The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

by Sarah Kendzior

  Lee was criticized by many for "hipster-bashing", including African-American professor John McWhorter, who claimed that "hipster" was "a sneaky way of saying 'honkey'" and compared Lee to television character George Jefferson.

  These dismissals, which focus on gentrification as culture, ignore that Lee's was a critique of the racist allocation of resources. Black communities whose complaints about poor schools and city services go unheeded find these complaints are readily addressed when wealthier, whiter people move in. Meanwhile, long-time locals are treated as contagions on the landscape, targeted by police for annoying the new arrivals.

  Gentrifiers focus on aesthetics, not people. Because people, to them, are aesthetics.

  Proponents of gentrification will vouch for its benevolence by noting it "cleaned up the neighborhood". This is often code for a literal white-washing. The problems that existed in the neighborhood - poverty, lack of opportunity, struggling populations denied city services - did not go away. They were simply priced out to a new location.

  That new location is often an impoverished suburb, which lacks the glamour to make it the object of future renewal efforts. There is no history to attract preservationists because there is nothing in poor suburbs viewed as worth preserving, including the futures of the people forced to live in them. This is blight without beauty, ruin without romance: payday loan stores, dollar stores, unassuming homes and unpaid bills. In the suburbs, poverty looks banal and is overlooked.

  In cities, gentrifiers have the political clout - and accompanying racial privilege - to reallocate resources and repair infrastructure. The neighborhood is "cleaned up" through the removal of its residents. Gentrifiers can then bask in "urban life" - the storied history, the selective nostalgia, the carefully sprinkled grit - while avoiding responsibility to those they displaced.

  Hipsters want rubble with guarantee of renewal. They want to move into a memory they have already made.

  Impoverished suburbs

  In a sweeping analysis of displacement in San Francisco and its increasingly impoverished suburbs, journalist Adam Hudson notes that "gentrification is trickle-down economics applied to urban development: the idea being that as long as a neighborhood is made suitable for rich and predominantly white people, the benefits will trickle down to everyone else". Like trickle-down economics itself, this theory does not play out in practice.

  Rich cities such as New York and San Francisco have become what journalist Simon Kuper calls gated citadels: "Vast gated communities where the one percent reproduces itself."

  Struggling US cities of the rust belt and heartland lack the investment of coastal contemporaries, but have in turn been spared the rapid displacement of hipster economics. Buffered by their eternal uncoolness, these slow-changing cities have a chance to make better choices - choices that value the lives of people over the aesthetics of place.

  In an April blog post, Umar Lee, a St Louis writer and full-time taxi driver, bemoaned the economic model of rideshare services, which are trying to establish themselves in the city. Noting that they hurt not only taxi drivers but poor residents who have neither cars nor public transport and thus depend on taxis willing to serve dangerous neighborhoods, he dismisses Uber and Lyft as hipster elitists masquerading as innovators:

  "I've heard several young hipsters tell me they're socially-liberal and economic-conservative, a popular trend in American politics," he writes. "Well, I hate to break it to you buddy, but it's economics and the role of the state that defines politics. If you're an economic conservative, despite how ironic and sarcastic you may be or how tight your jeans are, you, my friend, are a conservative …"

  Lee tells me he has his own plan to try to mitigate the negative effects of gentrification, which he calls "50-50-20-15". All employers who launch businesses in gentrifying neighborhoods should have a workforce that is at least 50 percent minorities, 50 percent people from the local neighborhood, and 20 percent ex-offenders. The employees should be paid at least $15 per hour.

  Gentrification spreads the myth of native incompetence: That people need to be imported to be important, that a sign of a neighborhood's "success" is the removal of its poorest residents. True success lies in giving those residents the services and opportunities they have long been denied.

  When neighborhoods experience business development, priority in hiring should go to locals who have long struggled to find nearby jobs that pay a decent wage. Let us learn from the mistakes of New York and San Francisco, and build cities that reflect more than surface values.

  --Originally published May 29, 2014

  Mourn the fall of the mall

  In 1978, George Romero debuted Dawn of the Dead, a movie about flesh-eating zombies who converge on a US shopping mall. Released when malls had begun to supplant downtowns as centers of commerce, Dawn of the Dead critiqued the conformity and consumerism of 1970s America.

  "It's some kind of instinct," one character explains, as brain-dead zombies stumble past escalators and chain stores. "Memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives."

  In 2012, Gillian Flynn released Gone Girl, a thriller that - in its portrayal of economic desperation, desolation and deception - is arguably the great novel of the recession. Like Dawn of the Dead, Gone Girl stages a key scene in a mall, only here the mall itself is the horror. Returning to his Midwest hometown, Gone Girl's narrator visits his old shopping grounds only to find a graveyard of US enterprise, a shattered structure of shuttered stores where the unemployed seek shelter and drugs.

  "I'd expected the mall smell as we entered: the temperature-controlled hollowness," the narrator observes. "Instead, I smelled old grass and dirt… It was suburbia, post-comet, post-zombie, post-humanity."

  Malls no longer breed zombie shoppers. Instead, they are graveyards of the US economy. Gone are the brain-dead consumers of a more decadent past, when there were things to buy and buyers to sell them and places with people inside.

  Now we are zombies with nothing to eat.

  Since 2008, hundreds of malls across the US have shut down, and half of all US malls are predicted to close within the next ten years. Thwarted shoppers visit online mall mortuaries like DeadMalls and LabelScar, where they post photos of their decimated economic landscapes. Others strip the malls for parts, stealing scrap material found inside.

  Who would have guessed, a decade ago, that the most valuable part of the mall's brick and mortar economy would be the brick and mortar?

  Mall memories

  Some rejoice at the fall of the mall, hopeful that it will lead to the revitalization of downtown commercial districts. This is a faulty assumption. Cities doing well enough to rebuild their downtowns likely did not depend on the mall in the first place.

  The mall has long been derided by those with the luxury of an alternative. When the US industrial economy faltered in the 1970s, downtowns in many cities crumbled, and shopping malls - homogeneous, enclosed and sterile - both enabled and compensated for their demise.

  In the media, malls were pilloried as monoliths devoid of character. Mockery of the mall spurred pop culture prototypes: vacuous valley girls, meandering mall rats. Underlying the mockery was grief for the loss of a seemingly more connected and welcoming urban life: the independent businesses, local markets, and community ties built around them.

  But while these were memories for some, for others they were merely rumors. A functional local economy was a story our parents told us.

  For US citizens raised in cities of post-industrial blight, there was the mall and the mall alone. We did not "choose" between supporting the mall or the local businesses, because by the time we came of age there were few local businesses left to support. There were no independent boutiques and bookstores to protect from corporate takeover: Such battles were plot devices of movies set in more cultured places. We watched from afar, wondering what it was like to have something to lose. Our rundown towns had little anyone wanted: empty lots, boarded windows, vacant stores. />
  Decades passed, and no one rebuilt them. Now the malls follow, and no one will rebuild them either.

  My generation watches the malls fall like our parents watched the downtowns die. To our children, the mall will be a nostalgic abstraction, a 404 in concrete.

  Online substitute?

  The rise in online shopping has been blamed for the demise of the mall. But some economic analysts see a more basic problem.

  "What's going on is the customers don't have the [...] money," notes longtime retail consultant Howard Davidowitz. "That's it. This isn't rocket science."

  Between 2000-2011, suburban poverty surged 67 percent, as gentrification forced city residents from their homes. Mid-tier malls that depended on middle-class shoppers faltered, as the middle class shrank.

  "They're marginal malls because they're in marginal areas, in many cases," says retail analyst Kenneth Dalto, noting how demographic shifts have drained the revenue base.

  The fall of the mall is a problem for the consumer: With local businesses decimated and chain stores departed, those without Internet access and credit cards can struggle to procure goods. But the fall of the mall is a bigger problem for low-skill workers.

  Materialism may remain rampant, but now its spaces are secret. Retail work has been replaced with jobs in online shopping warehouses where "pickers" labor unseen in brutal conditions.

  "We are machines, we are robots, we plug our scanner in, we're holding it, but we might as well be plugging it into ourselves. We don't think for ourselves, maybe they don't trust us to think for ourselves as human beings, I don't know," says Adam Littler, who worked undercover at an Amazon.com warehouse to witness conditions first hand. On a given night shift he walked 17km and was expected to collect an order every 33 seconds.

  Malls were once castigated for turning consumers into zombies. Now, the zombie is the ideal online retail employee, unthinking and robotic. Advice by algorithm, delivery by drone: This is what a dehumanized landscape looks like.

  Our connections and commerce are dependent on our screens. Pay attention, pay attention, to the men behind the screens.

  "When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth," the Dawn of the Dead trailer intoned 35 years ago. There is plenty of room in this hell: downtowns replaced by malls replaced by nothing. Old deserted buildings in cities, new deserted buildings in suburbs, always an available parking space, always a worker desperate for work.

  Do not rejoice at the fall of the mall. The setting may have been artificial, but the people in it were real.

  --Originally published July 1, 2014

  PART II: THE POST-EMPLOYMENT ECONOMY

  Surviving the post-employment economy

  A lawyer. A computer scientist. A military analyst. A teacher.

  What do these people have in common? They are trained professionals who cannot find full-time jobs. Since 2008, they have been tenuously employed - working one-year contracts, consulting on the side, hustling to survive. They spent thousands on undergraduate and graduate training to avoid that hustle. They eschewed dreams - journalism, art, entertainment - for safer bets, only to discover that the safest bet is that your job will be contingent and disposable.

  Unemployed graduates are told that their predicament is their own fault. They should have chosen a more "practical" major, like science or engineering, and stayed away from the fickle and loathsome humanities. The reality is that, in the "jobless recovery", nearly every sector of the economy has been decimated. Companies have turned permanent jobs into contingency labor, and entry-level positions into unpaid internships.

  Changing your major will not change a broken economy.

  People devalued

  In the United States, nine percent of computer science graduates are unemployed, and 14.7 percent of those who hold degrees in information systems have no job. Graduates with degrees in STEM - science, technology, engineering and medicine - are facing record joblessness, with unemployment at more than twice pre-recession levels. The job market for law degree holders continues to erode, with only 55 percent of 2011 law graduates in full-time jobs. Even in the military, that behemoth of the national budget, positions are being eliminated or becoming contingent due to the sequester.

  It is not skills or majors that are being devalued. It is people.

  Academics face particular derision for their choice of profession. "You got a PhD - what did you expect?" they are told when they note that 76 percent of professors work without job security, usually for poverty wages.

  It is true that the academic job market has been terrible for decades. But until 2008, PhDs could have expected more. Since 2009, most disciplines have lost roughly 40 percent of their positions, while the backlog of qualified candidates continues to grow. Most PhDs work as adjunct faculty or in the new euphemistic sectors of high-brow impoverishment: "non-stipendiary fellow", "special assistant professor" or "voluntary development opportunity".

  Best of bad options

  Despite the dire employment conditions of higher education, young people continue to enroll in graduate school. Detractors roll their eyes: Why would a young person spend years earning a degree of questionable value? Why not "go get a job"? To which the 20-something laughs, having graduated into an economy where peers spend years vainly looking for a job, finding only unpaid internships or low-wage contingency labor, often while living at home. A funded graduate program, with health insurance, seems a welcome escape.

  "But it is not just about your current earnings," the detractor continues, "It is about the wages you lose while in the program." To which the 30-something, having spent their adult life in an economy of stagnant wages and eroding opportunities, takes the 20-something aside, and explains that this is a maxim they, too, were told, but from which they never benefitted. They tell the 20-something what they already know: It is hard to plan for what is already gone.

  We live in the tunnel at the end of the light.

  If you are 35 or younger - and quite often, older - the advice of the old economy does not apply to you. You live in the post-employment economy, where corporations have decided not to pay people. Profits are still high. The money is still there. But not for you. You will work without a pay rise, benefits, or job security. Survival is now a laudable aspiration.

  Higher education is merely a symptom of a broader economic disease. As universities boast record endowments and spend millions on lavish infrastructure, administrators justify poor treatment of faculty, or lecturers, by noting that they: 1) "choose" to work for poverty wages, and 2) picked specializations that give them limited "market value" - ignoring, of course, that almost no one is valued in this market, save those who are reaping its greatest profits.

  The college major debate - in which "skill" is increasingly redefined as a specific corporate contribution - extends this inequity to the undergraduate level, defining as worthless, both the student’s field of study and the person teaching it. But when worthlessness is determined by the people handing out - or withholding - monetary worth, we have cause for reassessment.

  Failure of the system

  It is easy to decry a broken system. It is harder to figure out how to live in it.

  What must be made clear is that this is not a crisis of individual choices. It is a systemic failure - within higher education and beyond. It is a crisis of managed expectations - expectations of what kind of job is "normal", what kind of treatment is to be tolerated, and what level of sacrifice is reasonable.

  When survival is touted as an aspiration, sacrifice becomes a virtue. But a hero is not a person who suffers. A suffering person is a person who suffers.

  If you suffer in the proper way - silently, or with proclaimed fealty to institutions - then you are a hard worker "paying your dues". If you suffer in a way that shows your pain, that breaks your silence, then you are a complainer - and you are said to deserve your fate.

  But no worker deserves to suffer. To compound the suffering of material deprivation with rat
ionalizations for its warrant is not only cruel to the individual, but gives exploiters moral license to prey.

  Individuals internalize the economy’s failure, as a media chorus excoriates them over what they should have done differently. They jump to meet shifting goalposts; they express gratitude for their own mistreatment: their unpaid labor, their debt-backed devotion, their investment in a future that never arrives.

  And when it does not arrive, and they wonder why, they are told they were stupid to expect it. They stop talking, because humiliation is not a bargaining chip. Humiliation is a price you pay in silence - and with silence.

  People can always make choices. But the choices of today’s workers are increasingly limited. Survival is not only a matter of money, it is a matter of mentality - of not mistaking bad luck for bad character, of not mistaking lost opportunities for opportunities that were never really there.

  You are not your job. But you are how you treat people.

  So what can you do? You can work your hardest and do your best. You can organize and push for collective change. You can hustle and scrounge and play the odds.

  But when you fall, know that millions are falling with you. Know that it is, to a large extent, out of your hands. And when you see someone else falling, reach out your hands to catch them.

  --Originally published November 3, 2013

  Meritocracy for sale

  On April 24, 2013, the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights announced it was having an auction to raise money to “carry forward Robert Kennedy's dream of a more just and peaceful world”. Through the auction website CharityBuzz, bidders could compete for a variety of prizes: a visit to the set of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a personal meeting with Ryan Seacrest, a tour of Jay Leno’s car collection. Or a six-week unpaid internship at the United Nations, where the recipient will “gain inside knowledge of just how the UN really operates.” Current bid? $22,000.