One of the local news sites had an article today about area home values that included an interactive map. You could enter your zip code and get data on current median home values, % change over the last year and % change over the last five years. Because we moved here exactly five years ago this week I was curious to see how our home has faired. Uhm... not so good. If our house is anywhere close to our zip code median it has lost 35% of its value since we bought it. But it could be worse. Many neighborhoods have lost as much as 75% of their value over that period.
This morning I used plastic sheeting left over from the pond project and the cart I made for the VW body to make a painting booth on the patio. I got the seat frames, the steering column tube and a molding piece for the back seat primed and painted. The stock color is Silver Beige, a serious misnomer. A male came up with that. I read on TheSamba.com that Krylon's Almond Gloss is a dead-on match and a can runs one third the price. I want to put another coat on but that will have to wait until tomorrow morning. By 8 a.m. we were already in the 90's and the patio is on the southeast side of the house.
MSNBC.com has an article about divorce rates drawn from U.S. Census Dept. data that listed the top ten states for divorce rate, and Arizona came in at number ten. What caught my attention was the connection the article made between income levels and divorce rates. Eight of the ten states are in the South, the South has lower income rates and higher poverty rates, therefore divorce rates are tied to poverty.
Uhm... I don't remember a lot from that philosophy course I took in college but I do remember the section on false syllogisms.
Dogs get fleas. Dogs have wet noses. Therefore wet noses cause fleas.
Or...
Southerners listen to country western music. Southerns have a higher divorce rate. Therefore, country western music causes divorce.
Now there's one I could buy into.
Nevada came in sixth in divorce rate yet the median income for the state is 20th highest in the country and the number of people below the poverty line is the 20th lowest. Arizona is 16th lowest in income and 12th highest in number below the poverty line.
What those two states have in common is foreclosure rates. They rank #1 and #2 in the country. Many couples got in way over their heads in bad mortgages, then took out seconds, and ended up losing their homes, a process that takes over a year and puts incredible stress on a marriage.
I don't know what causes a higher divorce rate in some southern states yet not others, and the article doesn't even say how much higher. Is it a statistically significant increase? But if poverty causes divorce we should see a spike during the Great Depression and islands of higher rates deep within large cities and correspondingly lower rates in the suburbs.
Note: a family in the suburbs might very well have a higher debt-to-income ratio than one in the inner city.
Then we'd have to analyze for other variables like educational levels, how many came from homes affected by divorce, annual consumption of sweet tea (gotta be bad for a marriage; blech!) ....
Yeah, the more I think about it the more I'm convinced it has to do with country western music.
New song at Pathway this Sunday - Hillsong's "All Things Are Possible." It's been out a few years but we haven't sung it before. Great way to open a service.
The Americans are doing well at the U.S. Open. Still the first round but at Wimbledon we'd pretty much been washed out by this point. Blake sure looks good.
I'm headed up the hill to Paradise Bakery for dinner. Pam got called in yesterday so I've already eaten the meal she'd put together for tonight. The usual: turkey cranberry sandwich and maybe some soup. We only got up to about 112 degrees today, a veritable cold spell, so the soup should taste especially good.
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