Zatera Ul

The Perfect $100,000 House, by Karrie Jacobs. Chronicles a road trip across the country and back in search of an affordable modernist home, as the housing bubble was building toward its peak. I learned from this book how to tell good modernism from bad modernism: modernist architecture doesn’t have trim to hide sloppy joints, so look closely at where materials meet each other to see if it is well done. One other statement that I appreciated was when she noted that most first-time homebuyers are escaping achingly bare rental housing, and so there’s not much of a market for modernist starter homes. Also, architects that do a good job designing starter-size homes tend to end up working for the higher end of the market.

Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30-Somethings Can’t Get Ahead, by Tamara Draut. This book is from 2005, and explains how people born in the 70’s are struggling in an unravelling economy. The author is from a liberal think tank, so I don’t agree with her top-down big-government solutions. I also think the young adults in her book made a whole lot of poor financial decisions. She makes a $50,000 income sound like poverty level, when actually it is the median household income in the U.S. She also seems to think that graduation from college necessitates the purchase of brand-new sheets, towels, and cars, even if they must be bought on credit. “See, that’s why you’re poor,” is what I was thinking. The harder they tried not to look poor, the poorer they became.

Nevertheless, I thought her observation that zoning and development decisions have sometimes been rigged to favor childless households was interesting–families with school-age children use more local services (mostly schools) than they generate in property taxes, so some areas actively discourage their residence by impeding the building of affordable single-family detached homes, and by pushing for high-end homes, denser housing, and senior housing instead.

The other interesting thing about the book is that I caught some overtones of Fourth Turning ideas in it, probably because she cited Millenials Rising by the same authors. The attraction of The Fourth Turning is that we can blame most of my generation’s ills on the misdeeds of the previous two generations, while holding out some hope that our perilous times will resolve sometime before we die. However, I don’t agree that history is entirely cyclical; probably there are some cycles in recent U.S. history, but there is also a more linear progression toward decadence and decay and the general decline and fall of Western civilization.

What I have been pondering a lot lately is which effect I think will dominate in the next few decades. For the near term, my color trend tea-leaf economic readings are mixed; some bright springy colors in accessories, but still far outnumbered by the things designed to harmonize with funereal, bad-feng-shooey granite. Target even put a black plastic granite-patterned strip under their display Crockpots: “Look, it goes with granite! Really!” (Because the drab stainless steel, black, and dark blood-red products didn’t look that great against the pure white shelves.)

The one bit of economic hope in the retail sector that I have seen recently was at Bachman’s (local gardening store chain). In their decorating section, they had a lot of real, made-over, and somewhat repurposed antiques. Kind of a chic old-fashioned thrifty look, and one that MFH and I actually thought was kind of cool. A nice segue from the granite look, if they can pull it off.