[Kzyxtalk] [MCN-Announce]- It would be interesting to count how many people are in need of housing.

[Marco McClean]

On 7/4/2018 4:30 PM, Derek wrote:
 > No kidding, houses costing Peanuts now go for Brazil Nuts and 
Filberts, leaving Ca$hews out of the equation, it's absolutely... nuts. 
Derek -

That sounds right, Derek. When I came to Fort Bragg in 1979 I stayed 
with my then-girlfriend Julie in the garage of a mutual friend's house 
for two weeks until we rented a house out Highway 20 for $200/month. 
(Three days after I got to the coast I went to town expecting to get a 
job and just got one.) In 1982 I moved to a giant apartment in half of 
the downstairs of an old house at the T of Caspar Road and Caspar Street 
and paid $40/month (!) rent, and that included electricity. There was a 
contract with the gas company that amounted to about $15 a month for gas 
for the stove and water heater. The neighbor in the other half of the 
downstairs used to let his gas run out and just walk in and use my bath. 
I put in a $50 tin Lizzy sheetmetal woodstove and burned about $50 of 
firewood per winter. Those stoves lasted a couple of years and then 
burned through, and you just went to Rossi's and got another one.

A couple of years into that the rent went up a little, to $70/month. In 
1985 I moved next door into a whole house that was $150/mo. at first but 
went to $200/mo. That was the ancient little pink house across from the 
Caspar Inn. Tim Givon and I got /that/ close to winning a license to put 
up a noncommercial-commercial radio station there. We did all the work, 
paperwork, engineering, surveying, correspondence, everything, we were 
sure of it, and at the last minute they gave the frequency instead to a 
man who paid a Washington D.C. law firm like $20,000 to grease his 
application through, so go figure.

Tim moved back east. I met Juanita in late summer, 1986. In 1988 we got 
married. In 1992 the landlord told me he'd be tearing down the house to 
replace it, so Juanita and I moved to a trailer up Little Lake Road, 
then to Albion, and in 1998 Juanita moved to Rohnert Park for a job in 
San Rafael and I've been doing one week on the coast and one week at 
Juanita's ever since. I'm not making much more money than I was in 1980, 
and everything and every place costs /way/ more now. Also, back then I 
never bothered to insure the shitty disposable old cars I bought for a 
few days' pay, fixed up as well as I could and drove till they died 
--six months, a year, a couple of years each. They'd put a fresh set of 
four recap tires on your car at Coast Tire And Recapping for $60. And 
there's a whole raft of expenses now in fresh categories no-one had 
then. All the overlapping and interlocking projects so many creative 
people accomplished then were only possible because living was cheap and 
easy, the way it could be still if not for the entitled Nice People and 
the real estate racket.

Carol Root, who edited/typeset the Mendocino Peddler and Commentary 
until 1989, lived from the middle 1970s in a converted chicken house in 
Little River with an outhouse down a path behind it. Her bathtub was 
outside too, on rocks in a patch of plants in the sun, next to the front 
door. She heated the bathwater by building a little fire under the tub; 
there was an air channel and a little chimney to take the smoke away 
from the foot end. She told me once that she paid $25 a month for rent. 
She was living in Heaven and she knew it, and she didn't begrudge anyone 
else living in Heaven too.

And now that the whole coast has become a giant upscale retirement 
community, it strikes me as funny when baby boomers who brought their 
comparatively vast elsewhere-derived fortunes here, and drove living 
prices into the stratosphere, complain bitterly about others 
indistinguishable from them in the minutest detail potentially rocking 
their golf-course-like manicured seaside neighborhood and serene golden 
years with a Saturday afternoon fish fry and a skiffle band, good cause 
or scam, who cares?

Even funnier when it turns out to be a false alarm, as it just did with 
the threat of a South Caspar imported-abalone porta-potty-henge. And the 
spectral standing porta-potties bear witness, to paraphrase Robin 
Williamson.

That reminds me. Here, hear this. Five Denials on Merlin's Grave (14 min.):
https://tinyurl.com/5Denials

--
Marco McClean
memo at mcn.org
https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com