Housing Prices & Cost of Living Adjustment

Yesterday I returned to Washington. The cost of everything skyrocketed the moment our plane smacked tarmac, so later tonight I will resume skulking the streets of Georgetown clutching a scalpel and bottle of ether to try and eek out my Netflicks subscription through pilfered kidneys.

My last article used beer as a microcosm for determining the living expense of a city, but booze is actually an incidental factor. (Even in Washington DC, which is a town so thronged with alcoholics that “not drinking” constitutes a form of exercise.) No, the major factor in America’s marbled swamp, as with all the world’s premium metropoli, boils down to housing costs.

Let’s examine the housing costs of various cities together, from cheapest to exorbitant.

Monthly Rent: $300

Oklahoma – For $300 a month you’ll need to find a roommate, but can live in a reasonably nice duplex in an okay part of town. If you add one or two friends, the collective rent money is more than enough to secure a lovely house with large bay windows and multiple bathrooms. You can probably even find a place with one of those old-timey standing bathtubs with feet.

Los Angeles – I lived in a tool shed behind my best friend’s house in Los Angeles for half a year at a cost of $300 per month. Do note it was a nice tool shed– it had wood laminate flooring and the walls painted a soft, pastel yellow, so that it felt kind of like living inside of an Easter egg. I had full access to the nearby house’s kitchen and other amenities, but to be perfectly frank saw no reason to walk all the way to the house most evenings just to take a leak.

Washington DC – If you’re willing to pay $350 a month you can probably afford to live by yourself underneath a bridge in Fairfax, Virginia. You can lop off a further $100 if you choose a bridge with a mythical troll already living there. And by “troll,” of course, I mean meth head.

New York City – Cardboard box. (This does not include utilities.)

Monthly Rent: $850

Oklahoma – My so-called friend Paige once lived in a duplex below this price range, which included a master bedroom and a fireplace facing her queen-sized bed, a living room, a bathroom, a walk-in closet, a porch, and an upstairs studio/guest bedroom, along with a mysterious door she never fully explained and is still a little shifty about when questioned.

In Oklahoma for $850 a month you can rent an entire house, all for yourself. This would include the accoutrements described above, with the added bonus of no adjoining wall to share with neighbors. So you could rock out to your Pandora station as loud as you want, and if you’re planning on murdering anyone the screams would be less detectable. Plus you’d have your own lawn out back to hide the body and evidence in. The backyard would double as a good site for barbecues in warmer months, too.

Washington DC – I pay about this much to live in Washington in a windowless bedroom which has, coincidentally, the exact same dimensions as my mother’s walk-in-closet, were she to remove her arsenal of shoes. My two roommates pay even more exorbitant bills, as their rooms are larger and have access to natural light.

New York City – For $850 a month you can live in a “group house,” which sounds like some kind of altruistic government program designed for off-kilter people trying to find jobs sticking labels on boxes. Group houses were all fairly ritzy at some point in the 1830’s, but have since been subdivided into seven separate apartments each, most of which are inhabited by welfare cases and hordes of molting cats.

Monthly Rent – $1000

Oklahoma – A single person renting anything for $1000 in Oklahoma is unheard of. For $1000 a month I’m reasonably confident you could buy an entire floor in a rotating restaurant, so that your panoramic view would continually swivel around the horizon like a glorious LP record with furniture on the inside. You would have enough money left over to decorate the entire thing in the style of a wealthy villain from a James Bond movie. (I frequently fantasize about this domestic scenario when I return home to my lightless self-styled “oubliette” in DC.)

Washington – For this price your bedroom would be slightly larger than my own urban bear cave, only with windows affording a decent view of the gun violence outside.

New York – I haven’t the foggiest about $1000 worth of lodging in New York. I suspect you will have a very nice, spacious apartment, utterly negated by ten to twelve interns or college students crammed into their own $1000 room, most of whom ingeniously construct living quarters by hanging shower curtains around inflatable mattress to create the illusion of privacy.

Synopsis: Cows make housing less expensive

Housing costs grow exponentially more expensive the further a residential area moves away from cows. Cows seem to be the linchpin in this formula: the more cows pooping near your home, the saner your property taxes will be.

The obvious solution, of course, is to let cows wander around downtown cities wherever they want, in order to lower housing costs. This is what they do in India. If you’ve noticed brightly colored cow statues adorning street corners in cities around the world, it is a virtual certainty that urban planners strategically placed them there to try and bring the average apartment rent back down to sub-astronomical levels. They’re kind of like financial scarecrows.

The other trick we conjured up to make housing affordable were these two things called “Fannie Mae” and “Freddie Mac.” I won’t go in depth about them here. Suffice it to say that, in light of the 2008 sub-prime mortgage loan crisis and subsequent economic fallout, my strategic urban cow grazing program would probably have worked out better.