What Happened....

[ChrisB]

I don't want to be too elitist, but Paisley is right, once you get up into the "Top 20" range of Universities, people (employers) start caring about where you go (or went).

When hiring engineers, where they went to school is of little concern to me. Education is a tool. If I were hiring a carpenter, I would not look at his toolbox, but rather at what he had made with those tools. As a matter of fact, a few of the engineers I have been privileged to work with over the years have had no degree. A very difficult way to become an engineer, but they were exceptional people.

 

[Fading Fast]

After the mortgage debacle happened, I watched It's a Wonderful Life with a different point of view. If people hadn't been so encouraged by George Bailey to own their own homes, many of them could have moved where they could get work, without risking the stigma of bankruptcy, when the factory closed down. Old Man Potter would have been left holding the bag.

Owning a home isn't a smart decision for everybody. If you're in a shaky job situation, if you don't know where you're going to be in five years, if you can't afford repairs and maintenance, renting is probably a better choice.

College isn't for everyone, either. I meet more and more college graduates with all the drive of a wet noodle and the intellectual chops of Deepak Chopra trying to talk about physics. Frankly, they're debasing the currency of college diplomas. And I've never understood people who go to college just to party. For what little effort they put into their classes (they must put in some to avoid being expelled), they could get a job and keep on partying.

In all fairness to renters and people who aren't college material, there's nothing wrong with belonging to either group. Social engineers who try to make people in those groups into something they aren't don't do them any service, and as we've seen, it sometimes puts them under a terrible burden of debt.

You said what I was trying to say, only you said it better.

 

[Fading Fast]

Until the gentrifiers and real-estate speculators show up and drive you out of your rented home, and you end up further and further from your job until you lose that job and have to find one wherever you can manage to find a place to live. We have a real crisis here in affordable rentals and it's only going to get worse if things keep up the way they are. And when that happens, all the nice gentrifiers will wonder why they can't find anybody to unstop their toilets, fix their cars, maintain their roads, plow their snow, or wipe their kids' backsides.

They way that has gotten "solved" in NYC is that jobs to do the jobs you list pay very, very well versus the suburbs or areas in the city that aren't expensive to live in as the people who do them have to be compensated for the time, expense and inconvenience of a long commute into NYC. The plumber and electrician I used during our renovation - really nice guys with good crews - both become friendly with us and basically told me how much more they charge to do work in NYC. Neither could afford to live here, but both said they make a very good living from being willing to come into NYC to do work.

 

[Fading Fast]

I don't want to be too elitist, but Paisley is right, once you get up into the "Top 20" range of Universities, people (employers) start caring about where you go (or went). ...

As someone who did not go to a top 20 school, I am not arguing in my favor, but I agree completely with this and saw it in action.

If you went to and Ivy or near-Ivy, the name of the school on the resume carried weight. The HR person would highlight it to the person doing the hiring / the informal discussions about possible candidate would go like this - I liked them both, but she went to Harvard, that says something / etc.

The funny thing is though, away from those big names, no one cares. When I was in high school, the counselors would try to talk kids into schools like Franklin and Marshall and Lehigh on the argument that the name carries great weight in the marketplace. I think those are both fine schools and it takes a lot to get in and to do well at them, but at least in finance, those names carried no weight (maybe they do in other fields, and again, I'm impressed with them, I went to a State University, so I'm not saying anything negative about them, just stating my experience over 30 years).

 

[LizzieMaine]

Which is all well and good for New York City. But it's becoming more and more of a crisis in those parts of the Northeast that don't have a thriving metropolis within easy commuting distance. A society in which the people who support a community thru its work can't afford to live in that community is a profoundly diseased society.

Electricians are worth their weight in gold here. Many have left the area in search of "bigger money elsewhere," and those who remain are getting up in years and are increasingly difficult to schedule -- simple jobs here take two weeks or more to schedule. I've been trying to get a dimmer system in our lobby replaced for nearly a year.

Road workers have it particularly rough. Our city requires all municipal employees to live in town -- but there are fewer and fewer rental properties available in the price range that their wages could afford. We're getting near $1000 a month to rent a small house here, and our apartment stock is constantly being gentrified into "high end B&Bs" for the tourists. That might not sound like a lot of money from an NYC perspective, but when you're earning $12 an hour, it's a pretty big hunk of coin.

 

[Fading Fast]

^^^ I understand the problem and $1000 / month sounds like a lot to me. It won't solve the problem, but at some point the city might have to drop the live-in-town requirement as many communities around here have done - that relieved some of the pressure on some of these very expensive NYC suburban municipalities.

I don't think it really matters if the electrician lives in the town or two towns over, but if he / she doesn't live anywhere nearby, then something will have to give. Either the town's people will pay more and attract them or people will start moving out or some combination will happen - people need basic services and if they can't afford to pay for them somewhere, they'll move to where they can.

 

[LizzieMaine]

People don't move here for the services, unfortunately. They move here to gaze out at the ocean, without giving much of a damn about the people who maintain the infrastructure that makes their cushy retirement possible. Their philosophy seems to be "I've got mine, and devil take the hindmost."

 

[Fading Fast]

^^^ That model will break eventually - the "I've got mine" people need somebody to fix their toilet, pick up their trash, etc. Either they will pay enough to attract people or they'll move and the community will get less expensive or fade away - it happens.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The system is definitely unsustainable. The only question is whether it's left to rot and finally cave in on its own, or torn down completely and rebuilt from the ground up before too many more people get hurt.

 

[HudsonHawk]

^^^ That model will break eventually - the "I've got mine" people need somebody to fix their toilet, pick up their trash, etc. Either they will pay enough to attract people or they'll move and the community will get less expensive or fade away - it happens.

Who mines the dilithium crystals?

 

[Paisley]

At the bottom of many problems involving lack of housing and services is regulation. California has land use restrictions galore (and it's virtually impossible to throw out a deadbeat tenant). New York City has rent control. Colorado has a liability law that discourages developers from building condominiums; $1,000 a month will get you a modest apartment in Denver. (Don't blame me--I didn't vote for that law.) Other areas have restrictions on the size of houses and lots that can be built--hence the reason you don't see any nice places being built that teachers and handymen and police officers can afford.

I'm one of those who benefited from, not really gentrification, but the boom in Denver. I spent all the money and took all the risks. When I bought my house, it was near a vacant theater, a defunct ironworks, a dying shopping mall, and two doors down from Section 8 housing. A baby was beaten to death nearby. There was no guarantee that any of that would turn around; in my mind, I was just buying a centrally located house that I could afford. Twenty years after later, it was near the light rail system and trendy restaurants. The theater booked 21 Pilots; an investor bought my neighbor's 700 square foot house for $252,000 to tear it down and build a duplex.

When my roof was leaking, it took weeks and phone calls to a dozen places (most of them not returned) to get someone to fix it, more because they were booked solid than because of travel time. A carpenter and his crew came all the way from Commerce City--15 miles through Denver traffic--while they were waiting on supplies for another job to fix my roof. A couple fresh from Tampa, with some of their stuff still in a U-Haul, fixed the drywall.

Now I'm in Indianapolis--spending my money and taking the risks, in the hope this will be a repeat of what happened in Denver. A few miles away, gentrifiers are restoring and abandoned historic houses in some scary neighborhoods: think 25% unemployment, 47% poverty, and 2000 arrests last year in one of those areas. I've seen what look like hookers and drug deals in broad daylight where I buy groceries (I don't go there at night). Two people were shot in my neighborhood next weekend, one of them one street over from me. The people moving here are trying to make things better. I can't see that we're taking away anything from anyone.

I don't favor policies that drive up housing costs and make it hard for people of modest means to afford to live. It might benefit me somewhat as a property owner, but as others have pointed out, property owners need handymen, police officers, trash pickup, taxi drivers, and by extension, clerks, teachers, and care givers. I'm glad they can live nearby. I don't want to be on the road with drivers on a two-hour commute after a 12-hour day. I don't want my roof to leak for a month. I'm glad there are police officers who live in my neighborhood, one of whom drove past me twice on my way to the bus stop the morning after I posted some concerns for my safety on nextdoor.com.

Fortunately, Indiana is trying to change well-intentioned laws that make it hard to take over abandoned houses. And there's a lot of room to grow here, even within the city, without many housing restrictions AFAIK. (Some areas do have historical preservation rules.)

 

[LizzieMaine]

I didn't buy my house as an investment. I bought it intending to live in it until I die. I think communities -- really *healthy* communities, need fewer of the former class of homeowners and more of the latter. I've seen up close over the last thirty years what the "investment" mindset has done to this area, and in the end it isn't really good for anyone. The sort of "community" you end up with is a highly tenuous, artificial one, in which "community spirit" is something jigged up by the Chamber of Commerce to promote Downtown Merchant Days or some such, and not a sense of caring about your neighbors that arises organically from your living situation.

My mother, 77 years old, has lived on the same street in the same town her entire life -- but that street is almost unrecognizable today. The new people who've bought up the old houses because they're just a short walk from the shore, have no interest in the old people who live in the few houses that haven't been sold off, or the traditions of the neighborhood that, dating back to the 19th century, used to be an important part of its daily fabric. The result is a neighborhood in which all sense of it *being* a neighborhood is gone. All the open spaces which gave it a distinct sense of place have been filled with oversized, ugly houses which I'm sure have a high resale value, but do nothing for the sense of community that once characterized the neighborhood. People don't live there anymore. They "dwell" there waiting for their investments to mature. Every neighborhood in that town is the same as every other -- and the town itself is just another picture-postcard tourist trap in which "property values" are more important than social cohesion.

When you -- and the people around you -- are there for the long haul, when you have real roots in a community, and you know you're not going anywhere, I believe that the community itself is stronger. Growing up I don't remember ever hearing anyone talk about owning a home as an "investment." You bought a house to live in, and you lived there for the rest of your life. My great-great grandparents did this, my great-grandparents did this, my grandparents did this, my mother did this, and I did this. I think the rise of that "investment" mentality connects strongly to the decline of community feeling. It's very true in small towns and cities like this one, and I imagine people living in gentrified neighborhoods in the cities feel the same thing, especially those who are being pushed out so "young creatives" can have a place to play.

I've lived in this town, on this street, for twenty years come October, thirty miles from where I was born and raised, and while I'm not planning to go anywhere else, I feel great regret at what the town is becoming -- a cookie-cutter tourist trap/theme park full of people who don't care about what was once a vibrant local culture because they're too busy forcing their "vision for economic development" down our throats. At last count there were forty-six art galleries in this town of less than 8000 people. I don't need to buy any art today, or any other day. But if I want to buy a pack of "10 pairs for $10" cotton underpants, I have to drive to the Wal Mart in the next town. Is that real community-based "economic development," or is that development of, by, and for a certain privileged class of people? Gentrification is just another name for colonialism.

 

[Fading Fast]

Who mines the dilithium crystals?

Agreed and The "Cloud Minders" was an outstanding original Star Trek episode that touched on a lot of this stuff.

I've been thinking a lot about this thread and Lizzie's comments since yesterday and realize that I moved to three different states for work as it was clear where I was, was dying out. My Dad grew up, worked and died his entire life in a five mile radius which was not unusual at the time, but that is really hard to do today.

It's a brutal balance, as most of us would eventually like to settle down somewhere, "establish roots," etc., but with technology speeding up our economic change, sometimes moving is the only answer to maintaining a career or just finding a job. Each move was driven by a need to earn a living and a hope that I was moving my career forward. I really hated having to leave NYC in the mid '90s, but the number of openings for what I did was shrinking rapidly in the city back then (and there were way too many people like me looking for them).

And communities and areas of the country grow and shrink, have booms and bust - luck, geography, planing, etc. all play a part - and always have. I image if the positives of where Lizzie lives are that attractive to retirees, they will eventually pay more to attract the workers they need to maintain the community or they won't and they'll leave in frustration. It will all be evolutionary - it won't happen in a year or even five - but eventually, the direction will become clear as the community either depopulates or repopulates.

That will all play out over a long time.

Edit add - I just read Lizzie's post above mine - and she described parts of my family up until my generation. My generation just couldn't find jobs in the same places, so maintaining the older generation's house wasn't possible. Also, the house as investment idea seemed to really kick-in when the older baby boomers realized they were sitting on a pot of money for retirement if they were willing to move.

In the '80s and '90s, many of my friend's parents (and my mom), sold and moved from the expensive NY region to less-expensive parts of the country so that they could retire. My mom's ability to retire was greatly enhanced by moving to Phoenix (and to a condo, not a house). And we are not talking fancy, rich retirements, just the ability to live, pay your bills, etc. My mom has a very modest lifestyle, but it was made so much easier by the move.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Edit add - I just read Lizzie's post above mine - and she described parts of my family up until my generation. My generation just couldn't find jobs in the same places, so maintaining the older generation's house wasn't possible. Also, the house as investment idea seemed to really kick-in when the older baby boomers realized they were sitting on a pot of money for retirement if they were willing to move.

Around here we're getting the other end of that pipeline -- they're coming here to use those profits to buy up properties, and if they get involved in the community at all, it's to vote down the school budget every year and try to drive out what little blue-collar industry we have left because it spoils their view. Some of them even complain about the "run down lobster boats" cluttering up the harbor and making it difficult for them to get moorings for their cutesy fiberglass sailboats.

There are some neighborhoods where predatory real-estate agents are going house to house to try and persuade homeowners to sell. They show up here, that's when I think about getting a pit bull.

 

[ChiTownScion]

I've lived in this town, on this street, for twenty years come October, thirty miles from where I was born and raised, and while I'm not planning to go anywhere else, I feel great regret at what the town is becoming -- a cookie-cutter tourist trap/theme park full of people who don't care about what was once a vibrant local culture because they're too busy forcing their "vision for economic development" down our throats. Gentrification is just another name for colonialism.

You say that about two small Maine coastal towns, but it rings true in the big city as well. I sure as hell see it in Chicago. My people have been here since one marched off to fight for Mr. Lincoln.

There are so many for whom the city is just one rung up the corporate ladder: a place to put in your time until called to greener pastures in LA or the Big Apple. I get that, but I really resent it from radio and TV types, especially talk host personality types, who blow in one year and out the next. They don't appreciate the local history, the local customs, or the local people... but they sure as hell pass judgment at the drop of a Cubs cap.

In the context of real estate speculation, it gets a bit more nuanced. The needs we had in a home as newly married Double Income No Kids yuppies changed once we became parents. All of a sudden, it wasn't about easy access to the vibrant night life, or great restaurants, or indie cinema venues: it was about schools, park district programs, etc. Hence the move to suburbia. And it got even more complicated when one kid became three. Now that we're both approaching retirement, those yuppie priorities of a vibrant arts scene can be revisited and enjoyed. If not IN a city, at least within easy access to one. Buying and selling homes can take place, as with us, because of changing demographic need.

But here's the thing: when you become a resident in a community you owe it to yourself and your neighbors to get involved and invest more than your cash. Were I to move to any small town/ city, I'd likely affiliate with local lodge groups and meet the people who live there. My wife would get involved in local political groups sharing her ideology. I'd come as a novice willing to learn: not a big city type out to "educate" others as to how to get it right. (I know that I sure as hell resent when people pull the crap of the latter with me, so why would I want to pull it with others?) If the local school system needed a helping hand, I'd join the boosters and volunteer to tutor kids after school.

I can understand how any community that has been deprived of its traditional economic base (be it manufacturing, forestry, fishing, agriculture, etc.) and having to rely upon the tourist and vacation trade would have locals who are justifiably suspicious of outside speculators. Guess the challenge would be to convince them that one is an ally against that common antagonist.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I can understand how any community that has been deprived of its traditional economic base (be it manufacturing, forestry, fishing, agriculture, etc.) and having to rely upon the tourist and vacation trade would have locals who are justifiably suspicious of outside speculators. Guess the challenge would be to convince them that one is an ally against that common antagonist.

I think in line with you say about getting involved in the community, the first thing that needs to happen is that the gentrifiers need to get rid of the colonialist "we're here to civilize the savages" mindset, which comes thru in a million different ways, from commenting on how much they love to listen to our "accents" -- and I got news for you, chummie, we ain't got accents, *you* do -- to showing up at town meetings with a whole I-Pad full of things we need to change because they don't like the way we do them. And then lose the notion that we're hicks because we gag at the idea of eating raw fish. To our eyes, you're eating bait.

 

[ChiTownScion]

I think the first thing that needs to happen is that the


I think in line with you say about getting involved in the community, the first thing that needs to happen is that the gentrifiers need to get rid of the colonialist "we're here to civilize the savages" mindset, which comes thru in a million different ways, from commenting on how much they love to listen to our "accents" -- and I got news for you, chummie, we ain't got accents, *you* do -- to showing up at town meetings with a whole I-Pad full of things we need to change because they don't like the way we do them. And then lose the notion that we're hicks because we gag at the idea of eating raw fish. To our eyes, you're eating bait.

I get the eeks and yucks from my wife all of the time as to sushi. When in Vancouver last year, we found that sushi joints were as ubiquitous there as pizza places in Chicago. I was in heaven with it, but any suggestion that we dine out at one earned me The Look. I tell her that 125 million Japanese can't be wrong... but she won't budge. I count the victories as they roll in, however: last night she served scallops, and a week ago she grilled salmon. She's resigned herself that if we're going to retire to the PNW she'd better learn fish and seafood prep, at least in some capacity.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I have no objection to anyone who enjoys it. What I do object to is the supercilious look down the nose often directed at those of us who find the idea of raw fish revolting, along with the "awww, you don't know what you're missing." In our culture, fish is fried or broiled or grilled or poached in condensed milk or eaten on toast with mustard sauce. We're not Japanese, we're not gourmands, and we're not foodies. We're people who grew up beside the ocean and we eat fish the way we've always eaten it, and we don't need lessons from fromaways.

 

[Fading Fast]

For many years, I thought sushi eaters only liked it because they liked saying they liked it or something like that as I sincerely couldn't believe that people enjoyed eating raw fish (except, as noted above, by cultures where you were raised with it). It was as if you told me people were having cavities drilled for relaxation - I just couldn't process the thought.

While I still can't go near it, I realize I was very wrong and that many / most / a lot of the people who eat it sincerely enjoy it. It has been popular too long - with too many people of all types of cultures and backgrounds (in NYC, I've see union construction workers - forearms the size of hammocks, steel toed construction boots because they need them, worn jeans worn from doing real work, hardhats on - sitting beside a construction site eating sushi) for it to be a fad / a showy thing, etc.

I'm sure some are - as Lizzie implies - playing some food-superiority game (which I don't really understand), but I have to concede, despite how horrifying it is to me to even contemplate, people genuinely enjoy sushi. This would probably be the 10,000 thing I was wrong about when I was younger.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Which, as I say, is fine. It's their culture. It's not ours. Some enjoy eating fried insects. It's their culture. It's not ours.

Our culture is to buy live marine arthropods off the side of a boat, take them home alive, and them boil them to death in our kitchens, after which we rip them apart with our bare hands, with no utensils and no "presentation", sucking the flesh out of their bodies as we go. Or we go down the shore with a hoe and a basket and dig clams out of the stinky, sulphurous mud, take them home, and steam them to death in a big kettle, dunk their corpses in butter, bite off the siphon and gulp down the rest. And then we throw the shells out behind the house in a pile. That's our culture. I won't try to convince anyone who objects that it's really great and they ought to try it because I have no need to force my culture onto anyone else's.