JayB

I agree that it's not what you feel like you deserve, but what you can afford to pay that matters when determining where you'll live. I might feel as though I deserve a Manhattan penthouse and a Villa up at Whistler, but doubt I'd be able to parlay that sense of entitlement into a deed anytime soon. The striking thing to me wasn't the fact that there are people that have these feelings, but the fact that they were occuring in a couple with a combined earning power that's almost certainly north of $200K, who are looking for a starter home in Seattle. I think that's something new. But forget all of that!! Get busy and lasso yourselves into a neg/am, I/O, payment option ARM with substantial prepayment penalties and an auto-reset when the LTV hits 110%!!! Seattle needs way more "investment" property that rents for way, way, way less than the mortgage, taxes, and maintenance add up to. If we have to pay more than 1/3 of the real costs of ownership for a rental home in that town in '08 and thereafter I'm going to be seriously bummed.

"The economy hiccups and people are going to be walking away from their mortgages." Not that easy to walk away in the US anymore as a decreasing amount of mortgage debt in this country is of the non-recourse variety, and the bank can come after you for the difference between your loan value and what they can sell the property for. Even if they can't come after you for the debt, the IRS considers the amount of debt that the bank "forgives" taxable, so you're still on the hook for that. What's the law like in Canada?

Interesting post from a Seattle real estate blog. When a couple that includes an M.D., and an engineer with a graduate degree, with no children - can't buy something for what they think is a reasonable/justifiable price... Then it's clear that the YOY gains are just getting started!!!! Buy! Buy! Buy! " This blog is a clearinghouse for whiny twenty-nothings to vent their insecurities while waxing about things they vaguely understand...(blah, blah, blah) Am I such a whiny bastard that I feel that I should be able to afford a decent home in the city of my choice? I grew up in the Northwest. I've lived here all my life. I met the love of my life here in this city. You just don't get it. I WANT to live in Seattle. Get it? Not only that, we HAVE to. Why? Because my wife has the type of job (a Doctor!) that warrants us to live within 15 minutes of all hospitals within the Seattle metro area. She is on call almost every other day and gets paged constantly. She DOES NOT WANT to live in all the other areas you mentioned. I DON'T either. I'm an engineer who doesn't have the in-city living requirement, but damn it, if my wife is stressed out after working a 36 hour shift at Harborview, and if it means that living close can prevent endless hours of wailing and sobbing about life's miseries, then YES, I will pay that much extra to live in town. All we want is a decent section of area to lay our tired asses on after a hard day's work. But damn you if you think I'm gonna pay $749,950 for a piece of crap box that's been flipped by 2-3 investors from California who care NOTHING for this city, NOTHING for my town, NOTHING for the Northwest, and NOTHING for the beautiful gray skies and loving rain. And damn it, after earning a graduate degree in engineering and earning a very good salary from a prestigious company...after my wife working long, long, long, long hours as an undergraduate student, as a medical student and now as a medical resident...damn it, we deserve a starter home in Seattle! We've earned it! We deserve our piece of crap condo made of cheap composite materials with stainless steel appliances and granite counters. And damn it, we deserve it at an affordable price!!! And we ARE doing our best to save for a house (we're renting right now, of course), but we feel that after so much hard work, we shouldn't have to break our backs just to support our first home. We don't even have any kids yet! How can we afford to? You must be the type of person that thinks only the rich should live in the city. What a bunch of crap! I hope to God Seattle wakes up from this greed-induced real estate mania. "

I would expect that to be the case, but do you have any statistics or case study anslysis of any kind? Nope. I heard that our salutatorian - from a very strict, controlling home - lasted all of six months into her full-ride gig at SU before dropping out and hitting the pole for a living, but I believe that this was an exageration. Mostly just an observation on my part that most of the people who took to partying and/or ho-ing as a lifestyle seemed to have come from environments where they didn't have much control over their lives or choices. Authoritarian and permissive parenting styles both seem to be pretty disastrous.

The overmanaged types didn't seem to fare that well in general once the leash came off in college.

Maybe you could send a note to all the mom's and dad's out there and let their kids walk to school and generally screw around outside getting some exercise instead of managing their time with 'activities'. That and maybe let them ride the bus to school or ride their bikes. I've had my fill of almost getting t-boned by hurried parents who feel they ALL have to drive little Bratleigh and Snotleigh to school. I've wondered about this phenomena myself. I walked or rode a bike to school from about 3rd grade on, and rode my bike to my friends' houses from about 1st grade on, sans helmet - and my folks were hardly cavalier about this stuff. I was probably more at risk then than kids are today on a number of fronts, but other than the "don't talk with strangers" rule I pretty much had free range in the neighborhood and the surrounding woods. We also spent a bunch of time fishing in the local creek or tubing down it, building forts, making fires, etc - all delightfully free of parental supervision. In one article that I read, the article suggested that the tendency of today's parents to overprotect their kids had less to do with the real risks that the kids face than the parents trying to compensate for their own shortcomings. E.g. "Maybe I hardly ever spend any time with you, your mother/father is no longer in the house, and I pretty much let the TV raise you when I am around, but...at least I've saved you from the one-in-a-few-dozen million chance that you'll be abducted by a stranger by implanting the kid-cam and the GPS unit." It'll be interesting to see how this affects the kids when they become adults.

I love the ranking of Finland on that list, BTW. My eldest sister lived there for a year in the late 80's, and at the time it was common practice for mothers to leave their babies out on the sidewalk in their strollers/buggies while they shopped (while the weather was nice). They were apparently horrified when my sister told them that virtually no one in the US would ever consider leaving their babies outside in a buggy for fear that they'd be kidnapped or harmed in some way, or that passer's by would become alarmed for the baby's safety and contact the police immediately.

BTW - did you even look at the countries on the list before posting? New Zealand, Finland, and Denmark have interesting rankings relative to, say, Zimbabwe.

Interesting stats. Are total reported crimes really a proxy for safety, or a better indicator of a society capable of maintaining records, with a relatively capable policeforce, and a society which has some faith in the said police force and feels like reporting something to the police is not a complete waste of time? Might be worth taking another look at these rankings and imagining yourself strolling around the streets with a 3/4" gold chain around your neck. Do you really think that you'd be safer strolling around the average neighborhood in Jamaica than in Denmark? That there's really 15.5 times as much crime per capita in Canada than in Columbia? The US is definitely not the safest place in the world, but the overwhelming majority of the country is very safe, and even in the rest of the country the odds are good that if you neither join a street gain nor deal drugs your odds of getting murdered are actually quite low, and if you do get murdered it'll probably be at the hands of someone in your family rather than by a stranger. The safest places in the world are probably prosperous, mono-ethnic nation states like Norway or Japan, but even though we'll probably never see anything like that kind of tranquility here, I hardly think that the average US citizen needs to be living in fear either.

"Violent crime rates declined since 1994, reaching the lowest level ever recorded in 2004." The recorded occurence of pretty much every sort of violent crime has been decreasing, even as the total percantage of crimes committed reported to the police has been increasing. Hard to argue that things are getting worse.

I'd go one step further and toss out the conjecture that the US has become progressively safer, both in terms of the probability of surviving accidents and disease, and in terms of being attacked by another person. The major exception to this rule is people who are engaged in the drug trade in some fashion or another. I think that we have it pretty easy compared to just about everyone else in the world, or in history, and that's doubly true for just about everyone living in or around Seattle.

If you are bringing along a lightweight insulating jacket - which is a good idea IMO - the jacket plus the synthetic bag should be sufficient, and the fact that it's smaller is another plus.

I'm just trying to spread the gospel, brother. After all, "They're not making anymore land!" The Japanese - no stranger to land shortages - can attest to the fact that "They're not making anymore land!" has resulted in consistent appreciation, irrespective of any trivialities like trend wage-growth, etc.

There's plenty of down here - bet you downloaded some last night not so much breeding unless you hablar. We're like a cancer, Oregon's been infected, soon it will be gone Reproduction is inversely proportional to the median home value in this country. Who needs kids when you can wallow in the sublime fulfillment offered by debt-financed granite countertops, stainless fridges, bamboo floors, and...your very own...yoga room. Get that 50 year I/O, neg-AM, option ARM for 10X your combined full-time incomes and lock that sucker in before it's too late.

If you've got a half bag and a mid-weight insulating jacket, along with some kind of insulating pad and a bivy sack of some sort you should be ready to handle 95% of the weather you'd see on Stuart this time of year. If you've got a lightweight (+35-40F) full bag that would work well in conjunction with the rest of the stuff as well. Coming from the NE, I assume that you already have a bug head-net, but if not - pick one up and bring it along if you'll be bivvying. I bivvyied at that notch in late July and once dusk arrived the mosquitos were absolutely insane. Like Hitchcock Movie Insane. Without the bug-net I doubt I would've slept at all, which would have made the following day much less enjoyable. Good luck and have a good time.

Listen to her: "If cars evoke who we are today — SUV's for the hip and fertile, Buicks for the conservatives and mini-Coopers for the aspiring gazillionaires — houses are being built to reflect who we aspire to be. We hope someday to be the hobbyist puttering around the hobby room or the fitness buff splayed on a yoga mat in the garden room. We want to be the grande dame gliding down the winding staircase to greet a guest in the two-story foyer. And thanks to the miracle growth of real estate, many of us can. The aphorism that a rising tide lifts all boats is a principle at work here. People are using equity in existing homes to move up. Median home prices in King County shot up 16 percent last year. Try to mimic that on Wall Street." URL And not these guys: Missive From the Realm the Evil Number People You'll be helping me out.

I bet the players are stoked that they'll be getting to spend quite a bit of their time in Oklahoma City. Wonder if the local tire shops are stocking up on 22" spinners in anticipation...

You are not alone. "Massachusetts lost residents for the second year in a row..." Story Looking forward to making my own addition to these numbers.

The city should put a lien on the team so that anyone who buys one of the sports teams has to pay off the outstanding debt on the stadiums that they play in first. I'd love to see an analysis of the populist retardonomics that people used to support public funding for professional sports facilities. The Public's ROI on these stadiums will make people who stayed long on pets.com to the bitter end seem like guru's by comparison.

Sickness. That descent must have been quite the gut-churner. I'll have to cross that route off of my tick-list (Ha Ha). Serious question - how many of the major buttresses have been climbed? Maybe one of the walking databases that post on this site could draw the existing routes on the photo.

Killer photos. Thanks for sharing.

The Big Dig is a tremendous engineering feat in a lot of ways, but should also serve as a cautionary tale for Seattleites trying to figure out the best way to fix the viaduct/seawall problems. I'm not sure what the standard is for installing bolts that will secure heavy, suspended loads is, but some MIT civil engineering profs that they interviewed on TV seemed to think that it was kind of startling that the bolts didn't screw into metal plates embedded in the concrete. If it all works out I'll leapfrog from the greatest traffic cluster in history (here) to what promises to be a close second (there) in '08.

http://www.bigpharaoh.com/

Old Dog-Induced-Tension story below: "This reminds me of a day I spent at Turkey Rocks a couple of years ago. A group of climbers hitched their dog to a tree near the path that everyone had to follow on their way out, and - without fail - the dog reared back, growled, and lunged at each and every person unfortunate enough to pass by. Sometimes it actually lept off of the ground and got whipped around by the kneck when the leash came tight. Yet, the owners continued to insist that the dog was "friendly" and would "never just bite someone ." Perhaps they meant that it would never merely bite someone, preferring instead to latch onto their flesh and whip its head back and forth like a Moray eel on crank. This continued until one fellow decided it was time to go home. He was a very pleasant and affable guy, despite being built like a cross between Howie Long and George 'The Animal' Steel. He had been climbing elsewhere and had yet to see the dog in action, and obliviously strolled towards the lunge zone on his way back to the car. What followed was only noteworthy for the sheer spectacle of watching scores of millenia worth of evolution reverse directions in a millisecond. The guy didn't seem to take much notice of the low rumble emmanating from behind the bush, but when the dog hurled itself towards its next target, this guy turned the predator-prey dynamic squarely on its head and lunged towards the dog with one choking-hand extended towards its throat and one spam-block sized fist cocked atop an arm purpose built for skull-crushing, all the while bellowing out a roar that sounded like a silverback gorilla's kill signal amplfied by a speaker tower at a Motorhead concert for the deaf. In the same instant, the dog that was playing the part of the untamed Ur-canine just a few minutes before recoiled in mid-leap, let out a yelp that would shame a show-poodle in a grooming salon, and attained the head-down-with-fully-tucked-tail cower position before even hitting the ground. Upon arriving on the soil, the dog scuttled behind a tree and continued cowering and yelping incessantly while intermittently pissing itself as the primate looming several feet away continued to alternate between -literally - pounding its chest and roaring out some inspired, theat-laden profanity "I - (POUND) - WILL - (POUND) - RIP - (POUND) - YOUR - (POUND) -MOTHER- (POUND) -F&^%ing - (POUND) - HEAD -(POUND)- OFF (POUND) -AND - (POUND) *&^%ING (POUND) EAT (POUND) - IT - (POUND) RAW (POUND)...[etc]" This carried on for at least 20 seconds. It must be true what they say about dogs and their owners sharing a common psychological profile, as the blase indifference, casual dismissals and occaisional snicker (seriously) that had characterized while their previous responses evaporated, and they looked on in mute shock when the tables were turned, and it was they who were worried about their companion being injured by a violent animal. After they had finished cowering, pissing themselves, and yelping to one another they finally moved their dog away from the main pedestrian throughfare, and the other climbers were able to hike out without any further incident. "

The main source of tension I've seen has actually been people's dogs.