ABUNDANCE (1)
Today Ezra Klein’s new book, Abundance, showed up on Amazon Kindle. I was intrigued by it several weeks ago and bought it and today it was released.
I have only read about sixty pages and probably shouldn’t write about the book until I have finished it but what he is writing about first in the book is the American cost of housing and the reasons for this which he blames on liberal values.
I am about to sell my house. I and Kathe lived in college provided housing from 1965 to 1990. Not only was on campus housing provided to all staff, but during these years so was our furniture. The college, oddly, even washed the employee’s clothes and bedding.
We weren’t taxed on this free housing with furniture and when the tax code changed in the late 80’s and we did have to include housing in our salaries and pay taxes, it became clear that it would be to our advantage to own our own home rather than paying rent. The college made this easy by selling the houses on campus to staff members at a reasonable price. Houses were offered by seniority and as soon as our turn came we bought a beautiful small house that had been owned by the Rath sisters. Dinny Rath taught physical education at WWC after retiring from Swarthmore College.
The house cost $60,000. My father loaned us $30,000 as a down payment (which eventually we didn’t need to pay back) and we paid the other $30,000 over ten years.
I wasn’t making any financial decisions, I was just doing what everyone else did, but it turned out to be the most significant financial decision I have ever made. It meant two things. By owning and paying off our own house we had cut our cost of living almost in half. We have been able to live on a modest salary, much of it from social security, because we didn’t need to pay for housing. The difference between the way I have been able to live for the last four years, traveling all over the world, is because I don’t pay for housing. Without a house I would be living in semi poverty. But this has been very slowly dawning on me. I bought a house in 1990 for the price of a good used car now. Without the house, with one financial debacle, I could easily be homeless, instead I am doing fine.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 