Do you know how hard it is to live without a computer?!

Happy New Year.
Apparently my New Year's Resolution is to get a new computer, considering it looks like an ordeal to fix the last one (which was hurting, and going painfully and slowly, what with the torn off control button and the sticky space bar).
But here I am, attempting to get back into the swing of the blogging life, we'll see how that goes (sans computer it feels like it's going to be impossible, what with the computer hog my husband is).
We've been wondering around San Diego looking for a new place to live, this has proven to take an inordinate amount of time, what with my husband's long list of things he needs. I need two things, a good location and a dishwasher, and really I could sacrifice the location for the dishwasher (I do not do dishes).

We walk around and call a lot of people, but San Diego landlords have this mentality like "yeah, I'll get to it when I get to it." Where's the rush of of competition, the shmoozing and the crazy "ooo, ooo, pick me, pick me?"

Apparently they left all that behind and went to the beach... I continue my phone calls.

Oh boo hoo, it's not just going to be rich people that can live in Downtown any more

Middle class people might be able to afford buying there too?! Oh the pain, the pain, the entire economy is so messed up and we're going to suffer, suffer! (Well, people who are buying houses are going to suffer and people who are building condos and hoping to price them really really high for sale are going to suffer and people who bought their condos when they were super high and now realize they probably weren't worth that much in the first place are going to suffer...)

But that group of people (ahem) who might have looked around going "I'll NEVER be able to afford some kind of place to live in San Diego, oh well" can now look around and say "wow, maybe it's not soooo out of reach after all, relatively, well still a little..." From Voice of San Diego:

In July 2005, a one-bedroom, one-bathroom condo in the Park Boulevard West building in downtown San Diego sold for $417,500. The unit, No. 1203, was repossessed when the owner failed to make mortgage payments. It sold again last month, this time for $268,000 -- a 35 percent price drop.

Our housing market might suck a little but it doesn't suck a lot.

So Dean Calbreath over at The Union Tribune writes his article about how our housing market isn't the worst it could be:

In a study released last week by the U.S. Council of Mayors, San Diego did not even make the Top 50 list of communities that will be hurt by the decline in home prices next year. In fact, it ranked 88th in a roster of 362 metropolitan areas nationwide. Which still puts us at the bad end of the scale, but nowhere near the worst.

And people run with it.

How's the San Diego real estate market doing? Not bad at all, according to a commentary article in the San Diego Union-Tribune, which purports that America's finest city is feeling better with regard to the real estate market than the rest of the country.

This prompts the question, who is Dean Calbreath, and what else is he the authority on that we can run with? Will he tell me what kind of tree I should get for Christmas? Will he let me know where the best cup of Hot Chocolate in San Diego is? Will he please let me know WHY it thinks it can rain in San Diego? Did Dean Calbreath sign off on the rain?!

Calbreath says: it's freaking expensive to live in SD.

Dean Calbreath from The Union Tribune says it's expensive to live in San Diego, not only that, but it's hard to find a "dream job" in the city as well. And to top it all off there has been a massive exodus out of San Diego because it's so hard to live here, what with no job and one of the highest median home prices in the country.

Over the past five years, far more people have moved out of San Diego than have moved in from other locales in the United States. (This doesn't include the continuing inflow of foreign immigrants, which is another story altogether.) According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there has been a net domestic outflow of more than 130,000 people leaving San Diego over the past six years.

Schweyer's poll found that when workers try to decide whether to relocate to another city, career and professional opportunities are usually the top concern – even higher than cost of living or housing. Which suggests that if we want to find buyers for those dream houses of ours, we might want to put more emphasis on creating the dream jobs that can afford them.

Living in San Diego is expensive

Buying a house is near impossible

I gave up on the whole buying a house thing quite a while ago, figuring it would happen when it happened and Oprah came to her senses and just GAVE me a bazillion dollars because I'm like the daughter she never had. My parents were renters; they rented all through my young life because it made sense to them until one day my Grandfather said "you're going to die someday and WHAT are your kids going to have to remember you by?" So my parents went and bought a house so we'd remember them. (I was PISSED because they didn't consult me first and let me pick it out, I was eleven.)

Anyway, they are trying to fix that whole mortgage, jumbo loan, oops I can't afford my now higher interest rates loan and I was supposed to be able to refinance but it's not working out and look I'm going in to foreclosure you bastards I just want to keep my house which is in VISTA because everything west of Vista is RIDICULOUSLY EXPENSIVE, problem. From Sign On San Diego:

Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke suggested Thursday that Congress allow mortgage buyers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy and hold mortgages worth as much as $1 million, shattering the current loan limit of $417,000. Until now, an effort to increase the limit hasn't emerged from the Senate, with some lawmakers and housing experts arguing that it would be the wrong move. And a federal agency could actually lower the amount that can be borrowed in a conforming mortgage in 2009.

Home buyers who purchase more expensive homes must get what are called “jumbo loans” or second mortgages, both of which carry higher interest rates. In places such as San Diego, where home prices are above the national average, buyers face higher costs because of the conforming-loan limit.

It's expensive to live here, but we love it any way (we are a glutton for real estate punishment apparently).