Rental Numbers

As Karla mentions today on the family blog, we are moving from our rented apartment to a rented house next month. This will, among other things, let me get back to barbecuing, a hobby I’ve been unable to indulge for the past 14 months of apartment living. Before opting for this particular rental, we looked at all our rental options, and it was an interesting exercise.

We started out looking in our current neighborhood. Typical rents for a single family house around here, according to our (extensive but unscientific) survey conducted via Internet/phone/driving by, come out at about a dollar a square foot per month. That seems high by national standards as well as for Austin (it is about what we paid living on South Temple, a block from the Temple in the heart of downtown Salt Lake City). It is also high by our budget standards, since our goal was to pay roughly the same amount in housing as we are now ($0.80 square foot or so).

So what goes into that dollar/sq ft/month? A landlord has to pay taxes and homeowners fees in addition to the mortgage. And taxes around here are significantly influenced by the school district. (This post is not about correlating school taxes with academic performance, an exercise I am completely unqualified to undertake; all I can do is look at the numbers, and the fact is that certain school districts levy higher property taxes than others.) School taxes and HOA are components of the first three rules of real estate (location, location, location) and they result in higher rents when compared to properties that are not maintained to HOA standards and/or properties in school districts with lower tax burdens.

In the end we compromised on the school district, since we won’t have any school-age children for several more years. We found a nice place in clean, safe neighborhood that rents well below a dollar/sq ft per month, larger than our current place but for less per square foot. As an added bonus, the new place is 10 miles closer to work than our current apartment, with the following cost savings in gas (these calculations were made with $4/gallon gas and our aging Nissan, which gets ~20 mpg average city+highway):

• 30 miles/day = 1.5 gallons = $6 per day, * 20 working days/month = $120 per month commuting cost at our current home
  

• 10 miles/day = 0.5 gallons = $2 per day, * 20 working days/month = $40 per month commuting cost at our new home

Pretty cool, huh? Although it wasn’t the goal, it appears this reduces our “carbon footprint” as well—although, now that I can barbecue again, I guess we’ll be offsetting the decreased oil consumption with increased use of charcoal and mesquite smoking chips. So sue me.

Truman

Yes, it has been a while since I’ve posted a book review. There are several reasons for this: We now have an 11-month-old running (literally) around the house; Karla bought me the hardbound edition of the complete collection of The Far Side, and I entertained myself going through it page by page; and Truman has to be the most densely written book I’ve read since I left school. It’s only 1000 pages, but it felt about twice that long, spanning 84 years and featuring a Tolstoy-sized cast of American and European politicians and notables.

The only other book I’ve read by McCullough was 1776, and I think it took me about three days. In comparison, I turned the first page of this book last January, and I read about thirty pages a week until I was finished. The story is compelling, and certainly had its hooks in me for four months or I would have simply set it aside. What made it such a challenge to finish was the sheer breadth of the story. In my opinion, it should really have been written as three volumes, covering the periods prior to, during, and after World War II, and had much better pacing and flow. Had this been the case I would have been tempted to simply read the middle volume, clearly the most momentous and captivating part of the story. Nevertheless, I would have missed out on some interesting material about Truman’s earlier life, including his decorated military career. I was also drawn to his struggles to follow his moral compass during years of the machine and cronyism that dominated Missouri politics for decades.

Yet it is the WWII period that was, as predicted, the most fascinating part of the story. A handwritten note authorizing the nuclear actions against Hiroshima and Nagasaki is included among the several photos. The portrayal of Truman, having been willfully kept in the dark by a resentful Roosevelt, assuming command so effectively in such a short period, was inspiring. The story of how Truman so unexpectedly charmed Churchill and the British delegation at Potsdam (as he did so many other national and world figures throughout his life) was delightful. McCullough’s account was at its best when it portrayed how Truman’s Midwestern practicalities were key to his success in a variety of endeavors, not the handicap they were widely perceived to be. Truman was consistently underestimated and underappreciated throughout his career, but that did not stop him from accomplishing some truly amazing things.

The account bogged down a bit when it came to Truman’s presidential campaign, second term, and Korea. The “whistle stop” campaign was remarkable as the last great political effort before the dawn of television-centric politics, but it hardly deserved a treatment encompassing 15% of the entire biography. Korea of course was far more significant, and could not be recounted briefly while still doing Truman justice. Since I was born over two decades after the war ended, the whole picture, political and military, was a revelation to me, yet I found familiar echoes in press and personal accounts of “our boys dying for a foreign war” and accounts of military ineptitude being loudly proclaimed by Congress (1952, meet 2007). I think it would profitable for politicians on both sides of the aisle today to review the circumstances of Korea and the way in which the Truman and Eisenhower administrations dealt with the crisis.

Overall, Truman is a compelling portrait of one of America’s most remarkable presidents. Certainly the quality of a biography is dictated by the source material, and McCullough’s treatment does Mr Truman justice. In the future, however, I’ll be more aware of what I’m getting into when I pick up a 1000-page biography.

Seagate: It takes a licking…

I was amazed to see a post on Slashdot about a disk drive that was on board the space shuttle Columbia when it exploded. Investigators found “a 400 MB Seagate hard drive … in the sort of shape you think it would be in after being in an explosive fire and then hurled to earth from several miles up with a ferocious impact.” In an impressive feat of data recovery, the Kroll Ontrack firm was able to pull 90% of the data off, helping complete a complex scientific experiment. Cool.

First Steps