In some analysis three years ago for a client between NYC and Boston, we thought (and said, and said again) that the housing seemed over-valued. No, we were told, emphatically, by the economic development folks. Absolutely not. We have an acute affordable housing shortage we were told; there is no bubble. What signs are there of such a bubble, they asked sarcastically.
During the field work for that report, I happened to be going through some of the neighborhoods on the south end of the city, in mid February. It was exactly what you think of when you think of coastal New England that time of year. Leafless and seemingly lifeless (save an occasional winterberry holly) wooded lots between distressed three flats provided some relief from colorless and grim and weather beaten shiplapped.
Importantly, all was as it ought to have been. The cheap part of town, with dilapidated housing, on the wrong side of the interstate, windblown Tyvek on it’s last staples before sailing toward Long Island. Older make cars and their crooked license plates, brining in sea salt.
Suddenly a flash of orange. A man wearing an orange hat is running through the wooded lot. It’s about 35 degrees. Last week’s snow is still on the ground. It’s 11 in the morning and it’s gray everywhere except for those holly berries and this man’s orange hat.
I wanted to see what this was about. The man was clearly not jogging on the side of the road. I was out there with my parcel maps and notebook, doing field work. Not every day you see a man running through a wooded lot at top speed. I stopped the car and put it in reverse to have a better look.
My seatmate, an irrepressible Chicago community developer who’d come east to help me think about the housing challenges in this ethnic community of neighborhoods, would have none of it. “No! This is too strange, something’s not right, why the fk are you stopping the car? Let’s get outta here!”
Moments later we saw why the man was running, and apparently for his life. For 30 yards and a few seconds behind him was a bearded man with a crossbow, at full gallop through the shrubs, trying to shoulder-rest his bow and get a bead on the man in the orange hat. We drove away, leaving Vladimir and Anatoly to work out on their own whatever it was that had come between them.
The issue that remains salient though is the matter of what is normal.
It’s perfectly normal for a New England coastal community to be gray in February. For the poor side of town to be extra worn. We expect this. We order our days around these expectations.
And it is completely abnormal for a man in an American inner city neighborhood to be chased by another armed with a crossbow looking like a very angry Raskolnikov. Yet as we drove on to leave the crossbow and the hare to their own destinies, we passed people walking down the street, and none of them were pointing towards the manhunting exhibition that had, one could surmise, simply faded into the background of our evolving urban milieu.
Which brings me to the leaf blower, my Nicaraguan house cleaner, the foreclosure nightmare we’re in, and cheap meat. Or, put another way, to the suburban environment we’ve become immune to, decisions and their consequences, our time-honored tradition of kicking the can, and the double whopper.
In suburban Northern Virginia, November makes good on two promises.
The first is that the many maple and oak and other shade trees that are our beloved canopy drop their leaves by the ton. It turns out this makes wonderful leaf mulch and like so many communities nationwide, my town sucks them up and transports them by the yard to the magic mulch making place across town whereupon they become next year’s ground cover for whomever wants it.
The second is that what should ordinarily be a rather quiet neighborhood is instead a place of constant noise. From 10 am to 3 pm each day, the neighborhood is assaulted by five foot five inch Central American men in fall clothing wrapped in leaf blowing machinery. Trucks arrive mid morning like military assault vehicles. From each of their maws emerge a half dozen short men. They strap on two-stroke John Deere blowers and start moving next spring’s mulch to the street. They unleash a low roar that won’t stop for two hours. These yard assault teams break for lunch and then all the way through dusk tornado the lawns of a middle class unable to reach for a rake, that is if they know how to use one.
This phenomenon has been in full tilt for at least a decade in middle America, by 2000 rich enough to hire Juan and Carlos and Miguel to keep the grass green, and too busy (in their minds) to clean their own homes.
What’s fascinating – and troubling – is that the voting district I’m in, where every day these battalions of Central American leaf blowers visit and contribute to the wasteful consumption of fossil fuels their machines demand – voted overwhelming for Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, and Obama.
My district’s voting habits could be a body double for Berkeley, but what we have on our streets are Nissan Armadas, Chevy Tahoes, Range Rovers, and oh yes, the leaves from the yards of all those left voting pro environment folks who no longer own a rake owing to the availability of so many short brown men and their portable John Deeres. Now we have our share of Prius’s (is the plural of Prius Pruii? (Scary close to Pruitt Igoe)), but they’re still outnumbered four to one by the big vehicles with the jingoistic yellow ribbons on them supporting troops that never come from our neighborhood. Never.
In an important way these fossil fuel consuming two stroke strap on leaf blowers and the ceaseless noise they make are now part of the background.
They are a part of the suburban system that has so absorbed their presence they no longer stand out. All of these yardmen should have been a sign of an awful lot of disposable income, a sign of an awful waste of precious carbon absorbing capacity. Instead they are like the servants from an Edwardian downstairs, sneaking in and out with ladles of gravy and another mis en bouteille poached from a Buñuel screenplay. They’re not seen and neither is the full impact of all those leafless lawns considered. It’s our norm. Welcome to the Monkey House.
And it’s all connected. It turns out that one of the wives of one of the leaf blowers is a woman who has cleaned my house every other week for the last 12 years, too busy as I am (in my mind) to do it myself.
When she first started, she would arrive at my home in an older Honda or Toyota or Datsun, as would befit one’s expectation.
Some time in the late 1990s she arrived in a Land Rover. I made a mental note of this, how interesting it was that the lady who was cleaning my house arrived in a car twice the cost of the one I was driving. I mentioned it laughingly now and then to others, remarking “you gotta like this economy where my cleaning lady drives a Land Rover.” But though I noticed it, and took enough notice to mention it to others I didn’t really ever think about it. Never connected the credit scoring and predatory lending dots that in hindsight are so easy to see.
At some point I gathered she and her husband had purchase a home. I did a few back of the envelops to see how the math could work on her and her leaf blower’s salaries, and it never really penciled out. But I let it recede, no doubt in the same way my neighbors drove to the polls in their Chevy Surbuban to vote for Gore. My 401-K was performing, so why bother to unpack the inputs that enabled a cleaning lady’s salary to go from a Land Rover to a Hummer and buy a home in one of the nation’s costliest housing markets. And I’m in the housing business!
At some point in the early 2000s my cleaning lady called to say she had car trouble. The next time she arrived though she came in a Hummer. While I was making five to ten times her salary, she was busy buying a car twice as expensive as mine and more than twice as expensive to fill up.
I had a cleaning lady who had been driving a Land Rover only to switch to a Hummer. Out she would come, emerging from her assault vehicle in one part of my neighborhood to clean homes while her husband would emerge from another kind of assault vehicle two blocks away to clean lawns. I would arch my eyebrows a bit every time I saw this, but I never really registered it in a canary in a coal mine sort of way. Didn’t stop to really think about how it might be possible for her to afford these cars, to say nothing of owning a house in the half million dollar Northern Virginia suburbs on a noisy leaf blower’s wages.
The sheer oddity of this faded into the background. Her Land Rover was as much an assumed part of life as the idiocy of blowing leaves when a rake will do just fine. Of course she now drives a rather beat up minivan, long ago discarded no doubt by some soccer mom in Falls Church whose husband today blows his own leaves with his Home Depot Troy- Bilt, given the collapse of the value of their stock portfolio.
How it is that an army of Central American leaf blowers descending every day into suburbia could not arouse as much notice as Vlad the crossbowman remains a mystery. But then again I was standing in line in a Burger King in Fredonia, NY not long ago trying to pencil out how it is that burgers could be so cheap and what kind of an industrialized business model must be in place for a double whopper to cost the same as an organic apple.
Then again I’ve not take responsibility for my role in the terrible condition of the teeth my cleaning lady can’t afford to fix.
