The New American Madhouse
When I was born, my parents lived with my paternal grandmother and aunt while my dad finished up school. My mom worked at the Hagar plant in Weslaco, Texas as a seamstress, so my grandmother took care of me during the day (my mom would later talk about the horrible conditions she worked in). We moved a bit after that, first to Dallas where my dad had an internship with the federal reserve, then to the Wood River apartments in Corpus Christi. Soon after, we moved into a two-story, 3 bedroom 2 bathroom house and quickly afterward, my sister entered the picture. I grew up in what most would consider the typical American nuclear family: my mom was (mostly) a stay-at-home mom raising both my younger sister and I while my dad worked and often traveled as an accountant for KPMG. There was a small but burgeoning Mexican/Mexican-American community in our neighborhood and all of the families knew each other, so much so that every one of my friends’ moms gave my mom explicit permission to punish their sons if she saw them getting out of line whenever we were out playing, basically making her the de facto neighborhood mom. It was an idyllic life for the most part, complete with long summers playing baseball in the empty lot next to our house, bike rides exploring the surrounding neighborhood, and all manner of hijinks little boys get into. Of course there were some belt tightening times as with everyone, but we had what we needed and most of what we wanted. Years later another couple of moves, first back with my aunt while my parents built a house, then into said house in Mission, Texas, a 3/2 stucco house in the Cimarron Country Club neighborhood. Country club living and it was admittedly nice. We had it very good for a while, but divorce and a family collapse would see that dream collapse.
During that transition, I lived with my mom and sister and was working as a reporter. We were slowly learning how to build out our own lives and one of those was weekend cookouts. My mom would go to the store to buy some fajita meat and fixins and I would grab a six pack of craft beer (or a case of coors) and I’d sit in our backyard playing music while grilling. I remember thinking, it’ll be nice to be able to do this in my own house. On the weekends, on my way to and from the coffee shop I used to work at, I’d cruise down some of the side neighborhoods in McAllen, looking at houses I liked. I’d imagine what it would be like to drive my own car into my own garage, throwing the keys on the kitchen table and heading to my own backyard to sip a beer after work. Maybe I’d invite some of my buddies over and we’d shoot the shit and have pretentious arguments about music, like dudes in their mid twenties often do. Life took a huge turn when I applied and got into graduate school, spent 7 years at Purdue, then another 3 in Wisconsin at my first tenure track job. All the while, in the back of my mind, I waited for that time when I would get to have just a little bit of that dream I once had: a place to call mine.
I’m 40 now and married. My wife and I are both academics and make a decent living. We’ve both accumulated an absurd amount of student loan debt and pay an astronomical amount of money on our rent ($2500/month). We live in the greater Seattle area where home prices are averaging over $500k. We’re slowly trying to build our own savings up in the hope of maybe one day owning a home. But we’re three years into a pandemic that has laid bare the nightmarish reality that is post-capitalism in America. We’ve seen property management companies and investment groups snatching up what little inventory exists as a way to build more capital, leaving everyone else to fend for themselves in an outright hostile housing market. Almost daily, I check my Zillow and Redfin apps to see what’s happening with the housing market here, fighting the urge to keep up the hope that we will one day be able to own a home. Then I see this:
This damn near broke me. I grew up in an America that taught me that each generation was supposed to have it better than the previous. That if we worked hard, did well in school, got a degree, then we would be all but guaranteed a good life with good jobs and nice houses. That all of the effort we put into our endeavors would pay dividends in the end. Instead, my generation saw the housing collapse of 07-09, the burning of people’s retirement funds and 401k’s, and foreclosures rippling across our country. And the banks, investors, and hedge-fund managers responsible for this shit were bailed out with our dollars and none of them faced any repercussions. And as the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Citizens United, all any of us could do was stare in horror at how quickly corporations readied themselves to fuck us thoroughly. My home state of Texas had power outages that left 5 million of my brethren without power and over 200 dead as a result. And how did the state legislature respond to that crisis? By banning Critical Race Theory. No reforms. No punishments. Just the constant flattening of regulations and protections all in the name of the savage god of capital and all the while, the price of construction materials, food, precious metals and every fucking thing we need to function in the 21st century is skyrocketing at an astronomical pace. My generation did everything we were asked to do in return for the promise of prosperity and what we got was a godless hellscape where sociopaths rule supreme.
