an unmoveable feast

my beloved home state of california is becoming a very expensive place to live.  my own burg is seeing rents rise to incredible levels.  i don't know how young people can do it.

anna & i rented our first apartment in 1994.  the rent for a one bedroom/one bath flat with built-ins in midtown was about 500 smackers.  today that same flat rents for around 1700 smoleans.  midtown in the mid-90s was not a hip place to live but we loved the neighborhoods of midtown because they were older, urban, & as i said above, the apartments often had wonderful features like built-in architectural details like cabinets, shelving, & murphy beds.  a whole lot of charm was to be had for pretty cheap.  of course, our first place had crappy old skool knob & tube wiring.  we always had to replace old fashioned 1920s era tubes to the fuse box.  it was a great place.  i loved it.  our second place was also in midtown.  our third place, our house, we bought in east sac but our house is on the edge of midtown.  we fell in love with the old skool charms of an urbanized environment.

however, midtown has exploded in popularity.  lots of young, cool, hip people moved in.  the rents & house prices have risen accordingly.  these are not bay area prices, yet, but they are approaching critical mass.  & yet, when i read an article today about the unaffordability of the bay area for younger poets & artists i thought, come to sac.  my town is still relatively affordable.  culture does not rest on geography but on the people that inhabits it.  we make it as we see it.  i admit that i am a born & bred sac boy.  but i got no stake in the game.  sac also has its bigger city problems like horrible traffic.

i would love to see more younger poets & artists setting up a life in creativity in my beloved city.  still, i know that california is an expensive place to live.  how does that bode for the future of our artists & our culture[s]?

or our people?  the number of homeless persons is rising.  every day i seem to see even more tents lining freeway off ramps.  that is not happening only in california but in the rest of our nation.  what shall we do?

what shall we do about the rising costs of housing in our society?  i don't have any answers.  the causes for our problems are deep & systemic.  still, if i can risk being a booster, california is my favorite place in the world, & sacramento is the best place to live in a populous state.  i say to the younger poets & artists who can no longer afford the steep housing costs of the bay area, & southern california, come to sac.  midtown is a great place to live, work & create.  the rents & housing costs are going up up up.  but they ain't so bad that you can't afford to live here.  the weather is fantastic [summers can be brutal with triple-digit temperatures, but hey, i hardly hear from a booster of NYC that it snows in the city & the summers are hot, rainy, & humid; all of that, to me, is miserable!].

tho i do wonder in the near future when young creatives can log-on & skype their ways to a community.  what need of place, then?  still, we will always need a place to live & buy our groceries.  we shall desire a place to have our first, second our forever dates.  romance & the work of the world begins & ends in a physical place.  you can log-on for our virtual tour of any place on earth nowadays but to breathe the air & feel the street under your feet can never be replaced.

i don't know.  i see all kinds of housing being built as i walk thru my city, but these housing are meant for the affluent, not the penurious poet.  it would seem that california is no longer a moveable feast.

no?