[quote=toots] . . . The GS folks are mostly older and/or Navy retirees who got hired on after retirement. They bought their houses when they were affordable.
Contractors are either very young renters or have young families that live in places like Temecula, Marietta and Escondido. . . . [/quote]
Piggs, take a hard look at this “very typical” picture of longtime SD workers.
The GS “boomer” workers (a good portion no doubt current and future “double dippers”) are still working into their sixties and still contributing to FERS and their TSP’s.
Why? To keep OASDI “afloat,” the SSA is trying to convince them (if they’re “healthy”) to delay SS “retirement” until age 70 (for a MUCH higher monthly annuity) but of course, if they do so, they take the chance they will die in the interim and not collect a penny of it :=0
This doesn’t bode well for Gen X Federal workers’ upward mobility in the General Service and Wage Grade trades.
Younger Gen X and Gen Y have been working as “contractors” because as boomers and beyond retired, their positions were likely never filled.
“Contractors” don’t work for the government directly so don’t have a defined benefit pension.
SPAWARS and the old NOSC buildings (foot of Rosecrans) are a l-o-o-o-ng commute from TV. There are MANY areas of SD, East and South County which were and are just as affordable as TV but are located 8-20 miles of these installations. Listings abound in ALL of them.
These SD Federal contract-workers are making their daily lives hell as well as racking up their gasoline bills and auto maintenance/repair expense by commuting over 100 miles per day.
It’s ridiculous and never needed to happen. These SD workers did it to themselves.
Meanwhile, their “boomer” co-workers are living 0-20 miles away in houses most of them likely owned for decades.
It doesn’t matter what they paid for them. I can assure you that these workers were paid MUCH LESS when they first bought them with mortgages at MUCH HIGHER interest rates than today! It’s ALL relative. All you need to do is carefully take notice that they’re NOT MOVING and ask yourselves why a 55-yo 1550 sf house with a knotty-pine kitchen on a 5000 sf lot in Serra Mesa was good enough for THEM to raise their families in and also good enough for THEM to retire in but NOT good enough for later Gen X and Gen Y to do same.
Values and expectations have changed so much that today’s younger family-raising cohort wouldn’t be caught dead making offers in the same “middle-class” SD neighborhoods that their coworkers senior to them have lived in for decades. They want *newer* and *larger* straight out of the gate. So much so, that one or both parents in a household will drive 100++ miles round trip to work every day.
Hard to believe, but true. I believe this phenomenon of very high expectations among young parents is a direct cause of the “sequestration” we’re seeing in coastal CA counties. They’re doing it to themselves because they have so much “choice” and many are now “transplants” and don’t have any local family to advise them when they are about to make a big mistake (such as buying a primary home out-of-county when your job(s) are located in SD) :=0
