RED SQUIRREL

HURRICANES GOOD FOR THE ECONOMY? DON'T RESETTLE IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

Hurricanes?

I heard someone on the radio say that.  He said that there would be lots of jobs, so much rebuilding.  I ask you, with what money? Insurance?  A recent speech by HUD's Ben Carson emphasized that the government would provide NEEDS not WANTS.  That means basics.  Rebuilding is up to YOU.


Don't come to SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA to resettle here.  The cost of living, in particular housing, has gone "through the roof" which is not such a funny pun.


Let me explain just how bad it is.
I know several good people who are near homeless or facing homelessness.

Scenario One

This morning I ran into a senior citizen with a disabled son who has lived in the same apartment with the help of a voucher Section 8 from Housing Authority of  Burbank for 23 years.  This woman was also working into her senior hood.  The landlord had long ago stopped repairing things, including the plumbing, and she had previously told me that the Housing Authority questioned how she could possibly go on.
So, what happened?  She was given 6 months notice to move, with a rent increase (no rent control in Burbank) to $2700, more than double than she had been paying.  Five months in she had nowhere to live, and on an emergency basis, she and her disable child moved into a senior building.  It was last minute and she had to give away 70 percent of her possessions to fit them in this new place.


Scenario Two


I met "Pat" while waiting for the subway in Hollywood.  A clean cut man in mid life he told me he had moved from Vegas with an agreement to share an apartment with two other men already there. He lived there three weeks when the landlord raised the rent by $300 and said he had to go.  Pat is sleeping on the Subway, has a gym membership, and is applying to shelter programs near sleepless, so the question is, WHEN will someone take him in?  He has a good education and other marketable skills, but has not been able to look for work with so little sleep.  I have him texting me every day, as he does not have a street buddy or anyone to look out for him.  I can barely but he says he has a case manager now.


Scenario Three


"Emmy" is a single mom with a child whose father is out of state, living with her mom, and they are not getting along.  After months a friend offered her a small single apartment at a reasonable rate, and she is going to take it soon.  Without any furniture.  Her mom meanwhile told me that her parents are renting rooms in their house for $800.  So her parents who OWN a HOME are making $1600 a month on people who have nowhere to go.
Scenario Four
Took some donations to a local church service center that has a little clothing and food giveaway and there met another man who lost his apartment after 23 years.  In this case the rent just got higher than his income.  He's sleeping in his car while looking for a room to rent, hoping to have a separate entrance.
Scenario Five
I met Becky at my pharmacy where she is a very helpful clerk.  The single mom of two, she also lost an apartment that was going to be torn down and where everyone else fled with a couple thousand dollars given to them.  A lawyer protected her and got her better money.  But one day she had to go. Basically, she is in an RV in a friend's drive way, paying rent to be in it, and she and the kids are sick of living that way.  Their grades are dropping.  She is on my list of people who need AFFORDABLE HOUSING.


The whole situation here is going downhill fast and I mention this because in the past I have posted advice for incoming immigrants. I now think immigrants who are not independently wealthy should not settle in Southern California.


I fear that what happened with KATRINA will happen after the last two BIG HITS BY HURRICAINES.  Basically HUD or other funds will be used to help some people who are displaced MOVE TO SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA.  CHOOSE ELSEWHERE.  I met Katrina families who were allowed to use my gym for free when they came out.  They were whole families in rooms in houses and applying for homeless shelters.


When you've lived most of your life in a place, it's very difficult to imagine where else you might go.  Even the most flexible of us have a hard time with all the changes.

REVISITING A SINGLE YELLOW ROSE by ANNA KOCZAK

A couple years ago, I posted about this book.  Here is a scene from page 38 of the paperback that took place 70 YEARS AGO in the Chapter September-October 1947.  Sadly too many Hungarians and Hungarian-Americans remember these times because of their personal losses.

...Koros opened a document and handed it to Father. "It's your turn, Gyula," Koros said flatly, The paper bore the stamp of the government.  Like those before him, my father was being asked to sign away his land.  It was bad enough that this man treated others in the town with contempt, but that he could be so cold-hearted to someone who was part of his extended family shocked me.

"And if I don't," my father asked.

Waving his hand at the policemen, he said, "You will."

"Sign it, Gyula," my mother said, a catch in her throat.  "The land is not worth the price we'll pay if you don't."

At age sixty two, with the flourish of a pen, my father lost most of his land, his horses, his vineyards, his friends, his fruit trees, everything he'd worked for over a lifetime.  My mother too lost what she loved.  And so did all of us.

Father dropped the document on the ground. "It's all yours, Feri." Then in a calm voice and looking him in the eye, he added, "Men like you disgust me."

Tears tugged at my eyes.  I was furious and already imagined strangers cultivating and harvesting our land and the land of our neighbors.  How could this man so casually destroy people's lives.  Father was right.  He was disgusting...


I recently read this book over again.  The twists and turns and tensions build, but I'm picking up on some things I didn't the first time around.  Not only were Anna Toth's favorite color of roses yellow, but red roses were hated because they were associated with the Communists.

CHRYSANTHEMUMS

FARMERS MARKET

THE COUNTESS by REBECCA JOHNS

THE COUNTESS, a fictive novel which tells the story of Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who is supposed to have been the serial killer of hundreds of servant girls.  (I still think the numbers are exaggerated but even a dozen or two is extreme.)  Rebecca John's book was truly engaging. Reading his book and the Urbarium about the same time, though the events in this book took place more than a hundred years earlier, helped me understand better what life was for Hungarian women of the high nobility at the time when Bathory lived. Women like those married to the men who were counted in that census. 

Usually arranged to be married, never the less they still had poor relatives. They were often sent these poor relatives to work for them, to be educated a bit by working for the estate, or married off.  In this book the servant girls are often sexual before marriage, depicted as eagerly seducible, even promiscuous, and maybe that was a fact of class difference, or perhaps that is only in the viewpoint of a woman whose marriage is arranged,  but it is one of the reasons they are punished by her. 

Clearly increasingly sadistic, but with faithful servants also cooperating or punishing the girls themselves, the Countess thinks that it is completely in her right to be so punishing, but even the high nobility has its limits about what punishment is, and the torture and death of a servant, while not unheard of, is still not common. 

 

How long have the rumors been flying? 

How many good excuses, and bad ones, does the Countess have before she is walled up in a room, where she lives a couple years until she dies, visited only by a confessor, who can't actually get any sorrow out of her?

Is she a sympathetic character?  In my opinion, in some ways, she is. 

A countess of wealth had to be excellent at managing an estate and often spent months at a time - sometimes years - without seeing her husband and actually having a relationship with him.  The shifts of allegiances and power, at a time when Croation nobles are marrying with Hungarians and some Hungarians in Transylvania have a different notion of who should be ruling what, mean that a man really must be ready to battle physically if politicking isn't working in his favor.

There was a lot of research put into this book, so if you've been reading the Urbarium, or perhaps doing some personal family history or genealogy research, some of the noble surnames will sound familiar to you. Bathory's arranged marriage is history, as are the marriages of other nobles mentioned in the book.   

After the death of her husband, his best friend who had agreed to look in on her, did, but he also slept with her and then didn't marry her, choosing instead a much younger woman without a dowry to her name.  She is terribly embarrassed to have to beg money that was loaned by her husband to give her daughter a dowry and everyone suspects or knows that she has had this involvement and that the man will show off his new, nubile bride at the wedding.  Perhaps it's her husband's best friend who also, finally, puts a stop to her violent aberrant behavior.

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