Chiming in on the cost of living large
By HARRISON HEYL

The median price for a home on the South Coast reached $900,000 in May. With only a fraction of residents able to afford a home at these prices, you really need to get creative to live here.

For example, my girlfriend and I purchased a two-bedroom, two-bath Porta-Potty on upper State Street. It’s got a good school district and a very nice urinal. We’re thinking about taking out a home equity loan and adding a fan. With the increased air circulation and lower likelihood of a methane explosion, we can sell for a profit and move into something more roomy, like a three-bedroom storm drain.

OK, I’m exaggerating a little. We own a condo, which is really just a glorified Porta-Potty anyway. That is the sacrifice we made to live in this town. Sure, we wanted a single family home with a back yard and a methamphetamine lab just like everyone else, but we weren’t willing to sell our internal organs on the black market to come up with the down payment. So a condo it is.

One unusual aspect about condos is that you own the airspace within the condo, but you share ownership in everything else with the other owners of the complex. After living in a condo for a few years, I can honestly say it would be better to live out of a cardboard box or become an itinerant train hobo than to share ownership in the very floor, walls, and roof over your head with complete strangers, half of whom you will learn have been diagnosed with mental disorders — and evidently aren’t taking their medications — and the other half of whom you will grow to dislike intensely over time.

Somehow, throwing our life savings and 30 years of mortgage payments into a dysfunctional relationship with absolute strangers isn’t the savvy real estate investment we’d been led to believe.

There’s another problem with condo living. In condos, everyone has wind chimes.

When it’s windy, say in the dead of night when you’re trying to sleep, there’s this cacophony of wind chimes going off, like a bad junior high marching band parading through the middle of the complex. There’s no way to turn them off and they’re completely off-key, creating an obnoxious cling, clang, clong, not like some recognizable show tune or anything. One day I’m sure I will go mad and bang our pots and pans together on our patio and yell, “HOW DO YOU LIKE THESE WIND CHIMES?!”

Another thing about condos: your bathroom windows are located approximately six feet from the bathroom windows of your nearest neighbor. The significance of this does not become evident until you hear the concert hall acoustics of windows cracked at the optimum angle to bounce the tiniest of sounds into the neighboring bathroom. At the most private of times, I might add. For example, I’ll hear my neighbor clear her throat slightly, and I’ll realize that moments before I was bellowing, “Come to poppa” or “Thar she blows” or maybe “Everybody Wang Chung tonight.” Undoubtedly she jumps to the worst possible conclusions — as you are doing right now — about what I could possibly be doing to precipitate these remarks.

These are the sacrifices we make to live here. Sometimes you have to give up the idea of owning your own home, having privacy, operating your own meth lab.

You buy a condo. You rent. You live in a camper that the city of Santa Barbara won’t let you park anywhere. You tote your stuff around in plastic bags and a shopping cart. Like I said before, you have to get creative if you want to live in this area.

Fortunately, there are some things we don’t have to give up. We can still Wang Chung tonight. In fact, I think I speak for all of us when I say that Wang Chung-ing is the one thing that can get us through this housing crisis, if anything can.

Harrison Heyl is a free-lance writer and UCSB graduate. His patio wind chimes play “Everybody Have Fun Tonight.”