The Rage Diaries

There are no good neighborhoods, are there?

One of the side effects of joining the mortgaged class is an exquisite awareness of property taxes. I gasped in empathy upon reading that Loudoun County, Virginia will be raising its property taxes in an effort to make up for a drop in property assessments ("Loudoun Approves Jump in Tax Rate," WaPo, Apr 2, 08). The article says the overall tax rate is up 19%. If I'm reading the story correctly, here's how it will affect the landed class:

Scraping By on $200,000?

"My husband and I live in a nice four-bedroom house," wrote a woman with a $200,000 household income. "Our cars are not fancy and were bought used. I shop at TJ Maxx and consignment shops. My point is that we're not rich. According to most people, we're rolling in dough. I'm here to tell you that if we seem better off than most, it's because we work very hard, we pay cash instead of borrowing, and we do without stupid frippery. Maybe we'd be rich in some state that isn't NoVa, but then we'd have to live someplace that just didn't offer a life worth living."

-- "Scraping By on $200,000? The Tricky Task of Establishing the Line Where Wealth Begins," WaPo, Nov 6, 07

The column points to a growing disconnect among the different income-earning classes of America. One percent of Americans earned 21.2% of all income. The remaining 99% of Americans get to scramble for the 79.8% left. The last time the gap between the richest Americans and the rest of us was so big, it was the 1920s. ("Income-Inequality Gap Widens," WSJ, Oct 12, 07) And it doesn't help that the rate of wage increase has not kept pace with productivity gains. As reported in "One Pay Gap Shrinks, Another One Widens" (WSJ, Nov 2, 07):

The typical man earned $42,261 last year, which is 2.7% more than the typical man earned in 1996, adjusted for inflation. For women, it's $32,515, up 7.1% -- better, not great. In the same decade, output per hour of work, known as productivity, climbed nearly 30%.

So ... people are producing more, and getting paid less to do it. No wonder some folks feel poor even while raking in six figures. I'm not saying the perception of poverty when you're scrambling for ways to ease the AMT impact is at all accurate. But feeling like the rich get richer? There is something to that.

Those who do not remember history

My first and only question throughout the entire Don Imus drama: does anybody who covers radio remember Doug "Greaseman" Tracht?

I do. I remember why he was suspended back in 1985, and I remember what got him booted from the D.C. airwaves again in 1999. You can read his comments here; I don't wish to repeat them. Greaseman is back on the AM airwaves in the D.C. area, and greatest-hits bits play around afternoon drive time on an FM station. It's a lot better than he was doing in June of 01 -- you can read all the details in the St. Petersburg Times' "Radio Raunch Equals Ratings? Maybe Not."

Two of the WaPo's African-American columnists have written excellent pieces of why the Imus remark is not merely an unfortunate slip of the tongue. Michael Wilbon's Apr 10, 07, piece "Out of Imus's Bigotry, a Zero Tolerance for Hate" and Eugene Robinson's Apr 12, 07, piece "Why Imus Had to Go" provide primers to those of us who aren't intimate with Imus's body of work. But we only get two passing mentions of Tracht in the WaPo -- "Advertisers Pull out of Imus Show" on Apr 11, and today, "Don Imus is Fired by CBS Radio." I feel like the paper missed a chance to get Tracht's take on this -- it would have been an excellent local hook for national news.

But ten bucks says Imus won't be a footnote the next time some idiot on the radio runs off at the mouth; he'll be back in six months, raking in millions in a satellite-radio deal. And maybe that's why nobody's writing about what happened to the Greaseman -- because it may not happen again.

Frostbite in California, sunburn in D.C.

Our Subaru has an external-temperature gauge in the dashboard, and it is somewhat weird to be tooling toward the gym in the morning and seeing the gauge read 43 degrees Fahrenheit. I'm used to it being at least a little warmer here. And this nippy-Bay-Area-winter phenomenon felt a little weirder after I read yesterday's "Seldom Heard in January: Hot Enough for Ya?" in the WaPo. 73 degrees Fahrenheit! In January? Back when I lived there, January was all about fretting over how not to freeze during inauguration, stocking up on bread in anticipation of snow days, casting longing looks at Bahamas posters strategically placed in travel agency windows.

That this should appear the same day the NYT runs the speculative piece "The Ununited States, When It Comes to the Weather," is just delightful. The argument in the piece is this: because the U.S. has such vastly different weather systems, it's hard for anyone to make global warming seem like a national issue. Days like yesterday certainly seem to back that theory up.

New Dominion, Old Dominion

"It's as if you grafted South Carolina onto the suburbs of New Jersey," said Robert Lang, a demographer and director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. "This is a cultural divide that's on a national scale."

-- "So Close, Yet So Far Apart," WaPo, Nov 16, 06

The article's about the big, big divide between northern Virginia -- NoVa, as it was referred to on all the ride boards at college -- and the rest of the state. Having bounced all over the state from childhood to adulthood, I feel qualified to say that yeah, this article rings pretty true in terms of how distinct many different regions in Virginia are.

That said, I don't think "distinct" is the prelude to ranking the regions on some sort of scale. So I have to admit, reading stuff like this ...

Paige Grainger, a fundraiser for nonprofit groups, was born in Alexandria. Her mother was from Charlottesville. But, she explained to a group of working-mother friends gathered for a glass of red wine last week, she doesn't think of herself as a Virginian. The conservative bent of state politics is embarrassing, she said. And the recent passage of the ban on same-sex marriage makes her angry, especially because it passed on the day two gay friends bought a house on her street.

"I struggle a lot," she said. "When talking to people who don't know how different NoVa is, I don't say I'm from Virginia because I don't want them to think I'm in the South. That carries such baggage. That's not a part of me." In election years, especially, she finds herself saying, "I can't believe I live in a red state."

Wendy Moniz, an advertising executive who has lived with her husband and children in Alexandria for nine years, knows that feeling. "I don't live in the South. That makes me think of debutantes and gun racks," she said. "I grew up north of the Mason-Dixon line. I'm a Northerner. I can't be a Southerner. This can't be the South. No way." When people ask her where she's from, she never says Virginia. "I say I'm from the D.C. area."

... really chafes. It seems to me, ten years and 3000 miles from my days in the Old Dominion, that this kind of us-versus-them thinking is an uncanny echo of the national dialogue prior to the Civil War.

Nobody should be surprised if the phrase "Northern Aggression" begins popping up again, eh?

Behold the wrath of foodies online

No less than three hours after reading News.com's Jan 3, 06 "Why Companies Monitor Blogs," which includes this passage:

[O]nline discussions--be it in forums, on blogs or elsewhere--are a modern replacement for customer satisfaction surveys or focus group reports, which can take months to compile and analyze.

"When you're listening to the Internet, the discussion is taking place in real time," said Intelliseek spokeswoman Sue MacDonald. "We're able very quickly, sometimes in a matter of days, to pick up on what consumers are saying. If there's certain issues, like safety recalls or any mention of a boycott, we can set up an alert, so that we can alert a company or a brand so they can be on their guard and be ready to react, if that's what it takes."

I stumble across DCFoodies' news that Buck's Fishing and Camping served them with a cease-and-desist after the bloggers took photos of the food on Saturday night. Putting aside the whole "Blah blah blah information wants to be free blah blah blah intellectual property blah blah blah are bloggers reporters blah blah blah" business, here's what I found interesting in terms of weblogs and the way they influence customer opinion.

Prior to reading Jason's post, I had no idea there was even a Buck's Fishing and Camping in DC. Within five clicks, I had learned that  head chef, Carole Greenwood, allegedly has this philosophy in re: her customers:

"I don't cook to make people happy. I cook because I'm an artist. And food is my medium. I have no need to nurture the world. 'You're in the service industry.' I didn't get into it to serve people. I got into it because it was the least objectionable commercial enterprise I could think of."

Which, frankly, would be enough to turn me as a potential customer, even before reading about the inconsistent treatment that Jason and Amy got at the restaurant. Like it or not, the restaurant industry is a service industry: people can make their own wedge of iceberg with blue cheese dressing* at home, so what they're going out for is the service of having someone else make and plate their food.

Anyway, Jason and Amy's experience illustrates, for me, the value that weblogs have as a vehicle for showing how businesses treat the customer. And it also illustrates the peril of the informed audience: although I travel to DC and like going out, I won't be going to Buck's because I don't like how they treated the paying customers, and I don't like the way the head chef regards all her paying customers. Chef Mario Batali said recently, "When you think about it, all my greatest work is poop, tomorrow." That's work, not customers.

* I am not kidding. This is apparently among Buck's "signature dishes."

Hope in a bubble

Each Sunday, I check the weekly sales listings in the SF Chron to see how things are shaking in the ol' zip code. It's a not-bad way to gauge two things: how long a house stays on the market, and what it sells for relative to its asking price. It's also a fun way to keep up with the market: this house went on the market within days after we made the offer on ours, and it's now back -- all spruced up -- at a much higher price than in August. I'll be curious to see how it does this time.

Whether or not real estate investors are beginning to get burned is a growing story, I think. BW's "Bubble, Bubble, Then Trouble" (Dec 19, 05) provides a telling example:

Jim Williams, executive vice-president of the Northern Virginia Building Industry Assn., knew the "feeding frenzy" had gotten out of hand when a waiter in a restaurant he frequents confided that he had bought four houses on spec. "I'm sitting looking at him and thinking even with tips...he must be dying on the vine." Now, investors' scramble for the exits is creating problems for owners like Omar Singh, 29, owner of a trucking company in Herndon. His townhouse in Sterling has been on the market for $525,000 since October. He's hoping to hold out without cutting his asking price until April. But, he says, "I might not be able to."

Buying FOUR houses on spec? With what? Then again, I thought the same thing after reading "Buy, Borrow, Buy" in the Dec 9, 05 SFChron:

In the three years since Sacco and McCook put their faith in real estate, the couple have embarked on what might conservatively be called an E-ticket ride, pulling equity from appreciating properties to provide down payments for the next investment. They have bought eight vacation properties - four homes in Florida, three in California and 100 raw acres on top of a mountain in Lake County.

[...]

Sacco estimates that along with McCook's mother, who has been a silent partner, they've made $1.3 million since they began their buying spree, but all of this is still in equity on their properties. Their monthly reality is more sobering. They have $2.3 million in mortgage debt and negative cash flow that ranges from $5,000 to $15,000 monthly depending on the season.

So how do they pay the bills?

"We sort of count our equity loans as our income," she says, with the slightest wince. "If we had real jobs, we'd be fine, but we just need to get some money in. Some people call it a pyramid, but I don't like to think about it that way."

These sorts of investors are the people to watch as the market adjusts in 06, I think.

FWW, Behind the Mortgage's bubble coverage is very well done. After the jump, how some markets are heating up or cooling down, according to "The Ups And Downs of Home Prices" (BW, Dec 19, 05) ...

What's the matter with exurbs?

I keep tabs on the old neighborhood -- northern Virginia -- by reading the WaPo, and today's article, "Exurbanites Occupy an Unsettled Place in Virginia Politics," really did not make a case for the benefits of  gated-community living and lengthy commutes. Among assorted gems in the article:

The National Zoo: steps forward and back

All had been relatively quiet on the National Zoo front recently, but there's still the odd bit of sad news like this: the zoo's only camel, an 18 year old bactrian male that was thought to be healthy, died Monday.

To keep up with zoo news, I've bookmarked the Washington Post's National Zoo page. Most of it, I'm not too interested in -- panda mating does nothing for me -- but occasionally, there's something linked to the management issues I wrote about for a while, like a Jan 05 report that really, the biggest animal problems at the zoo spring from H. sapiens.

The fashionistas' dreams, coming true at last

We've long contended that low-riding pants are a crime against good taste -- and now Virginia state rep. Algie Howell wants to make them a crime, period. He's introduced a bill that would outlaw low-riding pants (HB1981). I love this part of the Feb 7, 05, WTOP story "Underwear Bill Gets Lots of Feedback in Norfolk" --

Howell told The Virginian-Pilot that he kept hearing from customers in his barber shop that something needed to be done about young people who wear their pants around their knees, exposing their underwear.

We can only hope other brave legislators will step up and ban velour sweatsuits, Uggs, legwarmers, Mom jeans, those big fat sneakers like Kevin Federline wears, Kevin Federline, and the asinine practice of wearing a tank top to Sundance.