A $50,000 electric bill? The cost of cooling L.A.’s biggest houses in a heat wave? A city budget deficit you’re not going to believe? I can’t even bring myself to use the word “exorbitant.”
No, it’s the reality of today’s Los Angeles.
“The city has become a huge, sprawling, bureaucratic wasteland,” the New York Times’s Jonathan Kirschner recently wrote, lamenting the fact our city leaders have lost touch with the ordinary people who built it, and who will one day have to live in it. But they can’t possibly understand this: What we live in now, that’s what we will die in.
You might not want to live in poverty, or fear being evicted; but you certainly don’t want to wind up facing a $50,000 electric bill. If it’s heat that’s got you freaked out, you need a better option than the cheapest furnace in town. At least they’re not like those old heaters used to sell at flea markets. The cheap ones you used to buy with a credit card — and which were basically worthless because you could actually install a new and better heating element or maybe replace the motor — are pretty much gone.
So where should you turn when your temperature hits 110 degrees, or your electric bill tops $400? The first decision is do you want to live in a heat wave? You might be able to find a relatively cool house for $600,000; but would you even want to?
The second question is what you can afford.
The city’s median home sale price is just over $400,000, with the median list price just over $250,000, according to Zillow. It would be surprising if the median price of homes was lower, and by many accounts very high. And what’s going to make a heat wave more unbearable than heat?
A study by the Los Angeles Times found that the cost of cooling a single-family home is anywhere from $500,000 to $2.5 million.
According to an article by the Associated Press, the city of Los Angeles had to save nearly $500 million for this year’s budget.
Los Angeles Times: A $10,000 electric bill
