Somewhere along the way, we started confusing value with price.
Not the same thing. Not even close.
My dad has lived in the same house for 60 years. Sixty. That’s not an address. That’s a timeline. That’s where birthdays happened, where arguments cooled off on the front porch, where neighbors became family, where muscle memory can still find the light switch in the dark.
Now the city wants the land to build a park. On paper, it sounds wholesome. Trees. Benches. Joggers pretending they like jogging.
They’re offering him a settlement that’s supposedly “more than market value.” Translation: the spreadsheet says he should be grateful. The spreadsheet has never watched its sons grow up in that living room.
This is the part that fascinates me. Some of the people involved in the process genuinely seem to believe that if the number is high enough, the attachment disappears. Now don't get me wrong. There are some people on the city's acquisition team who truly care and sympathize for those in the neighborhood. They are just doing their jobs.
But others I've heard seem to think that if I write you a check that you should just happily accept it and move on. And it's not because they are cold-hearted or anything. I'm not getting that vibe. It's because to those few, money solves all problems. Everything has a price.
“He’s getting more than it’s worth.”
According to who? Zillow? A city assessor with a clipboard? "Fair" market value measures square footage. It doesn’t measure memories. That house is the last piece of my late mom that my dad has. And what's "fair" about forcing someone out for a pickleball court to be built where their kitchen once stood?
You can appraise a roof. You cannot appraise 60 years of the lives under it.
And this isn’t just about property. It’s about how we’ve trained ourselves to think in dollar signs in any situation.
I saw a recent Facebook post where a woman named Ayisha Diaz said a man has to provide her an allowance of around $50,000/monthly to date her. Not figuratively. Literally. A financial minimum requirement to qualify for romance.
So now love has a net worth threshold?
Don't get me wrong. If attractiveness was a superpower, then Ayisha would be an Avenger. But it's absolutely ridiculous and immature to make that kind of statement. A man who is willing to lease-to-own a woman will most likely dump her as soon as next year's model comes out.
Somewhere between hustle culture and luxury Instagram aesthetics, we started attaching monetary figures to human worth. If he doesn’t make X, he’s not serious. If she doesn’t have Y lifestyle, she’s settling. If your house is worth more, your loss hurts less. That’s lazy math.
Money is a tool. A powerful one. It buys comfort, security, options. Nobody sane is pretending it doesn’t matter. But it has become the laziest shortcut for measuring importance.
If you love someone, you’ll spend on them.
If you value your home, you’ll take the highest bid.
If you respect yourself, demand a millionaire.
It’s all the same logic. And it misses the point every time.
The reason my dad’s house can’t be reduced to a number is the same reason a relationship shouldn’t be reduced to a balance sheet. Attachment is not transactional. It’s accumulated. Slowly. Quietly. Over time.
There’s a difference between compensation and equivalence. You can compensate someone financially. You cannot make them whole emotionally. It means sometimes the “fair offer” still feels unfair.
We like numbers because they’re clean. Emotions are messy. Bureaucracies love clean. Humans live in messy.
The irony is, parks are built to create memories. To give families a place to gather. To add quality of life. And in order to build those memories, someone else has to give up theirs.
I’m not arguing cities shouldn’t develop. Or that money doesn’t matter. I’m saying we should stop pretending money solves everything. A higher number does not automatically equal justice. Or closure. Or peace. You can value something deeply without being able to quantify it.
That used to be common sense.