It wasn't a rabbit hole so much as a nostalgia well. I read an article about ridiculously high rents contributing to homelessness among people with full time jobs. I started thinking of my all-too-brief slum-dwelling days before I let my doting Dad entice me back into the family home because he was frightened and grossed out by the apartment I could barely afford on my full-time wages.
This wasn't last week or last year, or even last decade. It was 44 years ago. The problem of "workforce housing" has been going on far longer than it's been a trendy buzz phrase among planners, politicians, and sociologists. Homelessness was already getting bad then. It's gotten steadily worse.
I rented apartments in Gainesville, Florida, from the fall of 1976 to the spring of 1979. I moved three times, once within the same complex, then to another complex closer to campus and a big grocery store. For one summer during college I was essentially homeless in Miami, couch surfing and sleeping in my car while I worked my summer job, after arrangements proposed by a high school friend fell through. Another summer I rented an apartment with two other people in Orlando, while working for The Mouse. Then there was a summer where I bunked in the half-furnished attic of the family's new home (new to them, built in the 1920s) in Annapolis, and one where I just stayed at school. Throughout that time, I had a general idea of apartment rents based entirely on the scale of a state university town in a state that never has to deal with frost heaves and snow removal.
After graduation, I based the housing portion of my meager budget on those impossibly friendly numbers. I had moved back to Annapolis in pursuit of job leads that proved to be mirages, before settling into grunt jobs as a sailmaker, then a house painter, then a general maintenance dude at a yacht club. I wanted jobs that would be easy to leave when I took off on all of the boss bike tours I was going to take, and that wouldn't demand too much of my creative faculties, as I tried to launch a career of cartooning and writing. By Gainesville economics I should have been able to land something, but roommates are always a problem.
The Slum was a grubby but spacious box I rented with a bike racing and house painting colleague after I'd gone over into another sail loft job and he had started working seriously toward his goal to become a carpenter and contractor. We were so low budget that we did not run the heat in the winter. I slept in my pride and joy 5-below-zero sleeping bag on a mattress on the floor. He went and got a girlfriend who could afford utilities, leaving me to enjoy the comforts of our drafty castle and chip the frozen soap off of the soapdish for my morning showers.
It was a pleasant, monastic existence. I was a five-minute bike ride or a 15-minute walk from work. I could come home and work on my novel until about 10 p.m., when the lady upstairs would pound on the floor because my typewriter was too loud. Then I could read and revise until I nodded off. I had no car, no phone, no money, and, therefore, no social or sex life. Highly economical. If you wanted to become invisible, having no phone and no car was a great start.
My roommate paid his rent until the lease ended. That left me unable to afford the place, minimal as it was. Goodbye, closet-size kitchen with an exhaust fan that would electrocute you when you tried to turn it off. Goodbye, living room furnished with a scratchy couch, beat-up coffee table, and four bicycles leaned up against the walls. Two were my roommate's. Girlfriend's place didn't have room for his fleet.
The place disgusted dear old Dad so much that he wouldn't even get out of his car when he came over to scoop me up and convey me back to the family homestead for a home-cooked meal. I would have to keep looking out the window toward the parking lot to see if his car was there. His choice. I could have biked over. I hadn't had my nasty night-riding crash yet. Not that that reformed me anyway... I just got better lights and a little more caution.
The other worker bees around me had various group living arrangements. Some of them just made more money, either with a partner equally better employed or as the senior financial partner. There were cheaper apartments further out of town or in certain more distant towns, but that would have meant getting a car and paying its attendant expenses.
Most of the blame falls to me for not majoring in something marketable as the 1980s loomed. Creative aspirations are an expensive luxury. I could have folded a lot sooner and gone into construction, or something like that, but I hadn't really liked the scream of circular saws, or the steady march of sprawl that was already starting to obliterate most of what made Annapolis nice. I kept making tiny advances as a writer, which lured me further and further into the cul de sac of failed dreams. But this failure has also given me first hand experience of the tenuous life of a low-level worker. I did climb into the lifeboat of the family home for a few years until those little breakthroughs selling articles and drawings combined with my first marriage to convince me to launch my own leaky dinghy and row away.
Twice, my first wife and I had rental houses sold out from under us, once in Annapolis, once in New Hampshire. We moved from the Annapolis rental house into a basement apartment not even fully separated from the house upstairs. The landlord was easy to get along with, but the place flooded during a heavy couple of storms, destroying among other things a lot of the pages of one of my journals. It doesn't have to be exquisitely crafted deathless prose. A journal is a writer's junk drawer from which occasionally emerge suddenly useful items.
We moved to New Hampshire in the summer of 1987 because I had taken a job with a startup outdoor magazine. The publisher started writing rubber paychecks before Christmas. The 1980s boom in New England was starting to crumble at that point. When the owners of our rental house put it on the market, we took a rental that included an obligation to work as farm help. Because I had lots of "free time," I ended up doing a lot of the work that was really more interesting to my wife, but her skills as a bookkeeper landed her a series of full-time jobs. She only got sexually harassed at one of them. I found a nice part time position as a copy editor for the local weekly paper, did some substitute teaching (my apologies, kids), and fell into another part time job at a bike and cross-country ski shop.
Rental properties were already hard to find in the late 1980s in this part of New Hampshire. The real estate boom had inspired a lot of people to sell their property. Speculators slapped up hastily-built, overpriced condos to suck in the newly affluent residents of Massachusetts, pulling in fat salaries in the tech boom that was about to bust. Those mostly clustered near feature attractions like mountains and lakes. Not exactly convenient to what remained of employment, and often still priced out of reach as overextended investors tried to cover their losses.
The house we finally bought was 576 square feet. Into it we packed two adult humans, two dogs, and a cat. This later expanded to two cats. When we divorced, we split the pets.
Various lucky breaks have left me with the home and land, but I couldn't afford to move anywhere else. And the house is bigger now, to accommodate the next life partner. Fortunately, I like where I am. On the way there, though, I was buried in credit card debt, and fully dependent on having someone with whom to split rents. We had to bum money from relatives and borrow from short-term lenders. Buried in credit card debt, on the hook to short term lenders, are classic elements in the setup for a self-help book from the 1980s. Shit like that was everywhere: "I was down and out and then I stumbled on this sure-fire way to a life of wealth and leisure! Just buy my book for $19.99 and you too can have a Porsche and a hot tub and endless vacations!"
I wonder how many get-rich-quick writers ended up in the financial dumpster because they couldn't compete in the crowded market of get-rich-quick books. Nowadays it's financial YouTubers, TikTokers, Instagramaticists.
I don't recommend that anyone do things the way I did, because my escape from the wheel was a unique accident. Because I didn't manage to turn the windfall into an investment bonanza or otherwise open the valve on the money pipeline, I'm back living paycheck to paycheck, more or less. I will certainly never retire, just die.
Barbara Ehrenreich published Nickel and Dimed in 2001. Since then, the income gap has become a canyon, and real estate as an investment has far outstripped the concept of real estate as a place to live. There are more than twice as many people in the United States alone than there were when I was born, and more than a hundred million more than when I went full time into the labor pool and housing market. That has an effect, no matter how much the cheerleaders for unlimited growth will insist that it does not. People wherever they are have to find occupations that attract enough money to pay livable wages, while the planet has to provide sufficient resources to feed them all, at the same time that the ecosystem continues to function to support us. Growth advocates have little value or respect for the natural world. Open space is "wasteland." Nature can take care of itself, or we'll devise some scientifically engineered, streamlined set of indispensable species and the others are free to die off. Except our knowledge doesn't advance nearly as fast as our need does.
Way back in the mid 20th Century, when we briefly acknowledged that there was a population problem, my answer was that we should slow down everyone's birth rate and focus on providing quality of life worldwide. Coast the population down to coexist with the complex machinery of nature, and use our technology to take the pressure off of every person as much as possible. Instead we got the winner-take-all fuckfest of the 1980s. We inherit the results of that now. My philosophy still holds; we just have to accommodate a much larger population from which to coast down.
