California dream

Yes. I can see Robin in California, even though my ideas about California come mainly from books and movies and a week I spent in San Francisco 15 year ago now. Not L.A., not anywhere in Southern California. There is a kind of quirkiness, a free-spirited quality and a concern for others about her that I associate with Northern California, with redwood forests and dramatic cliffs along the sea shrouded by fog. San Francisco. Organic farmstands and wine country and hybrid cars. I can see her there easily, living that life.

But it's just a dream. How can any normal person live in California these days? Real estate is so absurdly expensive that it makes even New York look cheap.
It's so nice here now, the fetid summer air giving way to gentle indian summer, and I walk around drunk with joy at the beauty of the streets, the old buildings and the things that they remember, the little architectural touches in each house, the funny things I overhear people on the street saying, the sidewalk restaurants. I think, I would happily stay here forever and never get tired of it. Except, of course, I can't afford it.Unless I win the lottery or the housing market collapses there is no way, even with jobs that pay fairly well, that we can buy an apartment. And I am not dreaming of a penthouse, or a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights or the West Village. I cannot afford 700 square feet in Cobble Hill.

The prices reflect the fact that lots of people find it nice here, feel they belong, just as I do. But I found myself wondering, why can't the market react and make more Brooklyns? If so many people want to live like this, why can't they? Why is new housing all faceless subdivisions? New Urbanism, sorry, is no match for the real thing.
And then I thought, Brooklyn is like that old-growth timber that was chopped down 150 years ago, fell to the bottom of lakes and rivers during transport, and is now being hauled to the surface at great trouble and expense because there is no wood like that in the world anymore today. The conditions that produced it no longer exist, any more than the conditions that produced Cobble Hill do.

Where you belong and what you can afford: two very different things. The solution, obviously, is to become very wealthy. Yet this isn't as simple as it sounds, or everyone would do it.