House poor. Cash poor. Working poor. Poor poor.

Eric,Shhh. Don’t tell any more people about our little sanctuary up here close to the Canadian border. It’s already beginning to suffer from the real estate inflation you talk about, although not to the extent that the D.C. area does. Great post today. The costs are far reaching. As parents, my wife and I have struggled with balancing home life, work, etc. because we know the ill effects of too much time in the car and daycare will have on the kids as well as us.

Read the article. Raises tough questions for which there are no easy answers. In the end it seems like “the market” is always king–-supply and demand. Try and manipulate it and often one gets unintended consequences. Example would be rent price controls that led to 1000s of unimproved apartments in New York City because it was no longer worth the investors’ $$$ to upkeep the units for the limited rental prices. In the end buildings ended up dilapidated for decades before being razed years later when the populace couldn’t take it anymore. Also investors/developers stopped building new apartments and maintaining them since they could no longer cover their costs….If one cannot afford to purchase a home–they should try and rent for much less and use the money saved on a mortgage to invest in 401Ks and stocks/bonds for the long term w/ advice from a financial planner with integrity.When you have some 120,000 jobs created in Northern Virginia in a few years…it’s hard to manage that kind of an economic trend without being behind the curve as county supervisors. If one built some roads in relation to increased population the past 30 years much of the pain of the upswing in population would be diminished. Example, population goes up 65% over a couple decades and the amount of roads increases 15%. I forget the exact numbers now since it’s been a few years since I attended the conference, but the county and state have woefully short of making concrete investments in transportation the past couple of decades and now they want to try and limit supply and demand after the fact as if its some inherently evil trend. The whole thing is a mess…that we can agree upon. But don’t give me victim mentality bullcrap fairfax county reprsentatives.jay

Eric,Good post…. The social costs you highlighted are the key. The goes back to the question of why are we, as a society, working longer hours and sitting in traffic for more hours each day? The numbers just aren’t adding up.I think that’s why more people are moving into the city, even if it means a smaller house. Who cares if you have a big house if you never see your family and your friends?