There’s a small town called Aurora about 75 minutes from where I live that I like to visit sometimes on the weekend, because it’s near some of my favorite local wineries (King’s Ferry and Hearts and Hands), has a little store where I can buy weird local stuff like squash seed oil that I can’t find anywhere else, and because the town is very pretty. The buildings in the center of town, in particular the Aurora Inn, are in beautiful shape, strangely so for the area — upstate New York tends to be comfortably run down outside of a few wealthy areas like Cooperstown. It turns out that this is because a wealthy alum, Pleasant Rowland, of the town’s main employer, Wells College, entered into some partisanship with the university to take over a lot of downtown and “beautify” it. This made some local residents very angry. I had a bit of a hard time understanding why and when I first tried to write about it, I found myself sounding like a condescending prick. Then I spoke to someone who lived there and he explained: the old sub-and-pizza place and bar had been replaced by stuff a little more formal and upscale, traditional access to the lake had been blocked, and there was a feeling that the whole town was now ruled by a multi-millionaire who might pack up her tent and leave at any moment.
Now, I think that the economic future of the Finger Lakes may depend to a large extent on fru-fru agrotourism, and having fancy hotels in nice-looking towns helps with that. But I can also see why locals resent having their town taken over.
I thought of this when I read about Megan McArdle’s adventures in gentrification (Alicublog via atrios):
Yesterday, I rode the bus for the first time from the stop near my house, and ended up chatting with a lifelong neighborhood resident who has just moved to Arizona, and was back visiting family. We talked about the vagaries of the city bus system, and then after a pause, he said, “You know, you may have heard us talking about you people, how we don’t want you here. A lot of people are saying you all are taking the city from us. Way I feel is, you don’t own a city.” He paused and looked around the admittedly somewhat seedy street corner. “Besides, look what we did with it. We had it for forty years, and look what we did with it!”
Now there’s nothing wrong with the McArdle-Suderman family using their hard-earned Bradley-Koch dollars to buy a place in DC instead of living in a suburban McMansion like real Americans. But, sheesh, trolling the bus for people who say they are ashamed of what “we” (whatever that means here) did to the neighborhood.
Does everything always have to revolve around making non-wealthy Americans eat shit? It’s not enough to just thank your Galtian overlords for paying their taxes, it’s not enough to let wealthier people buy up your town or neighborhood and turn it into a place you can’t afford or don’t feel welcome in, now non-wealthy Americans have to express shame for turning their towns and neighborhoods into shit holes.
Where does it end? Blue collar workers have to accept that even though free trade may cost them their jobs, it’s all for the best for our society, so shut up and smile and find a new job. Middle-class people who paid into Social Security need to accept that we need entitlement reform, i.e. not giving them their Social Security benefits. And it serves them all right for not being sufficiently successful.
Church Lady
Don’t let your arms get too tired fighting that strawman.
Bulworth
Yeah, that dig about “Look what we locals did to the joint” was pretty choice.
Sue
Sigh. There goes the neighborhood.
wagon
She’s full of it, right? I mean, who says that to some random person on the bus?
chopper
wow, the white man’s burden II: this time it’s on a bus!
burnspbesq
Take the long view. in 50 years, after global warming and mining of aquifers elsewhere have taken full effect, Upstate New York will be feeding the world. Buy farms that have fallen into disuse now, while you can.
chopper
then she totally met a guy who said ‘please take my wallet, you’ll do far more with my money than i would,’ so she treated herself to lunch.
Will
Yeah. We moved into a pretty tough neighborhood in Jersey City a couple years ago so my wife could get in-state law tuition at Rutgers. I have gotten to know many of the locals, who have been around for awhile. I have never once heard any of them “apologize” to me for what “they did” to my new neighborhood. I find the idea that someone did so to Megan kind of preposterous. Perhaps this incident happened, but maybe not in the way she is framing it.
burnspbesq
When I was in law school at USC, the neighborhood around campus was really sketchy (it’s less so now), and I got burglarized once. I’m not at all looking forward to having to share Megan’s feelings of victimization and violation when that happens to her.
david mizner
“We” — means black people. MM’s clear about that. She’s also clear that she should be congratulated for not wanting all the blacks to move out the neighborhood. Big of her.
In any case, I call bullshit on the quote. That doesn’t sound like a real person. And I don’t believe she happened to find someone to make her feel better about moving there. This is small scale Stephen Glass, if you ask me.
I”I don’t know what to do about” gentrification, she says. Well, it’s clear what not to do about it: pursue the kinds of policies MM advocates.
PeakVT
I rode the bus for the first time from the stop near my house, and ended up chatting with a lifelong neighborhood resident who has just moved to Arizona, and was back visiting family.
The incident is just so completely improbable. Stranger things have happened, but not to a dullard like McAddled.
gene108
I believe The Rent is Too Damn High! Party was founded to address the issues you are writing about in this thread.
Maybe they should expand their reach outside of New York City?
JGabriel
Will:
I like to think that, as soon as Megan got off the bus, her interlocutor rolled his eyes and the whole front half of the bus cracked up in derisive laughter.
“Now, now, really,” her interlocutor responds, “She was a very nice girl, for a Republican.”
Which, of course, only provokes more laughter.
.
Rhoda
I don’t know which is more racist; the bus rider or the invention of the bus rider. But I do know that at the end it comes down to this:
I don’t think there’s any point in even talking about the inherent racism and fucking myopia of her post. I like it better when she just fucks up numbers.
Dave S.
The NY Times article you linked to describes the Aurora Inn as “some of the most elegant lodging in the state west of the Hudson.” (Emphasis mine.) As someone born and raised in DougJ’s neck of the woods, I would like to take the opportunity to say “Fuck you, NY Times.”
John - A Motley Moose
Basically, the answer is, “Yes.”
Culture of Truth
No, it’s not enough! They also have to come up to white people in random places and get down on their knees and thank them moving in to their neighborhoods, after black people trashed it for 40 years.
DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.
@Dave S.:
Yeah, I thought fellow upstaters would be pissed off by that.
Bulworth
I’m going to ask that the next bus rider quote be from someone who still lives there.
Radon Chong
If I remember correctly, McMegan’s bus buddy was in town visiting, having recently moved to Arizona. Can we assume that he’s now ruining his new neighborhood, since that what he says his sort does? Or perhaps he’s saving it from Mexicans.
Radon Chong
If I remember correctly, McMegan’s bus buddy was in town visiting, having recently moved to Arizona. Can we assume that he’s now ruining his new neighborhood, since that what he says his sort does? Or perhaps he’s saving it from Mexicans.
JGabriel
Dave S., DougJ: Aw, you upstaters are so cute when you’re angry.
.
Ash Can
Now, why do I find it so difficult to believe that the conversation McArdle relates never actually took place outside of her own head?
slag
@chopper: Hahahahahaha
gbear
I just spent about half of my lunch break listening to horror stories about what it’s like to live on disability told to me by the guy who cleans tables part-time at the local Wendy’s.
The answer is ‘yes’.
c u n d gulag
You would have to be a “Moran” to believe this lying, ignorant hack.
I’m surprised she didn’t make up something like, “You knows, Missy Meaghan, we’s never had it so good since we left yo Great-great-great Grandpappy’s plantation! Looks at wha’ we did here. Tooks us this fine Ol’ White neighborhood and n*ggered it all up. Why, we’s all glad you White folks is comin’ back to clean up after us. Say, if’n I shine yo shoes and does a song n’ dance number, maybe you’ll see it yo’ heart to gives me a little to bit buy my ol’ black bones some Ripple, or Mad Dog 20/20? Thanks, Ma’am!”
Why does she still have an economics column? Mr. Ed is better at math, and he only had 4 hooves, not 10 fingers and toes.
DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.
@Church Lady:
I support most free trade and I like visiting gentrified Aurora. I just think that sometimes there needs to be some recognition of the fact that people who don’t have money are still human beings.
cyntax
Not really. Everything (for McMegan and her ilk) revolves around making themselves feel better about screwing everyone else over. Eating shit is a means to end, not the end itself, and so not what everything revolves around. Everything revolves around them.
Jonathan
I think a lot of people forget that the Fingerlakes region is first and foremost a diverse agricultural area. It’s not all vineyards, wineries and Bed and Breakfasts. There’s more grain and vegetable farming going on there than grapes.
The lakes are gorgeous, and a bunch of nice towns to visit (I got married in Skaneateles) , but the farmers in the area should have some water access and places to hang out that aren’t tourist traps… but like you said, given the economy, that might be the way to go.
SpotWeld
Now, I think that the economic future of the Finger Lakes may depend to a large extent on fru-fru agrotourism, and having fancy hotels in nice-looking towns helps with that. But I can also see why locals resent having their town taken over.
And that’s kinda the whole thing in a nutshell. Let’s say you do a purely economic division on the town’s population over time. Come up with a plot that shows “income” vs “number of days in town” (And this would include the weekend only or summer only temporary ‘residents’)
It’s only conjecture on my part, but I suspect you’ll see a picture of two populations. One is a large lower income group that’s in town year round, and a smaller higher income group that (an averaege) only spends part of the yera in town.
So the tax-paying residents see thier town get modified to better serve the temprorary residents.
Rents on main street go up, so the only shops are the high end botiques that are only open in summer. A little influence gaming is played and the country club gets premium access to the beachfront and the annual town 4th-of-July picnic gets shunted over the park with poor parking and rocky beaches.
Lots of little things. Some of it is unjustifed xenophobia and fear of change, and some of it is a town trying to cash in on potentially short term profits at the risk of the long term stability of the community.
licensed to kill time
Wow! On her very first bus ride Megan has a Mustache of Understanding-esque Encounter! How convenient, and indeed, how central to her point!
Cat
She’s being absolutely brilliant here!
Tom Friedman already locked up the “Things Cab drivers told me” meme so what is a wanna be white elitist going to do to show her creds as a real american? She fishes around and latches onto “Things bus riders told me”. This is pure genius!
kindness
I went to college in Ithaca many many moons ago. It had a couple of industries but was and is mostly a college town. I loved the area and am so happy I don’t live there any longer. The winters in western NY are brutal, way worse than down state where I grew up.
Gentrification…..it sucks & it’s OK at the same time, but I don’t know there’s anything that one can do about it.
david mizner
@licensed to kill time:
Next ride she’ll come across one of “them” holding a dogged-earred copy of Atlas Shrugged who tells her how desperate he is for school choice and abolition of the estate tax.
Holden Pattern
Did this guy move to Arizona because he couldn’t find work as a cabbie anymore when Tom Friedman’s wife lost her billions in the real estate crash?
Seriously, she must have just made this guy up. What a crock of shit.
Sator Arepo
“Does everything always have to revolve around making non-wealthy Americans eat shit?”
Sort of. It’s a side-effect, but (as they say in the intertoobs) it’s a feature, not a bug.
But this is the crux:
“And it serves them [read: us] all right for not being sufficiently successful.”
The happy myth is that we can all be successful, a country of fucking millionaires, if we lazy assholes would just get off of our fat duffs and work. There are only losers in the game of capitalism because poor people [read: distasteful people] are lazy.
licensed to kill time
@david mizner:
Why, that bus must be chock-full of closet libertarians! Who knew?!
freelancer
@chopper:
And at lunch she ran into a hacker who was being wooed by Jukt Micronics, who stood up on the table, gyrating his hips going “I want a Miata! I want an Xbox! I want X-men Comic #1. I want Penthouse! I wanna go to Disney World!”
Ahhh, the free-market.
blondie
Not having money is a sin in these United States.
Paris
okay, but what do we get to do to them when they don’t? I understand waterboarding is little more than a tickle session so I’m looking for something a little more painful.
Nutella
Black people, obviously.
They ‘trashed the place’ just out of orneryness and lack of ambition. Red-lining by the banks (aka affirmative action for white people) had nothing to do with it.
/snark
trollhattan
Repeating my link from the open thread, Edroso takes his bat to McMegan’s latest, bouncing it off the left field wall.
http://alicublog.blogspot.com/2010_10_17_archive.html#8322229413383680011
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
I too recently had a bus-stop conversation. It happened at about 8pm on a Friday night with a nice young man who was tired because he had just gotten off of working a 12-hour shift at a local Hilton and was in the middle of a 2-hour long trip (involving 3 bus connections) to get back home (that’s 2 hours each way, in addition to his working hours). That day had been only his 2nd day on the job. He was just happy to have a job and hoping that his manager would notice how hard he was willing to work. He had no comments about the aesthetic quality of the neighborhood, unfortunately.
Does that answer your question?
Brett
You know, I have to disagree with Doug on this.
If some local wants to sell his home, or his empty business lot, then it’s his right, and I don’t care if some local snob is upset about the changing culture. Nobody’s forcing him to sell, and nobody forced the people in the town in Doug’s post to sell stuff to the millionaire.
Just change a couple of words, and you have the same rhetoric you get from a lot of the anti-immigration people, about “those people” messing up the local color. It’s particularly hypocritical in the case of many cities, because the current population migrated it there earlier themselves (think of Harlem, which was originally Dutch).
Legalize
McMegan’s post sounds exactly like the billions of random message board posts from Real Americans who totally had conversations with black people, the gist of which being that black people always admit that they’d rather collect welfare than work for a living, unlike Real Americans who totally work for everything they have and so do all of their friends and fellow church-goers.
Scott P.
I think this post mischaracterizes Megan’s post. She actually said she disagrees with her interlocutor’s characterization of the neighborhood.
fanshawe
It was nice of Stephen Glass to lend McArdle his rolodex for this piece. I’m sure it helped her get in touch with
her girlfriend, she goes to college out of state, you don’t know herthe long time resident of her neighborhood who totally, like, just moved to Arizona so don’t bother trying to track him down.jacy
Just think of it as McMegan’s version of a Penthouse Forum Letter –
“I never thought it would happen to me, but the other day on the bus….”
After all, I think McMegan gets most of her gratification by imagining that everyone realizes how special she truly is.
Steve
Ryan
Class struggle will be the last great civil rights movement in America. Last because everything else will get resolved first.
fanshawe
@Steve:
Great minds…
Mumphrey
I have bad feelings about “gentrification”. I grew up in Media, Pennsylvania, “America’s Hometown”, as the signs say as you come into town. It’s a great little town; has a trolley that runs right down the middle of the main street that you can ride on into Philadelphia.
When I was little, 30 years ago, it was a normal small town, maybe a little behind the times. There was a hardware store; there was a small independent department store; a used record shop I spent a lot of time and hard-earned yard-mowing money in; bakeries, barber shops, grocery stores, a camera shop, pizza shops, an independent office supply shop, an ABC store an armmory and a bunch of other 5000-odd population town stuff.
Now most of that stuff is gone. There’s a Trader Joe’s in the old armory and the hardware shop is a fancy knicknack & Christmas decoration store. There are antique shops, art studios, fancy restaurants, places where you get the art you bought at the gallery framed, things like that.
Now, I’m all for antique shops and fancy restaurants to go along with Apollo’s Pizza (my testimony: best in the world) and the Hoagie Hut, but it’s hard for me to see why it has to be just one or the other but not both. Media Office Supply went under about 15 or 20 years ago, when a Staples or some such shit opened down the Baltimore Pike a few miles out of town. The camera shop went under maybe 10 years ago; I can see that, with the rise of digital cameras.
But sometimes it makes me sad to see what the town has become: it’s like a place where people can’t live their evryday lives and do their everyday things anymore. If you want 6 ounces of gruyère cheese or a tiffany lamp or you need your new Picasso framed and you live in town, you can walk right downtown and take care of it. But if you need some nails or a combination lock or some notebook paper, you have to drive out of town into some crappy strip mall and go to the Home Depot or Staples to buy $1.67 worth of stuff. And to get there, you deal with 800 stoplights just to get somewhere 2 and a half miles outside town. It just seems so weird and unnatural.
grumpy realist
Well, speaking as someone who grew up in Ithaca, I can say a lot of the Finger Lakes frou-frou is for the weekend tourists looking at the landscape. Ithaca might be a spot of DFHs surrounded by conservative farmers, but I can tell you we upstaters unite in our seething contempt of the touristas from NYC.
(I also like Ithaca because it has stubbornly stayed unconnected to the highway system and can only be reached by the vehicular equivalent of back trails over the mountains. And the winters–yeah, they’re brutal, but they weed out the weenies.)
Corner Stone
@Scott P.:
This is snark, right? Because there is no interlocutor.
liberty60
Here in Los Angeles, the downtown area was abandoned by the middle class after WWII, and declined into poverty and general seediness.
Or so we suburban dwellers thought.
I discovered when I dated a Mexican girl that the old part of downtown was a thriving vibrant place, populated almost exclusively by Hispanic people, who crowded Broadway and Spring Streets and shopped at the hundreds of mom & pop stores, restaurants, and nightclubs that catered to them.
Because the populace was “foreign” and the businesses were the marginal scrappers, it was invisible to the rest of us, even us who studied urban planning. When we drove through, wearing our suburban white lenses, all we saw were the homeless derelicts, the clutter, the faded and tattered shop facades.
But it was in fact a thriving economy, that paid taxes and employed thousands, and contributed to the well being and upward economic progress of thousands of families.
Now of course that same area is being gentrified and the old tattered bank buildings are being turned into boutique lofts with BoBo cafes and nightclubs.
Maybe the natural evolution of cities makes that a good thing, but we shouldn’t go around thinking that what preceded it was necessarily bad- the immigrants and tenacious shopkeepers kept the area alive and viable for decades while the rest of the city gave up on it.
Short Bus Bully
The tenor and rationale of these posts is quality and needs to be expanded upon IMHO if for no other reason than it makes Sully uncomfortable.
Yep. It’s important to realize this and come to terms with it. Having grown up rural around the hicks and poor it still always makes me laugh when the rich fucks ride in on their white horses (beemers) and are shocked, SHOCKED that people can stand to live this way and aren’t just chomping at the bit to have self-same rich folks on their white horses “beautify” everything for the poor dirty un-hip plebes.
Holden Pattern
@Brett: I think you misunderstand Cole’s post. The bullshit here is that McMegan “found” some “native” to rationalize what McMegan wants to do for her own reasons, based on what is pretty clearly McMegan’s own internal classist schmibertarian voice.
ninja3000
Mumphrey:
Apollo Pizza is terrific, especially their hero sandwiches. Is Pinocchio’s still around? (I’m remembering it from the early ’70s.)
fasteddie9318
@david mizner:
I believe that “small scale Stephen Glassing” is known in the business as the “Friedmanization” of one’s output.
Maude
@DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.:
When you do go to the wineries, please take a ton of pix and post them.
Gentrification moves out the old and brings in the new. Not always a good thing. It has been going on in Britian also.
And, about the west of the Hudson? Welcome to NJ.
different church-lady
I don’t get it: what were “they” supposed to have done with it without having any money?
Rocketship
Am I the only one who read Happyland in Harper’s a few years ago? At the time I had no idea it was based on a real story about a real person–“Pleasant” was renamed “Happy,” and other details were similarly flimsily veiled.
Mike B
I’ve been saying for years that there is a pervasive and deeply embedded classism in American culture. I’ve always been amazed more people don’t see it. I think it is becoming far more blatant, lately, but it’s been there for some time.
And yet, if you try to point it out you get denounced as trying to promote “class war” — even though it’s pretty obvious where the real class war is coming from these days, and it’s all one-sided. And some crying assclown can get on Fox News and rant about how government healthcare and stimulus spending is destroying America and get struggling Americans to contribute to the Chamber of Commerce.
This country is so doomed.
Francis
Damn it. Late to the thread. I saw that Bob Guccione died, and thought a letter to Penthouse spoof would be the perfect response to MM. hmph
Martin
Well, I’ve got a different take on this. It’s a subtle thing, so keep that in mind.
Communities have a sense of their own economic ability. If the area drops below that, people wonder what went wrong. If the area rises above that, people wonder if it’s sustainable, and what the hitch is.
This is particularly acute in small towns where there are fewer points of failure. The old version of this is the factory in town that employs everyone. Great if the factory is making iPhones, not so good if it’s making typewriters. The modern version of this is when Walmart moves in, wipes out everything on main street, and then closes 2 years later because the town was too poor to sustain the WalMart because everyone with good paying jobs on main street now works at WalMart – and nobody can buy enough shit to pay their own salary.
Small towns have delicate economies. Residents usually seem to know this. They notice when the business at the hardware store changed when the guy on the edge of town with the woodworking hobby moved. People outside the town usually aren’t in a position to do the McMegan economic analysis of ‘well, if you just did this, business would boom’ without totally fucking it up. People inside the town often have trouble seeing what could be brought in to improve things. It’s a tricky thing to get the people in the town to accept what would help, and it’s also a tricky thing to get the people outside the town to truly understand that delicate economy.
fasteddie9318
@different church-lady:
Starve to death, or get sick and die. It’s the only civilized way for the morlock to get out of the way of society’s winners.
Garrigus Carraig
@Brett:
Lolwut.
@Mike B: This. The myth of the classless society endures.
Garrigus Carraig
@Brett:
Lolwut.
@Mike B: This. The myth of the classless society endures.
Garrigus Carraig
Ugh. Sorry about the double post. Also, no edit feature. Experimenting with Chrome this week.
liberty60
@Mike B:
I agree- IMO, it is class, even more than race, that divides America. Most of what we consider racism can be explained by the fact that for most white Americans, black=poor.
This is why rich black rappers, movie stars and athletes are welcome into privileged neighborhoods by the very people who would roll up their windows and drive by them faster were they still in the ghetto.
Garrigus Carraig
@liberty60: I hesitated from bringing race into it, but I agree with this too. One factor is that while race-based animosity is easy to understand & has existed in many places at many times, we have been telling ourselves so long that we have escaped Europe’s hidebound class system that we can’t bear to believe we’ve fallen back into it.
Never mind that the race narrative obscures the class situation & tends to suck all the air out of the room with regard to the national discourse. Alsotoo.
different church-lady
@Martin: Good comment. I think we really have lost sight of the idea that the people who live in a town should have some kind of say about what goes on in that town.
WalMart shows up and says, “We’re bringing you cheap prices and jobs! Isn’t that wonderful?” and if the people of the town say “no” they’re looked at like backwater primitives who think they still live in 19th century Walnut Grove. And then they get sued.
I think a lot of this has to do with corporate evangelical zeal. In order to work in a modern corporation you need to engage in a great deal of suspension of disbelief. You can’t work at the WalMart corporate offices without believing that WalMart is inherently good. Therefore it becomes utterly inconceivable that a group of people would not want your inherent goodness in their community. If any doubt about that starts to slip in you’re not long for that job.
The Grand Panjandrum
Sweet Jesus in the morning we now have Tom Friedman in drag. Sigh. Obama must be an optimist because this sure as fuck doesn’t make me feel like things will get better. At least not with this pseudo man in street interview shit. It is becoming more and more apparent why Doc Thompson decided to check out early. (Or was it early?)
ricky
Thanks for the memories Doug J. I had occasion to be in Aurora for a brief time in the 1970’s. At that time Wells College was in financial trouble, as was the rest of “downtown. Over beers at the Fargo, one local explained
it all succinctly. “Well,” she said, “the college owns everything.
And like the college, everything is losing money. Except this bar. And they don’t own it. But they are trying to.”
goblue72
The world will always be full of lying sacks of s*&t willing to give out BJs to their patrons in the oligarchy for a few shillings. McMeghan is just one in a long string of court jesters. Mocking aughter and contempt are her just desserts in the life she has chosen. Hopefully she’ll get mugged on the way home next time and with any luck it’ll involve a couple of punches to the face just to make sure reality gets to intrude on the self-righteous bubble she’s created for herself.
Bill M
Ricky-
Now the College DOES own the bar, and their decision to end the lease of the person who had run it for years was the straw that broke the camel’s back for most people who were still on the fence.
I understand people’s comments about gentrification happening and sometimes even being a good thing, but in the Aurora case the new places are NOT making money. The same folks who prettied everything up for the out-of-towners who don’t come as often as it was expected they would are now upset that “locals” don’t support the businesses enough. The Inn has closed for the last few winters, laying off for months at a time the people who work there.
Everything looks nice, but whether it was best for Aurora or for Wells College is still very much up in the air . . . . But that’s just my opinion . . .
El Cid
I rode on the MARTA train the other day. A Latino guy turned to me and said, “You know, for a while, we were jealous of all that you Americans had up here. But now, we realize how uncomfortable we made you, and I hope someday you’ll forgive us.”
This is totally true. Because I wrote it.
Bill Murray
@different church-lady: Tom Slee has a lot to say about this in his book “No one makes you shop at Walmart” Much of this is also relevant to gentrification
http://www.web.net/~tslee/excerpt.html
Nancy Irving
If anyone really did say that to her on the bus, for sure they were pulling her leg.