Suburban Walls

44 thoughts on “Suburban Walls”

1. The problem with the case you are making is that school funding is nearly entirely local. If you allow the better off people to self-segregate, you are going to create areas with the most need and no ability to pay for those needs. I don’t see the problem with letting people create communities with their own rules about appearance, but that’s the business of HOAs, not towns (which, at least here, tend to come with their own school district).

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   1. Massachusetts set up a financing system which is not entirely local, as part of school reform. To simplify, the state sets a required minimum funding level per town. The towns which can’t meet that funding on their own receive supplemental funding from the state. Wealthy towns effectively lose part of their taxes, which are funneled by the state to other towns, based on a complicated formula.

      Does it work? Maybe? There are significant drawbacks. For one, the state does not step in when the town _could_ raise property taxes, but chooses not to. Thus, a town with lots of retirees (who vote), might have room to raise taxes, but voters who don’t want to. As long as the state mandated minimum is met, the state won’t force the town to raise taxes, nor will it add funds to the pot. That means urban schools might be better funded, and have better school buildings, than rural towns with lots of retirees and “valuable” real estate.

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      1. We have a state based funding system, actually funded by the state-based tax mechanism. I think it’s better than the alternative of local funding, but it is not without consequences, as you describe. As you describe for MA, we also have a re-distribution scheme. In our state, the re-distribution does seem to generally go to poorer children (rural communities & places with large areas out of the tax base, including Indian reservations and parks/protected lands). So, I’m comfortable with the re-distribution, in genera. Our problem is that the state-wide funding means that the minimum education is offered — urban areas want more education, and would be willing to pay for it, but can’t because state wide taxes must be raised to support the programs (and, we have supermajority requirements for raising taxes).

         The state legislature is currently fighting the courts under the “McCleary decision”, in which the state was told that the constiutional requirement of prioritizing education was not being met in the state, because of a lack of funding. There’s still no resolution in sight.

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2. Why are cars parked on lawns more of a problem than cars parked in driveways? That sounds like pure snobbishness to me rather than a quality-of-life issue. I don’t like the philosophy that landowners have very little control over what they can do with their property just because some people in their town (possibly a majority, possibly not) don’t like it. If you’re buying into a “community” like an HOA, whatever, but insanely restrictive zoning and codes enforced by government are something else.

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   1. Cars parked on lawns is a perfectly reasonable issue for a town in cases where parking on a lawn means entering or exiting a street at a place where the city didn’t give permission for a curb cut. As a pedestrian, it’s nice to think that there are places on the sidewalk where nobody has any excuse at all if they drive into you.

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      1. Right.

         It also suggests that the home is stuffed to the gills with residents, perhaps in violation of building and fire code.

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   2. Parking on lawns can also mean cutting down mature trees/shrubs to make room for vehicles. It’s often a greenspace issue as well.

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      1. My views on cutting down trees will probably change in about six weeks when all the leaves fall. But, my point is that the ground on the side of your street isn’t private property. It’s the city’s right-of-way and there are a variety of good reasons for this (mostly safety and utilities) and controlling where you cross that in a care isn’t an insane restriction an more than a stop sign is an arbitrary exercise of government power.

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      2. Care, car. Whatever.

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3. Density is definitely something that’s managed by zoning. Vancouver is hemmed in on three sides by the Pacific Ocean on the west, the mountains on the north and the US on the south (below some suburbs). In order to limit sprawl to the east, zoning was changed to allow for lane way housing. In other words, within strict limits you can build a second home at the back of your lot that opens onto the alley.

   The lane way house is a good idea for a mother-in-law suite or other family accommodation with housing being so out of reach price-wise. From a strict financial perspective they don’t make sense because they cost $200,000 -$250,000 and the rent you would earn barely covers the cost.

   The city also looks the other way with unauthorized basement suites.

   Where they have dropped the ball is allowing the teardown of older homes (including mature landscaped yards) to be replaced by cheaply built McMansions that then sit empty most of the year.

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4. Marie Antoinette couldn’t have said it better.

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   1. Is this in response to my comment?

      If so, I was trying to describe how Vancouver is making the city much more dense through zoning changes —–> more affordable ——> more diversity. It’s a huge challenge for what is one of the most expensive cities in North America.

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      1. No, it was in response to the original post. “People can create communities of their choice.” Sure. Wealthy people. Not anyone else. Zoning laws that prevent affordable housing for working class people isn’t indicative of “little democracy”, it’s indicative of gilded-age values.

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      2. And there’s that underlying judgement that if you live in a sketchy ‘hood, somehow it’s your fault. Just as if you live in a good ‘hood, it was all done on your own steam.

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5. Since I’ve had this blog, I’ve lived in three places. One was a five story walk up apartment with drug dealers on the front steps and a heating system that would stop working for days at a time. In the middle of winter. One was a house in a working-class/middle class town. And now we’re in a town with some diversity, but dominated by wealtheir families. This town is a lot less stressful.

   It was depressing to live in an area with cars on the front lawn. It wasn’t fun to look out my kitchen and see others with backyards filled with trash and rusting car parts. People didn’t bother going to school meetings. They didn’t care about the things that I cared about. They didn’t care about funding the schools or libraries. They didn’t care if the streets were safe for kids to ride bikes. Or maybe they cared, but didn’t have the time to protest or the efficacy to believe that protest was worth while. But for the most part, they thought I was crazy for caring.

   They were parking their cars on their front lawns, because they had too many cars to fit in their driveways. Sometimes the owner had a weekend hobby of fixing old cars. Sometimes the owners were illegally renting out rooms in their homes and the driveway was full. These illegal rental situations brought in some scary dudes, who were extremely transient. If you have small kids running around, the scary dudes are very worrisome.

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   1. I understand. Believe me. I will NEVER be able to afford to live in a safe neighborhood. I can’t send my daughter to a “good” school. Your solution is not a solution for most people. We have to live within our means. You’re lucky—you have more means.

      And I don’t begrudge people the means to buy bigger houses, or prettier houses, or fancier stuff in their houses. I begrudge like hell the fact that basic safety and decent schools are inaccessible to me. I begrudge like all hell that I live in a nation where one’s human worth is directly proportional to one’s net worth.

      That’s what it comes down to. Those “little democracies” are busy creating less overall democracy. Concentrated wealth has consequences. You won’t like the consequences, even though right now it’s improved the view outside your window.

      I get not wanting scary dudes around your children. Do you have any idea what that sounds like to those of us who’ve never had that choice? That never will have that choice? Why do we deserve less?

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      1. LaLubu,

         You have a great union job. Why can’t you afford a decent neighborhood? In 75% of the rest of the country, people with professional qualifications and jobs at your level can afford a decent house in a decent neighborhood. It’s just not that expensive.

         I would encourage you to think about a move. What is more important than your and your family’s safety?

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      2. Construction work has layoffs. I have to gear my house payment towards what I can pay during the times I’m on unemployment and paying COBRA to keep insurance. It’s cheaper for me to live in a rougher neighborhood in the city than it is to live in a small town with the sky-high cost of commuting (gas is expensive in Illinois) and the astronomical price of small-town electric.

         You’re asking the wrong question. You should be asking why all these formerly fabulous, perfectly safe, working-class neighborhoods no longer are. I’ll give you a hint: the vanishing of living-wage union jobs with benefits. It’s next to impossible for someone without a college education to get a decent job, and even for those of us (like myself) that have managed to do that, our working is hit-or-miss, not a steady, reliable paycheck.

         So I do the best I can. Where I live is the best I can do.

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      3. Seriously. Why shift the blame to working class people for not getting the scratch together for a more expensive home (that so many people with my “decent job” had foreclosed on them ) rather than the musical chairs economy?

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      4. Nobody in their right mind wants to exclude people like you from their neighborhood. You’re smart, a hard worker. You care about schools. You like good food. I wish you were my neighbor.

         The problem is that by creating zoning laws that try to get rid of the creeps in the illegal rentals (we all can agree that those dudes are bad news), those laws go too far and restrict all rentals.

         You know it’s actually safer to live near drug dealers than in these questionable suburbs. Drug dealers kick the shit out of perverts.

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      5. Not everyone in an illegal rental is a creep. Often the landlord is someone who lost a job and is trying to make the mortgage. But, sure, it’s fun to pretend they are all creeps.
         The guy working on cars on the weekend is also trying to make it. They are hustling and working a second job, but you don’t want them near you either. Maybe they don’t care enough about food.

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      6. “Construction work has layoffs. I have to gear my house payment towards what I can pay during the times I’m on unemployment and paying COBRA to keep insurance. It’s cheaper for me to live in a rougher neighborhood in the city than it is to live in a small town with the sky-high cost of commuting (gas is expensive in Illinois) and the astronomical price of small-town electric.”

         I mean move to a neighborhood with similar costs in a more economically vibrant part of the country. You’re always complaining what a hell hole your area is, and I believe you.

         In our part of Texas, everybody seems to be hiring entry level, and there are huge amounts of construction going on right now: the college is on a multi-hundred million dollar building binge, we’re getting yet another huge sporting goods store, there’s a 700-bed student apartment going up, the major strip mall is about to double in size, there are new gas stations, smaller apartments, and some retail going in–I’ve never seen anything like it. Obviously, it won’t go on forever, but I suspect that you could easily earn two times what you’re currently making for a year or two, if you were free to pull up stakes and come. Our hotsy totsy suburban school district (really good high school) has houses starting at just over $100k (our slums that are equivalent to your slums start mostly around $40k).

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   2. I thought something along these lines when Bush won the second time around, after Katrina, after Iraq, . . . , that my wealth meant that I’d always be able to protect my children, that I wouldn’t be sending them off to war or walking in the flooded streets with children in my arms, or sending them to inadequate schools.

      While realizing this enormous benefit/safety in my own life, I try to think about the ways my choices affect others who are not so fortunate.

      The key issue for me, is whether the zoning is being used to regulate the population or to create a quality of life. And, when we answer quality of life (the only right answer), how far we are willing to trade diversity, of ideas, of people, of race and religion in return for the quality of life. The next question is whether we the zoning/rules to regulate life are leaving spaces for others, or are putting the rest of the population into limited areas (i.e. jails). Zoning of 2 acre/septic tank lots on an island in the sound? Probably OK. Similar zoning on prime property near the city? questionable. And all neighborhoods should be required to have some housing accessible to the median income population and some plan for the poor. Making your neighborhood nice by pushing all the “undesirables” elsewhere, well, that was the very definition of state-sponsored segregation, in housing and in jobs and in schools (where it was and still is used to exclude students others find annoying to educate — but, at least that’s against the law).

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      1. “I thought something along these lines when Bush won the second time around, after Katrina, after Iraq, . . . , that my wealth meant that I’d always be able to protect my children, that I wouldn’t be sending them off to war or walking in the flooded streets with children in my arms, or sending them to inadequate schools.”

         Your wealth means you can avoid the avoidable.

         There’s still a lot of hazards that doesn’t cover, though.

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      2. Oh a lot is avoidable with enough wealth — say, even health can be bought.

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6. “Those ´little democracies´ are busy creating less overall democracy”. Good observation. Valid point. Food for thought.

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7. I live in what I guess one might call an upper middle class neighborhood–sort of. It’s such a mixed up place. It’s hard to know. We’re two blocks from the commercial district where there’s a couple of delis and pizza joints, a nail salon, some flower shops, two decent restaurants, a pub, a bar (that had to be a speakeasy back in the day), a 7-11, etc. In other words, not upscale. Our houses are close together with tiny lots. The street closer to the commercial district has duplexes mixed in with the single family homes. There are a few apartment buildings in the commercial area. The further you get from the commercial district the bigger the houses and yards get. Across the main street (two blocks from my house) is the Merion Golf Club where the US Open was held last year. Those houses are fancy, fancy. And there’s a gated community a little ways from that. But those are enclaves. It’s a real mix here. Economically, I feel like it’s diverse, but racially, not as much. On just my street, there are two Asian families, but I do not see black families very often. A colleague of mine moved to a similar, slightly more upscale neighborhood that was more ethnically diverse.

   There’s no room to subdivide around here and not much room to build. About the only issue I have on the zoning front is traffic. I wish they would make our streets running through the commercial district more pedestrian friendly. I hear they’re working on it.

   Re: school funding. Yep, yep. I live in the suburbs for the schools. You’ve heard of the Philly school district, yes? I vote, though, to improve funding for those schools, to make things more fair. In case you’re curious, here’s an article on how PA schools are funded: http://thenotebook.org/summer-2007/07104/how-schools-are-funded-pennsylvania-primer .Taxes are higher in places like Reading to make up for low housing costs. It’s weird.

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8. True story. I grew up in a suburb near here. Across the street was a Latino couple of empty nesters. Next to them was a Waspy old lady with her troubled grandson. My parents and the Latino couple got along great. Regularly cooked dinner for each other. They were cordial with the old lady, but never forgave her for calling the cops on them the first night they moved to town. They didn’t know it was illegal to park your car in the street over night.

   So, the grandson finally got a job at a garage. He started fixing cars in the driveway. This was also illegal in this town. The Latino neighbor asked the kid to stop it. He worked as a Mercedes repairman and didn’t want to hear all that banging when he came back from work. After lots of polite requests to stop, the guy called the cops. The grandson was pissed, so he called the cops on the dude for growing an impressive pot plant in his garden. That was also illegal.

   I was home from college and saw the swat team from the local police bang down the front door with guns out. One cop had dug up the plant and was carrying it around like a trophy. The plant was truly impressive. I guess the cops thought they had busted open an international drug ring.

   Not sure if this story fits in, but I like to tell the story. I will act out the story, too, if you give me a couple of beers.

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   1. Calling the cops on an autorepair shop in a residential street is, especially after a warning, completely reasonable. Calling in somebody for a parking violation on their first day, especially when you know where they live, or for a single pot plant is asshole.

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9. AmyP: Texas wages are low. So monetarily, I wouldn’t be gaining anything. Meanwhile, I’d be starting over from scratch when it comes to housing, at an age when it’s far better to be on the downhill slide of house payments (I’m 47—and yeah, I take good care of myself, but I really don’t have another twenty years of working life in this body). And I’d be damned if I send my daughter to Texas schools. The worst shithole in Illinois (and trust, I used to live in one of ’em) doesn’t have the awfulness of the schools in Texas. And that’s setting aside the fact that Texas is a nonunion state (read: no pension, unsafe construction jobs, workers comp that would make the 18th century proud, women-need-not-apply as construction workers)…you know, the more-than-trifecta of “oh hell no!” after the wages. Texans aren’t all that welcoming to pagans, either. I’d have an easier time of it than my daughter.

   Sure, the economy is bad here. But life requires more than just a good economy, too. I’ve been living in this city since 1988. In my neighborhood since 1994. I have a base here. A name. People that I can rely on. Moving means giving up on all that backup, at an age at which it is particularly difficult to start over. More importantly, at an age at which my daughter can really benefit from some stability. My plan is to get her off to college. Once she gets established somewhere, then I’ll pull up my stakes, so I can be around my future grandchildren. That somewhere is not going to be anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon line, for multiple reasons.

   But again—why is the solution individual rather than societal? My neighborhood, every neighborhood I’ve ever lived in for these 47 years, used to be thriving and vibrant. One of those places has gentrified because it was close enough to a major metropolis to be swallowed up by yuppies looking for what is to them, lower house payments. I barely recognize the town anymore, and couldn’t afford to live there (and all the unofficial bike trails are gone now, too). Every other place? Fuggetabout it. Where my parents grew up made the list of top ten homeless student populations. It isn’t “me” that’s been abandoned. It’s the whole goddam nation. So here we are, eking out a living amidst the meth and booze and heroin and falling-apart houses that people are trying their best to stay in but can’t fix up “broken windows” style, because that takes money that’s better spent elsewhere (mostly, saving for the next crisis or layoff, or at the very least a vehicle after the old one finally shoots craps).

   This place was vibrant. This place had an economy. Its name is Legion. There aren’t lifeboats enough for everyone, and we don’t even have a good band playing while the boat sinks.

   Why is it acceptable to just watch the boat sink?

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   1. Are you sure that wages are low in TX for electricians counting cost of living?

      One of my friends (a professor’s wife who had previously lived in the NE) used to gripe about the snooty plumbers’ wives at her kid’s old Montessori preschool in our town.

      I also wonder how low the wages can possibly be for construction in our area with so many HUGE projects being done at the same time (and I mean huge–we have hundreds of millions of dollars being spent just on the college campus right now). Between that and all the petroleum jobs in the state which are drawing on a very similar pool of skilled blue collar workers, that’s got to be exerting a lot of upward pressure on wages.

      I don’t know how reputable this is, but it strikes me that the wages they mention for TX electricians seem to be within striking distance of a $100k house in our suburb with the excellent public high school. And yes, it is truly an excellent public high school.

      http://www.indeed.com/salary/q-Electrician-l-Texas.html

      It might be sensible for you to stay where you are if your daughter is almost finished with school, but we really do have some very, very good public schools. Not acknowledging that is just prejudice.

      Some solutions have to be individual. If it were possible to just stay where you are and magic a good economy with great jobs into being, you’d still be in Sicily. My ancestors would never have left Sweden or Germany or Denmark or the Dust Bowl or all the other places they left because life there was lousy. My husband and his parents would never have left communist Poland. Your ancestors went to Illinois because it was presumably better than the places they came from, not because they expected their descendants to live there until the heat death of the universe.

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      1. Here’s a story in very broad outlines (this is oral history, not exact history):

         I’m from a small logging town in Western WA that went through the spotted owl thing in the late 1980s. My old high school English teacher once said (with more than a bit of disgust) that when things were really booming, her high school students would buy houses with their summer earnings. With the spotted owl restrictions during my high school years, there was suddenly less loggable timber available to cut. The local economy transitioned to having a huge proportion of “good jobs” being jobs as prison guards, plus tourist industry stuff. At the same time, automation hit, and there was less and less need for manual labor in the timber industry at every step of the process, from forest to mill. The pool of timber jobs dried up even more. Meanwhile, there are huge amounts of illegal aliens. There’s also the persistent rumor (and reality) of meth. The schools, which were never that great, are terrible now. (My sister had a kid there–she pulled him out after a couple of years of extreme mediocrity and headed to the Seattle suburbs. They come back for work, but my nephew is never going to set foot again in our hometown school.)

         So, whose fault is the economic decline? Can we really blame “The Man” for all that?

         (I have to add, for completeness, that my dad says that those logging jobs that everybody weeps for weren’t all that. You’d get a 200 ft tall tree felled on you in the worst case, and in the best case, you’d eventually wear your knees out in the woods. It was also very boom and bust, I believe. He said that his goal was to get out of the woods and stop carrying a chainsaw by 35, and he did.)

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      2. Are you sure that wages are low in TX for electricians counting cost of living?

         Absolutely. Yes! The significant wage cut you take in Texas is not made up for by the cost of living, which is on par with downstate Illinois. I know what electricians in Texas make. I know what the wage scale is. More importantly, I know what the pension contributions are. No thanks. (seriously. I know people who went to work down there on a temporary basis. Home never looked so good when they got back. The universal opinion is that working down there resulted in a greater net loss than being on unemployment up here—it costs more to work down there than it does to be on unemployment up here. You only do it if you’re likely to run out of unemployment—-Texas, Louisiana, any southern state—-is the absolute worst case scenario)

         Also: I got into an argument on another blog with a guy who made a quip about rich electricians. Come to find out, he wasn’t referring to electricians—he was referring to contractors. That’s apples and oranges. When you make your money primarily from the labor of others, it’s a different scenario than when you make your labor solely by your own hands. I suspect those “snooty plumbers wives” are the wives of contractors.

         There’s no upward pressure on wages in Texas because it’s a right-to-work state—no effective collective bargaining. The only reason blue collar workers ever had decent wages is because of collective bargaining.

         Look—I’m not brand-new. I know what my realistic options are based on my actual situation, and the drawbacks and advantages of those different options. My people left Sicily because their options were better here (they were starving landless peasants there—hard to get in a worse situation than that). The option you recommended to me is worse than staying here. You mean well, I recognize that. But you’re looking at things from—not just a different perspective, but one that doesn’t include the most crucial variables. And I get it—it’s because you haven’t lived it. Single Mother 101—any decrease in human resources means a necessary increase in capital resources to maintain operations. *grin* You’ve just recommended a pretty large cut in capital resources, with no requisite backup from anywhere else (proportionate cut in housing, utilities, groceries, gasoline, price of durable goods, etc.). You haven’t factored in pension. You haven’t factored in housing—not really (I almost own mine. Why give that up? Owning a home is huge for old age. Yes, I would be able to buy a comparable house in Texas—in a comparable neighborhood. For a higher price. On significantly lower wages. And yes, in that wage/housing bracket, probably a worse school. Pardon me if I’m not seeing any advantages here). You haven’t factored in the immense loss of human resources—giving up 25 years of social network is tremendous. It’s not just “oh, you’ll find new people to have coffee with”…it means a return to being first one on the layoff list, always, because no one knows you and they have mutual obligations with everyone else. It means very little chance of getting into a more stable job position to carry me into old age, because again—the circles in the trades are very small and parochial. It means having no one to rely on in a tight spot. It means never, ever getting to see relatives back home because the much lower wages don’t leave room for airfare and car rental (and driving there means loss of wages too—two days of one-way driving is four days lost wages). It means sending cards to funerals you can’t attend. Need I go on?

         I’ll leave you with this: the most relevant thing you haven’t factored in—acceptance of women in the trades in Texas is about forty years behind what it is in Illinois, and I’m not exaggerating. Think about what that means for regularity of employment. Think about what that means for on-the-job working conditions. Think about what that means for quality of life. Fear and anger raise my blood pressure now; they didn’t when I was in my twenties.

         People trade lower wages for increased quality of life all the time, with the caveat that there is a point where wage reduction itself will result in reduced quality of life. You’re recommending lower wages, with decreased quality of life, and likely a moderate increase in prices. Are you kidding me?

         Once more with a feeling: we structure our economy in these United States (just fixed “Untied States” again) on the policy level as a game of musical chairs. You think I’m in a position to win at getting a better chair. From my vantage point, from a career-specific and age-specific position, know better. it’s true that someone will always get the last chair. The good chair. But what about all those left standing? All those superfluous people? We aren’t going away. We’re still going to be here. What’s going to happen to us, on the policy level? Traditionally, superfluous people are sent to war. Ask yourself if that’s going to improve the quality of life for your children and grandchildren. The powder is here. The pressure is here. All it needs is some heat (or maybe more pressure). Conversely, less heat and less pressure has been effective too (think: New Deal). What’s it gonna be?

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10. I’m always struck by the irony of all the moms in the lily white suburbs fighting to the death to get their kids into “diverse” schools like the Ivy League. THey all go on and on about how wonderful it will be for Junior to be exposed to diverse kids from all over the world — never getting the irony that they spend most of their money and most of their time as far away from America’s own diverse population as they can possible get. True story: when we moved back to the US and settled in NOrthern Virginia, the school principal completely unironically bragged about how “our elementary school is fed exclusively by single family homes.” In other words, none of those pesky renters, or families in transition. It was so expensive that people regularly had to sell their homes and move away if they got divorced — so the kids were exposed only to upper middle class and upper class mostly white people from two parent homes. We were renters — although we rented a home. We never fit in — not that we would have wanted to. But it is hard to believe that places like that exist, that there are so many of them, and that it’s entirely possible apparently to raise kids in these places who never become aware that the rest of the world doesn’t live like that — until they go on their carefully choreographed trips to the Third World shortly before college admissions season rolls around.

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11. I love hearing your stories, Lubiddo. I saw a lot of what you describe in Cleveland. But I’ve seen some cool things lately…

    Last week, we went to visit one of our old neighborhood haunts in NYC — Inwood Park. Steve used to take the boys there on Saturdays, so I could grade papers and write lectures. I needed children out of the house. It was always a cool park. It’s original forest in Manhattan with zero views of skyscrapers. Really worth checking out if you live in the area.

    Inwood used to be filled with geriatric Irish people and Dominicans. There wasn’t much to do up there. I would get hassled if I went up there by myself. The public library was full of sleeping homeless men. People would occasionally die in the park.

    Now, it’s brimming with great cafes and bars and dance clubs. Hypsters live in the area now, but they don’t own the cafes. They are run by the third generation Dominicans who never left. A kid who lived next door to us in our old apartment is now a man (!) and is a manager of a microbrew bar.

    The same Dominicans have moved to a nearby suburb. The whites did move out when they came in, but are moving back, because the town looks so good.

    Yet, your story is true, too, Lubiddo. It is a tragedy that neighborhoods and individuals are being discarded and forgotten. We as a nation need to be forced to think about ways to improve this situation. Big swatches of the country are in the same boat. But you need to do the right thing for yourself and your daughter. If you see others doing better by moving to another city or state, then you have to consider it.

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    1. The difficult thing about relocation—-(a) giving up all your human resources. It takes years to rebuild that sort of thing. Is that what I want to be doing as my daughter enters high school? Nope. (b) the book system—there’s a reason they’re called “Locals”. Work is doled out according to Local membership. If you’re a “local hand”, you get first dibs. “Travelers” pick up the tail end—you only get the opportunity to work during boom times, and it’s difficult to transfer your ticket (union card). Locals want to keep out the “fleas” (travelers who stir up shit, have extensive criminal histories, or are lazy as hell. The assumption is that if you were a good worker, you’d be able to find enough work at home to make a go of it).. (c) yes, the double standard is operative for women travelers—the assumption is that you’re a shit-stirrer or slut (or whore! doing sex work on the side for pay) if you’re on the road. Otherwise a good man woulda made an honest woman outta you. (d) did I mention being 47 years old? Do you know what that means in construction? Having “people” is critical when you reach my age—and not having people (translation: being on the road means they don’t like you at home) is its own message.

       Meh. Bird in the hand worth two in the bush sorta thing. I’ve been on the road. It thoroughly sucks if you have kids, and I have one. Other than that, it’s exhilarating—I love new places. But I don’t want my daughter spending the next four years raising herself in a series of hotel rooms, especially hotel rooms surrounded by horny male construction workers. My neighborhood could get several orders of rougher before it would approach the lower-quality-of-life on the road. Staying put means my daughter (with an IEP) gets a better quality of education, and the kind of extra-curricular activities that will prepare her for her future. Living out of a suitcase won’t do that—and I have ample examples from my own family to know what that future trajectory looks like. It is what it is. In the meantime, I’m “upper working class”. I’m so much better off than the service-industry workers, which is most of what’s left around here. Life is a series of trade-offs. Living where I live means a better series of trade-offs than what I’d have if I made different decisions, whether it’s a cross-country move or cross-town move. This is the best alternative.

       And I’m gonna keep on saying it—this is happening all over. This is life in these United States for people without a college degree. (why do I want to keep typing “Untied States”?) We, the people, used to be valued. And now we are not.

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       1. Moving across the country, especially without a specific job offer in the new place, really is a game best suited to younger people. It’s like drinking Natty Light. And if enough younger people move, the wages will rise for the older workers who stay. But, with wages for unskilled labor being so low, I don’t think the kids see enough of a gain to make it worthwhile to move. My summer jobs while in college were paying what would be $12 to $15 an hour, but I don’t see a whole lot of people getting that for general labor these days. Actual skilled people my age were easily getting what would be $20/hour after adjusting for inflation.

          This is another place where I think the refusal to let the minimum wage grow at anything close to the rate of inflation has hurt everybody, not just the low wage workers.

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    2. I was just informed that the cafes in Inwood are drug laundering money. Heroin. I’m such an idiot.

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       1. Seriously? I live in the neighborhood still and had no idea. You think whoever told you has inside knowledge?

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       2. There’s poppy seeds, but not on the bagels.

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12. Nobody in their right mind wants to exclude people like you from their neighborhood.

    Oh sure, but that’s ‘cuz you know me around here. I use big words and bring great sangria (well, I would bring great sangria. Around here, maybe virtual sangria, which isn’t as good as the real thing). But when I read the post, I immediately flashed forward to how it works in my city, where the near-gated communities across town lawyer up to keep condos from being built in their neighborhoods, because said condos would attract the “wrong element”. And the wrong element is me. Me and people like me. Dope dealers and halfway houses aren’t in the market for condos in neighborhoods filled with nosy neighbors. I’m not so keen on the nosy neighbors part, but the idea of living in a place where I could go for a walk right in the neighborhood at night, instead of driving across town to a park is appealing. My daughter attending a school that’s clean and well-maintained is appealing (we had our first long talk about classism in second grade, when she noticed how several-steps-up the construction and maintenance was in the school where summer-school was held. The rich kids’ school. It had air conditioning. And toilet paper! And more than one sink in the bathroom was functional!). A neighborhood that doesn’t light up like the Milky Way on the Illinois State Police’s helpful sex offender website is appealing. No needles on the ground or 3:00AM meth-fueled rages is appealing.

    Again, that’s exactly the kind of neighborhood this used to be. It didn’t get this way overnight. It isn’t a lack of protesting or can-do attitude that made it this way. It was a series of policy decisions made over generations. Better-off people looked the other way at what was happening. Now it’s affecting them too. This neighborhood was a tax base. Now it isn’t. Service industry jobs (in their current state) can’t build an economy. Our national economy is based on consumer spending, at a time when disposable income is low-to-vanished. The rust belt is the worst off because we don’t have a population of better-off people at a close enough distance to eat up for tourist money. And we already ate up our home equity and credit (“we”, meaning “not me”. Living in a rougher neighborhood means having the scratch to put back into a 401k. Always think three steps ahead).

    Yep, nothin’ but good times….

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13. “Nobody in their right mind wants to exclude people like you from their neighborhood. ”

    Oh my. This is much too close to “Some of my best friends are . . . . ” Through the ages, people have made exceptions for the gay/black/asian/hispanic/working class person, I guess, to pigeon hole lubiddu in this stereotypic way/jew/arab/Indian/texan/etc. that they know, while trying to maintain their antagonism to the group is justified. Yup, Lubiddu is a person as am I, who should be judged on our individual merits. But, the same is true for any member of any class that we might belong to. I’ve battled this labelling all my life (do I hang out with people outside of my “crowd” a lot? Don’t know).

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14. Krugman’s column yesterday talked about the issues being uncovered here in these comments: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/opinion/paul-krugman-wrong-way-nation.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&_r=0

    Bottom line of the column is that wages are high in the NE, but that housing costs are so high that people are being driven out anyway, potentially away from better, reasonably paid jobs: “It would be great to see the real key — affordable housing — become a national issue.”

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15. Alright, let’s keep this conversation going in a new thread. I’ll do quick post on Krugman.

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