Week 10: Affordability and Digital Cities

In Tuesdays lecture, we explored the concepts of Housing Costs, transportation costs, and the definition of affordability. According to Professor Sanchez, the rule of thumb is your house should be less than 30% of your income (this does not take into consideration location).  This article http://budgeting.thenest.com/much-income-should-spend-mortgage-4065.html says you should spend around 28% of your income on housing… so less than 30% seems like a pretty accurate generalization. Transportation is about another 15 percent of your income; depending on location, transportation and shelter average out to being around 20% of your income each. Then, food comes in at about 13% of your income. However, a journal entry from soundmoneymatters.com http://www.soundmoneymatters.com/spend-more-food/ states that the average American family only spends 8% of their income on food, as opposed to the French, who spend 14% of their income on food. Americans spend less than other countries on food because we are opposed to over-paying for food. We like our gas, food, and water incredibly cheap, or we complain. But, the real dilemma is: are we sacrificing quality for price? And the answer is a most definite yes. The class also explored the concept of location efficient mortgages, which means the more efficient your location is, the more your housing payments are because you don’t have to make as many payments on cars. For instance, if you lived in the middle of a city, you wouldn’t need to own two or three cars, so you could pay for a more expensive mortgage.

Accordingly, on Thursday we covered Digital cities, a very interesting topic that is rapidly developing and becoming more innovative, even as I type this blog post. The barebones definition of Digital cities is: what kinds of information or facilities or technologies can be used to better connect households with households/ businesses/ government? Cities use this technology to simulate what they will look like ten/twenty/ 100 years from now. It tries to figure out how can we predict the changes in the future as far as service needs, infrastructure, and demographic changes? Most of what we see Digital/ wired cities developing around is internet connectivity. Professor Sanchez also told us Chatanooga, Tennessee is the most wired city in America as of right now. They are experiencing serious technological and infrastructure advancements… it is a city that has come back from the dead. Although from my point of view, it doesn’t really seem like these is much to do in Chatanooga, TN, a travel guide article below this sentence shows the best things to do in Chatanooga. None of these activities really seem all that appealing, even after looking at this article http://attractions.uptake.com/tennessee/chattanooga/610503799.html. Skipping to another point I found interesting, apparently most universities aren’t able to deliver most of the services they promise, so they outsource to technological firms. I think the meaning of this is most of American money is spent inefficiently. Going back to Ralph Buehler’s point that the German AAA makes money of taking care of German roads, whereas the American AAA loses money, seems like America started off strong, but we cannot maintain. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/mead-tt1107.html ß The article to the left makes it seem like colleges are spending every bit of their money they can to keep the cost of college as slow as possible. They spend most of the endowments given to them, and the government’s money to keep the cost of college low. I really can’t find a solution for the inefficiency presented by the American governments careless spending, aside from bringing the troops home. I guess our generation is going have rapid change pushed upon us, in the form of expensive renewable energy (that should have been slowly implemented over time), higher taxes, and higher payments in general.