Confused about the million dollar+ houses and the supposed "upper-middle" class factor associated with it (Boston: upper-class, low crime)

[brightdoglover]

I did think you could get a decent 3-bed house in Arlington or Wakefield for up to $500K. Maybe not a new big box "colonial," but certainly not a dumpola.
In my town of Littleton, you could get the new house (with some nice features and a half-acre) for that and less.

[professorsenator]

For the record, $500K will still buy a nice, roomy house in safe, quiet outer southwest 'burbs like Norfolk and Franklin that have good (not great, but quite good) public schools. If you work downtown, your commute would almost have to be by train, but commuting to spots on 128 via car is doable from these places.

[Concepts]

Yes, and $300,000 will buy a decent, smallish starter home in a decent town with decent schools.

There are still plenty of affordable properties out there. Some may be on a busy road, some may need some repairs, it may not be the home of ones dreams. It isn't necessary to pull in a $200,000 salary to afford a home here.

Yes, it would next to impossible to live in Concord and Lexington. I'd love to live there but I can't. It's like one of us moving to CA and not understanding why we can't afford to live in Malibu or Santa Barbara. It just isn't going to happen.

[syracusa]

Originally Posted by littleimp

I see people who live in these big houses, the women stay home, etc. and I have no idea how they do it.

So my thread is not dead yet.

Granted, threads with uncomfortable questions die uncomfortable deaths. What a concept. When I started this thread I MEANT to give it un uncomofortable title, I guess I didn't have anything better to do (such as working on career-friendly publications that might raise my odds of finding a job in MA from 0.0000% to 0.0001%).

Such titles often "strike a cord" and then you "hear" people fidgeting unpleasently from a distance, taken aback that you even DARE to ask such a question. "Hey Miss, stay in your place, there is an army and a soldier out there, way better qualified than you are who are not even "there" yet, so why would YOU expect such goodies?".

If you ask them "there, where?" and "define goody", the sparks start flying. The painful part is that such discussions have extremely complex and yes, higly upsetting systemic roots, and your average poster wants things kept simple and pinky, along the lines of "if you worked as hard as those other people" ...

In my field, for example, I concluded that I may have to get another PhD (the "latest and the greatest" new hires have two, by the way), have 60 articles and 20 books published by the time I get ready to apply, and oh, yeah, switch maybe to a lucrative field by grabbing a professional degree on the way too, all while raising two perfect children ready to join the little Rat-Race with runners having their alphabet and numbers figured out by the time they are 3 mo. Otherwise, how in the world are they going to survive in MA's "excellent" schools?

Then it folllows like this: you get the acrimonious snap-replies implying that you are a snob and an elitist, or alternatively an idiot, a sour grape or a naive ball of bitterness (did not happen on this forum, it happened on another one, where the TRUE SNOBS live and fight).

Here is the deal: I am a relatively traditional person by contemporary standards, born and raised in a traditional culture that is now changing at a furious pace to keep up with the 21st century Madness. I often pray that people there wake up and start resisting it somehow, but it might take a while and a miracle.

I should specify that by "traditional" I do not mean anything close to the American right wing nuttery, in reality the most virulent enemy of tradition. When I say traditional I mean living a life guided by time-tested wisdom and common-sense, as opposed to the "latest and the greatest".

I have seen, and lived in a different world - so I experienced an alternative to what western contemporaries know about life. One million books read or even written about "traditional cultures" or "different socio-economic systems" amount to a glorious ZIPO compared to lived experience.

You said:

<I see people who live in these big houses, the women stay home, etc. and I have no idea how they do it>

And all I can tell you is this:

I am not sure you are supposed to HAVE an idea.
Ferdinand Lundberg's superb but now obscure classic offers the best answers yet. IMHO.

PS: I like beer just fine. But beer is not the point because beer itself is scarce nowadays.

[syracusa]

<For the record, $500K will still buy a nice, roomy house in safe, quiet outer southwest 'burbs like Norfolk and Franklin that have good (not great, but quite good) public schools. If you work downtown, your commute would almost have to be by train, but commuting to spots on 128 via car is doable from these places>

Professorsenator,

Would you mind if I kindly asked you to capture, in just a few words, what might be the difference between "great schools" (such as the ones in Newton) and "good/decent" schools?

What does it mean "decent" nowadays in MA? Thanks a lot, I am trying to get a better idea beyond official ranking systems...(since this thread just won't die).

[texman70]

Hello,

First time poster here but I felt compelled to write since my situation is so similar to the original poster. We moved here from Texas 4 years ago and just bought our first home here last year. We did manage to buy a home in Newton for just under 500,000 with 5% down. Its not a large single family colonial, all shiny and new. We purchased a 4 bedroom home that is the 2nd and 3rd floor of a 2 family victorian. It was completely renovated and it has plenty of room for us and our 2 children. There are a few minor inconveniences that you get used to quite easily like not a lot of electrical outlets, an average size kitchen, no central air, etc. We have a small back yard that has enough room for our children to play. My wife and I have a combined income of about 135000. So it can be done. Now we don't live extravagant lives. We drive used cars that are paid for, we have no credit card debt or any debt other than the mortgage. We save for retirement and for our childrens' college. We have a little less disposable income than we had in Texas, but we believe the quality of life here is worth it. What is confusing to me is when people post on here that they can't buy a 500,000 house comfortably on a 200,000 salary. I guess its all relative.

In short, if you are patient and wait for the right opportunity and are willing to accept you can't have the mcmansion that you can have in Atlanta, I think you will find a home where you can be happy in the areas you are looking for.

[Cato the Elder]

Originally Posted by texman70

What is confusing to me is when people post on here that they can't buy a 500,000 house comfortably on a 200,000 salary. I guess its all relative.

I might be wrong, but I don't think anyone has posted anything to that effect. Yes, it's been pointed out that you can't buy a dream home in places like Newton on a middle-class salary. I personally don't get the I make $100k/year and I can't buy a "reasonable" (4-5br, 3.5bth, half-acre, single-family) house in a "reasonable" area (Newton, Lexington, Concord) with "reasonably good" schools (Arlington, Belmont are crap) and this reflects on the depravity, elitism, and unreasonable nature of Boston and the US in general. I would like to know where you can buy a house like this with that salary in any metropolitan city. It sounds better than Shangri La. Places like Omaha, Bratislava, and suburban Hotlanta do not count.

Originally Posted by texman70

In short, if you are patient and wait for the right opportunity and are willing to accept you can't have the mcmansion that you can have in Atlanta, I think you will find a home where you can be happy in the areas you are looking for.

Bingo.

[DreamingSpires]

Originally Posted by syracusa

So my thread is not dead yet.

...

Such titles often "strike a cord" and then you "hear" people fidgeting unpleasently from a distance, taken aback that you even DARE to ask such a question. "Hey Miss, stay in your place, there is an army and a soldier out there, way better qualified than you are who are not even "there" yet, so why would YOU expect such goodies?".

If you ask them "there, where?" and "define goody", the sparks start flying. The painful part is that such discussions have extremely complex and yes, higly upsetting systemic roots, and your average poster wants things kept simple and pinky, along the lines of "if you worked as hard as those other people" ...

Then it folllows like this: you get the acrimonious snap-replies implying that you are a snob and an elitist, or alternatively an idiot, a sour grape or a naive ball of bitterness (did not happen on this forum, it happened on another one, where the TRUE SNOBS live and fight).

Here is the deal: I am a relatively traditional person by contemporary standards, born and raised in a traditional culture that is now changing at a furious pace to keep up with the 21st century Madness. I often pray that people there wake up and start resisting it somehow, but it might take a while and a miracle.

....

When I say traditional I mean living a life guided by time-tested wisdom and common-sense, as opposed to the "latest and the greatest".

I have seen, and lived in a different world - so I experienced an alternative to what western contemporaries know about life. One million books read or even written about "traditional cultures" or "different socio-economic systems" amount to a glorious ZIPO compared to lived experience.

Syracusa,

I have been following this thread for a couple of weeks now, and I don't even know where to start.

You seem annoyed by the fact that your posts have drawn some criticism. If you've read City-Data for any length of time you would know that robust discussions with varying points of view are the norm here. It's one of the things that makes it such a great website. So if you weren't prepared for a variety of responses, why did you post in the first place?

I am not affronted by the fact that you "dared to ask a question" and I suspect no one else here is either, at least judging from the posts. You started an interesting thread that raises interesting issues, both practical and philosophical, that are relevant to many people. Although there are a few "critical" posts that challenge some of your key assumptions, there are also many very kind, helpful, informative, and sympathetic responses. Yet the critical ones seem to "stick in your craw" whilst the kind ones seem to have made little or no impression on you, at least judging by this latest post. I wonder why that is?

If I were to describe your personality strictly from how you come across in the two threads you started at the MA forum I would say, "Syracusa is conflicted in that she seems to simultaneously crave that which she vociferously claims to despise."

"Nice people" can be found in all kinds of towns and neighborhoods. "Highly educated" people can be found in all kinds of towns and neighborhoods. Six-figure jobs can disappear overnight--even for people who (gasp!) hold a master's degrees from an Ivy League school. Life has taught me this.

If you don't believe me, spend some time lurking over at the "Work and Employment" forum here at City-Data. I also favor the New York Times comments section when issues of unemployment, especially white-collar unemployment are featured ("AnnS" from Michigan is one of my favorite social commentators over there).

Try googling "invisible adjunct" to learn about the tends of thousands of PhD's, mostly in the humanities and social sciences, who scramble for part-time teaching gigs after dedicating their entire 20's to painstaking academic research and dissertation-writing. I have recently learned that some of those in the "hard sciences" are also having a very hard time (friend's husband has a PhD in Chemical Engineering and can't find any job).

Take 15 minutes to google "law school scam" and read about what life is like for tens of thousands of highly educated young attorneys who now find themselves crushed by a six-figure debt with little or no job prospects in the legal or other fields. "JD Underground" is a very eye-opening discussion forum in this regard.

Before you dismiss me as provincial and ethnocentric, I will point out that I too have "seen and lived in a different world" and "experienced an alternative to what western contemporaries know about life." I've lived and worked in both the U.S. and Europe for extended periods of time and, like you, have a cross-cultural marriage (American and European) and, like you, my spouse and I have one doctorate and two master's degrees between us. Both of us love books and are very well read.

We have never had a gross household income stretching into the six figures. I drive a 13-year old economy car with no power windows. We have never fretted about living in the "right" neighborhood with the "best" schools, or felt that because we were hardworking, intelligent, cultured, well-read, socially aware individuals with advanced degrees that somehow we were entitled to do so.

We live on a road we can afford where there are plumbers, carpenters, house cleaners, a nurse's aid, retired folks, and some unemployed. And our children turned out just fine (I won't mention their specific academic achievements in detail because as a rule I do not boast about my kids, but I will make a slight exception here in order to illustrate a point--let's just say they are both now thriving at elite institutions on scholarship, engaged in scientific/technical courses of study that will give them "secure and prestigious" places in society). I am proud of their achievements and glad they have successfully challenged themselves--but, far more importantly, I am proud that they are both good and caring people who love books, history, and learning, and who have internalized through the deliberate example set by their parents that a person's character is far more important than where that person lives, what they do for a living, or where they went to school.

[syracusa]

Originally Posted by texman70

Hello,

First time poster here but I felt compelled to write since my situation is so similar to the original poster. We moved here from Texas 4 years ago and just bought our first home here last year. We did manage to buy a home in Newton for just under 500,000 with 5% down. Its not a large single family colonial, all shiny and new. We purchased a 4 bedroom home that is the 2nd and 3rd floor of a 2 family victorian. It was completely renovated and it has plenty of room for us and our 2 children. There are a few minor inconveniences that you get used to quite easily like not a lot of electrical outlets, an average size kitchen, no central air, etc. We have a small back yard that has enough room for our children to play. My wife and I have a combined income of about 135000. So it can be done. Now we don't live extravagant lives. We drive used cars that are paid for, we have no credit card debt or any debt other than the mortgage. We save for retirement and for our childrens' college. We have a little less disposable income than we had in Texas, but we believe the quality of life here is worth it. What is confusing to me is when people post on here that they can't buy a 500,000 house comfortably on a 200,000 salary. I guess its all relative.

In short, if you are patient and wait for the right opportunity and are willing to accept you can't have the mcmansion that you can have in Atlanta, I think you will find a home where you can be happy in the areas you are looking for.

Dear texman,

Our situation sounds indeed quite similar to yours, except that you do have more family income than we could reasonably count on any time soon in Boston. With some long distance/online/part-time work I can hopefully continue to do for a while, we would be able to pull off a very maximum of 120,000 a year; but I do not envision anything more than this in the near future.

That being said, I never expected a McMansion anywhere, like some posters deduced, least of all in Boston; and indeed, we never lived extravagant lives.

No credit card debt, modest cars both paid off, no student loans, saving as much as we can, the works. The only apparently extravagant thing we do compared to most other American families, would be annual or once every two years trip to Europe; but I will certainly not give up family ties in the name of being modest and frugal in America.

I just wanted to add that we never lived in a McMansion, not even in Atlanta. I can be pretty safe in saying that we count ourselves among the very rare middle-class families with children in the South who live in a townhouse/condo, with no yard and none of the child-friendly amenities pretty much automatically expected by families with children here.
When I tell people that our second born's room in the first year of her life was our bathroom, they just about have a heart attack. And yet, that's how it was.

At the same time, I still do not see as reasonable for a hard-working, struggling, eternally agitated middle-class family who makes "achievement" their one and only God, to be paying half a million dollars for un uncomfortable, small, old structure, made of poor quality materials, and ready to fall apart, always giving the owner an endless number of headaches. Not even in Boston, be it America's Heaven on Earth.
When such things are a reality, there is something incredibly rotten in the system itself - period.

And yet, people seem to be forced to do it if they want to secure "the good area", which they see as the only passport to a better life for their children. Of course, if we get to split hairs, this line of reasoning is usually flawed. The kids get pushed into the same febrile, insecure middle to upper-middle class rat-race, which in the long run, DOES NOT translate into quality of life for the child. It may translate into all sorts of frantic achievements, but not quality of life.

But hey, you can at least increase their odds of becoming a serious "human resource" for some corporation tomorrow; and maybe they'll be in slightly less danger of being laid off than the kid who did not go to the hot schools. Maybe.

All in all, pretty sad, as far as I'm concerned.

The question is what is the alternative? How do you drop your kids out of the "holy race"? What do you offer them in return? And because many people do not have an answer to such questions, then watch out for the battle over Newton and the like.

Going back to Newton, we thought about it initially, especially when we heard there is a school there with my native tongue as language of instruction. I care about this more than I care about academic excellence per se.

It would have been nice to have the kids attend such a school. However, we realized Newton will not be an option for us and we decided not to buy in Boston, anywhere.

We will rent until we somehow manage to relocate back to Europe, the Devil I've known since I was born, for better or for worse. Yes, I hear all the time that 'things are changing there too', but they've got some distance to go. America's leading the way and we certainly don't need to be "avant guarde".

After all the answers I received here on this forum and elsewhere, I do not think, in all honesty, that we will be able to have a decent life in Boston as well as offer our kids the prospect for a decent life in the future - all on 100,000 a year or so.

It is simply not enough - and the two of us, with our backgrounds, talents, abilities or what have you, cannot produce much more than that.

Thanks again so much for the tips!

[syracusa]

Originally Posted by DreamingSpires

Syracusa,
Before you dismiss me as provincial and ethnocentric, I will point out that I too have "seen and lived in a different world" and "experienced an alternative to what western contemporaries know about life."

I would never dismiss you as such because I agree with pretty much EVERYTHING you wrote. I was not even sure where our disagreement might stem from, when I realized it is probably about the degree to which we each can accept a certain level of orthodoxy.

On the one hand you describe a system that is clearly lacking (see your post); on the other hand you don't seem to have anything critical to say about it. Is this a virtue?
You talk about your children's achievements (which I am sure are as impressive as you describe them), yet you realize that your children are vulnerable to the market whims I am decrying, regardless of how talented they turn out to be.
At the same time, you also say you are sure that they will have "prestigious and secure" positions in society because of their "elite school" attendance. I thought you said everyone is prone to insecurity, regardless of elite school. Does this apply to others but not to your kids?

I sense a lot of contradictory directions in your argument, and I am afraid your main point was to "compare and contrast" your decency, modesty and reasonable-ness with my less than orthodox attitude.

You say:
<I drive a 13-year old economy car with no power windows>

Pretty much same here.

You also say:
<We have never fretted about living in the "right" neighborhood with the "best" schools, or felt that because we were hardworking, intelligent, cultured, well-read, socially aware individuals with advanced degrees that somehow we were entitled to do so>

This sounds like true virtue, except that in the real world, where idealistic poetry begins to lose its shine, people want to be able to relate and connect to others like themselves. I see any claims to the contrary as ideological hypocrisy, the right-way-to-think "du siecle". This does not mean that we think we are all the wonders you mentioned, but we do think that it wouldn't hurt kids to grow up in a community with such values.

If you take the superior/inferior parameters out of the equation, would you accuse someone for wanting to have things in common with their neighbors? How about the chance of befriending some of them based on shared life experience?

I certainly don't think I would fit in a "rich housewives" neighborhood as much as I would not belong in a remote rural, under-educated area. Heck, I don't think I would belong in an OVER-educated area either, if geniuses were to congregate in such a place (though I would probably love to learn a thing or two from them if I could).

Either way, I have been in "mismatch" situations in the past and let me assure you that the the sense of loneliness and disconnect you can experience can be quite depressing. I am in no way denying that it would be impossible to "click" with someone in an area that you would have never theoretically considered compatible with yourself; but that doesn't change the fact that your odds are better in a place inhabited by people with somewhat similar life chances or experiences.
It might not be "cutting edge" to say it, but this is what I honestly believe.

Other than that, I absolutely understand, and agree with, everything you said.

PS: I forgot to mention that I may have indeed shown a bit more annoyance than I should have in my recent post, given that it was caused by extremely virulent and nasty attacks on ANOTHER forum, and NOT on this one. You were very, very right in that many posts here were extremely helpful and I want to thank again everyone who took the time to throw in their 2 cents. I am sincerely grateful, I gathered an enormous amount of information that will help us take the right steps in the future.