{"id":1495,"date":"2014-09-05T21:59:48","date_gmt":"2014-09-06T04:59:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/?p=1495"},"modified":"2014-09-06T06:52:49","modified_gmt":"2014-09-06T13:52:49","slug":"almost-giving-up-on-home-ownership","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/?p=1495","title":{"rendered":"(Almost) Giving up on Home Ownership"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After a half-year of keeping a close eye on the market, it&#8217;s becoming increasingly evident that housing available for purchase on Bainbridge Island breaks down to roughly three categories:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Large homes on large lots. More home and more lot than I could ever want or need, in fact.<\/li>\n<li>Condos built one atop another, typically in a brutally modernist style (which I dislike) and with all-electric kitchens (I strongly prefer to cook with gas).<\/li>\n<li>Townhomes of the sort I would like, but only a tiny number, demand vastly outpaces supply, and I have no interest in participating in a real-estate feeding frenzy that leaves me no time to do due diligence on my purchase.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>In short, nothing suitable seems to really exist. Maybe I&#8217;ll get lucky and find something, but it&#8217;s becoming increasingly clear that any such result depends on getting lucky, i.e. the odds do not favor it.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s really no rentals that have everything on my list, but that&#8217;s not so important for a rental, because rental housing doesn&#8217;t come with the long-term commitment that owned housing does. And there are rentals that have more of what I want than my current rental does. They&#8217;re pretty scarce, but one comes on the market about every quarter.<\/p>\n<p>So it&#8217;s looking increasingly like the Island is neither a short-term solution nor a long-term one but a medium-term one. That&#8217;s about what a better rental that still falls short of what I&#8217;d really like is worth.<\/p>\n<p>Still better than Seattle proper; each time I visit, my general impression of Seattle tends to be that I&#8217;m glad I escaped that mess, and this impression is particularly strong every time I have to contend with the freeway system there or think about what an onerous budget obligation Seattle is getting itself into with their multi-billion-dollar boondoggle of a highway tunnel under downtown.<\/p>\n<p>Not only will the latter cause taxes to be high (for something I didn&#8217;t want built in the first place), but the it will also sap the ability of Seattle to spend money improving its long-neglected mass transit infrastructure. So it seems inevitable that Seattle will continue to be lacking in what a city needs to be a livable place for me in the decades to come.<\/p>\n<p>Thus, despite the advantages of there being more social activities of interest (which does have its temptations), it&#8217;s still not the sort of place I&#8217;d wish to live.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After a half-year of keeping a close eye on the market, it&#8217;s becoming increasingly evident that housing available for purchase on Bainbridge Island breaks down to roughly three categories: Large homes on large lots. More home and more lot than I could ever want or need, in fact. Condos built one atop another, typically in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1495"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1495\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}