The Suburbia Nobody Knows

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🏠 The Suburbia Nobody Knows, Daily Kos, March 28, 2024. Ed.

My neighbor across the street has an outlet on her front porch. She uses it to plug in her Christmas lights in the winter, and her lawnmower in the summer. In Nov. Nicki, another neighbor, was using it to charge her phone. Nicki works at the convention center. She’s part time and temporary, of course. So her schedule is irregular. She has to check in, every now and then, to see when she should come in. Last Nov., that became a little bit difficult, when her electricity has been shut off.

Nicky and her husband, Tony, lived up the street from me. They do yard work.

In the summer, they thwarted my efforts to grow flowers. In the winter, they did an impressive job of clearing away snow. Tony had a landscaping business with a friend, until the friend was murdered by someone looking for money for drugs. Now, like his wife, he takes whatever work he can get, and struggles to get by. In Nov., their electricity was shut off, and they were doing everything they could to raise money to pay the bill. The electric and gas companies aren’t allowed to shut off services from Dec. to April.

So, Nov. is the shut off month, when people scramble to pay their utility bills, so they’ll have heat and light as the days get colder.

I charged Tony and Nicki’s phones for them, sometimes, but they didn’t like to impose too often. That winter, Nicki would stop by sometimes, asking for small favors, bread once, because they were out. (Just a few slices.) Cash for sanitary supplies. They’re expensive these days. Tony and Nicki have made some bad choices in their lives. They both smoke. I would see Tony coming up the street, now and then, carrying a case of beer. Nicki had trouble with the law, she says because she took the rap for an ex-boyfriend.

But they were good people. I miss them, since they moved. They had to find a cheaper place. They couldn’t afford to live here anymore. Nicki was worried, because she’d have to take three buses to get to work. I live in a suburb of a small town in the Monongahela Valley. The place where I live is one of a number of communities that grew up around the steel industry, then suffered, when the mills closed, and Ronald Reagan told the people who lived here to “vote with our feet” and move...

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Wonderful. I can so relate. I grew up in a mill town in California. Pittsburg. Their mill is just now shuttering but because of the proximity to the greater SF Bay Area the impact won’t be as severe. I feel ya...
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The suburbanization of poverty is nothing new. We were talking about this 25 years ago. In NJ. This is partly because of gentrification. Places like Jersey City are upscale now. So the suburbs became the next stop. Now, they too are being overrun with condos and apartments built near the train stations so people can get into the cities, because even the workers with good jobs can’t afford the Jersey City’s anymore. I was a bit taken aback when my well off GI specialist mentioned he lived in Jersey City a few years back. Made sense. His wife was a doctor at NYU. They have a nanny for the kids. And, they are immigrants. So not all immigrants are working poor. In fact, in these parts, they are likely to be in tech and healthcare.
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Truly lovely, I also thank you for sharing, and for your many kindnesses.
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Reagan started the hollowing out of the middle class 40 years ago, and the effort has largely succeeded.