Movers and...Workers?

     At some point you may have entertained the thought of moving to a new place, whether to a new apartment or home or even to another part of the country.  But whether you rented or owned, and regardless of whether you wanted to move or were forced to move, you likely faced a price shock.  How much was the rent on that apartment?  Or was that all the homes that were available?   Said a piece in TIME: The median price for a house in the U.S. has climbed nearly 20%, while the mean price of a rental unit has jumped roughly 14%, according to a Zillow index (it notes that in Sunnyvale, a city just south of San Francisco, "...the median price of a midtier home exceeds $1.5 million; a one-bedroom apartment rents for an average of $3,330 a month.")  Said HUD (Housing and Urban Development) Secretary Marcia Fudge in the article: The housing crisis...is about much more than housing.  It’s about people no longer being able to live where the jobs are.  It’s about companies no longer being able to hire people to fill open positions.  And it’s about the damage done to America when buying a home—still the best way for a family to accrue generational wealth—becomes impossible for all but the already rich.  As if to add salt to the wound, data on Zillow (or Right Move in the UK) often shows that many of the properties now being listed were purchased just a few years ago at half the price.  For those just starting out, frustration is in the air.

    My wife and I have often considered the possibility of moving to a new place, this after over 30 years in our current home.  Nothing against our home since we actually enjoy it; but for some reason, we're being pulled to move somewhere else, perhaps because we've watched the traffic in our area grow more congested, the air grow more polluted, and the crowds growing larger just about everywhere, from grocery stores to hiking trails to restaurants and such.  But we know that should we decide to move, wherever that would be, it may prove to be the last time we'd do such a thing...so we'd best choose wisely (an underlying view may be that we didn't want the home we're in to be the place we'd take our last breath).  At first we pictured ourselves going overseas, our "tourists" eyes painting such places as New Zealand or the Cornish coast as ideal places for us to settle down.  But the reality was that spanning such a distance made moving a bit impractical.  Just the difficulty of finding a place when you're doing it remotely vs. physically being there, coupled with the thought of packing up our animals and whatever else we would take, not to mention the actual time spent moving out and in...plus the 12+ hours of flying overseas.   Phew, we grew exhausted just thinking about it.  So our sights shifted a bit...

     We considered places a bit closer, places such as Sedona, Arizona where we enjoyed much of the hiking.  But then we felt that if that was the only draw, then what would happen when we couldn't hike?  And besides, the place was getting "discovered," not only by tons of outsiders (which of course, included us) but by the mega-money, heavily gated & guarded communities that suddenly popped up at the end of a leisurely canyon drive (we're talking Dick Cheney sort of money; as an article in NY Books revealed about one such enclave in Wyoming where Dick Cheney has one of his residences: The average income for the top one percent in Teton County is $28.2 million a year, by far the highest of all the 3,114 counties in the United States...Most people have no conception of the refuges of the very rich, or of the places where the very rich have decamped to, with their wealth that piles up on them unstoppably, like the chocolates coming off a speeded-up conveyor belt in that episode of I Love Lucy.  The chocolates are piling up in Sedona, Arizona, and Hobe Sound, Florida, and Bozeman, Montana, and Big Sur, California, and Sisters, Oregon, and other scattered venues).  Let's see, an average yearly income of $28 million...uh, that's not us.  And then there was also the drought to consider, one plaguing the southwest in general, and if historical trends are any guide, that drought still has another 10 years in its pattern.

     So Sedona and its surrounding areas were out.  But after driving along the Oregon coast last fall, we couldn't hep but be reminded of what we loved about Cornwall, a wild ocean crashing below jagged cliffs, all lined by spectacular and sometimes accessible beaches.  But I remembered that I had also seen tsunami warning signs posted every few miles during our drive, which  made me think about the power of a tsunami, such power once described in an article in The New Yorker years earlier, one which wrote about the subduction zone that lies off the Oregon/Washington coast and how "the big one" was already some 50 years overdue: Said part of the piece: Those who cannot get out of the inundation zone under their own power will quickly be overtaken by a greater one.  A grown man is knocked over by ankle-deep water moving at 6.7 miles an hour.  The tsunami will be moving more than twice that fast when it arrives.  Its height will vary with the contours of the coast, from twenty feet to more than a hundred feet.  It will not look like a Hokusai-style wave, rising up from the surface of the sea and breaking from above.  It will look like the whole ocean, elevated, overtaking land.  Nor will it be made only of water—not once it reaches the shore.  It will be a five-story deluge of pickup trucks and doorframes and cinder blocks and fishing boats and utility poles and everything else that once constituted the coastal towns of the Pacific Northwest.  Yikes!  And here's what else I remembered...that the ocean water up that way was freezing!  So then where?  Tornado Alley?  Flooded islands?  The big blowout waiting at Mt. Shasta and Yellowstone?  

     The thought of moving to a place and living a life trying to outwit the natural forces (or fate, in a sense) was a bit like an exercise in futility, a gamble with geology.  My wife and I live on a fault line, an actual major fault line, and one which is also "overdue" to shift.  We've lived here for over 30 years.  But then if my wife and I are finding it difficult to find a place to move to, what about the millions of others?  We doubt that we could pay $3000 per month, much less pay that for an apartment (the average take-home pay for someone making $15 per hour, 40 hours per week, would be just over $2100 said the site Savvy Budget Boss...added Policy Advice: The average annual wage in 2019 in the US was $51,916.27, and the median annual wage was $34,248.45**...An estimated 63% of Americans say they live paycheck by paycheck since the coronavirus pandemic lockdown in March 2020.)  With that being the case, why are so many places advertising for workers?  Our local city is having trouble getting school bus drivers, even with a starting pay of $22 an hour...

     Remote work is here, and here to stay, said an article in Forbes: “There’s this clinging narrative of a ‘return to normalcy’ that many employers are holding onto, when in fact, the world of work will never truly return to the way it was before,” Ragu (Ragu Bhargava, CEO at Global Upside) said. “The pandemic revolutionized the workplace and expedited an already growing need for remote workers.  The pandemic served as a massive wake-up call, teaching us not only that work was more than capable of being completed from home, but showing the need for flexibility for employees to take control of their own schedules—a necessity for those with long commutes, pricey childcare arrangements and those who simply wanted to spend more time with their families.”  Sounds ideal, but who works the planes or the hospitals or the schools?  Said the New York Times: “It’s about overcoming the inertia that’s been built over a couple years,” said Mark Ein, the chair of Kastle Systems. “It’s going to be a very, very long time before you see return to the office at the same level as you’ve seen the return to other parts of life.”  And yet, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 24 million people quit their jobs between April and September of last year; 4.5 million more quit in November alone. 

     So, asked the NY Times again, are we simply lacking ambition?  Here's what Noreen Malone wrote in the piece: Recently, I stumbled across the latest data on happiness from the General Social Survey, a gold-standard poll that has been tracking Americans’ attitudes since 1972.  It’s shocking.  Since the pandemic began, Americans’ happiness has cratered.  The graph looks like the heart rate has plunged and they’re paging everyone on the floor to revive the patient.  For the first time since the survey began, more people say they’re not too happy than say they’re very happy...[said] the very first sentence of Richard Scarry’s “What Do People Do All Day?”: “We all live in Busytown and we are all workers.  We work hard so that there will be enough food and houses and clothing for our families.”  Work is mainly, really, about making money to live.  And then trying to make some more.  A boring, ancient story.  The future of work might be more like its past than anyone admits.

     So what IS going on?  How are people able to afford to quit when prices continue to climb?  Perhaps this workplace unhappiness is a matter of perspective, especially since the data shows that the economy, wages, and jobs are all way up from just a few years ago.  Wrote Bloomberg on March 16, 2022: ...it seems economics itself is ill equipped to answer why people are so down on the economy.  And therefore that makes it hard to judge policymakers on sentiment itself.  What we do know is that the labor market is booming, household net worth has absolutely soared, and inflation is running very hot.  For good or ill, this is not what anyone expected almost exactly two years ago, when the pandemic really began to hit the US.  Added another piece, again from Bloomberg: What do workers really want in a job?  The answer depends in part on where they’re from, according to a global survey from management consultant Bain.  Americans and Japanese demand a good salary and benefits above all else, but pay matters less to the French, who want interesting work.  Brazilian and Nigerian workers look for opportunities to learn, while those in Indonesia value a good relationship with co-workers.  Chinese jobseekers look for a company that inspires them, and Germans long for job security. 

    " ...my father actually needed nothing to be happy except books," wrote Jeanne Darst in her memoir, Fiction Ruined My Family: There was enough in literature to challenge, entertain, amuse and inspire a man for a lifetime.  Books and music were simply enough to sustain anyone was what he radiated.  Humor, love, tragedy, it was all contained therein.  And if all he needed was books, then he probably wouldn't mind if he lost the house and the wife and the whole life.  Because the story was more important than the family.  The story being that he was going to write the Great American Novel and finally be important, and in being important, he would be loved.  Willing to lose his family to be loved by his family.  Oh, the tragic blunder of this.  It could almost drive someone mad.  Wait, it did drive someone mad.

     For me, the inequality mantra is not so much about the Dick Cheneys and the 1% but is right here in the real world of finding jobs and a place to live.  For those quitting and deciding to follow their passion and to rebel against being treated like dirt, bravo; but at the end of the day the groceries still cost more and the bills are still coming.  For many in that world of barely making it, that means working more than one job, or both people working, or having to leave the kids with a family member, or cramming more than one person into a bedroom, or making do with carb-loaded food, or simply going hungry for more days than you expected.  My wife and I are comfortable and feel fortunate to have finished our working days relatively unscathed.  But we worry about the many others struggling to just make it or living on the edge (as my realtor/broker friend noted, so many people recently got such low mortgage rates that should a downturn happen, refinancing won't be an option).  If you've successfully cashed out or made money in the market, hats off to you.  But along with Ukraine and other events happening, it's a good time to think about those who may be struggling, maybe even those folks just down the street...tipping that Amazon delivery person or telling that person handing you your burger to keep the change may seem inconsequential but it may lead to a profound change in that person's day.  A smile and eye contact to an "everyday" person can bring as much hope as a check to a national charity.  

     Said Orion Jean in an interview in TIME: ...when the pandemic began, I saw a lot of things were happening, people were losing their jobs and losing access to food and homes and all of these essential things.  And I knew right then that I wanted to do something to help, but the opportunity actually came around when my teacher suggested that I enter into a speech contest.  And if I won the prize money that came with the contest, that means I could start a kindness initiative to help these people...The race to kindness is not just a series of events, but also a call to action.  It’s a way to get people involved in the community, you know, and when they see something happening now they can go out and do something about it...kindness is a choice and while we can’t force others to be kind, we can be kind ourselves and hope to inspire other people.  So many people have great ideas, but never act on them.  I think it’s all about really caring about the issues that you’re seeing.  Someone told me that you have to find something that breaks your heart for you to really get out there and make a difference in that area.  And I want others to know that they can start today.  If there’s an issue or problem or something that they see that they want to solve, all it takes is really just knowing deep down inside that it’s something you care about, and you can go out and get started.  Said one of TIME's editors, "We looked for the attributes we want to see more of in the world: determination, passion, kindness, bravery, and innovation."  This was what they saw not only in Orion but in children throughout the nation.  Orion is 11 years old...

*Okay, I got a little flack for mentioning pizzles in the last post, causing some to say well why not just come out with it?  And to that I would say that men don't care to talk or think about two things...their emotions and their privates.  Bravado and jokes aside, the thought of cancer or "dysfunction" is anathema to even the "toughest" male (yes, ED is so touchy a subject that such disfunction is spelled with a "y" which turns out to be the correct spelling; but then what's with the OBGYN label, a term that only entered general usage in the 1960s?).  So let me spare some of the never-admit-to-being-embarrassed men out there...this report on the prostate came from a doc, and a doc in Scotland no less.  And it's a good chance for us men to learn a bit more about how "down there" really works, at least on the inside.  Prostate cancer is no joke so if you're a man reading this, then read a bit further and check out the informative and educational article by Dr. Gavin Francis (which appeared in the NY Review of Books).

**Policy Advice explains the difference between "average" wages and "median" wages this way: The median wage is the wage “in the middle,” while average refers to the measure of central tendency for all the data.  There is a big difference between the average and median wage data. The average numbers are higher because the distribution of workers by wage is highly skewed.