The Ghetto-ization of American Life
Behind the facade of normalization, even high-income lifestyles have been ghetto-ized.
Consider the defining characteristics of a ghetto:
1. The residents can't afford to live elsewhere.
2. Everything is a rip-off because options are limited and retailers / service providers know residents have no other choice or must go to extraordinary effort to get better quality or a lower price.
3. Nothing works correctly or efficiently. Things break down and aren't fixed properly. Maintenance is poor to non-existent. Any service requires standing in line or being on hold.
4. Local governance is corrupt and/or incompetent. Residents are viewed as a reliable "vote farm" for the incumbents, even though whatever little they accomplish for the residents doesn't reduce the sources of immiseration.
5. The locale is unsafe. Cars are routinely broken into, there are security bars over windows and gates to entrances, everything not chained down is stolen--and even what is chained down is stolen.
6. There are few viable businesses and numerous empty storefronts.
7. The built environment is ugly: strip malls, used car lots, etc. There are few safe public spaces or parks that are well maintained and inviting.
8. Most of the commerce is corporate-owned outlets; the money doesn't stay in the community.
9. Public transport is minimal and constantly being degraded.
10. They get you coming and going: whatever is available is double in cost, effort and time. Very little is convenient or easy. Services are far away.
11. Residents pay high rates of interest on debt.
12. There are few sources of healthy real food. The residents are unhealthy and self-medicate with a panoply of addictions to alcohol, meds, painkillers, gambling, social media, gaming, celebrity worship, etc.
13. Nobody in authority really cares what the residents experience, as they know the residents are atomized and ground down, incapable of cooperating in an organized fashion, and therefore powerless.
I submit that these defining characteristics of ghettos apply to wide swaths of American life. Ghettos are not limited to urban zones; suburbs and rural locales can qualify as well. The defining zeitgeist of a ghetto is the residents are effectively held hostage by limited options and high costs: public and private-sector monopolies that provide poor quality at high prices.
Daily life is a grind of long waits / commutes, low-quality goods and services, shadow work (work we have to do that we're not paid for that was once done as part of the service we pay for) and unhealthy addictions to distractions and whatever offers a temporary escape from the grind.
We've habituated to being corralled into the immiseration of limited options and high costs; the immiseration and sordid degradation have been normalized into "everyday life." We've lost track of what's been lost to erosion and decay. We sense what's been lost but feel powerless to reverse it. This is the essence of the ghetto-ization of daily life.
Behind the facade of normalization, even high-income lifestyles have been ghetto-ized. But saying this is anathema: either be upbeat, optimistic and positive or remain silent.
What's worse, the ghetto-ization or our inability to recognize it and discuss it openly?
Thank you for this post. It explains most of what I see and experience for even the San Francisco Bay Area is now this after a process going on for five decades. It has become unavoidable in seeing this as even the façade that was created and being maintained to hide this is now too eroded to work.
Culturally, politically, and until about 2000 economically, San Francisco was a dominant influence, but now the city of my birth is a very bad joke, a punch line that when I was born few, if any people, would have predicted as happening in my lifetime. However, I can say similar stories about the rest of the Golden State with the destruction of Port of San Francisco including all the industries that supported it along with all the other light industries during the 1960s starting this path to its doom loop, so too with the rest of California; the fecklessness, incompetence, and massive corruption of the ruling elites with the aid of the political establishment that ignored the growing collapse because until now it did not affect them. I would guess that as with other countries the wealth will continue to be funneled upwards as everyone else including the upper middle class scrambles to protect themselves from the undeniable decay eats its way into formerly affluent, safe areas.
With this said, what happens now? Will Americans continue to blame each other? Will the growing belief that the general prosperity of the recent past is impossible to recreate continue? Will the deliberate imposition of hatred, poverty, and despair by the ruling elites continue to be unsuccessfully opposed?
The prosperity and opportunities of the past was not just created from an accident of fortune, but the deliberate and creative hard work of generations of Americans over a hundred and fifty years. This great success took six decades to destroy to the benefit of the wealthy. Yes, Americans now living no longer have much of this inheritance from earlier Americans, but should we just accept the ghettoing of our existence or recreate a similar grand inheritance for our children? It is **our** decision to make and no one else’s
Correspondent John D. correctly guessed that I was recalling a classic 1970s song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKKMdmPBWRk
The World Is A Ghetto (3:54 min) 1973
I tend to see homelessness as a second-order effect of globalization and financialization. Globalization pitted American labor against a vast global labor force willing to work for a fraction of the wages needed to live in the US, so low-skilled labor positions were eliminated. Either customers did the work now (Shadow Work) or automation did the work, or workloads were increased.
Financialization made it profitable to "redevelop" lower value properties via gentrification, wiping out the low-rent SROs and flophouses that provided low-cost housing. the two studios I rented as a student / young worker were more or less slums but the rent was affordable. All these affordable housing options have been wiped out.
Another factor is the failure of cities to own and maintain their own housing stock. It's rare for any US city to own desirable housing stock. What is owned is often ill-managed and maintained, so it's a ghetto of the worst sort. The American approach is to subsidize private-sector housing, i.e. pay landlords most of the rent with tax dollars. This doesn't create or incentivize new housing, nor does it increase public ownership of housing that would create a pool of housing that was outside the pressures of financialization. Some European cities have managed public ownership more effectively, so there is a model of public-private cooperation.
The Bubble Economy has reinforced the bourgeois suppression of building new housing, as now that every house is worth $1M+, the owners are frantic to maintain the high value and the enclave nature of their neighborhood that supports that valuation.
Put another way, there are multiple causes at work, and while throttling globalization and financialization won't solve everything, it would eliminate deeply structural sources of distortion and dysfunction. IMO of course.... warm regards, charles