houses, society
There's a big problem with the (slowly deflating?) housing bubble that has installed itself as a seemingly permanent feature of the American economy. (It is not, of course, permanent; such a setup must eventually fall through--but for the time being, most homeowners are acting on the presumption of its permanence.) The problem is summed up in the following question: where are people of my generation going to LIVE? Perhaps a related question, though not as clearly derivative from the booming housing market, is: just how indebted to the rest of the world are we going to be, and how will we ever pay off that debt? War, to make it obsolete? Not a good answer.
My family spent Christmas at my grandparents' home in Litchfield, CT. Their home is lovely and in a beautiful, walkable town, and I had the abstract thought that
this was a place I'd like to live, a place to have a family and a livelihood, a place to settle down. So just out of curiosity, I went to the government website and pulled up the recent sale prices of housing in Litchfield (this information being in the public domain). My reasonably well-informed estimate of the cost of an average single-family home there? $1-3.5 million, depending on location, land, and age of the building (older, strangely, seems more expensive...?).
In some ways, this is exactly what owning a home is supposed to be like. You put a
lot of money into owning your house and land, but it's considered a solid investment anyway because real estate always rises in value (or so says conventional wisdom). The people who bought these homes 30, 20, or 10 years ago are all, I'm sure, very pleased with the cost of their home these days.
But what about those of us who were only 13 years old ten years ago? Where will we live? Even the cheapest of actual homes, physically sound (if imperfect fixer-uppers), in the cheapest housing markets in the country, are easily topping $150,000 (except in Alaska, it appears). The US Census Bureau tracks statistics for the cost of new homes each quarter; you can see here that in 2005,
a new home in America is far more likely to go for between $300,000 and $500,000 than for any other price. And the average price of a New York City apartment--sans yard, sans space, sans parking--has just topped a million dollars.
This is a problem. Homeowners who bought their first house for $80,000 15 years ago can now sell it for $300,000, which they can then use to buy a new home in some other, more convenient place. Even if they can't buy an appreciatively nicer home, they can still move fairly easily. Moreover, they could move from a one-family home to a smaller apartment (now that their kids have moved out, for example), and take the price difference (say, $100,000) off the top to buy a new boat and car or to set aside for retirement. And these people can also get credit and borrow money against the value of their home, allowing them many more financial options than those who don't have homes.
But those of us whose starter home is going to cost $200,000? Well, most of us will simply never
get a starter home under these circumstances (much less in the very expensive market that is Litchfield, CT). What will we do in ten years' time, when we want a loan to start a business? What will we do when we want permanency in our lives? The great thing about
owning a home, instead of renting, is that after 20 or 30 years of paying your mortgage, it's
yours. Markets may fall, Armageddon may break out, you might lose your job or become bedridden--but even if you can't sell it on the open market, your home and your land give you a permanent place to live. Indeed, anybody with a small yard can have a garden and make their own food in an emergency. Anybody with a bedroom has shelter. In short, owning your home means not just having a large financial asset to your name, but actually, physically having a place to stay even if you're unemployed or in otherwise dire straits.
But my generation? We don't really have much of a foothold on the homeowner ladder. In part, it's because we're more wandering and unsettled (not with a bad connotation) than twenty-somethings of previous generations. But in large part, it's because we couldn't buy a home if we wanted to. Our actual assets, as a general rule, are tiny.
That's a big problem. People who don't own their home can easily be kicked out of it--via everything from rent increases to eviction. No landlord has an obligation to re-up your lease, after all. But dependable permanency is a necessity for reliably run businesses, too, and for reasonably good schooling (consider the school where all students are drifting in and out--so much for the student-teacher relationship), and even for simple human contact and getting to know one's neighbors. Moreover, relatively reliable permanence helps make people stakeholders in their societies; you care who the mayor is, who the governor is, whether this lot turns into a park or that one becomes an apartment complex, how big class sizes are in the local elementary school, and what the seatbelt laws are, because you buy into the idea that this place is somehow yours and the place where you will continue to live.
But if young-ish adults aren't able to break into the housing market, we face a lot more apathy. (Look at voters by age in America, and we'll see that this is something we already face.) Moreover, in the more distant future, we face a world in which either one of two scenarios come into being. On the one hand, it could be that in forty years it will be my generation that comes to own the homes as our parents and grandparents move to smaller apartments, nursing homes, and (sorry to be crude about it) the grave. To accomplish this, I suspect there will be a
rapid decline in home costs, thus radically shaking up our economy and likely causing an overall financial imbalance that could lead to serious instability and possible depression. On the other hand, it might be that we never really manage to break into the market at all. But then what? We'll be paying rent our whole lives? We already graduate from college with an average of over $2500 in credit card debt--not to mention as much as $250,000 in financial aid that needs to be repaid. We're swiftly becoming a debt-based economy. If we could be "renting to own," that is, paying a mortgage, then eventually we would have much more disposable income (when the house is paid off and there is no more rent on it), which we could use to back up and pay off debt (the way most homeowners generally do it even now). Alternatively, we could just run an account deficit of an increasingly large number of trillions of dollars, until the rest of the world figured out that the only thing underlying this is superior military power (since the economic power is actually in the hands of the lenders). Not a lovely scenario, either.
Actually, a third possibility comes to mind. Those of us with homeowning parents might eventually inheret the homes that they cannot themselves afford, while those whose parents don't own a home will simply be out of luck. What a superb way to widen the income gap and stem social mobility!
This is an obvious and problematic economic reality. The papers and the markets are aware of it. But it seems like nobody is paying attention to the political and social implications of a generation of wandering, uprooted, unconnected people. This is precisely the opposite of community, and seems likely to lead to problematic overindulgence in individualism, less and less enthusiasm for supporting social safety nets for others, far less self-policing and communal pressure to act decently (and therefore greater legalism and opportunism, both of which lose the point of the rules in the first place), and a power disparity between the haves and the have-nots which might even go so far as to effectively disenfranch the latter and threaten our democracy on a grand scale. It's the doomsday scenario, to be sure. But I do think it could happen.
Work, work, work
The problem with working is... well... that you have to work. Even when you don't want to.
Being young and new to my job, I get the worst schedule while others take time off. (Seniority does buy you something, even in the most profit-driven companies around.) I will be working through Friday, and then again from the following Tuesday. Over here it's Christmastime, though, and I happen to be one of those who celebrate Christmas. Of course, normal responsible adults work such schedules (unless they are lucky enough to be self-employed and solvent, teachers, or members of Congress), but this is my first Christmas in the normal adult world. I'm not sure I like it. Give me the six-week-long vacations of my college days!
Quite seriously, I'd like to see a large company that gives well-considered, universally-applicable time off (whether at Christmastime or not is relatively unimportant). The French get three weeks in the summer (or, at least, this is a French ideal). Small businesses close their doors when the owners go away. In Brooklyn, whole neighborhoods close shop for Rosh Hashana. There is space in this time for relaxing, for cultural activities, for life outside of work. Perhaps this is not competitive, but it is human--and I suspect it doesn't actually cut the competitive edge so much anyway.
So here is a resolution: If ever I start a company that becomes a giant success--not likely, I confess--I'm going to simply close the doors for a week or two every year. All employees get the time off. Paid? Okay. It might mean that salaries are a little lower. But at least there's no pressure. You haven't shunted your work off onto someone else while on vacation, and you aren't behind when you return. Simply, the work ceases to exist, and we all go on vacation.
How wildly implausible is this?
Strike!
Tuesday, 20 December: Strike! Just in time for Christmas and New Year's Day!
Walking nearly three miles to work every morning is not going to be fun for long, I have no doubt.
However, walking to work today turned out to be great.
Everybody was walking. For the first time in my experience, New Yorkers turned out
en masse to do something together. We chatted with strangers as we moved up and down the streets. We laughed about the strike, the difficulty getting to work, the gridlock, and how pleased we were to live in Manhattan (pity the poor Brooklynite who has to walk to Times Square!). We speculated with neighbors on how long the strike would last. Everybody was open and pleasant, very un-New Yorkerly; suddenly the city, home of eight million different cultures, languages, and people, became a much smaller, much more intimate place.
New York is truly an entity unto itself. To be sure, it exists with New York State, within the United States, within an interconnected world. But the experience of living here is really quite unique. If transit workers (or teachers, or builders, or whomever) struck in Jacksonville, there would be difficulties, there would be havoc, there might be big problems. But here,
life itself changes. Attitudes change. New services spring up overnight: taxis take off, Starbucks must be making millions (every businessman who formerly took the subway stopped in to have a coffee as he walked, it seems), shoe stores opened early (no kidding), wireless hotspots are filled with people commuting "from home." The roads change (direction, and parking rules and driving permits are suspended), the school schedules change, the stock market changes, one's relationships with neighbors change, ambulances drive differently, business acquaintences chat about getting to work over the phone before moving on to important issues: everything changes. And it is annoying, yes, but not MERELY annoying. It's an experience.
And it's not all bad, either. My walk this morning took me through Central Park, which was lovely. I liked talking to random folks, joking with those who made it into work, noticing the cool weather and seeing people laughing in their filled cars. All things considered, a day or two of this might be great.
(Of course, the strike is sure to last longer. Oh well.)
NY's "Fair" Employment Act
New York State Civil Service Law, Article 14, §210.2(f): Payroll deductions. Not earlier than thirty nor later than ninety days following the date of such determination, the chief fiscal officer of the government involved shall deduct from the compensation of each such public employee an amount equal to twice his daily rate of pay for each day or part thereof that it was determined that he had violated this subdivision...
December 16: The midnight deadline for the Transit Union to call a strike here in New York has come and gone, and the subways and busses are still running (much to the relief of the vast majority of the city). Contract negotiations haven't finished, but at least they seem to be getting somewhere; a new Tuesday deadline has been set, and we shall see if the city descends into chaos then. (Contingency plans seem a desparate effort, at best: no cars on the road with less than 4 passengers, taxis to pick up multiple passengers (but note the cabbies' claim that they won't be scabs for the MTA), walking lanes on bridges into town (as if commuters from Westchester are going to walk to Manhattan Island), and several streets closed to anything but emergency vehicles in anticipation of incredible gridlock. My company even went so far as to put people up in hotels in Manhattan so that they could get to work in the case of a strike.)
Needless to say, then, I'm pleased that I didn't have to walk two-and-a-half miles to work this morning. And, my populist tendencies aside, I have to say that I think the MTA has some solid proposals in this very disruptive, very tense dispute. I know the union hates the idea of conductorless, remote-controlled subway cars, for example, because it gets rid of many jobs--but it does seem the way forward into a more-efficient, more cost-effective, high-tech world. I know the union wants a bigger cut of the MTA's one-time budget surplus, too--but, I mean, half that surplus is going towards paying down debt on the employees' pension plans. It's not that the employees are getting screwed by the MTA, but rather that they won't see this money until they retire. And then, I suspect, they'll be glad for it.
So, in a different world, I might have great sympathy for the MTA, and I might even be inclined to tell the union to suck it up and compromise a little bit more: longer contracts in return for high-tech conductorless trains; no broadbanding (when one employee, often skilled, is required to do several unrelated, often unskilled, and usually lower-paying jobs in addition to her skilled work) in return for no one-time kickback from the MTA's surplus.
But you know what? In this world, I can't help but to be on the union's side all the way. That's because the MTA is shameless about playing the press, about screwing the union, and about not giving an inch at the negotiating table. Heck, everybody knew (for years!) that December 15 was the contract deadline. You'd think the MTA would have proposed a contract, then, by, oh, let's say December 8th. That would give them at least a week to try to hash out the details. But instead, they went to the governor, the mayor, the courts, and the press, outlining their demands. And they never--or not, at any rate, until very recently, handed the union a sheet of paper with proposed contract details. How is the union supposed to respond to hints of MTA contract negotiations, without actually seeing any well-formed proposal? Of course things went down to the wire; the union had no choice but to wait until they had a document to work with (and yes, it was the MTA's responsibility to propose the contract in the first place). When the papers asked union reps what they thought of the MTA's compensation proposals, what was the TWU supposed to say but, "We don't know, we haven't seen them yet?"
You know what gets me even more annoyed than the MTA, though?
The state.
In the last few days, I've learned a lot about New York's Public Employees' Fair Employment Act (generally known as the Taylor Law, perhaps in an attempt to replace the obvious misnomer in the proper name). I've even gone so far as to read the whole damned thing. It's horrible. How on earth can it be legal for New York State to ban strikes? To ban them. To fine striking workers twice their rate of pay for every day, or part of a day, that they strike. How can it be legal to simply presume that somebody who is out sick, and whose boss doesn't believe his excuse, can be fined for striking? (I quote: "An employee who is absent from work without permission, or who abstains wholly or in part from the full performance of his duties in his normal manner without permission, on the date or dates when a strike occurs, shall be presumed to have engaged in such strike on such date or dates" and shall be subject to all the punishments laid out in the law for strikers.) How can it be that, in determining whether a union helped foment a strike (thereby making it subject to extensive legal action), "compliance with the technical rules of evidence shall not be required?" Don't we Americans generally require evidence before the law? Don't we presume individuals to be innocent until proven guilty (instead of presumed to be striking--illegal!--if absent)?
To be sure, none of these provisions seem to be dissuading the union too much; transit workers seem almost eager to strike even if it means paying the required fines, while the union is declaring that possible financial and legal repercussions (to the tune of several million or even hundreds of millions of dollars) will not keep them from supporting a strike if need be (Governor Pataki's "don't do it!" and declarations of illegality clearly notwithstanding).
But why should they have to pay? I could choose not to come to work any day of the week. I could quit. I could walk off the job. My friends could do it, too. It wouldn't be nice; the company would be left in difficult straits; I'd be unemployed; our clients would be left in the lurch. And, to be sure, my company would be welcome to fire me or to withold pay for the days I was absent (beyond my paid leave, I suppose). But my government, certainly, has no right to fine me or, God forbid, throw me in jail if I don't pay their fine. That is one of the things that it means to be a free woman in an free society. That's why I live here, for goodness's sake. If I want to stop working--because I don't like working conditions, because I'm bored, because I get a better job offer, because I marry a rich guy, because whatever--I can. It's that simple. My government cannot, or at least, emphatically ought not, be able to tell me that it is illegal not to work--and even moreso should they not be able to tell me that it is illegal not to work for somebody in particular (in this case, the MTA)!
There is an argument, of course, for balancing public good against individual liberties. And, indeed, doing so is in fact the role of government. A transit strike would wreak havoc on this city, it's true, and perhaps that gives the government some special right to step in and arrange things, even to the detriment of individual transit workers. Forcing people to go to work, however, is going far, far too far. A government can arrange new forms of transportation (which might undermine the strike's effectiveness to some extent); it can let cabbies carry multiple passengers; it can stop street parking to open up more driving space in a congested city; but surely, surely, it cannot force people to work for the MTA if they don't want to.
They Say the Neon Lights are Bright...
...on Broadway.
I've had visitors here for much of the last week (yay for cousins and significant others!), and this has forced me to get out and go to a couple of Broadway shows. I'm living a cliche: never seeing New York until the family comes to visit, so to speak (or, perhaps in a better light, seeing the real New York as opposed to the staged one).
I'm not so into musicals, I'm the first to admit. They're good for a fun time, but often don't really make one think: more spectacle than substance, one might say. This pretty much sums up what I thought of
Chicago, too. There were very catchy songs, singing, dancing, all the requisite musical
things--but overall, I remained relatively unimpressed (which is not to say I didn't enjoy myself).
But the truth is,
Chicago has a harsh and thought-provoking moral, of sorts: in America, the innocent but uninspiring are hanged; the guilty but interesting are let off the hook (with the help of expensive, manipulative lawyers and a good sense of creating a story for the press); and the boring, dependable, good-hearted, and hardworking are alternately ignored and manipulated by those who are in the spotlight. This is a moral to think about. Moreover, its presentation is interesting; we are first introduced to and most enamored of (or, at least, most invested in) Roxie and Velma, two murderers yearning to be in the public eye (one of whom has also been unfaithful to her very loyal but very boring mechanic of a husband). The play is a comedy and not a tragedy, in a Shakespearean sense, however, because both women get off and even end up sharing the spotlight in their own vaudeville show (fulfilling a kind of dream for each of them). It would indeed be shocking and displeasing were they to be convicted of the murders (which they both very much did commit), and worse were they to be hanged for their crime. They are the characters whom we the audience follow and with whom we sympathize (insofar as there is sympathy for anybody in the show). There is room here, then, for thought, both political and literary: we might fruitfully consider whether good story management really does make such an enormous difference in the way that justice is dished out in America (or elsewhere) today, and we might wonder about the narrative forces that turned the least sympathetic characters in real life into the most sympathetic characters on stage.
But
Chicago does not really invite these considerations, I find. Perhaps it lives up just a bit too much to its own lyrics:
Give 'em the old razzle dazzle
Razzle Dazzle 'em
Give 'em an act with lots of flash in it...
How can they see with sequins in their eyes?
I'm having trouble reconciling my relative disdain for
Chicago with my great appreciation for
The Producers, however. After all, this latter, too, was a comedy, and full of spectacle. But
The Producers had many genuinely funny moments in a way that
Chicago never did;
Chicago's pleasures were
dependent upon spectacle and song and dance, rather than enhanced by them. What's more,
The Producer's funny moments were of many types: the slapstick physical humor that has two men end up on top of each other in compromising positions; the amusing and exaggerated facial expressions that make us grin simply because they look silly; witty repartee; puns, both bad and good; a clever plot; even the slightly uncomfortable but very funny humor that comes from exploiting stereotypes (of relationships, of the elderly, of producers, of Swedes, of accountants, of women, of gays, and, yes, even of Hitler). Even the spectacle part was infused with humor: in the opening song-and-dance number, for example, the observant audience member would have noted that among the tuxedoed men and the be-gowned women could be found a pair of nuns, for no reason other than to highlight the unexpected.
Perhaps its greatest virtue, however, is that
The Producers never takes itself too seriously. Maybe I'm wrong to criticize
Chicago for not being particularly thought-provoking, then; maybe, in fact, the problem with musicals is that they often try to be serious love stories or (un)reasonably deep politically or philosophically important works--but really, how often do your very somber lovers burst out into a fully orchestrated, four-part-harmonized song-and-dance number? To be sure, some musicals try with moderate success to explain away this strangeness in order to maintain a kind of consistency (necessary for gravity);
The Phantom of the Opera readily comes to mind as a show of this kind (as if setting the thing in an opera house really makes it less ridiculous that Andrew Lloyd Weber should pop into the mind of a lovestruck ballerina). So maybe
Chicago, with its heavy-handed gesture towards a more serious criticism of American justice, simply gets bowled over by its own flashy song-and-dance, scantily-clad women, and unlikely lyrics.
The Producers, on the other hand, takes the ridiculousness and runs with it, with no pretensions to anything but good comedy. "As long as we're going to burst out into song anyway," the actors seem to be saying, "well, forget consistency and toss in a couple of nuns, a few tap-dancing old ladies (played by young men, I note), women in evening gowns and men in neon green visors." There is little attempt to try to justify the spectacle as an integral part of the plot; rather, the emphasis is making sure it is as spectacular as it can be (without, however, sacrificing
all relationship to what is going on in the rest of the show).
There is a way that the musical numbers of
The Producers reminded me of the best of Bollywood. It was ridiculous, to be sure, but laugh-aloud funny, and very well done. In deciding to embrace all the strangeness, absurdity, and sheer good fun of the musical medium,
The Producers succeeded brilliantly where most other works simply flop (in my opinion, at least).
I guess that means I don't dislike musicals after all.
Let the Trumpets Blare
There is something sad about the musical instrument wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. To be sure, it is filled with lovely things: harpsichords, a gorgeous cello, guitars, even a harpo-lyre. I can't help thinking, however, that this is little more than a chronicle of instruments unplayed.
It is of course true that some of the items on display are more works of art than works of instrumental craftsmanship, and perhaps it makes sense that Namur's Belgian guitar (with its parquetry decoration) or Voboam's 17th-century Parisian guitar (complete with patterns of tortoiseshell, ebony, and ivory) should be on permanent display in the art museum. Maybe we can justify the Tibetan trumpet, the Chinese gongs, and numerous other foreign instruments, too; after all, they are instruments that we don't see every day, and the museum is a valuable cultural as well as artistic repository. But the three Stradivarius violins? The numerous pianos? Even the organ, not particularly remarkable and very like those found in any number of churches across America? Sure, in some way they chronicle the development of modern instruments, and in some way each are objects of great worth and value that, it is at least arguable, ought to be publicly accessible.
But not like this. Not silent, unplayed, in a museum with deaf ears. These instruments are preserved, looked after, researched, and analyzed--but they are nearly never
played. What good is an exhibit like that?
Incidentally, and not that tangentially, I feel the same way about rare old books. They should not be acquired by museums merely to be put behind glass, allowing us to appreciate all of
two whole pages. Rather, we should put them in publicly-accessible archives (or even private libraries) where they might be read, enjoyed, researched, and--gasp!--
handled as books are meant to be. One of my greatest joys at Cornell was to venture into the Rare Books and Manuscript Collection, to request a lovely old volume, and just to sit and read it. Because, after all, old (or financially valuable) things should not be so revered that we forget what they are
for, and thereby lose all joy of them.
