Speaking as someone who lives on the south side of Chicago, I think I can explain exactly what that kryptonite consists of. 
6 Likes
You would think that, but it has more to do with zoning and property acquisition issues. The crap parts of Brooklyn and Queens are largely industrial in nature. Urban rust belt. The South Bronx is still largely residential.
What is happening in NYC is that commercial and industrial buildings are being rezoned as residential and made the focus of gentrification. It is far easier to knock down a factory or warehouse than it is to buy out the owners of a couple of apartment buildings in order to create the space for luxury high rises.
In North Jersey the areas which rose the quickest in value were the former rotting industrial detritus of Hoboken and Jersey City. Cities which were major commercial ports/commercial transportation hubs that fell upon hard times. The former docks were dismantled and âwaterfront luxuryâ buildings took their place. The middle and working classes of those towns either ended up in undeveloped slums in Jersey City or in adjacent towns.
2 Likes
It is a very weird definition of âmiddleâ that excludes 98.5% of households in the US. Almost like itâs not really the meaning of the word at all.
You seem to misunderstand - my point is that if youâre making houses for the six-figure set, youâre not actually making houses for the middle class. Youâre making houses for the wealthy. If your town includes no houses that people actually in the actual middle class can actually afford, you canât be claiming that these projects are âmiddle class.â Theyâre just going from the top 1% to the top 1.5%. If you want houses in your town that the middle class can afford, you need houses that people whomake < $75k/year can afford.
One of the kinks here is that location is privelege. The fact of the matter is that in the suburbs of Boston or in NYC like me (or near Silicon Valley like the article), you have opportunities that people in other geographies donât. It doesnât matter how much of a coding ninja you have the potential to be if you were born and live in Bumblefuck Missouri.
Cost of Living is a real bugaboo, and urban areas can have their own nexuses of poverty (the difference between Bumblefuck Missouri and Crown Heights in Brooklyn is less grand than it seems), but âMiddle class Boston Suburbsâ is still âRichâ by most measures.
The way to break that would be to bring the benefits of urban spaces to more rural areas, to make moving seamless and cheap, to put powerful internet and infrastructure into our most distant and isolated corners, and all sorts of other things that donât even seem on the table when we DO talk about economic equality.
Two-income households might be a plurality, if youâre talking about affordable housing, that housing needs to also be affordable for the single mom with three kids who works as a hairdresser and makes most of her money through tips or the person working at the bookstore for $8/hr.
10 Likes
I never thought of myself as a character from a Richard Scarry book before. I call the bananamobile!
13 Likes
Just look at it!
8 Likes
I disagree - I do understand what you are saying - but you are talking about median wages which does not mean âmiddle classâ to me. My definition is taking what âmiddle classâ was in the 50âs - and applying inflation. Which would start âmiddle classâ today at around 135k a year and go to around 600k. I donât care that itâs an âelite fewâ - because just making an âaverageâ wage doesnât make you financially secure and able to handle college, rent/mortgage, save for retirement, and have enough cash to survive a layoff. Thatâs really what âmiddle classâ was - and what it should be (in my opinion).
Iâll grant you that many people view âmiddle classâ as those making the âmiddle incomeâ - but that cheapens what we (as a country) actually considered middle class.
6 Likes
Ah, I see what youâre saying more clearly now. Yeah, I think the fact that a true âmiddle classâ is something that now needs to actively be restored to reality is a very worthy goal and certainly part of making housing affordable for everyone!
2 Likes
Thats fucking middle class? Man I could be so less worried about things with that income.
13 Likes
I agree, but those people are not middle class. Theyâre working class, and in your example making near-minimum wage while trying to support three children. That is not a problem you can solve with housing policy alone. You solving it by requiring all employers pay a living wage, and by eventually instituting a guaranteed basic income.
Suburbs began with the single-earner-household middle class of each particular city, so if the middle class today canât afford to live there, this should be a solvable problem since we are a richer country in total than we were when they were built. Also, I bought my house in the Boston suburbs while making less than $75k/yr household income, and in a reasonably nice town, too.
Cities donât function without a working class, too. That means you either subsidize the cost of living for everyone in that working class, force the working class to live in slums and/or drive two hours each way to work, or gradually lose those advantages that bringing in a city is supposed to bring because essential work isnât getting done and all the businesses that everyone relies on close.
And the same wage that is solidly middle class in one part of the country is lower class in another. Thatâs why different regions need to be allowed to set their own minimum wages, no matter what the Governor of Alabama thinks. Any attempt to say âno one who makes over $X is middle classâ will be accurate everywhere unless X is so high as to look ridiculous to most of us. You canât define class nationally with a dollar value, but you can define it by location on the local or regional income distribution, or relative to cost of living.
4 Likes
I remember the day I officially made enough money to get into the lower echelons of the middle class.
I made less than 45k at the time.
1 Like
Depends on what kinds of perks you associate with âmiddle class.â For decades the American concept of being middle class was something like
- Able to own a 2- or 3-bedroom home
- Able to afford 1 or 2 cars (maybe even a new car once in a while!)
- Able to raise 2-3 children, possibly even paying for their college education
- Able to afford all the basics like food, clothing and health care
Heck, a couple of generations ago a middle class American family might even be expected to have all those things on a single income.
Admittedly it may well be that this Cleaver-family concept of âmiddle classâ is an outdated relic of a long-gone era and 21st century families shouldnât have the same expectations for things like private car ownership and whatnot. But in most of the country people can have all these things and still be considered âmiddle class.â
In San Francisco, having all these things means your family had better have an income well into the six-figure range.
8 Likes
For Palo Alto and San Francisco, that is middle class, though. Because those are the two most expensive cities in the Bay Area, so their average incomes are totally screwy, but income inequality in the Bay Area is some of the worst in the nation. It requires at least $100K in income to buy a house anywhere in the Bay Area (actually it might be a bit more than that, now), which is either the starting salary for a Google/Apple engineer or the combined salaries of three middle income earners.
2 Likes
The thing that makes this discussion difficult is that, as we see, defining the middle class is not so easy, which makes discussion slippery. When people idealize the middle class, they generally arenât thinking of statistics. Some people are thinking of the concept of stability, some are thinking more about equality, some are thinking more of the old aspirational social class. Some people view it as relative, i.e. it doesnât matter if a poor person now has a higher living standard than the middle class of 1960 because incomes have shifted, and some people view it more as a fixed basket of lifestyle-goods. You know, a modest home in a modest neighborhood, with job stability and 2-4 weeks of vacation and the ability to both save a little and afford 1.7 kids.
(oops, I see Brainspore essentially hit some of the same points while I was typing)
4 Likes
There was a time when only one income was normally considered when applying for a mortgage. From a feminist point of view, itâs arguably a good thing that this is no longer the case, but itâs obvious that more money chasing the same housing stock has seriously inflated prices.
Those are getting pretty hard to find.
In my increasingly distant Chicago childhood, raising two boys in a 1000 sq ft, 2bd/1ba home on a 25 x 125 foot lot was considered perfectly normal. No one thought of us as poor, nor were we. We just lived in a normal people house.
Of course, my dad defined âmiddle classâ by how much he could save every month and how quickly he could get to âburn the mortgage dayâ rather than whether every member of the family had their own bedroom, TV, and phone.
4 Likes
Definitely agreed about inflated housing prices as a result of second incomes. My grandfather worked at a gas station in queens and owned a two family, 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom home.
IOne of the main reasons people try to live in expensive neighborhoods is (real or perceived) quality of schools and level of crime. I suspect national or statewide control of spending on education and policing is probably one of the only things that could in principle change that.
1 Like
$130k, on the nose. I live in a bedroom I rent from a couple in their seventies. I drive an eleven year old car, buy clothes at Target, and havenât eaten out (or bought artisnal cheese) in half a year.
I am not living on the edge, I always have contingency plans. And this year may see two or three difficult ones executed. So it goes.
2 Likes
Mine is probably easy to find out, I am pretty open about being on UK disability benefits and unable to work*. A few years ago that was in the UK top 30%, but i doubt it has stayed there. I definitely wasnât in the world 1% last time I checked.
* I can actually do some degree of work, but nobody will give a job to someone who will be ill for 50% of the year, selected at random each morning.
I have been saying that the middle class doesnât exist for a few years now. We have people who need to work to live (people on welfare are in this group too), and people who can live off the work of others.
6 Likes
Iâd be careful before riffing on the âkids todayâ too much about the modern conveniences like phones and TVs. For one thing, a black & white TV back in the 50s probably took up at least as much of a familyâs income as a couple of fancy flatscreens today. For another, the average familyâs cell phone budget usually isnât enough to make or break their ability to buy a home.
While middle class families today do enjoy some luxuries that werenât available to previous generations, the same can also be said of every generation since at least the industrial revolution.
5 Likes
Fair enuff. Iâll just suggest we consider the square footage issue.
