Everything Is Awesome: Housing 1

I think, sometimes, that graduating college and not taking any classes for a two-year period (but now I'm baaaaaack!) was one of the best things that happened to me in terms of understanding the world in a Grace kind of way - the way where I analyze the social constructs that led us as a nation to think that grabbing a coffee at Starbucks is fun. Paradoxically, that's also how I have fun - analyzing social constructs at Starbucks while drinking... Starbucks. You know how you make a tall-decaf-skinny-cinnamon-dolce-latte-please taste so much better even with the empty calories? Corporate social responsibility and America's search for the communal third place. Oh yeah.

About two years ago I read a book called The Warmth of Other Suns. It's 640 pages of beautiful writing by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist about the migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North during the 20th century told through the life experiences of three people. This book literally changed the way I look at the world, which is ironic, because usually I try to avoid books by journalists because they're often pretty sensationalist and not backed up by footnotes, and I always avoid books with a terrifying page count because ADD doesn't usually let me read beyond 250 pages without losing interest and moving on. This book explains a major reason for the present composition of our communities, and manages to do that in a way with incredible emotional impact - and remember, I'm half Vulcan. A two-word sentence doesn't usually make me cry, but this time it did. You all should seriously read this book. I promise they don't mention corporate social responsibility anywhere in the book.

But anyway, Warmth of Other Suns sparked one of my vaguely-creepy interests in housing. (It also made me a huge fangirl of the author, and I actually got her to autograph my copy, something I've never felt the need to do previously.) The spatial composition of America (translation: where we live and why we live there) is so important to your opportunities, your economic status, your social status, your perspectives, your life experiences. OK, now I'm just going off on a tangent.

Houses are fascinating. A little more than a hundred years ago, only a third of the American population lived in or near the cities. Cities were not especially fun places to live in the 1800s. Basically, there were a lot of people squished together, and there was no trash service, no indoor toilets, minimal public hygiene, and no separation of functional buildings, which meant you could live right next door to a 24-hour textile factory. Summer in the city was rarely fun due to the yearly epidemics of a variety of deadly diseases. To be fair, though, rural life wasn't much fun, either. If you lived on a farm, and you lived on a farm prior to the development of modern agricultural technologies, you were normally a subsistence farmer and could starve or lose your home if it didn't rain for like two weeks when it should have been raining. And while you weren't living in a city of half a million and didn't have to deal with piles of trash in your back yard, you also weren't living in a city of half a million and didn't usually have access to people like doctors. It was a lose-lose situation for lots of people, and if some health magazine starts going on about how we've polluted the earth and everyone is sick and unhealthy and we need to get back to the days when everyone respected the earth, I'll see you a failed potato crop and raise you a cholera epidemic.  

And here we are, 150 years later. I think, don't quote me on it, that the last statistic for the urban/rural balance was 80/20. How the heck did that happen?

Tune in next time for the exciting conclusion!