Empty bedrooms

The Seattle Times "FYI Guy" does a neat service--he'll investigate to find the answer to a question sent in by a reader.

On Dec. 16, he reported the results of the question, "How many empty bedrooms are there in King County homes?"

He counted 3 + bedroom homes that a single or married couple owns and lives in, with no kids or extended family living with them. He used census data to come up with the figure of 144,000 homes in King County that have empty bedrooms.

Starting with the third bedroom of these 144,000 homes, that was 200,000 bedrooms with no one sleeping in them.

Yes, empty nesters, mostly, peaking now with the Baby Boom generation. But it makes you think, doesn't it? Makes me think about sprawl, for one thing, as young families move outwards to new construction, while a single older person in a five bedroom home in the city stays put due to a tax break.

What I want for Christmas

1. I want for a well-off liberal to find any six Midwest Jerry Springer fans and bring them to New York City for a couple of nights at the theater. Because they must not get out much if they mistook this past election for theater.

2. I want a half-dozen local people to join me in writing thank you notes to anyone and everyone who does the difficult, good, and necessary work that we depend on, particularly work in the civic arena that most of us run away from.

3. I want us all to start a composting habit, if we haven’t already. Besides the regular reasons you can easily find to do so, it will help you to feel cleansed. It will help you get your head up and anticipate rich soil in which healthy things can sprout in this great land.