The neighborhood I grew up in – a story of decline

The neighborhood I grew up in – a story of decline

 

            Things have changed a lot and not for the better in the neighborhood I grew up in it’s a more gloomy stagnant place than it was when I grew up. The sense of decline is palpable There are empty houses and others in foreclosure, While the houses still are mostly well kept the neighborhood has an empty decaying feel. There is no there there, No sense of hope and no future.

           

Like many after the war my parents moved to the suburbs a year or two after they married in the late 1940’s, They were lured by the promise of having their own home in a more peaceful setting at a reasonable price, They didn’t have much money but with the help of the VA loan program they were able to buy a house and start families. The houses in these postwar suburbs were not that big sometimes bland and cookie cutter and not as expensive as today’s suburban mansions, but they did provide the spur to the growth of suburbs in America.

 

I can’t say I loved the suburban life I grew up in. There were many ways in which it was narrow parochial and small minded. I was never comfortable and didn’t fit in. But it was however, if in a modest way prosperous and active. There was a sense we were on the way up. Many of the families in our neighborhood worked for Kodak. A few ran small businesses like plumbing and service stations that prospered in the decade after the war. It was mostly working class with a couple of white collar workers. For a working class area, people were doing well. A number had boats they used in Lake Ontario and a couple even could afford second home cottages along the lake shore. There were lots of children in the neighborhood and we played baseball on the streets in the summer touch football in the fall, made snow forts in the winter, and shot hoops in our driveway basketball courts. There were lots of school yards and other lots to play ball as we got older. We played in high quality high school bands and others in high school sports and were well regarded. Despite the fact that we had some decent schools, living in the oldest part of my suburb advancement through education was not really emphasized. Most ended up staying in working class jobs like Kodak until they started cutting back or other similar jobs, The girls didn’t generally go to college in my immediate neighborhood and married boys of similar background and aspirations, Short of one family that moved out before high school, I am the only one of my neighborhood to even go to college. (Other newer built parts of my suburb had a higher percentage of college bound students) Still for the most part life in the suburbs was isolated and comfortable and if way too homogeneous. We were very isolated from the problems developing in the City of Rochester. When the riots in Downtown Rochester broke out in 1964 as kids we were taken by surprise. Of course in the white solidly republican suburb of Greece that was a problem caused by those other people who weren't like us. Luckily I had parents that were more enlightened but for the most part the sense of suburban prosperity rested on a thinly veiled sense of soft racism.

 

The situation is quite different today. My old neighborhood is a mix of elderly still living in the houses they bought in the post war years, older families downsizing or with reduced economic resources, and a small smattering of younger couples. It is no longer the prosperous area I grew up in. A lot of these folks are struggling economically and/or medically. You hardly ever see kids running around or playing on the streets. Occasionally you will see a group of teenagers from a catholic group home walking around trying to look tough. But any regular group of neighborhood kids is gone. In the houses where there are kids, they generally stay inside. Many people don't seem to have jobs or have low paying ones. In the house across the street from where I grew up, three adult children live (a couple and one son) none of whom work. The only one in the house that works is the 75 year old mother. Down the street are two adult children who seem to be very well educated, live with their adult parents, and don't appear to have permanent employment. Rochester is littered with well educated workers who worked for Kodak, Xerox Bausch and Lomb, and have lost jobs as these businesses radically downsized. Despite the fact that the local media tout the success stories of a few upper level employees who have started successful businesses, the majority of those who were still young enough to enter the workforce either had to work at lower paying jobs or faced age discrimination trying to find jobs at their skill level. I read a statistic while back that in the first decade of the century, incomes declined 17% in the suburb I grew up in which was heavily populated with Kodak workers. The working middle class has virtually disappeared in our area.

 

The worst harbinger of .decline is however, the creep of empty houses in the neighborhood, This never would have happened when I grew up, Apparently the  greater  Rochester area is 10th highest rate of zombie (empty or abandoned home) foreclosures in the nation   zombie homes In another piece I read it is ranked 7th worse/ THe house two doors down from me went into foreclosure and has been empty for close to a year. The one next door was empty for a long time too after a similar foreclosure and although it is was sold and owned by an absentee landlord it is only sporadically occupied. Down in the next block another house is unoccupied. A quick list of the contiguous streets on in my neighborhood on internet site Zillow indicated numerous housed in foreclosure and many for sale.  Another house on that block while well kept up shows no sign of occupancy. A local town activist has started to document the growing number of empty homes in the town many in the oldest part. Some have been unoccupied for years.

 

The specter of drugs also plays a role in some of these foreclosures. The couple two houses away were both drug addicts, not the down and our kind but the working ones, THe female was arrested released and then jailed for parole violation leaving the father, who worked as a minimum wage restaurant worker to take care of the two kids, He fell into a deeper more addiction. He let the house go down living with the kids for over a year in house without heat or electricity until he was finally addicted. The house next door only occasionally occupied was last used as a place to sell drugs. So things are surely going downhill.

 

Obviously there are economic consequences of empty houses. It estimated that an empty house in the neighborhood up to 15% and costs a great deal of tax money in maintenance. But the broader problem is what it does to the character if the neighborhood, It can attract petty thieves looking to rob the house of copper pipes and other valuables. Stripping the house of its infrastructure however, makes the house even more difficult to sell and costly to repair. Two main economic culprits are the financial crisis of 2007-8 and the longer term one of middle class decline. In the short run the financial crisis burst the housing bubble and recession meant that many could not afford the houses they had purchased during a time of cheap money. Given the lime it took for foreclosures to process in New York State, these foreclosures are just coming on line. They are however, significant. THe foreclosure rate is 4 to 7 percent in the suburbs and 7-14 percent in the city.

 

The longer term problem however is the decline of middle class incomes for the large majority of the population. Without the ability to make a substantial down payment or paying monthly payments many can no longer qualify for mortgages or afford to pay them. Many have high debt loads especially from student loans. The dream of a home of one's own is dying.

One becomes more transient a non-permanent resident who has less of a stake in the community. And while central city Rochester has one of the highest poverty rates in the country the inner rings suburbs now have areas of persistent and significant poverty.

 

Scholars have noted some of the features that are at the root of decline of the inner ring suburbs.  One of them is the desire for larger housing and with it further escape from the problems of inner ring suburbs. This has led to a disinvestment in the inner ring suburbs by developers. There is a disinvestment in housing stock. Another is the above mentioned deindustrialization, which has led to the loss of working class jobs with the resulting declining incomes for the working class. Inner ring suburbs have become less homogenous and more ethnically diverse with some the problems that entails. The result is what has been called the new suburban gothic. “in the most problematic areas” according to Short Hanlon and Vicino. “there are issues of a housing stock that is no longer marketable, an infrastructure that is in need of repair and residents that are dying out without a younger generation to replace them.” The result is the rise of central city problems like rising crime and schools that are failing.