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Thursday
Dec122013

I've Been Thinking a Lot About Place


I’ve been thinking a lot about place. With my life these days, it's a hard topic to avoid. Right now I commute from one valley to another, straight up the peninsula, through San Francisco, and over the Golden Gate Bridge. I go through at least three microclimate zones, and probably more. The fog descends, then lifts. The scents that come through my cracked windows change—dry, golden grass, eucalyptus, low tide, dense fog, and finally, as I get out of my car, stretch, and take a deep breath, bay trees and coastal oaks.

I’ve been thinking about the city workers strike that happened in Hayward this summer, about the union member on the radio who told the reporter that they all just want to be able to live where they work.

I’ve been thinking about my state, the state that theoretically went from deficit to surplus in the year and change that I was gone, the state where housing prices have skyrocketed, but my friends and former colleagues at community colleges are, for all intents and purposes, losing their benefits, slice by slice. This is not just the voice of a woman who wants a full time teaching position (although I do); this is the voice of a woman who is seriously concerned about the health of her community.

I’ve written about this before. Better writers than me have written about this before, this dislocation that comes with the bussing that’s happening now, not school children this time, but young engineers, on their way to a different type of campus. At their best, campuses should face outward, should create a scaffolded version of the world, and give kids practice where it doesn’t matter quite so much how badly you fail. Ultimately, all of this is to prepare students to leave.

But these campuses don’t ever let you go home. We’ve all heard the stories—free food, nap pods, laundry onsite, ping pong tables—your entire life in one place. (Although the childcare situation isn’t always great, despite what you’d expect—I’ll let Zuckerberg tell you why.) Your entire life on that perfect college campus you never quite reached before, and this time, not only is the beer cold, hoppy, and free, not only do you get to bury yourself in wifi the entire drive down instead of watching the world go by, they pay you for it. When do people ever step away from that world? Sunday brunch in the city, in that one place no one knows, but everyone knows, where they serve French toast so sweet it melts on your fork and the plates arrive, charmingly instagrammable?

I see the busses sometimes on the road as I make my way home. Sometimes I even know where they’re from. And I can’t say that I wouldn’t use the wifi if I were aboard—I got through grad school in large part by doing a giant chunk of my reading on public transit, after all, which is in some ways the same thing, and yet in others not the same at all.

The Economist even took it up this week, but there is still no suggestion in there of what I’d really love to see: techies, move down here. Move down here, take those commute hours and instead of giving them over to more work, pour them into the community. Why can’t we have hip things down here in Silicon Valley, decent transit, all the wonderful things that draw people to the city in the first place? We don’t create them, and the people with powerful voices aren't demanding them. (Also, we don’t have a big enough, sustainable enough artist class to rely on to create them for us while we’re busy commuting. And as any kid studying cause and effect will tell you, the hip things will vanish once you push out the people who actually do have time to create them.)

Some mildly delusional entrepreneur is even talking about tubes. A tube from LA to San Francisco, they say, might deliver people in about thirty-five minutes. There are people in LA I’d love to see on a more regular basis, but I can’t help thinking about the dislocation that would come with waking up somewhere near San Bernardino, and then, less than an hour later, going to work in Hayward. Where do you live if that’s your commute? Where are you from? Who are your people—the other passengers? The tube operators? And what godforsaken place do the tube operators get stuck with?

It’s easy to pretend that this problem is new, now that it’s impacting the top 20% or so, now that it’s clear that the model that still works in other parts of the country doesn’t work here—we have good jobs, but we can’t afford to buy a place. It’s an indicator that things are out of whack, perhaps, that certain economies are at full sprint and we’re all struggling to keep up.

It’s also easy to respond to these kinds of critiques psychologically, and not sociologically, and to take the whole thing personally. We do what we have to do; we do what makes sense for our individual lives and families. I don’t particularly want to commute 60 miles each way twice a week and contribute to all of the recent spare-the-air days; I do it because makes sense for our lives, that, long term, will most likely remain rooted down here. And every techie in the city has a similar story, or one that makes just as much sense when you sit down and listen. At a certain point, though, don’t we have to pay attention to the larger picture that all these stories are creating? Isn’t it to our detriment to ignore the sociological side? Isn’t it insanity?

Where we lived when we first came back from Stockholm, on a street near the train tracks, just underneath the flight path of the retired bombers that seem to be forever coming and going from Moffett, well within the flight path of the flock of local feral parakeets, we were the gentrifiers. It wasn’t intentional—we didn’t come for the taco truck, though there is one that still comes around ten pm for night shift workers. We came for the six-month lease and relatively cheap rent. A good crash pad on our way back into the country.

To my half-Mexican husband, this Latino neighborhood felt familiar, though he looks white enough that he freaked out one of the neighborhood kids when he spoke to her in Spanish. And those kids were the best part of living there. They ran through the neighborhood in packs, rode bikes, played games, interrogated neighbors and then fell silent whenever they actually got a response, and clumped up in a corner around a dirty joke book, casting furtive glances over their shoulders but not daring to step away. We watched, however, in just a few months there, as workers renovated the end unit of the building next to ours, watched the newest young professional couple start to move in, and I watched—surprised, though I shouldn’t have been—when the male half smiled and nodded at me, as though we had something in common.

I do not want to gentrify. I do not want my presence, both physical and economic, to make it so that kids can’t live the dream of being two houses down from their cousins, playing tag in the summer twilight just because their parents are recent immigrants, and not the H1-B kind, but economic refugees, like my great-great-grandparents were. I do not want to live in a community where it is impossible for the people who work within it to live. I already do, to a large extent; maybe this is simply the way of a recovery. But we’re losing something that we’ve already nearly lost, we’re hemorrhaging it, and I’m deathly afraid that it won’t stop until it’s too late.

This is the point of an essay in which, if it’s satisfactorily written, the call to action happens. I should know; I’m a writing teacher. But there are others far more qualified to tell us what to do next when it comes to concrete social changes—affordable housing advocates, community organizers, community college counselors who see the most vulnerable students, and my friends in an organization that volunteers all over the South Bay. They can all pinpoint specific needs far better than I can.

There is one thing that I can demand, however: pay attention to the larger picture. Don’t give in to the constant hum of distractions that surround us all. Look around your neighborhood; look around your local store. Take your headphones out when you’re in a public place (and if you see me with them in, make me stop). If you’re a busser, look out the damn window, both when you’re on the bus and when you’re at home. Notice how things change as time goes on. See if you can pick out your impact.

There’s a certain strain of Silicon Valley Ron Paul supporters that exemplify the worst of this tendency to look inward, libertarianism as “I’ve got mine, now leave me the fuck alone.” Except that’s the great illusion; none of us, not in this lifetime, not on this planet, are ever, ever alone. Some of us can pretend, and from where we stand, buffered by money and privilege, it may look like success. But it only looks like success if you stand in a very, very specific spot.

Whether you realize it, this is an ecosystem. We are an ecosystem. Your personal decisions affect everyone around you, just as theirs affect yours. Take them seriously, and take them in context. They’re critical to the futures of the kids on my old block. How those kids do in life, how they're allowed to do in life, will, eventually, affect us all.

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