Due to economic conditions in San Francisco, I have reluctantly surrendered my home. We are required to evacuate the premises next Thursday, May 8. At that time, my wife, our infant son and I will get into our remaining car (we sold the other one) and we will drive north toward Canada in search of as yet unknown opportunities. Blogging might be light for the next few days.
But before you feel sorry for us and start sending envelopes of cash and cartons of baby food, you should know that all of the above is true, BUT, I'm pulling your leg. In fact, what's really going on is that we're selling our house and buying a bigger house with a smaller mortgage in a city with better public schools! Wa-hoo!
We closed escrow on the SF home today, and we expect to close on the new home on Monday. So for the next few days we are officially homeless, so to speak, but the buyer is letting us live here until Thursday. To celebrate our blessings, the Mrs. Shark and I are having dinner tonight at the legendary Chez Panisse.
I've lived in San Francisco since 1990 and in the Bay Area since 1984. San Francisco is truly a great city, especially if you are a single person or childless couple, and/or if you are fabulously rich. If you have children and are merely upper middle class or worse, you will either live in a small house without a real yard and send your kids to a scary public school, or you will live in a small house without a real yard and work like a dog in order to pay through the nose for your kids to go to private school and then you will enjoy a retirement of penury. But San Francisco, so far, has been very good to me. Yeah, the city is full of oddballs, misfits, lunatics, crooked politicians and insane politicians, but all of that is just an expensive form of entertainment until you really need the city to do something for you, like give your kids an education.
So we're moving north to another great city a little closer to Canada, that is sure to provide plenty of entertainment. A modern city with high-tech coffee, low-tech software, mountains, ocean, trees, a good university, major league baseball and a statue of Vladimir Lenin. Yes, even if you didn't follow the links, you probably figured out that we're moving to Seattle.
Why Seattle, of all places? Because (a) it's cheap, and (b) because of the weather. You laugh, hahaha. But no, seriously. The only city that makes Seattle look cheap is San Francisco, but that's where we're coming from, so to us, Seattle does look cheap. The new house is 2/3 larger than the old one, the new mortgage is 1/3 smaller than the old one and we're still getting cash back! And the weather? When contemplating new cities, the wife's two NON-NEGOTIABLE criteria were (a) hardly any snow in the winter, and (b) hardly any heat and humidity in the summer. That didn't leave us with many places to choose from. And Seattle has a warmer July and August than San Francisco has.
Yes, I'll miss San Francisco. I'll miss all of our wonderful friends, and I'll miss this view from my kitchen of the Bay and the Marin Headlands and the Golden Gate Bridge.
We won't have a view from the new house, but we will be in the Green Lake neighborhood only a few blocks away from the lake and the zoo!
This whole process of finding a new city and a new house and selling the old house has been a comedy of crises. I can count at least four (4) distinct crises with the wife, a crisis with a neighbor, a crisis with the buyer of the old house, a crisis with the seller of the new house and various minor flare-ups with just about everybody else involved in the process. If this were to go on any longer I would probably require medication, but praise Allah it's just about over. Except for the packing, and the 800 mile drive with a baby and a cat named Chomsky, and the unpacking. Some day, I'll write about the whole thing. In the meantime, I gotta go put a lot of shit into a lot of boxes. Blogging might be light for the next few days.
Oh, if you need a real estate agent in San Francisco, Janis Stone is the best there is. If you need to sell a house, you want it staged by Arthur McLaughlin
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at May 02, 2003 08:00 AMI'll miss your ragging on the San Francisco Chronicle and its readers. I hope there's a paper in Seattle will cause similar reactions.
Good luck dealing with the subsequent crises that are sure to arise!
Posted by: Scott Hanson on May 2, 2003 01:53 AMHaving made the same move in 1970, and being an enthusiastic reader of yr esteemed Blog, I say welcome. We're only a few blocks apart. Come over for dinner.
Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive on May 2, 2003 08:17 AMI've visited Seattle many times (I have friends there) and I can assure you that you will find idiotarians a-plenty to blog about in the Seattle area. After all, your Congressman will be Baghdad JimMcDermott and your Senator Pat "Osama's Daycare" Murray!
Seriously, I love Seattle...it is a really nice city in a beautiful area (nothing like the clear days when you can see mt. ranier!)
Good luck with your move!
Posted by: Mike Silverman on May 2, 2003 08:53 AM...Oakland Hills here. Heading off to Portland after nearly 30 years in the Bay Area. Can't wait myself. Everything's about half the price and we'll no longer have to look down on Berkeley. Best to you Seatlle.
Posted by: Gary Frank on May 2, 2003 08:55 AMOn the one hand I'd trade you Toronto for Seattle just for the sea and proximity to great skiing. On the other hand, when the big quake hits, Toronto will be beachfront property.
Posted by: marduk on May 2, 2003 12:00 PMHave a good move, Stefan!
Posted by: Ralf Goergens on May 2, 2003 04:04 PMThis is great news -- let me be the first person to welcome you to my town! You'll find Seattle is similar to SF in many ways (near water and mountains, great outdoor culture, can't go anywhere without getting on a bridge, heaps of idiotarians, newspapers that make it laughably easy to dash off incandescent letters to the editor...) and different in others (nowhere near as many great museums, nothing to match Live 105, but MUCH cleaner air, incomparably more vegetation and much more accessible skiing). You've picked a beautiful part of town to live in.
Although (like you say) the only place that makes Seattle look cheap is San Francisco (and perhaps Honolulu), the cost of living here is about 30% less than that in the Bay Area. All around, I think Seattle is a much better "buy" than San Francisco (I used to live in Mountain View and made almost exactly the same decision you did, although I spent three years in Phoenix between San Francisco and Seattle).
There is PLENTY to see here, and if you get tired of Seattle there's always Vancouver, Victoria and Portland within a few hours' drive. If you make one stop between San Francisco and Seattle, make it Cannon Beach, OR and take a walk on the beach there with your family at low tide. It's spectacular.
Good luck on your voyage north. If there is any way in which I can help you or make your transition to life here easier, I hope you will drop me a line. I mean that sincerely.
Best,
Sol Ezekiel
Welcome to the hood, Stefan. Although I'm astonished to hear that Seattle is "cheap," I realize it's a relative universe. I figure housing in the Emerald City will become affordable for working people if either North Korea nutcake Kim Chong-il makes good on his nuclear threat/fantasies or if the economy REALLY BUT REALLY goes south. You hear about an alleged economic slump, but home prices just keep shooting into the stratosphere.
Posted by: Aron on May 3, 2003 09:13 AMWelcome to the area and unless you are in one of the Southern suburbs, you won't be represented by McDermott.
Posted by: quiet storm on May 4, 2003 11:10 PMIt's all you fags that move to Seattle that make it overpopulated. All you fucks need to stay where you're from. Stay the fuck away from Seattle you sorry-ass bitch. I'm sick of all you fucking bitches moving into my homeland. Stay in CA fucker!
Posted by: bradsh01 on July 21, 2003 09:38 PMIf you do move to Seattle, I pray for you and your families quick death!!! Maybe I can help, but there are alot of sicker individuals here that will probably beat me to it! If you do come here, you better be prepared, this isn't a city of mainly faggots like SF, it's a city that likes violence, and hopefully I'll be seeing you on the news tomorrow. Stay home you piece of shit! You'll see just how cheap it really is when your kid is sold to a Jap family for 40 bucks after you've been mysteriously killed. It's cheap, but your life is cheaper fucker.
Posted by: bradsh01 on July 21, 2003 09:55 PMJust kidding, but know that it is getting very overcrowded. I didn't really mean any offense by my comments, but it bugged me that you called Seattle cheap.
Posted by: bradsh01 on July 23, 2003 12:25 PM