devoish (98.81)

Who's going to buy my house now?

November 21, 2007 – Comments (4)

I do not care.

 Location, location, location. That’s what the real estate agents say, and it has always been true. For thousands of years it meant good farmland, and access to fresh water. Today it means live on a court, or a dead end street. Get an ocean view or a deepwater dock. A great school district or access to jobs creates value.

But locations are temporary, factories close and jobs leave, coasts erode and mud slides.

 On a Green River rafting trip I learned that years ago the Green River flowed to the Gulf of Mexico before breaking through the Uinta Mountain range and leaving the American plains suddenly high and dry to join with the Colorado River and flow west. Sometimes people can ruin locations when they build a damn upstream from your house, or worse still pollute the water as in Hinkley CA or Love Canal NY.

 Location can make a property worth more or worthless. Where I live on Long Island we have drinking water beneath the island to last 100 years. It is raining today and though our top aquifer is becoming polluted the lower two will last us a very long time.

 The Colorado River water is used and reused before it reaches California. And the river is drying. It is smaller today than ten years ago. Everything below Lake Meade is polluted with rocket fuel. In the Southeast things are worse. Lake Lanier is drying up. Atlanta has an 80 day supply of water left at the beginning of a 100 year drought. I am praying that someone from the Dept of Unregulated Free Market Capitalism will run down there and help you out. Or at least blame the government. But I bet what help you get will come in the form of United States tax dollars. If it does not rain there soon, a second US city may be lost this decade.

 I still do not know who is going to buy my house. And I do not care. I am staying where the water is.

Atlanta, you have my prayers.