The Keeping Up With The Joneses Trap

 

Living in or waking up in a home like this is a personal vision of hell for me. Creative Commons Wikimedia

 

The difference between living in a house, a trailer, or an apartment is primarily socioeconomic. What I have always enjoyed about apartment or trailer living is the diversity of age, race and culture that can be found. Our current apartment is a diverse mix of working and professional-class people from every corner of the country and the planet. The other difference is that in an apartment nobody cares about conforming to any norms to get along with neighbors and acceptance of difference is part of the deal. The same goes for living in a trailer park, where I lived for a few years. Trailers and trailer owners are diverse from the marginally livable, to the outlandish and the upscale and it is accepted as being part of the deal. 

Conversely, home ownership is a force that constrains difference and diversity. I often wonder if some of our political polarization stems from the housing socioeconomic monocultures we have in our country. People living in echo chambers of their own neighborhoods. I often wonder how much our single use zoning (separating, homes, apartments and business areas from each other) has on our attitudes toward others.

 Owning a house presents such a high bar that it precludes socioeconomic diversity or diversity of any kind. When I owned a house, the neighborhood was essentially a monoculture of white middle-class people from their 30s to 70s. In many areas, vast swaths of people outside a certain income level are locked out of home ownership because there is little choice but the expensive monolithic "McMansion" of thousands of square feet. Don't get me wrong, they were all great people, and I can only hope to have neighbors as nice in our new neighborhood.
 
Further, locking people out of homes is restrictive zoning that prevents rental units and smaller homes, locking me into a neighborhood for that ratified class (me included) that can afford it. Zoning makes anything but a single-family dwelling of several thousand square feet on a large lot impossible and locks all but the most privileged out of home ownership. In some places that was part of the plan, a spatial racism that kept others out through socioeconomic means. Like so many things in America, zoning is tinged by the stain of structural racism.

We could learn a lot from other countries where mixed use zoning and allowance of diverse housing is the norm. The mixed use zoning and compact development of Tokyo is part of what makes that mega-city function. In Japan, if you want to subdivide a lot and build several smaller houses it is legal and they still must fall within reasonable parameters. Paris, with similar smart zoning is, like Tokyo, one of the most sought after cities in the world. We would like to have bought a smaller house, but unless we build in the country somewhere, or purchase something built a long time ago, the market won't allow it.

As a form of relaxation, I often turn no YouTube walks though distant locations around the world. As urban walks go, there are none for sprawled suburbia, because it isn't something anybody wants to watch. Nobody wants to see a line of identical houses set off some super wide freeway next to identical box stores and fast food joints and lots of pavement because it is ugly. The only way to tell scenes from Fargo, Chicago or Arizona apart is to look at the plants if there are any. We all hate it, but for some reason keep building that way. The most popular are walks thorough old cities in Europe and Asia, with narrow streets and close set buildings with shops and cafes set below housing. People spend thousands to walk tightly spaced streets in Europe and Asia because they are convivial and pleasant spaces that are even relaxing to watch on TV. If we like such spaces so much, why don't we build more of them?

Moving toward living in a house again has me thinking about adapting to living in the "monoculture" of the privileged middle class like myself again and what I dislike the most: the "keeping up with the Joneses treadmill." The treadmill first involves owning and paying for an endless volume of crap to maintain, upgrade and live in a neighborhood where others expect you to maintain a certain standard out of middle-class conformity and property values. To be different is to court the ire of neighbors who see their property values plummeting. My predilection would be to dig up the yard and plant a garden, but I will be constrained by the narrow minded ire of my neighborhood. Whenever I see a homeowner who has tilled up their grass to plant prairie or vegetables, I do a little cheer at for their nonconformist rebellion. Vive la révolution!

Secondly, the treadmill involves a non-stop forced march of consumption. To be austere and middle class in America is to be weird. I remember my neighbor before touting with pride how he spent hundreds of dollars monthly to keep his lawn a deep emerald green; it was a beautiful lawn, but an excessive ecological nightmare in a world where most lawns are ecological nightmares. He looked down on my barely green lawn that I kept just alive enough to be green as a sort of abomination, continually asking why I didn't water or fertilize my lawn more. I could have replied that dumping all that water on useless grass is a waste of money and water and most of the fertilizer actually runs off to pollute the environment, but he wouldn't have understood why that was a problem.  I am not looking forward to forced financial and social conformity again.