Why an entertainment column about real estate? In an era when the stock allure of rock stars, real estate has become a form of perverse diversion. curled over her reading material.
I tried to surmise from her transfixed body language what she might be reading...
The latest John Grisham? Harry Potter? The Story of O?
No, it was that hot, new "magazine," Real Estate Times: San Francisco. "Are you looking for a home to buy?" I asked.
"Of course not," she answered, blushing. "I could never afford one of these." "Then why are you reading it?
" She gave me a grim smile. "I can't help myself." Art, film, music, literature.
.. San Francisco has always been a city for for spectacle.
The high-tech economy has exploded the cost of Bay Area to its grotesque drama. We gaze at the pictures in realty windows; we amuse our voyeuristic impulses at open houses. We trade tales of eviction, memorize exorbitant prices, compare the changing faces of neighborhoods.
interest rates and the dos and don'ts of buying a home, here is a place mad. I'll be profiling a motley cast of locals in their homes, uncovering the dark truths about their rents, their mortgages and how they came to live as they do. Other weeks I'll explore the back-stage scenes which are speculators, protests and revolutionaries.
But like so many really good stories, this one isn't as simple as it appears. Neither a melodrama of villains and victims, nor a happy capitalist fairy tale of winners and losers, the Bay Area real estate game is full of gray areas. Monoliths shatter when seen from up close, fragment by fragment, at the level of individual lives.
is currently at work on a book about Bay Area real estate. She teaches a class on buying your first home in the Bay Area, and another class based on her best-selling career counseling book for creative people, "Creating a Life Worth Living." For more information, email her at .
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