The Sunnyvale Sun

Letters & Opinions

One paycheck away from homelessness?

By Carol Bogart

One of the first things my predecessor, Sandy Sims, brought me up to speed on as I began this job was projects already in the works. One, which will be our cover story next week, is the concept of "affordable" housing.

With Bay Area prices so high, even college-educated people with marketable skills find themselves closed out of home ownership.

This generated spirited discussion among those of us on staff who have had to downsize because we could no longer support what we had, or who haven't been able to upsize in the first place.

For example, I once had a 46-acre farm.

Rural Ohio home prices don't begin to compare to California's prices, of course. I bought the farm at auction for $132,500. After investigating whether an old farmhouse insulated with wasp nests could be saved, I concentrated instead on restoring the big red barn, tore down the old house and built a new one.

For someone who loves nature, as I do, this peaceful, quiet retreat was heaven on earth. The house overlooked a good-sized creek (Mike, my son, once caught a brook trout in it). Because it was richly stocked with everything from crawdads to water snakes, it attracted an abundance of birds: A bald eagle swooped in to land on a branch, surveying the water for any hint of fish movement; two great blue herons were frequent visitors; and on a branch overhanging a quarter-acre spring-fed pond I had excavated, a belted kingfisher shot like a bullet into its depths to fly off with one of the koi (Chinese carp) I'd added to eat the algae.

And of course my many feeders attracted a multitude of songbirds and hummingbirds.

With the 12-acre woods awash in trilliums and other wildflowers in spring and a hill made for small-boy snowboarding behind the barn, the farm was truly paradise found. Country nights, unpolluted by manmade light, are so dark the stars glitter like far-off flecks of tinsel. In summer, as flocks of fireflies glint on and off, the two seem to converge, creating a light show that fills the heart with wonder.

Still, just as I was facing the hard reality that I no longer had the resources to support the farm, Mike, at 16, was more interested in keeping his Camaro running than he was in walking the fields to find arrowheads or taking jar and strainer to shallow wetlands in the woods in search of tadpoles.

Since selling the farm, the past several years have found us moving from one successively smaller apartment to another.

We're not alone.

When I was managing editor of the weekly in Pleasanton--where the average home price is well over $1 million--a former mayor told me about six elderly women found living in a converted garage, partitioned down the middle. The executive director of a health services agency devoted to the un- and under-insured told me many of those coming in for free health care now are college graduates who lost their jobs during the dot.com bust.

Mike's been away at school for over two years, so when I got this job, it propelled me to do what I should have done the minute he left home: move out of the two-bedroom rented townhouse I no longer needed (and couldn't really afford in the first place) into something cheaper, since a kid in college is not the world's least expensive proposition.

I finally settled on a studio. Although it's in a big old converted one-time mansion in San Jose bounded by wide sidewalks and 100-year-old landscaping (big trees), it's yet another adjustment in the "personal space" department.

As my movers drove away and I was trying to straighten up a collection of outdoor plants I hoped my new landlord and co-tenants wouldn't object to, a man approached me, said he'd noticed I was moving in, and asked if I needed any help. I had just been engaged in conversation with one of my new neighbors who'd expressed interest in helping me plant the tea roses I'd also uprooted and brought with me. Once done rearranging the potted plants, I'd planned to take the outdoor rocker around to the wide, covered, tree-shaded front porch. Exhausted from the move, I nodded gratefully and said, "You can take that rocker around to the porch if you want to."

He did and minutes later was back asking me if I needed anything else, "anything at all."

I smiled, thanked him and said, no, that was it.

As he walked away, the young man I'd been talking to about the roses said, "That's the guy who lives in his car. See that blue one parked on the curb?"

I saw a faded old finned gas-guzzler with nearly flat tires.

In a doorway across the street huddled a small group who looked like they would love to have a dry old car to sleep in.

Each morning when I walk Dodger, I exchange pleasantries with the industrious soul fishing cans and bottles out of Dumpsters into six bulging plastic bags hanging from his shopping cart. He must start before dawn.

And as I sit here, typing this in the comfort of my cozy, clean studio with its high ceilings and broad bay windows, I think, aren't I lucky?

Carol Bogart is the new editor of the Sunnyval Sun. Contact her at cbogart@community-newspapers.com or call 408.200.1055.