lookin' out my back door...

the good part of high gas prices is it keeps poor people off the roads! I was thinking about houses so I went on a ride Sunday into Santa Barbara..first to Big Five for some big fun..then I went through Hope Ranch to see if Wendy wanted to go to lunch but I couldn't find her..maybe she was already out to lunch!! ha ha! hey do you think I should buy a winery?? well the News-Press finally chimed in on the housing element in Santa Barbara...housing element.. geez, I've been watching too many city council meetings! I mean the lending program provided to a few city employees (teacher's pets)...we all know that the News-Press is last with these stories usually following the Daily Sound by a few days...and we all know that they, the N-P folks, can't do many stories without rewriting the next day because the first version was full of errors..what do you expect from an award winning paper?? and to make matters worser (no editor no problem), they ask Joe Armendariz, an ignorant Mexican, what he thinks about it all! Joe, who gives my tax money to nonprofits like Peoples' Self Help Housing, Joe who as Carp councilman has given us a budget deficit, and who can't remember when the council was making deals and promises with the Lagunitas housing project (a project that never happened)... Lagunitas was to provide housing for a few city employees and if I remember correctly when Browning Allen worked here, the council offered him some sort of sweetheart deal, but he went to work for the City of Santa Barbara anyway which was ok by me because soon he miscalculated the Granada Garage parking entrance and set off a media firestorm while the folks in Carp were snickering... but there was all kinds of weird stuff was going on with Lagunitas...most of the land was finally sold by Investec last year so the big new age digital campus with bioswales, green energy, native plantings etc never happened..I'm happy to say the field is empty 'cept for the weeds..it looks great! but anyway, back in the 1990s it was a buyers' market...you could get a good deal on a house and if you worked for a city, in a career that would last for awhile, there was help to get you a house..the Coastal Housing Partnership helped some people buy.. others, like me, just went out and found the best deal they could with no help...it was a good thing to own a house and not send your money to a landlord anymore...some folks liked the ease of paying a landlord low rent and let them deal with the headaches...different strokes.. my point being..uh..I dont really know what I'm trying to say! have a nice day...