Economic Nomads in The Geography of Nowhere

 

Title is borrowed from this book, "The Geography of Nowhere" which I am reading now too.

They jacked up our rent sky high. We can pay it, but another increase could be coming next year. Even long time apartment neighbors have told us they feel pushed out due to the cost.  Investors are buying up apartments country wide and rent is skyrocketing. America is being ruined. Where I live even has no stairs to get in. That's very hard to find. This place has both pros and cons. Worrying about being priced out of an entire town sucks. That's one of the worse things about life for me, always this feeling of instability like everything's always going to be upended. I already witnessed the economic destruction of one small town. We hope we are not forced to move. We don't want to. When you get older, it's harder to start over again and again. My husband plans to work on making more money for the increased rent.

Some person from my town wrote "I need rent around 800 a month", on Facebook, everyone told them they would have to move out to very rural towns in our county to get an apartment for that price. That's sad, how people take it for granted that people should be priced out of an entire town. Not everyone has the resources to drive 40 miles to see a specialist or to afford all that gas. All the moves would be far enough away, it would be essentially "starting over" for that person. The people and stores they would see day to day would be completely different.

There were two small towns in the county where I could cut rent by 30 percent or so myself, but as my husband joked, there's a reason no one wants to live there. One is very far out and even more remote and low on resources then my past small town.  There's no options of going to a bigger city. The rent doubles if I go to a town over 50,000-100,000, I remain uninterested.

“the immersive ugliness of the built environment in the USA is entropy made visible. It indicates not simple carelessness but a vivid drive toward destruction, decay and death: the stage-set of a literal “death trip,” of a society determined to commit suicide. Far from being a mere matter of aesthetics, suburbia represents a compound economic catastrophe, ecological debacle, political nightmare, and spiritual crisis — for a nation of people conditioned to spend their lives in places not worth caring about.”

― James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-made Landscape

In my life, I always refused to live in what I call "ugly" places. When I choose where to live, there has to be some decent things to look at. 

There's plenty of "ugly places", entire cities now of endless residential areas where there's no where to hang out. Houses that all look a like. Kunstler talks about architecture too. His book was written before the McMansion phenomenon so some of those trends worsened. The older buildings look far better. In my state in most towns, most of the downtowns were built in the late 1800s, most of those buildings have a far better "look", they are still standing while the local dying mall built in the 1970s, is basically crumbling.  There's a lot of modern stores built in the last 25 years that look like they are falling apart. It seems wasteful how they are constantly rebuilding fast food restaurants and some of those buildings were less than 20 years old. The "vivid drive towards destruction, drive and death" means not building for things to last anymore. You can see this in new buildings, they build on out of plywood. My older apartment complex is made out of old cinder block, you don't have to hear every neighbor's fart, but they built a new one out of plywood. 

Columbus Ohio outside of an inner "German district" is one of the ugliest cities on the planet to me. It's basically strip mall hell and stretches out for miles and miles. At least Chicago had a few nice brick buildings built in the 1800s and the lakefront. The most run down place is probably Gary, Indiana, I used to have to take a bus through Gary to get to Chicago. I've visited people in the suburbs before and you needed a car to get everywhere and anywhere. 

Suburbs are often soul-less to me. Kunstler decries them too in his book, and the endless feeder highways, big box stores, and houses lined up in endless rows all looking like each other.  How many people get lost in a sea of houses that all look alike. This is an industrial society set up to lose connections and fail from the start. He rallies against endless billboards, and laments the lack of public spaces. Ask how many places you can go right now without paying to be there in many cities? I hate the suburbs. I won't live in any. It's small towns or being in the city for me. Being broke in the suburbs means basically having no life. There's no bus to come get you either. Everyone is separate watching TV in their own "big" box with their health declining and their weight rising. So many suburbs lack character and soul. Bedroom communities are all spiritually asleep. 

Gas isn't that cheap anymore, building things to be spread out maybe worked in the 1960s-1980s but isn't going to work forever. Then there is the abandonment of the inner cities too, that only gets brief mention in this book. I would have liked to see more of that expanded but understand the limit in space. It seems that society right now is being built for the middle class and upper class only while the rest are forgotten. We need places to live too. Should entire towns force out everyone that doesn't reach a certain income level?

Just look at Dead Mall websites to know life is changing. Building nothing but stores with gigantic parking lots isn't the way to go anymore. I was in shock to watch videos of the mall near where I went to high school. This mall is in a far wealthier area, and is dying too. It has some stores left but most have closed. I don't think malls were good for real community. It was just consumerism, oh sure they sold it as a public space, but it was designed to vacuum up your money. It's interesting to realize most of these malls were built in the 1980s, and were dying by the mid to late 1990s. 

The Geography of Nowhere talked about how community eroded because of how things were set up in America. This book was written in the 1990s so things had gotten even worse. Kunstler definitely was right about the organic nature of community that is now being destroyed:

"“Community is not something you have, like pizza. Now is it something you can buy. It's a living organism based on a web of interdependencies- which is to say, a local economy. It expresses itself physically as connectedness, as buildings actively relating to each other, and to whatever public space exists, be it the street, or the courthouse or the village green.”

― James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape

Americans love those old movies and places like Disney world and other parks where small towns are emulated. Kunstler points out in one part of the book, that Disney world has no cars, and it's one reason it's able to push it's idyllic view of community. People harken back to the past, maybe they remember their Grandmother talking about how "life used to be". This is one reason people love to visit the Amish, and eat chicken fried by them in "old fashioned" restaurants. They have a weird fascination with touristy small towns, colonial set-ups, and little farms with gardens. My family used to visit the Amish constantly, was my mother trying to catch glimpses of her old farm life as a child? I'm not much better, I've often found myself wishing I had been born into the Hutterites where there was automatic community. While the religious part and endless work would be hard on me, at least there's community and belonging.

 My mother grew up among 100s of relatives in a small town, where everyone from Germany moved there around 1860. It's ironic to me still that day I was crying because our move didn't work out and I wanted to go back to my old small rural town and my husband didn't. My mother sneered and said, "Why do you want to go back to Hooterville, anyway!". She would mock me for living in the "middle of nowhere".  She had no idea of place or loyalty to it. She took everything for granted she had including knowing hundreds of people in the small town she was born into. 

 It was weird doing geneaology, people don't realize whole families moved from one village in the Old World, and moved to a new small town in the new and stayed for about 100 years. The 1960s is when things started to break up and people moved away from the homestead. When I did Ancestry, all the records for both sides of the family existed in two small towns.  I could literally pluck entire sections of my family tree out of single small town cemeteries with literally dozens of relatives all living in the same place. Life is not like that anymore. "Real" grandpa sowed his oats all over the place, this guy should win some "player" award, but even his homebase was in the same family small town.

As a child, I was moved too much. I got to watch my cousins grow up on a road full of relatives, 5 houses in a row with cornfields spacing them out while we were always whisked back to suburbia out east, or back to the later dying Midwestern medium sized city. They had stability I lacked. I'd get to get to know adults and neighbors in communities, which being such a lonely child probably served a greater role for me than for most, but I would always be moved away from them. How would it would have been to know Mr. and Mrs B as a teen? 

 I am one of those people who does get attached to places, and this goes back to childhood too, when I was forced to move constantly. It sucked to be moved away from everyone I cared about. The roots of life ruination and my feeling of never belonging goes back to all those moves. There were too many friends my parents dragged me away from at the ages of 8, 13, and 17 years old. The era of watching extended relatives all living close together and knowing each other was painful as well.  My cousins got to play together while we were the family that always lived far away--first 600 miles and then later 120. As an adult, being forced to move or moving a lot became a problem, with the boarding houses, the poverty, the time in Chicago and then the small town that finally felt like "home" and being forced to leave there.

People lost sight of what was important years ago and one of those things was community and families [well for the loving ones anyway]. When they switched everyone into economic nomads and destroyed place and community, they loosened ties that fuel human civilization.  When they turned everything into a commodity, it starting making things fall apart. Yes economic trade is part of a community but it can't be everything. Those who rule over us do not want us to have any spontaneous or informal, or close social ties anymore. 

The lives of the kids in one metro Eastern big city neighborhood I spent 1976-1982 in turned out far different then my own. They were far more economically successful and had better educations. Facebook is how I learned how their futures turned out. Dying factory towns in the rust belt of the Midwest didn't offer much for teens in the 1980s. My mother's decision to instigate that move was incredibly selfish. She didn't think of our futures at all.  My father had good jobs, there was no economic pressure.  He became a different person too and changed for the worse, maybe he realized what he gave up. Once I looked up the house, we lived in then, my mother paid for her foolishness. The house my parents bought for $77,000 in 1977, sold for $900,000 circa 2018. 

As an adult I moved too much too, and it was always for economic survival. Too many especially in the lower and working classes, know what's that like. You always have to move or live where you can afford the rent.  The job too determines where you live and how long. The gig economy changed a little bit of the pressures to move for us personally, but for most, moving is something economically demanded. I never wanted to leave the old small town but my husband was not in good enough physical shape for the factories or fast food restaurants, with his education we thought he could do far better. There have been several times, I feared homelessness if I did not make a move. Those who are in a better place economically buy more stability of place and belonging now. 

My old rural town was extremely conservative, but one thing I miss about the place is there was community there, it was almost a throw back to 30 years ago. Of course modern forces worked against it and then later the crash of the 2008 which was rolling by 2004 in that town. I notice here, there's some community but it's not as close knit or the same. Far more people move in and out. What is weird is sometimes in my old small town is sometimes people would tell me, "It's great you got to live so many places, a big metro city out east taking subways as a child, Chicago, and then other towns.." And I would answer, "It's not that great...." Many of them had cousins right down the road, classmates they knew from 25 years ago, and lived lives I could not even imagine. They envied me because they saw their lives as "dull and constrained" and I envied them, for their social ties. 

Someone wrote on Reddit, that they noticed conservatives who tend to be more rural, have stronger family backgrounds, they are the people living among their cousins and with more sedate lives. They have the close knit families. I found that interesting. It seems most conservatives had a family, close by. Maybe this is why they decry government programs for help, they have each other to depend on. There's always someone along their side. Remember I lived in the "conservative" world and it's something I noticed. Many liberals who didn't have the same family ties, knew that without welfare, or gov't programs they'd be on the streets. This is one cultural battle few comment on.

 During my years in fundamentalist churches, I never met a fellow fundamentalist who didn't live among a strong family network. They always were home for dinner on Sunday. This is one reason why family is so strong in those circles. In the second IFB it got nauseating, this IFB was on the edges of town with most living in surrounding rural areas, everything was family focused with the life of the church revolving around those families. The pastor there looked at us with a suspicious look for not having children. He constantly talked about his life legacy and grandchildren. 

 For someone like me, even when I had low contact ties with my own abusive family, it wasn't enough to culturally fit in. I was missing many things they took for granted. I think this is one reason my own life in that world didn't work out. One reason I went into it, was looking for the same stability and connection and it wasn't to be found. My old IFB church closed only two years after I moved away. When I was in that church, it did strongly advance the idea of a "church family", and community and we had some to a degree, but it broke up anyway. 

During my life, I got tired of being the "new person" or always having to "try to get to know people". It got wearying. It did seem every time I made a friend or found a niche or a place to belong, it was always wrenched away. One question why does that happen to a life? I definitely had too many friends die, even ones who were long distance. Sometimes I think these feelings of angst are definitely related to the endless childhood moves and the endless moves of adulthood where my bearings were always on quicksand. There always felt like there was nothing to count on. Here autism may have me hating changes and losses others roll with easier.  Kunstler asked important questions about where society was headed. I'm sure there's a million different stories like mine, of people forced to move, and feeling no stability. 

I don't regret my no contact, it was necessary. Life did improve by a lot without the constant stress and put-downs. It changed life for the far better. This may be one reason I grieve Covid so much, the world was massively opening up to me over those early no contact years and then the door got slammed shut in my face. Time is short with progressive illnesses too. Everyday I wake up and feel like my 50s are being lost.

 I burst out in tears seeing a local 60 something who had her nephew visit, others even without children, had siblings and their families in their lives. There were families taking care of other disabled people in my disability group, looking out for each other. At times it blew my mind. All I had were these selfish people who never cared about me and let me stress this too, I never was allowed to give much to them either from the other side. They always "wanted me gone". They may as well had handed me a letter saying "Move away and leave us alone".  It would have been easier then the fake posturing.

The ostracization existed far more before I went no contact. My family was a product of this culture. They embraced the new materialism whole hog. I saw a change in the 70s, toxic personalities were still there, but things were "different", the narcissists didn't have so much control as they later got. People and places weren't so disposable. I got the feeling among the older generations, there were ties to the land and place, that all eroded quickly. 

I had relatives with Huntington's disease, who were far more disabled and younger then me too. Huntingtons is equal to early Alzheimers, you basically lose your mind and motor skills. It struck multiple uncles and first female cousins in my mother's family. 

 I watched one of my great-uncles unable to walk. Us kids thought he was "drunk" but the adults explained that he had Huntingtons. It was a nightmare disease, most ended up in nursing homes. Once I had to be screened for Huntingtons by a neurologist, I was diagnosed with multiple tic disorder instead, related probably to my autism but they figured out it didn't go through my individual family line. My neurologist even interviewed my mother.  This was ironic because my "stimming" and tics used to elicit tons of anger from my family. Even my brother developed a nervous tic for a time from all his abuse. 

Very disabled people then weren't abandoned or relegated to non-personhood like I was early on. Maybe some were victims of family narcissists in ways I didn't know, but the older generations of family rallied around them as far as I can tell, I am depending on some very old and distant childhood memories here. 

 One painful aspect of LONG no contact which will hit it's 9th year anniversary this June, is realizing no relationships really existed. I was too far away too long. The networks even if neutral instead of negative were dying alone from mere distance and lack of money to travel. 

Distance alone where we had nothing economically or geographically in common anymore probably if they had not been toxic people would have rendered the relationships down to near strangers with a few polite cards. If you have not seen someone in 10 or 20 years in person, do your really "know" them anymore? It's funny my mother never seemed to care about connection to people. She just found new ones where ever she was but she also took all the family and other ties she had for granted.  She never knew loneliness or loss of those they once had in their lives. Narcissists are unaffected by such things. Her siblings never ignored her, the world revolved around her. 

How many ACONS try to replace the family they always should have had, and end up short. All of us who went no contact and some who have had to leave our entire family know the community is the new source to find a "found family". How is this new Covid world going to be for new people who go no contact especially if they bring more lock downs and insanity back?

I feel the losses of community here now, and they are adding up. This isn't always easy to do. I encounter ACONs who say "I am still alone" out here. Part of this reason is the problems inherent to our communities. Human beings were born to have more life long connection then this. Some of us find good friends here and there, online and off, but it feels like we are floating out there too untethered. It really does. I am fortunate to have had a loving husband to be there with me but many don't have that. They are out in this cold world all alone.

One reason I ended up in fundamentalist churches was thinking God would hand me a "new family" on earth. It's one of those promises in the Bible that didn't pan out. I was looking to replace what could not be replaced.  Acceptance worked out better. Maybe this is why all these moving and community losses have taken such an immense toll on me. This is why an old friend and I came to tears over our lives in my old small rural town discussing things on Facebook. She said, "Things will never be the same again." 

They talk about the destruction of family in conservative circles, but that's related to place too. Kunstler goes into this a little bit, talking about how people had to move for jobs and away from everything they knew, and having to sell homes. He refers to  “two generations without a habitat”, and refers to how people have lost a habitat of quality and of belonging. This is three generations now and really began with the Baby Boomers while a few of the WWI generation, left the farms earlier on. He was right about all the people left socially adrift.

My life has outside of marriage and online friends become so socially isolated since Covid began, it's scary. Sometimes I do ask "What happened?" I don't have the normal social ties people take for granted. There's times I am so scared of anything happening to my husband because I would be totally alone in this world. I do still see UU church members, a nice lady in our church brings me food from their vegetarian meals, and others have stopped by in the last 2 years.  That's the only folks I see outside along with two newer friends I met this year. 

I miss all those community connections I used to have. The day in and day out of book clubs,art classes, people seen just being out and about. Zoom's not the same.  People don't realize the damage that has been done to the social fabric because of Covid. The powers that be just want plugged in robots, with everyone having fake friends on the Metaverse, they don't want people who actually talk to one another.  It disgusts me everyday what they have done. You can tell they are afraid of people comparing notes. This is why they censor everything so heavily. 

Maybe the ball got rolling with the Internet. I'm guilty, so much of my connection and good friends now are online. Even with real life local people I talk on line with many more than in person. I noticed a switch over especially with smart phones too. Something seemed to change really fast around 2010. Didn't Facebook come out just a few years before? Smart phones became more common.

Kunstler probably is correct it all began with television:

“The American house has been TV-centered for three generations. It is the focus of family life, and the life of the house correspondingly turns inward, away from whatever corresponds beyond its four walls.At the same time, the television is the families chief connection to the world. The physical envelope of the house itself no longer connects their lives to the outside in any active way; rather it seals them from it.The outside world has become an abstraction filtered through television, just as the weather is an abstraction filtered through air conditioning.”

― James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape

Remember this was written in 1993, now add the Internet to the mix. They captured people's minds and hearts. How do you define reality when they script it from a box or a computer screen, and you are even more blocked from "word on the street"?

I wished more people questioned things here in this town. It's more affluent and it is a trend that more well off people have trusted the system. That worries me for the future especially if they keep wanting to shove poisonous mrna in everyone's arms..  We stay here for medical care and other resources. I don't fit in conservative world with their intact strong family ties and religious views and now I don't fit in liberal world. I've stayed in my UU church, since religiously my views still fit but politically outside of environmental causes and Medicare for All, I'm on a totally different wavelength now. I tend to avoid more political services but enjoy ones on spiritual life, the environment and more. I adjusted things and it's working out. I still care about everyone there even if we disagreed adamantly on vaxxes and this Covid mess. They've helped us, and been there for us. I worry about them all.

My old small rural town has one of the highest vaxx refusal rates and that's a positive to me.. We used to discuss going back, for years but always hit the wall of needed medical care and it being too far away there. I need too many specialists and there they'd all be an hour away.  The hospital is also very limited.  I worry about the economic problems there, anyway. Most people we knew there are now deceased or had to leave themselves. It's sad.  Others were scattered to the four winds not just us.

 Out of curiosity I recently looked at the housing and was in shock their rent skyrocketed there too. Even in the middle of nowhere decent apartments are at the 1,000 dollar mark. The people there are poor outside of the thin sliver of professionals, how are they expecting people to pay that much rent? It's shocking. While money has always been a problem throughout history now money breaks up communities. I'm not sure what's going to happen there. 

I do still plan activities, and try to hold on to the connections I did build, via Zooms, I am planning an art show for next year and went to an art friends online art show, and still go to UU Zooms but the cost to just not seeing people has been hard. I am supposed to run an online Aspie group next week, that I have been attending for a year. So there's still a lot of activities to do. I'm not bored, my health is such there's only so much I can do.

 I see a few friends including two new ones, and plan to visit them soon, but having a life otherwise so devoid of people in person has gotten weird. The old communities and groups I used to be a part of just don't exist in the same way.

Now around here a lot of people moved away. Sometimes it feels like people "disappeared", I worry that they all got sick from vaxx or virus or have sunk into extreme poverty--the kind where even internet access disappears.  It worries me how many people just seem to have gone poof! The isolation has taken a toll on me. Are any of you noticing that?

I do wish Kunstler would update his book, he can get into worsening suburban sprawl, gentrification which is helping to make the rent skyrocket. He could talk about the effect of Covid on everything too if there was space. So many things changed in my life time. How things became more the same as corporations took over lowering the unique flavors of each place. How neighbors no longer had dinner with each other and I grew up watching neighbors talking to each other and how that disappeared. How everyone who could work became overworked and no longer had time and how community events disappeared. The town I live in used to be an active community, an art show, lecture and theatre event every other minute. I used to go to these art events on a quarterly basis. All that got wiped now. I don't think a lot is coming back either. 

His ideas to redesign things are valuable. He's maybe too hard on cars. The elite may take away more freedom making cars too expensive for the ordinary person. Not everyone can walk well. He is correct community has been lost. Even our communities have been built to serve the corporations instead of the people they are meant for. Why don't we have more public spaces? He's right about social isolation and disconnection growing. 

How come whenever I find community it is always lost or ruined? Why do all my friends move away or die so young? Even if I stay in one place, people move away from me then. There's a point where you've had so many hits, you think well something will come to "ruin" this too. Something is wrong, even giving a voice to it is strange because most of the fish swim in water they are used to, and don't notice it clouding over.

I wrote a poem on this moving and loss of community topic, I may share it later. I'm trying to get it published now. My local writing group really liked it. Maybe more people relate then I have guessed. Many have spent their lives looking for "home" and have struggled to answer the question, "Where are you from?"

Kunstler's warnings have all come true.