to Detroit. Or St. Louis. Or I guess some Red State shithole cultural wasteland. And yup. Rents are cheaper.
And you will still go nowhere.
The cities don’t invest in themselves or their young people. Trumps s tax and entitlement cuts are going eventually gut Red States. Most are dying and held hostage by dying elderly republican dipshits who vote against their interests and liberal areas are gerrymandered out of power so they they would take decades to change.
Yeah. Move there. Great advice.
It's just inevitable that another city will start to look like the end of the rainbow when some "Big Business" or two invests in it and kick starts it.
...
"You were born too late. Deal with it. Find another city that is Seattle in the 70's."
@40: Thanks for your uninformed opinion.
The move was supposed to be temporary, a place to stay until I found a house in Seattle. At first my new small life was a little depressing but as time went on I realized that I rather enjoyed the sense of freedom that no stuff, no house had given me; I had inadvertently freed myself from the tyranny of things.
Now the thought of owning a house full of things and expending all the energy necessary to for there maintenance and management is a little depressing. Try small for a while, loose the junk, take your time (and it does take time) and you might really like it.
And yes, I could afford to buy a house in Seattle.
Here in Hawai’i--the island of Oahu is where Honolulu and Waikiki is. One million people live on an island 20 by 30 miles. About 30% is habitable. Our studio apts average ~175 sq feet and that includes the lanai (the balcony.) Asian families bring over grandparents, children, etc and it is not unusual for 10 to 12e people to live in a 200 sq ft studio. How? Each adult has a futon sized mattress (youth sized) and 2-3 children can sleep on one futon. During the day one puts the futons up against the walls. Then the area is made into the kitchen with hibachi grills. No windows--just jalousies otherwise everyone would die of carbon monoxide poisoning.
We have flash floods all the time. Last year a house was carried downstream...a house where the owners had been hit up with dozens of fines...but nothing done.
85 people !!!! lived in that house! Two bathrooms for 85 people. The owners kept putting up more 1/2 inch plywood walls. The areas were so small that one could not lie down and stretch out/Or STAND UP...sort of like “tiger cages” used for POWs in the Vietnam War.
I once lived in a single garage that had been divided into four areas. Three guys and me. My room had two sides that were a corner of the garage. Third wall was plywood and 4th wall was chicken wire. I had a youth mattress, a two drawer table and a coat rack to hang clothes. One outside bathroom, and a cooking area with a hot plate and sink. Still bigger than the 25 ft sailboat I lived on for 5 years off the grid.
When the dorms at the U of Hawai’i were finally condemned a call went out to house the students flying in 2,000 plus miles to school. People were offering up their couches for $1,000 a month! Really! JUST the couch..not use of a bathroom or kitchen or fridge. Come in the back door and sit on the couch, then “stretch out” on the five foot couch.
Hawai’i had the highest number of homeless per capita than any other state. Polynesians who have been here since the third century live in rusted out pick up trucks, or homeless under an overpass.
This article was laughable. 30% of the people in the world still live on less than $2/day. Mud floor huts in areas of civil war where the women have to walk 6 hrs to fetch potable water.
Oh well...
And to all the hater-commenters: at no point does she ever complain about her plot and I'm pretty sure she's 100% aware that spending an inheritance on world travelling was less fiscally responsible than spending it on a down-payment. If you failed to pick that up you might want to work on your reading comprehension.