Not that we’re looking–we’re renters for life–but the wife keeps finding cute little places in the L.A. Times Hot Property section that are a million five or more. And the thing is, they are cute little places. The kind of house you see tucked away on a hillside cul de sac amid shade trees and roses. It’s gotten to the point now that cute costs as much as fifty average Americans make in one year. Pretty cost twice that. You don’t even wanna know gorgeous.
We were driving in a stretch of Burbank a couple nights ago, where the city butts up against the Verdugos and can’t go any further. Cute were the bottom end places, most of the houses were in the pretty range, with the occasional gorgeous occupying half a block. We must have gone miles, winding with the streets, once coming smack against the mountain, the bottom of a cliff really, and you could smell pine and hear birds we don’t hear down here in the Silver Lake hills. But it occurred to me as we drove along that we had never been up there before. Never been on any of those streets, and that we know no one who lives up there. They’re not in our class, the wife joked. But they aren’t. They’re in the class where cute is a mere million five, and I can’t even imagine that.
Brick Wahl 
One recent morning I test drove for trade-in my beat-down Outback with its scars and 5 o’clock shadow, with a peppy young Subaru Santa Monica sales guy riding shotgun. We meandered through Pacific Palisades, up and down streets I’d never been down before in my 25 years living in Los Angeles. Totally alienating. I’m not sure that Pacific Palisades does cute, it just starts off at gorgeous.
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Fantastic comment, thx….
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It’s shocking and degrading. How did the price of homes skyrocket straight out of the stratoshpere? I am a fourth generation native Californian and I will never be able to afford a home in my homeland.
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It’s weird out here. A “decent” house in Chattanooga itself can easily be half a million — “fancy” houses are at the million range. Meanwhile, out in Marion County where we live (45 min commute from Chattanooga, maybe 25 miles west of it as the crow flies) we have a “nice” house and forty acres of woods which is valued at something like $180,000. It’s too big for two people but provides the room needed for 17 and 1/2 cats (the “1/2” is for the one who just visits here to eat outside.)
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