My partner Cynda Green sometimes offers editorial suggestions regarding my essays here in the Daily Post, and yesterday morning, she expressed some rather urgent concerns. She felt uncomfortable with my editorial referencing “Declining Ovulation Rates” in its title, and then right away discussing a Thingamajig Theatre “Mamma Mia!” rehearsal.
The two topics clearly did not belong in the same article, she felt.
I can imagine other readers may have experienced a similar sense of disorientation. Yes, it might at first seem like too much of an intellectual leap, to see a connection between wine & cheese parties, mule deer reproduction rates and the lack of work force housing in Archuleta County. But rest assured — it’s all part of the same messy soup, when you take a holistic view of the universe. The topic of ovulation rates among our mule deer populations in Archuleta County had indeed come to the fore at that very Thingamajig event on May 21, during my chat with master gardener Ron Chacey during a break in the theatre activities. During our conversation, Ron happened to bring up the fact that deer and other wildlife can experience a reduced ovulation rate when food is scarce.
It’s just the way nature works.
Our brief chat had begun with my question about his gardening lecture, held earlier that same day at the Riverpointe Coffee Cafe and sponsored by the Pagosa Springs Community Gardeners:
How to develop soil for vegetable gardening.
Ron mentioned that he’s constantly experimenting with planting times and vegetable types. I suggested that I — for one — would like to learn more about vegetables that are deer-resistant. Ron smiled, and suggested a visit to a gardening blog (like, for example, this one) to learn more about that subject. He then noted that last year, during our very dry 2018 season, the deer were nibbling on pretty much everything in his garden.
“They were even eating the onions.”
He surmised that the fawns born last year during the drought were ‘taught’ to eat anything-and-everything that was even marginally edible, and that the fawns likely developed a taste for garden vegetables not normally touched by mule deer, thus learning eating patterns likely to stay with them for their entire lives. As the result of beginning their lives during a drought, when mere survival depended upon eating whatever foods were available, this generation of fawns might someday — when they eventually become parents themselves — ‘teach’ their own children to eat onions.
And that next generation of fawns might, one day, teach their children to do the same. And so on.
The thought came to me, later on, that I was likewise taught by my parents to eat a certain diet, based on the foods that were available — and affordable — in California’s Bay Area. (My parents were unable, however, to convince me to eat fried eggplant, or overcooked broccoli.)
After leaving home, I went through a lengthy phase of being vegetarian — something my parents found concerning, especially when I started raising my own children on a vegetarian diet. My mother assured me of unfortunate results, if my children didn’t drink a glass of milk at every meal.
Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, we were also taught by our parents about real estate, and home ownership, and concepts around ‘private property.’ In my own case, my parents had purchased a ‘cracker box’ suburban home in 1954, via a low-interest mortgage loan program created by the G.I Bill — officially, the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, created to help veterans of World War II. That particular federal law established hospitals, made low-interest mortgages available to vets, and granted stipends covering tuition and expenses for veterans attending college or trade schools. From 1944 to 1949, nearly 9 million veterans received close to $4 billion from the bill’s unemployment compensation program.
My parents purchased our little suburban house for about $11,000 and enjoyed it for about seven years before moving back into the big city — Oakland — to eliminate Dad’s stressful freeway commute to his teaching job. The four-bedroom house in the Oakland hills cost my parents about $20,000, also funded with a low-interest G.I loan.
I cannot recall, while growing up, hearing my parents talk about our house as an “investment” — as something expected to grow in value and provide a future profit. Mom and Dad didn’t generally subscribe to the “buy-low-sell-high” mentality. The way I understood home ownership, the way I was taught — by my parents’ actions and conversations — was that a house was meant to be a home, and you maintained it and cared for it, not to make a future profit, but simply to have a warm, safe dwelling place. This was not an uncommon belief, back in the mid-20th century. Americans in general purchased and maintained houses with a primary intention to use them as the family’s dwelling, rather than buying them as real estate investments. And the housing market reflected those intentions. You bought a house to live in, not to make a profit.
I also learned that many people in America never earned enough money to purchase a home of their own, and some of them lived in public housing ‘projects.’ These often-massive apartment buildings were generally built in core urban areas, were typically poorly maintained by the government agencies in charge, and were sometimes infested with criminal activities.
My family never lived in a ‘project.’ With the help of the federal government, we were able to own our home and yard, even on a school teacher’s salary.
I shared the following graph a couple of weeks ago. It was created for a Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas report on comparative housing costs around the industrialized world. The authors came up with illustrative graphs showing the approximate progress of housing prices in 14 different countries, measured in Real Prices. That is to say, home prices adjusted for inflation.
The report included 14 graphs, with some obvious similarities. Here’s the graph for the US; our average home prices in the year 1990 is indexed at “100.” This graph runs from 1890 through 2012; the gray bars indicate World War I and World War II.
According to this research, the “Real” price of a house in the US changed very little between 1950 and 1995. During that long pause, ‘nominal’ home prices increased, but the increases were correlated with the rate of inflation. In other words, during this period of our history, most Americans were not trying to make a profit on their “investment.” They were selling their homes, in “Real” terms, for about the same dollar value they had paid out in the first place.
Then, after 1995, we saw a sudden and dramatic rise in home prices, far greater than the inflation rate, peaking in 2006 at about 4 times the relative price of a home in 1890. Finally, the Great Recession drove prices down, to almost the same level as 1990, the “index” year.
By 2005, my parents were having difficulty climbing the stairs, to their upstairs bedroom. They realized that they could no longer manage — or afford — to maintain a mostly-empty, four-bedroom house… and they put that big, old house on the real estate market.
They were utterly amazed at how much their house was now worth.