Week 2 Blog Post:

If I was the father of a low-income family of four, money would definitely be the main key factor for the location of where my family and I reside. For instance if I just moved into a brand new city or was about to and started looking around for a place to live. I would start by asking myself or studying my finances to see if I can first afford to buy a home or determine if I will have to rent a residence. Being our example is a low-income family I’m going to say that my family and I are going to have to look for a place to rent for now. Once that has been decided I then need to go through my finances once again and determine how much rent can I afford a year. Then once I resolve what I can afford yearly I need to look for apartments, houses, or condos which I can afford on my budget that I made. Now when I’m looking for the right area to live in there are certain factors in which I need to think about and keep in mind. Affordability which we’ve talked about I think almost too much now is the first thing and as you can see is a very important piece of this puzzle. Following affordability you need to then think about things like a decent area of town, area with good schools, one with low crime rates, affordable taxes, opportunities for good employment, close to public transportation. I know there are lots more we could think of but those would pretty much be my main concepts when determining this. Another thing that would be impotent, which I am adding in this post only because I’m a real estate minor and there’s a section on this in the reading also on this, is if you were buying a house or property do it in a county with low property taxes and in  a high value real estate area.

I’m going to be comparing my area living factors  example with the concentric rings model that was created by Ernest Burgess in 1925 and revised a few years later. I chose this model to use in my example because I feel this model out of the other two is pretty much the easiest to understand and look at how the different parts and areas of the city lays out and appears.  I think this model is very easy to understand because also it is very organized in a neat fashion and well planned out. With the factors that I’ve mentioned above I believe that they would set my family and I up in Zone Four in Burgess’s model. Burgess describes Zone Four as a place with: “single-family homes, apartment houses, residential hotels and bright light areas.” I could see me and my young family starting out in Zone Four and only building and growing my employment to maybe one day change to a different zone and own my own home.