We arrived in Connecticut Friday on the red eye at 6 am (ugh), got the rental car, loaded our large pile of luggage and three cats, dropped two cats off at a vet to be boarded, then went to my sister’s house with Peggy Sue (Sue’s 17-year-old cat) where we promptly slept for 4 hours. We’ll be here for a few days until escrow closes on our new home.
I’m looking out the back window at snow-covered woods now, it’s really quite beautiful. Plus there’s no police helicopters or plane noise (our previous home in Van Nuys was on the approach path to Burbank airport.)
In many ways, Los Angeles was very good to us. The huge increase in home prices the past several years is allowing us to buy our home in Connecticut with just a little baby mortgage. The more you have, the more you make is a truism of capitalism. Yet many friends in LA still rent because they can’t afford to buy. The average rent for a 1 bdr apartment there is now at least $1200 a month and more like $1600 on the Westside. Yikes.
More than anything, it was the traffic that was a primary reason we moved. When you tell people here that Sue’s recent 17 mile commute to a client in LA took 90 minutes each way you often get a blank stare. Commute times like that just don’t compute here, they are just too insane. Too many in LA endure these long commutes and high rental prices when it seems to me that a government and society that genuinely cared about its populace would make affordable housing and mass transit be top priorities. priorities. Instead, a tiny number of rich get much richer while most everyone else struggles to get by. Is this a sustainable way of life? No.
Looking out that back window again, I’m thinking maybe a deer will be by soon, foraging for food in the woods. Or maybe that mom bear and her cubs will appear and raid the bird feeder for food like they’ve done before. Such is life in the semi-country, far from the maddening freeways.