A key understanding of San Francisco Bay Area culture.

[brooksmoses]

I was grumbling at kiya about the ways in which the local housing market is messed up (suffice it to say that when we moved from renting half a duplex to buying a house with the same amount of space in functionally the same neighborhood, our property tax became about 80% of what we were previously paying in rent), and stumbled across a sort of key observation about Bay Area culture when I realized that although I have lots of canned rantage about this, it doesn't feel like my canned rantage so much as just part of the local cultural fabric.

See, at social situations like parties or work gatherings where one needs to make unobjectionable small talk with quasi-strangers and acquaintances that we barely know, we can't talk about the weather because we haven't got any to speak of. So, instead, we complain about the housing market. It basically occupies the same social niche that weather does in places like New England.

(I am now pondering the "Everyone complains about the weather but nobody does anything about it" truism.)

Comments

[wordweaverlynn]

Definitely. When I want to tease my snowbound northeastern family, I talk about California weather. (Well, until the past few firestorm years I did.) When I want to tease myself, I look at real estate back home.

[julesjones]

It is utterly bizarre and makes no sense to anyone who doesn't know the back story.

A large number of my legal aliens circle of friends were living in rented accommodation owned by people who'd moved to a different part of the area or a bigger house, and were renting the new place while renting out the old. Sometimes there were multiple steps involved. The UK has house purchase chains; the Bay area has house rental chains.