American Dream

I took this picture about a month ago, and it wants to be posted, rather than passed by like hundreds of others that don't make it to the light of day. I feel I sometimes neglect the residential face of Willits.

Home ownership has long been held up as the ideal in a stable American-style democracy. Over the last twenty years, the prices put on property grew so disproportionately compared to the only slight growth in ordinary salaries, that only people who already had equity in a house before that period could safely leverage that value to move to something bigger and better. Anyone trying to step into the market stream after that, had to find "no money down" options to finance ridiculously inflated price tags on something even as simple as this little blue cottage. People now lament the "wealth lost" by folks in the first category, but forget the impossible position of folks in the second category, who now face forclosure.

Perhaps as the next ten years unfold, the phrase "affordable housing" won't strike fear in the hearts of "nice" neighborhoods, and housing development models can be imagined and built to include everyone. And now turn to #225 in your hymnal...