Berkeley erudition

My family is in the midst of a house hunt after nearly three years of renting in Berkeley. We have some very specific ideas of where our ideal house should be and the severe market disruption at the moment seems to be having two effects: first, prices even in our highly desirable target zone have moderated noticeably; second, there is very, very little supply on the market.

One factor that we hadn’t thought about originally, however, was proximity to highways (not that our desired neighborhood was that close in any case). But one of the readers of my wife’s housing blog pointed her to a Lancet study that makes a strong case for staying at least a third of a mile away from a highway if you have children. What I found fascinating, however, was the erudition of the replies to my wife’s post on the matter.

I know we should expect a better quality of comment when the subject is Berkeley (or, at least, when the bulk of the readers are Berkeleyites), but to my eyes “Toady’s” comments are of the level I’d expect in a peer-reviewed journal. It’s reminiscent of that scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen pulls out Marshall McLuhan to clinch an argument about his thinking.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *