A Paradigm Shift in Parenting

Dear Hermann,

The problem in the Washington, DC area is that even prices in minority neighborhoods are increasing rapidly, especially as neighborhood after neighborhood becomes "gentrified."

I'm currently dealing with the problem from sort of the opposite end of things. My mother died last year, and my father has a progressive degenerative illness. I would like for him to move near me so that in the years he has left, we could assist him.

I live in Anne Arundel County, under Baltimore, to the east of Washington. Although there have always been zip codes that were quite expensive, large parts of the county for many years offered fairly affordable housing. Five years ago, I could have gotten my father into a comfortable 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom house (in anticipation of some day perhaps having to have live-in assistance) for around $100,000 in the southern part of the county.

A quick check of realtor.com reveals that out of over 1300 listings in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, there are precisely 9 houses with at least two bedrooms and two baths selling for under $200,000, the least of these being $170,000.

These are all in the Glen Burnie area. The neighborhoods (I'm familiar with the neighborhoods listed) are, frankly, undesirable.

There is not a single home in the southern part of the county with 2 bedrooms and 2 baths for under $200,000. The least expensive house meeting these relatively-basic criteria is listed at $229,000.

I could ask my father to live in a rowhouse in Baltimore, but Baltimore city has become a rather undesirable place to live, partly as a result of former mayor Kurt Schmoke all but legalizing the drug trade.

As for Washington, DC, proper, out of a couple of thousand homes listed, there are precisely 16 properties listed with this basic description for sale for $100,000 or less right now. Everyone of them is in one of three bad neighborhoods.

There are seven more, all, again, in very bad neighborhoods, between $100,000 and $150,000.

Between $150,000 and $200,000, there are another 14 homes with these criteria. The only one not in the worst part of the city is in Northeast, in an iffy, if not terrible neighborhood, going for $200,000.

That's it.

In neighboring Prince Georges County (land of high taxes and execrable services, high crime and low amenities), we have the following: $100,000 or under, two properties - a condo in a bad area, and a house in a worse area; $100,000 - $150,000, 24 properties, nearly all either in bad neighborhoods or condos.

As I look above $150,000, there are some older, small homes in satisfactory neighborhoods. However, property taxes for a house sold at $175,000 will run over $3000 per year in Prince Georges County, thus significantly affecting affordability.

I live near Bowie, MD, which going back only three or four years, was a very pleasant, very affordable community. A nice 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom home could be had for $150,000, or even a little less, and that's with a nice 1/5 acre lot. It's still a pretty nice place to live, but the same house is now commanding $250,000 - $300,000. It's become insane.

Anyway, if you don't want to live in a bad neighborhood, and require 2 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, you're pretty much looking at $200,000 to have much of any selection, even in the least expensive parts of the inner Washington region. I'm sure if you want to live in Carroll County or Mannassas, there will be a modestly better selection of houses under $200,000.

My father is fortunate in that he could afford to spend $200,000 or more, as he own his home in Florida free and clear. But a $200,000 house, considering taxes and insurance, will require an income of about $65,000. This is certainly achievable for many folks with professional positions, but I know lots of folks who go to my church where the husband doesn't make $65,000.

sitetest

Maybe it's because these kids were largely ignored by their parents when they were growing up, became depressed, parents again ignored them by medicating them, and the kids took things into their own hands, however extreme.

That's another way of looking at or saying the point I was trying to make.

I'm not sure if you're aware, but all those antidepressants called selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, SSRIs, such as Prozac, Zoloft, etc. have new "Black Box" warnings on them mandated by the FDA because a small, yet significant, potential for suicide. Their potential for homicide has largely been ignored.

Thanks for reminding me. I should have bookmarked the story just for those links.

Whatever the merits of the various arguments, this is definitely a debate this society needs to have. We have entirely too many human beings reaching adulthood in a feral state. The time to tone down the savagery is when they're young. About all you can do with adult savages is lock them up.

Hear, hear!

There is more than one definition of "nation."

Certainly, if you include modern liberal redefinitions of words. According to liberals, "marriage" doesn't mean union of man and woman either anymore.

Somehow, I doubt you will ever get around the basic enymology and meaning of the word - nation, from natus, relating to birth.

It's going to take a lot less than that for Hispanics to become dominant in this country....

Excepting native Hispanics in New Mexico, keep dreaming.

Certainly, if you include modern liberal redefinitions of words. According to liberals, "marriage" doesn't mean union of man and woman either anymore.

The dictionary is a liberal source?

As I mentioned earlier, NYC, DC, MA, CT, NJ, LA, SF, etc. are all now unaffordable for a normal family, and therefore for normal single people also.

Time to flee.

In Philadelphia, you could buy your father a nice three bedroom rowhome in much of the Northeast or in Port Richmond for $60-80,000. Taxes would be a low $1000 per year too.

They will make great future citizens

Undoubtedly they will.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by that. These people will NOT adopt the kids in their own country because of their biases.

That was my point. They believe that children should be raised by their biological parents.

Yep. If you still live in the city like I do (in Philly), your wife can still stay home. My single family home in the city cost about 2/3 of what a similar suburban home would cost, and has 1/3 to 1/2 of the property tax burden. A row house or twin would be much, much cheaper.

St. Louis is similar, but I think in both cases it won't fly unless you homeschool or can afford parochial school, because the St. Louis city schools are very bad.

The problem is that many people do not want to homeschool - it's still only about 2% of the population.

Then there is the reluctance many people have to raise children in an inner city area. In my area the farther out from the central core you go, the more conservative the people get.

The advent of the two income family coincided with the explosion of the cost of the nice house in the suburbs with the good school district as middle class whites poured out of cities in the 70's. That house costs two paychecks. Period.

That's becoming increasingly true. Homeschooling is *not* an option for everyone, and I don't see it ever being more than a few percentage of all school age children. However, the advantage of homeschooling is that it frees the family from being tied to the high cost of a "good school district."

In St. Louis County, just about the only "cheap" housing left in good school districts is in traditionally black neighborhoods, and those are rapidly disappearing as they're either gentrified or entirely bulldozed for shopping centers. Were my husband and I earning equivalent salaries today (adjusted for inflation), we wouldn't be able to afford our house or the neighborhood we live in.

A child raised by Americans and assimilated into American culture IS as American as one born to an Anglo-Saxon like John Kerry.

Absolutely. Blut und Boden have no place in American life.

This image (don't want to paste it cause it has some goofy formatting stuff in it) shows perfectly the attitude not so long ago of the "Boston Brahmins" to the Irish. It shows a caricatured black man and Irishman on either side of a scale, being "weighed in the balance," and they are equal. IOW, the Irishman is "no better than" a nasty 19th century word for black people that starts with an "n."

Good thing us pesky Jews arrived in 1654, eh?

Dear Hermann,

Yeah, I don't entirely disagree with what you're saying.

If I were 20 - 25 again, I'd definitely think hard about costs of living in determining where I'd want to settle down.

Even now, I'm 44, and I've been thinking about southwest Virginia, maybe about halfway between Richmond and Williamsburg.

I could sell my house, pay off the mortgage, and pay cash for a house as nice as what I have now, but with more land.

I wouldn't need anywhere near as much income if I didn't have a mortgage. If my business grows some more, I might sell it and do just that. With no debt and a few bucks put away, I could be a little adventurous.

But here's the thing. DC has always been kind of expensive, but up until recently, there were plenty of places within the region that were pretty affordable. If you didn't have to live in McLean, or Fairfax at all, or lower Montgomery, or the Gold Coast of upper Northwest, you could find affordable housing, even up until the late '90s, early '00s.

I sold my four bedroom house in College Park, not far from the University of Maryland, for $130,000 in 1993. As late as 2000, that house was still around $160,000.

I was looking at houses over there. The neighborhood where I lived, houses are going for $300,000 and up.

That's only the last four or five years.

My wife grew up in a dump called Rogers Heights. Twenty years ago, it was a white, working class neighborhood. Today, it's much more crime and drug-infested.

Twenty years ago, the houses there sold for $40,000 - $50,000. Ten years ago, those houses were selling for under $100,000. Five years ago, maybe $150,000. Maybe not quite that much. Looking, I see houses listed there for $260,000 - $300,000.

And the problem is that when folks have lived in a place a long time, gotten pretty far into raising the kids, etc., and all of the sudden, things get wacky, it isn't so easy to move. When my wife and I were young and first married, we could have moved away from the DC area, very easily. But back then, it was still pretty affordable. I didn't have to live in Bethesda.

Now it isn't affordable. If your household income isn't in the high five figures, it's really tough to buy a home in any part of the region anymore. If you want a nice home in a nice community, you need six figures of household income.

If we were in a position to need to grow into another size house, we'd be out of luck. My income has not grown nearly as fast as housing values in this area. I couldn't afford my own house, if I had to buy it today. I moved to this house less than four years ago.

It only happened in the last few years. It was quite sudden.

We have friends who are just about outgrown their current house. They have five kids, and the wife would like to have one more (she's 44, more than one more might be a little bit of a stretch). But even though they have a pretty large house, it's getting a little tight with five, and six would be kinda tough. Fortunately, they're quite well off. If they have to move, they'll be able to afford it. He's got a lucrative IT job, she homeschools, and they've been shrewd in their home-buying, they're real savers, they'll be fine.

But other folks in similar situations come to a point where they can live in cramped quarters, or maybe mom goes back to work. When you're 10 or 20 years into your career, you have three or four or five little ones, with a couple or more in school, little league, etc., moving to a new region isn't so easy.

And then the question is, if it happened in Prince Georges County, Maryland, why would I think it won't eventually happen in Philadelphia? Or other places that are relatively low-cost?

It happened here in less than five years, Hermann. Five years. If you had another two or three kids, would you think about a somewhat larger home? Imagine if the prices all doubled over the course of the next five years, while your income only went up, say, 40% or so.

sitetest.

St. Louis is similar, but I think in both cases it won't fly unless you homeschool or can afford parochial school, because the St. Louis city schools are very bad.

Philadelphia has good public schools I think if you are out of the black areas (its magnet schools are the top high schools in the state). The schools in the black areas are abysmal and border on inhuman. And the parochial schools are very cheap up to 8th grade - about $1200 per child.

Then there is the reluctance many people have to raise children in an inner city area.

I found, growing up in the city better because there were things to do, and you could get their on public transit or bike or walk, so you didn't need to be dependent upon getting a ride from the parents all the time. My neighborhood is very safe because it has a well deserved reputation for not treating street thugs very nicely when caught by the local citizenry. Our biggest problem is probably high school rivals picking fights periodically.

In my area the farther out from the central core you go, the more conservative the people get.

This is another funny thing about Philadelphia. My neighborhood in the city voted for President Bush by a 55% majority. No suburban neighborhood within 5-10 miles of me (I live one block from the city line) was even above 45% for Bush. We also have Republicans as our representatives in the City Council and State House (we would have a Republican State Senator too, except that we were gerrymandered into a majority black district after our State Senator suffered a surprise defeat in 2000). The neighborhing suburban townships have Democrats at those levels.

This image (don't want to paste it cause it has some goofy formatting stuff in it) shows perfectly the attitude not so long ago of the "Boston Brahmins" to the Irish. It shows a caricatured black man and Irishman on either side of a scale, being "weighed in the balance," and they are equal. IOW, the Irishman is "no better than" a nasty 19th century word for black people that starts with an "n."

The blacks had a saying, "Rather be a nigger than a poor white man." Or as was observed to Frederick Law Olmstead down south, when he observed at a dock that blacks had the job of recklessly tossing huge bales of cotton into ship's holds, were the Irishman had to stand in the ship's hold to arrange the cargo, "The slaves are far to valuable to use down there, but if one of the Paddy's get his back broken, nobody loses anything." Or as a black observed, 19th century society was like a cup of coffee: Up at the top, like the cream, was the best of the white folks who were property owners, then in the middle like the coffee was the black folks, then down on the very bottom like the sugar was the low sort of poor whites.

This stratification is why men who were from the lower ranks, like President Andrew Johnson, were so contemptuous of both the upper class whites and the blacks.