Hypotheticals abounding.
Yesterday, I made a couple of snarky comments about some of the more unappealing aspects of the whole earthy-crunchy strawbale house culture, but since I've been making some changes to my weblog software, people couldn't comment. One person (I'll respect their privacy, so they will remain anonymous here) commented in email about the tradeoffs you might make, and posed a hypothetical question:
If someone offered you $1,000,000 a year to work a have-to-be-in-the-office-every-day job in Washougal (editors note: no mass transit, as far as I can tell), would you move there? Turn it down? What if it were a one-year contract?
US$1 million a year for a job in Washington is about US$600,000 after taxes if you live in Washington. It's about US$500,000 if you live in Oregon, which is a state that just last year passed an amendment to the constitution making me a second class citizen.
If I lived in Washington, that would give me an additional US$100,000 to put into buying a lot and putting up a Nebraska-style strawbale house (or, if it was a contract, renting an apartment for the year and then having a stack of money lying around so I could move somewhere where same-sex marriage is legal, then build a house at my leisure.)
When I was younger, I spent a lot of time living in Chicago, then NYC, then Los Angeles, but working halfway (or all the way) across the country. And I wasn't getting paid nearly US$1 million on any of those jobs, but I still rented apartments (or lived in residential hotels) near the jobsite, then either walked or took the city bus from the apartment to work (including one job in Spokane, Washington, where the bus took the long twisty path to go the 2 miles between the flat and where I worked.) I didn't have children then, but my sweetie had jobs in my nominal home city, so I ended up periodically commuting back and forth across the country to visit home from work.
I'm probably not a good person to ask about that hypothetical, because it's something I've repeatedly done. But in no point along this path did I feel particularly compelled to buy a house 30 miles out in the countryside, no matter how earthy-crunchy it might be. Sure, it's nice to be out in the wilderness™ and to commune with nature™, but I grew up in LaCrosse, Wisc, and that wore out my desire to live in towns and little cities.
Strawbale in the city? Sure. A nice quasi-craftsman house close to the El (or along a trolleybus line, I'm not picky) in Vancouver, yes please, I'll trade the 300 foot walk to the #19 bus stop for that. But you'll not find me living out in the country unless I can do that and walk to work.