The line is blurring between city and suburb
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
The article is saying that suburbs are becoming more like urban areas.
I like the author's evidence that housing prices are falling:
> In that same city in 2012, a typical McMansion would be valued at $477,000, about 274% more than the area's other homes. Today, a McMansion would be valued at $611,000, or 190% above the rest of the market.
Up 28% in price - must be dying!
[1] http://time.com/107808/census-suburbs-grow-city-growth-slows...
[2] http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/03/2015-us-population-wi...
[3] http://www.businessinsider.com/americans-moving-to-suburbs-r...
[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2013/09/26/americas-...
I think you are misreading it to mean something it does not say.
Edit: You might want to revise your definition of misleading. Misleading doesn't mean something is factually false. It means it's true but is presented in a way to lead you into believing something else. So you can feed a narrative without lying.
Click-baity and misleading are not the same thing. Having a title that gets people to look at all is necessary to get traffic. This is true even on HN, in spite of how much people decry the evils of click-bait titles. It is incredibly hard to title things excellently well, such that it gets traffic but won't get labeled as "evil, nefarious click-bait with some dirty agenda" by the HN crowd.
I do freelance writing and I blog and I submit stuff to HN regularly. My view of this is not rooted in stupidity. It is rooted in knowing that click-bait titles work to get views and can get your article flagged to death even if the article per se is an excellent piece of writing, yet trying too hard to not be click-bait can mean you get very few views and no upvotes.
Titling things well is hard. I see nothing nefarious in how this is titled and I have too much firsthand experience with how incredibly critical HN is. The criticisms here are to the point of being neurotic and cranky. It is not merely a case of placing a high value on excellence.
My point exactly.
I was not critising click baiting, or the article. I was simply pointing out that the title was in fact misleading and exaggerating by using semantic tricks. I used the term click bait because in that particular case, the author was not trying to lie, but rather simply make their title have more impact.
It is no wonder dang feels HN has a civility problem and hoped he could cure it by doing a political detox week, which did not work because it wasn't the issue.
However, if you think having an argument is calling you stupid and is a personal attack then this is your own problem.
I had upvoted your comments and I liked your reply. It doesn't mean I agree with you, and it doesn't mean Im here to get you neither.
Article titles are and will always be a problem on HN. This won't change, all we can do is try to point out when there is a problem with them and then immediately complain when the mods editorialised them a little bit much.
The misleading thing may be that this is just standard depreciation, although I wouldn't be surprised if houses in the 3000-5000 sq.ft. bracket were depreciating faster than smaller houses. (Though it seems likely these numbers they stated were the simplest way they could find to say that they are depreciating at an unusually fast rate.)
The cost to tear down a McMansion that isn't depreciated way is very high, making the lots value questionable. Additionally, since tract housing is often identical in most ways, if your neighbors homes are going to shit and depreciating, that will impact the lot value too.
It's not a detail that changes the conclusion, but I want to focus on it:
The U.S. definitely can afford to maintain its roads. The country is the richest in the history of the world, richer than it's ever been. U.S. GDP in 1960, when the Interstate Highway system and many suburbs and malls were being built, was ~$3 trillion in real dollars;[0] now it's ~$18 trillion.
The U.S. chooses not to maintain its infrastructure.
[0] According to one unofficial source on the web, which I'm going to trust for this purpose.
Federal highway dollars get dropped in to build, but then no dollars are available to maintain.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/2/five-ways-feder...
In my state (New York), US and state designated highways are maintained by the state if it isn't located in an incorporated city. So my city (Albany) can barely afford trucks to plow the snow, but you literally cross the city line and an army of DOT trucks are plowing. Long Island is a great example of this, as "towns" with 300k people aren't incorporated, so they get "free" services.
Even sewers are the same story. It's way more expensive to maintain buried infrastructure in the city and very cheap in the burbs. Fewer connections == fewer excavations == less labor.
First up, you seem to be conflating the source of infrastructures funding (state vs city) in an area with whether the population of that area could without external funding pay for their infrastructure.
And secondly, while maintaining buried infrastructure in the city is likely more expensive, your argument presents no claim that it is more expensive _per capita_.
edit: see http://usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2015/0... for some numbers on the last point
In my city, a tax/ratepayer base of 100,000 people bear the burden of supporting hundreds of miles of streets and other infrastructure. Guess what? They cannot afford it.
1 mile away, most of those costs are supported by 20 million state taxpayers.
This is precisely the same as the problem with schools. My City School District is struggling to get funding to cover basic services because they have to deal with a larger, poorer and sicker student body. That district one mile away is debating whether or not they should have a full size Olympic swimming pool or not. No poor folk, fewer disabled kids who need expensive intervention and a larger tax base.
If the State pays for services in unincorporated areas, it should still pay for those services in incorporated areas. The only difference should be in management - that the State manages the budget for unincorporated areas, but the municipalities manage the budget for incorporated areas.
If municipalities are expected though to raise their own taxes to pay for these services, then the tax base can't afford it, because they're already paying to maintain the rural infrastructure through the higher State taxes.
They could subsidize the infrastructure required to integrate the country and keep the non-dense areas viable even if these areas don't have the local tax base to pay for that infrastructure, just as they did with federal highway dollars when they were built, just as many other countries are doing. It's a choice to do so or not. The rules of who pays for maintenance of which parts of infrastructure are essentially arbitrary and the U.S. can alter them if they choose to.
Other countries subsidize rural areas primarily for 3 reasons: 1. Certain political parties have their base in rural areas and want to subsidize their life style. 2. Strategie for making the country more food-independant through farming. 3. Military strategie for having people in remote areas.
Nobody in the world subsidizes non-productive suburban sprawl.
The suburbs are politically very important in the U.S. because a lot of people live there. The question of most national elections is whether the suburbs will ally with the urban core or the rural areas, and the answer is usually the rural areas.
It's like saying a poor person CAN afford a new iPhone if they just only start eating only rice and beans, and therefore iPhones are affordable for the poor. It's not just about whether the cost can fit the budget, but about what you're getting for that cost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_State...
https://taxfoundation.org/gasoline-taxes-and-user-fees-pay-o...
- Land use. While every transportation mode uses land, cars use way more, and in dense urban areas that land is very valuable; users of the land who are driving are getting it 'for free', when it could go to a more productive purpose.
- Pollution
- Noise
- Danger
All of these are 'costs' that just looking at how much money you spend on roads won't account for.
I prefer to have the privacy that's afforded by having my house set 40' back from the street, with plenty of space between my and my neighbors' homes, rather than living in a house that abuts, or is 6 feet away, from my neighbors'.
I prefer a spacious driveway and an attached, heated, two car garage, to parking on the street a block from my house, and having to dig my car out after a snowstorm.
I prefer to own a home that was built during or since the 1950s, when Romex wiring was original equipment, rather than own something that still has knob and tube wiring with decaying fabric insulation.
I prefer a home built with drywall or rock lathe and plaster, over one built with wood lath and plaster.
I've found that most pre-1910 homes I've examined do not have foundations or basements to my liking.
I prefer to live in an area where I can leave my doors unlocked and my windows open at night without giving it a second thought. Or where, if I leave the house and realize I left the front door unlocked, I don't feel compelled to go back and lock it.
I prefer to live in an environment where junkies and bums are virtually nowhere to be seen, rather than an environment where I have to be careful not to step in human feces when I walk between two parked cars.
When I can get all that affordably in the city, I'll consider moving back.
Tax income tax based on where someone's office is; given them the right to vote there accordingly.
Tax someone's property where they live/own/rent it (property tax should be built in to the rent, but as this will be passed on to renters, they too deserve to vote on local issues).
This is an oversimplification. If you look at the bay area for example and its housing crisis, the people who are most impacted are the people who haven't moved there yet but might do so in the future (and will pay higher future rents if housing supply does not increase). But potential residents obviously don't get to vote.
And that's how you get into a situation where people can't afford to settle down in their hometown area, even when they have good jobs.
The other thing you're missing is that you can easily end up with a tragedy of the commons type situation when local government is sufficiently fragmented. Again, this happens in the bay area: if the bay area was one city with one government, people would probably be fine voting for more housing supply across the whole area, but since it's split into dozens of cities, each one tends to suppress housing supply to boost local property values, instead arguing that some other city should be the one that provides more homes.
Suburbs receive a level of service from public entities that is far in excess of that justified by the private investment there. They receive bus funding from State government that doesn't count against their school budgets. The roads and pipes reliably cost more than the houses they service.
There's nothing wrong with living in a rural house. But as long as money gets funneled disproportionately into these places, you should expect to have that decision second guessed. Plus, when all the suburbs finally have to face facts, delivering services to the suffering poor people left behind there will be an absolute disaster.
Of course, our laws regarding financing and building anything that increases density in suburban areas are hopelessly awful too. We have a sort of donut hole, if you will: cheap financing for suburban houses, and for large apartment blocks. But the logical increment of a 2-3 story building with first floor commercial is left out. Ask for a loan on that, and you'll be laughed out the door for your silly request for a non-conforming mortgage.
Then let the market figure it out.
From the way you describe it, it seems to me that the suburbs are/were an effective social program to reduce homelessness.
This is a win-win situation. The more other people live in denser urban areas, the cheaper you can get what you want, and the closer your lot can be to a city.
That's true, but unfortunate, because a lot of non-inflammatory posts made in good faith get downvoted to where they get marked [dead] simply because they express unpopular opinions.
I tend to try to counter that phenomenon through upvotes. I won't hesitate to upvote something I disagree with if it appears to be getting unfairly downvoted.
Have a separated (UI distance is important) button for reporting abuse/too far off topic.
* "a home that was built during or since the 1950s"... is supposed to be preferable? A home built in the 80s will be considered old-fashioned in places like Seoul. (Besides, what's that got to do with city-versus-rural difference?)
* "I prefer to live in an area where I can leave my doors unlocked..." Some cities have crime problem. Others don't. Also, I have the impression it's always the (Americal) rural dwellers who say "You urbanite liberals have no idea why guns are necessary!" So I'm taking your argument with a grain of salt.
* "...rather than an environment where I have to be careful not to step in human feces when I walk between two parked cars." Well... then don't live in SF, I guess?
> "a home that was built during or since the 1950s"... is supposed to be preferable? A home built in the 80s will be considered old-fashioned in places like Seoul. (Besides, what's that got to do with city-versus-rural difference?)
First, a little background. In a previous life I was a carpenter who did some new home construction, but mostly remodeling, in both cities and suburbs. So, given just about any wall in any home, I have a pretty good idea what you'll find under the paint if you take a sledgehammer to it.
In the northeastern US city I'm using as my reference point, the housing stock is on average much older than the suburbs. And to me, an old house is like a a really old car. It breaks down a lot and requires a lot of maintenance. The walls are less likely to be square and plumb. The wiring is more likely to be obsolete and insufficient for all the computers/gadgets/appliances we rely on today. I just don't care to deal with it.
Different people have different value systems. I really don't care whether or not there is excellent Thai Fusion cuisine available within walking distance, but I like a home that is reasonably up to date and low maintenance. The so-called charm of century old city houses is of no value to me. In some wealthier areas of my local city, most of the houses have been gutted and refurbished down to the last piece of trim by their cardiac surgeon owners, but those houses sell for around 4X what I paid for mine and cars are still more likely to get stolen from their driveway than from mine.
So, to sum up, my preferences are based on my own set of values, which are markedly different from people who prefer to live in cities.
And one thing I've noticed, is that when I say things like this openly, for example at a dinner party attended mostly by white professional city dwellers, it invariably bothers some of them, visibly, that I have the preferences I do and I'm not embarrassed to admit them. (I'm well aware of how fashionable suburb-bashing is among fashionable people.) I always find that part amusing. They try to convince me that it's so awesome living as they do in a row house in some "up and coming" neighborhood, but it really sounds like they're trying to convince themselves.
FWIW, this isn't always true. I live in the suburbs about 30 miles from work, and it takes about as much time for me to drive there as it does for my friends who live 3x closer, but in the city. They get all the traffic; I can literally just set cruise control at speed limit, and coast 20 miles out of those 30 on a wide open freeway.
I live in >500k fully walkable european city with okay-ish public transit. During peak times, it's ~30 minutes to get to downtown by both public transit and car. But most of offices are located outside of downtown(=oldtown) area. One office area is 30min+ by public transit (and requires a transfer or long walk) or 10min by car, even during peak times. Office park on another side of the city would be well over 1h by public transit, but 30min by car. There're locations that take 3x longer by public transit and/or require elaborate transfer plan than driving. Difference gets even bigger if you can start a wee earlier/later.
And do account for the relatively shitty public transit infrastructure that is the norm here in US.
And you seem to be assuming that the offices are also right there in the city. That's not the case for many people.
Besides, where did you work when you lived in Seattle? Plenty of people live in the city, but work across the lake in one of the offices in Eastside (Microsoft in Bellevue, Redmond or Samammish, Google in Kirkland etc).
You don't need a car in a sense that you can take a bus, or the private connector shuttle if your employer provides one. But they sit in the same traffic jams on the roads, so it's not really saving you any time (although you do get the benefit of reading or doing something else while waiting).
My main complaint with suburbs is the likelihood of myself or my kid getting struck and killed by a car while cycling. I can't do that in the suburbs, or at least the ones I've lived in. The drivers go 50 mph+, turn right on reds without _ever_ checking for people walking or cycling, and will blame a dead kid for cycling if they were killed while riding a bike.
Maybe that's just California though.
It's much narrower than that. It's really the culture of the particular area. I've been in some towns in California where you will get angry people if you drive like that and others where that's the norm.
Anyone who has ever done any significant renovations on an old house knows the problems with aging housing stock.
I would go even further and say 1950s is still a pain in the neck.
It's really nice to work on a house built after 1985, for the simple fact you can sand door and window trim down to a nice smooth finish without having to worry about unleashing the lead kraken.
Next time I buy an old house I'm going to do a full gut renovation. Take it down to the frame and build anew. It's the only way to go in my opinion.
Drywall is very easy to repair. Old walls covered in decrepit wallpaper with who knows what underneath, not so much.
It is difficult to get insurance for a house with knob and tube wiring, and this is just the start.
Anything built in the 50's has the potential to contain asbestos as well.
In regards to density, I have found that .15-.25 acre single family lots with some three story apartment complexes sprinkled in make a very nice compromise that gives most of the benefits of suburbia while allowing for a nice walkable to bikeable town.
Obviously you'll never get all those things in the city, especially the ones involving lots of land. What makes a city a city is having people close together. That's what a city is.
The only way you can get density that low in a city is when zoning regulations require some area to stay that way, and its regulations like that that enforce low densities that have caused tons of problems in the US.
I mean, your argument is pretty disingenuous, given your requirement of not being physically close to your neighbors. That pretty much violates the definition of the word "city".
You could have stopped with that. You'll never move to a city.
As for 'human feces', it's not a problem of cities so much as lack of safety net. It's not because of cities that people are homeless, it's because we removed the infrastructure that prevented them to go homeless in the first place (social support networks, mental health support...). They are more tolerated in cities and cities typically invest in basic services for them, so that's where they congregate. Your ability to not step in human feces in your suburb is directly dependent on cities' willingness to provide services for this population (or they'll simply die).
So is this an argument not to provide services for the homeless? If the result of providing support in the city is human shit everywhere, then maybe the homeless services should be moved outside the center of the city.
If you get enough snow that digging your car out might be a concern, isn't the street going to be snowed in as well?
(I'm not sure why you're equating urban=ancient and suburb=1950s, that's got to be specific to certain places surely?)
I don't have a good feeling for how much space an acre is or what it would cost, so I went googling: high £1.7m in London suburbs, http://www.uklanddirectory.org.uk/land-for-sale.asp?id=72226 versus £55k http://www.uklanddirectory.org.uk/land-for-sale.asp?id=73298 remote Scottish island.
[1] http://jedkolko.com/2016/03/25/neighborhood-data-show-that-u...
But right. A particular demographic of young professionals (which happens to align with both a lot of writers in these sorts of publications and tech workers) are moving to a handful of mostly coastal dense urban centers.
I'm not sure how much of an outlier his interpretation of the data is or if you just don't hear a lot from his perspective because it doesn't support the urbanization narrative.
The problem demographic is couples with kids. Our urban schools are bad, so they leave the city to find good schools. But people with no kids -- either before children or after they leave for college -- are living in cities.
Good urban schools exist, but there aren't enough of them, hence there is intense competition to get into good urban schools. To your point, this then ends up driving more families away from dense urban centers.
It's not just that — due to desegregation (itself a good thing!) one can't ensure that one's kids will go to either a good school or one nearby. Parents want the best for their kids, and will do their best to ensure their kids' success (note that Mr. Obama's kids went to Sidwell Friends, not to a public DC school).
High housing costs get even worse when you are paying for 5 people instead of 1 or 2. This multiplication factor also carries over to many other costs so a city block with artisanal restaurants and locally-grown grocery stores just doesn't cut it for family budgets.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13854928
That suggests a long-term downward trend.
I didn't always feel this way, but I think the use of cellphones has created and environment where even slow moving drivers are unpredictable. I now walk to work and frequently see people on their phones while driving, if a line of ten cars are stopped at a light at least three people are on their phones. The result isn't an extreme increase in accidents but a constricting deficit of attention which incrementally lengthens every encounter on the road. More short stopping, more people missing green lights or just driving super conservatively and not merging holding up traffic.
Also I never use my phone while driving, but the fact that I can't even look at it when I know someone is trying to contact me is incredibly frustrating and impacts my enjoyment of driving.
As a cyclist, I often check who is on their phone when I pull up to a light. My guess would be even higher - 50-75% of drivers are on their phones when stopped at a light.
Also, the no.1 reason why people seem to want to move to suburbs is children (IMO, anecdotal etc.)... perhaps the falling fertility is making married/live-in couples more willing to live in a dense, urban communities?
Also, I suspect you can almost buy a house in the 'burbs for the difference in rent between a one and two bedroom apartment in SF.
My son lives in a new 500sqft flat in a nice downtown neighborhood. His rent in $2200/month and that seems fairly typical for that area. You can spend less for an older unit or one in a less desirable area.
That $2200 is definitely enough to pay a mortgage in many parts of Fairfax County (assuming a moderate downpayment).
... or managed to survive the seemingly insane NYC Department of Education admissions process to enter your child[ren] into public Pre-K, Kindergarten or Middle School. There are good schools in the city, but most are difficult to get into for a variety of reasons.
For Americans that grew up in Suburbia though...this might be different.
I don't think it's anecdotal.
In nearly every city in the US the urban schools are bad and there are much better suburban schools. It's not just a funding difference as many urban schools do get decent funding. It appears to be a complex issue of parent engagement, varying leadership quality in different urban schools, and peer role models and family life.
Whatever causes suburban schools to be better, I believe the gap is narrowing. Today's high school population reflects parents' housing choices ten years ago. Urban elementary schools are already far better than they were a decade ago.
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-millennials-live-in-san-f...
Living in vans. Living in boxes in larger apartments. Thirty people living in a 10-bedroom building.
There is vast demand to live in these cities, and their governments are utterly failing to accommodate it in an orderly and dignified fashion.
I keep being surprised that major employers keep paying the SV surtax to employ engineers in the Bay area rather than in cheaper places. I understand these organizations need to keep people in the Bay area, sure. It's the center of the industry; it's where a lot of new things happen. But do they need so many people within a half-hour of HQ?
Seems like an obvious place to cut costs.
I expect it will all self-correct. There is new housing coming on line. There is some upper limit to the premium companies will pay and some lower limit to the squalor software engineers will tolerate to live in SF. Market corrections can certainly happen.
Housing in the Bay Area is like roads; build more and capacity will simply be soaked up. Either move elsewhere or accept the SV tax. No property owner in their right mind would vote for more building (depressing the value of, most likely, the largest asset they own).
TL;DR Vote with your feet, prefer remote first companies.
You must destroy demand. It is the only way out.
Building as much (and sustainably) as possible + a land tax to discourage speculation and people not actually living in housing might be a better solution.
There's only so much land you can build on, and only so high you can build (whether through physics or legislation).
Should workers vote with their feet for remote first companies? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean SF shouldn't also build more housing.
Saying you shouldn't build housing because people will just buy it all up it is like saying you shouldn't grow food in a famine because people will just eat it. The problem is that demand and supply are massively out of step, and that means you need to build a lot before it starts to even out.
And sure, there are political reasons it doesn't happen, but that doesn't mean it's not a good idea.
They don't have money for restaurants, let alone the resources to pick up a hobby as expensive and time-consuming as golf.
Of my friends and people I've in mid twenties to late thirties, most define eating at home as microwaving or heating a frozen meal; otherwise fast food and eating out are what they spend their budgets on.
I don't know what it is now, but back when I bought my first house the average length of time people stayed in a house was 4 1/2 years.
A house is still a longer term investment than a car, even if you sell it.
So I live in Metrowest Boston Area. I own a multi family. My wife, infant son and I live in modest square footage despite having fairly generous annual incomes (e.g. well above AMT tax rate).
My parents used to live nearby in affluent town (Wellesley) before just recently selling their house to a developer... who of course knocked it down to build a gigantic pimped out house. The same developers was buying 4 other houses at the time. In short Metrowest Massachusetts has become tear down central.
The problem is other than foreign investors (a lot of Newston, Weston, Wellesley, and Needham is getting bought out by foreign investors) nobody from my age group.. the age group that is looking to buy houses wants a super mansion... even if its decked out (That is these houses aren't McMansions. They are real mansions).
From my general experience of talking to other educated thirty somethings is people want authentic and charming not McMansion and yet there all these new houses replacing old New England house.
Yet these new houses are priced ridiculously high. And again talking to other peers it seems gone are the days where people buy 4-6 times their salary. People are buying sometimes as low as just twice their salary and completely fine. And if people want convenient they are going for condo and not McMansion style.
Historically New England has been fairly bubble proof. I fear that time is coming to an end.
When it does happen I might buy some of these big boys and convert them to multi-families ... BTW this is exactly what happened to parts of New England in the late 19th and early 20th century [1] where giant houses were converted to multi families aka Somerville and Waltham (where I live).
I love that in the summer they can hang out with friends at the local pool, or play ping pong with friends at the local rec center during the winter. Point being they have a lot of activities with in walking distance where they can meet with friends and we don't have to drive them. My son in high school has discovered he can hang out in one of the many many restaurants around his high school with his friends.
I don't think they would have the same freedoms or independence living in a cul de sac somewhere, at least not before getting a driver' license.
I'd love to see more 'streetcar suburbs' with local amenities within walking distance, where parents and kids can safely bike around, where transit to the city proper isn't a cruel joke, etc.
I'd say most of the west half of SF feels like a suburb. Takes forever to get downtown, tons of traffic and no jobs there.
I'd also say it's on big suburb from SF to SJ, plus the other side of the bay.
* 1 Good schools for kids
* 2 Privacy (isolation of noise/smell/etc from others)
* 3 Space (more of it)
* 4 Lower costs (rent, parking, prices in stores)
* 5 Safety (a perception that being more isolated makes you safer)
* 6 Community (this is often a fallacy)
2 is mostly down to building things in stupid, cheep, short-sighted ways, and building codes that allow that.
3 Too many studio units, not enough 3-4-5 bedroom combo units
4, 3, 2, 1, 5, 6 All due to not enough competition to keep prices down.
Happy to answer any questions if you have them.
When I lived in Manhattan and Brooklyn, most things were walking distance, and buses trains and cabs super convenient.
I live in Pittsburgh now, and can walk (half hour) or bike (10 minutes) to work. Shopping requires a car, but not much traffic and plenty of parking compared to NYC, so still convenient.
I know other US cities, though, have bad public transportation and bad traffic, and those might be worse than living in the suburbs.
You know, it's funny. Some cities are trying to quickly build out higher-density apartment buildings in/near the downtown areas, and from what I've seen the same concept applies. I'd love to see some of those fancy mini-arcologies spring up, but really the boxes are just a bit bigger (or smaller, depending on how you look at it.)
I do hope that malls become very cheap real estate before long; I think it's already happening in some places. I would just love to buy what is essentially a cheap, empty, commercially-zoned warehouse and stuff it full of things like laser tag, arcades and e-sports, a couple of lounge areas and coffee shops/bars depending on the time of day...but I doubt you could make something like that work without very cheap square footage and a lot of people within a 30-45 minute drive.
I mean, currently NYC has a ridiculously low carbon foot-print for its population size. So if more places become dense population centers with public transportation like NYC, it can only be a positive thing in terms of mitigating climate change.
And the reason people don't own as much as years before is because we realize that we can't afford to. If you give me a mansion for $10 (without any zeros behind it) I'll gladly prefer it over my apartment.
What will be the next article in the series? Children in Jemen prefer to eat less food than their bodies require?
I love how they think it is only a matter of willingness. Do they realize the cost cited prices out around two-thirds of the population?