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There’s affordable, and then there’s affordable

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Yesterday my morning started, as weekends often do, with a little writing, some coffee, and then a conversation with my wife. Usually I bore her a bit with the topics which have sprung to mind as I write and then we turn to discussions of family, friends, finances, and our plans for the weekend. Yesterday Liz had an article from the New York Times she wanted to read for me; it was about Mt Kisco, New York. 

We know Mt Kisco particularly well since that is where LuLu often spends weekends with her dad. It’s a great little town with a lot of interesting shops, places to eat, a movie theater, and a much more diverse population than one might expect in Westchester County. The New York Times agrees:

Affordable? I am so out of touch. The couple highlighted in the piece managed to find a nice little home for $455,000. Affordable. Assuming a 20% down payment, meaning they had stashed away around $100,000 in free cash, they will only need to pay about $1,600 a month on the mortgage and say $700 a month in property taxes, add a few hundred for insurance, and that’s almost $3,000 as your ante. I get that Mt Kisco connects to the best job market in the United States via commuter rail and that the salary scale is beyond my ability to comprehend, but it just seems that everything in life would need to chug along almost perfectly for 30 years in order for this to turn out ok.

As a high school teacher I’ve got a pretty steady gig, and it wouldn’t surprise me if inflation were to diminish the purchasing power of my income over the next ten years. As unlikely as it is for me to lose my job, it’s not like there aren’t hundreds of jobs, even thousands, in my field that pay at least close to the amount I now make. The people finding Mt Kisco affordable must have jobs paying in the hundreds of thousands of dollars in jobs which require really specialized skill sets and whose existence depends on creating lots of real value in the market place month after month. I would think that those positions are few and far between and that finding a new one on the same salary scale if a position were lost would be quite a challenge.

I’m a mediocre person with mediocre financial needs and mediocre expectations. I kind of like that. At one point a few years ago students at my high school watched a series of people engaging in “extreme activities”; living life to the fullest. I remember offering that some people are drawn to that, and if that is your calling then, by all means, have at it. If, however, doing the equivalent of jumping from a moving van off a bridge in some sort of bungee related rapid descent thing wasn’t your style, not to sweat it; life can be pretty engaging and entertaining without skydiving or hang-gliding.

A different news item I came across during the week discussed how home buying overall was slowing, but not for Hispanics. The article went on to note that this was occurring despite the fact that many Hispanics live in areas with overheated and overpriced housing markets. Another dark cloud was the issue of immigration. Needless to say, neither the concern over high prices nor those regarding citizenship obtain around here. I wasn’t able to find specifics on Springfield in the piece, but a perusal of home purchases from just this week showed over half of the single family and multi family home purchases in the city were to people with Hispanic surnames. All of them were well under $200,000 and a few were less than half that amount. For most of these people the mortgage, property taxes, and insurance won’t add up to $1,000 a month. There aren’t a lot of jobs that won’t cover that. 

The abundance of high quality single and multi family homes at affordable prices will, I hope, give the city some stability and some resilience when the hard times do arrive. The bar is set pretty low here. Let’s hear it for humble aspirations, and limited expectations.

The River Gods

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As compensation for spending time at the beach my wife and I will make sure to hit a used book store nearby. Down on the Connecticut shoreline the best one is the Book Barn in Niantic; a house, a few outbuildings, dozens of kiosks, a basketball hoop, animals, some benches and a huge collection of well priced books. 

Last summer I found “Nineteenth Century Cities: Essays in the New Urban History” for $4 and as the snow came down last Tuesday I decided to give it a read. I hadn’t noticed that one of the pieces was written by an expert in 19th century Springfield and focused on the community elite and the emergence of local politics. The author, Professor Michael Frisch, takes note of the fact that in the 18th century Springfield’s town elders were known throughout New England as the “River Gods”. He remarks on changes to the political system one hundred years later as being in some way inspired by the fear that the enormous growth of the working class gave a poorer transient population too much control over a community in which they had too little long term interest; the wealthy and their progeny were tied to the city in ways laborers were not.

As LunaLucia and I were spending time at the library yesterday I found another essay by Dr Frisch, this one on the occasion of Springfield’s 350th anniversary in which he notes that, in the 80’s, changes to our economic system reversed that relationship; it is the poor who were most tied to the community. He notes that the upwardly mobile gladly move from region to region to secure improved positions, the corporate bosses live in far away places, and what elites do inhabit the region have chosen to live in suburban locations.

A recently published map at CityLab shows that Springfield’s otherwise little known Hampden County has taken in more María refugees than any county in the United States outside Florida. As my wife and I were planting some new grape vines and another apple tree in the backyard yesterday I struck up a conversation with a neighbor whose back porch overlooks our back yard. He began to talk about the mango trees “he has” in Puerto Rico, and the other fruits “he grows” in Aguadilla. He has only been here a few months. I asked him if he was here because of Hurricane María: “Oh, no. I lived in Waterbury for 15 years but I’m tired of it so I came here.”

He’s been in New England for going on two decades but he still “has” roots on the island. 
If the analysis is correct, Hurricane María has only hastened the exodus which was already taking place because of the economic/debt crisis in Puerto Rico. Before María Springfield was taking in roughly 5% of those emigrating from Borinquen and those numbers appear to be holding. So thousands of people are coming here, most of them for good. Will they ever think of Springfield as home? If they do it just might mark them, despite their citizenship, as NOT being true Americans after all.

The Call is Coming from Inside the House

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It’s funny. So much energy expended in the discussion of building a wall to keep out the Spanish speaking hordes from Mexico, but an island famous for its walls is already inside “Fortress America” and the savage category 4 hurricane named María seems destined to bring hundreds of thousands if not a million of those Gringo Hispanos to the mainland. Already citizens, they can’t be stopped. No one can prove that the elaborate Chinese Global Warming Hoax played a role in the rapid strengthening of María to a Category 5 hurricane as it passed from Cape Verde to the Lesser Antilles, but I wouldn’t put it past those inscrutable bastards!

The data I’ve seen says that roughly 50% of Puerto Ricans who leave the island come to the Northeast, and roughly 10% of them choose Massachusetts. Springfield, according to some sources, has the 4th highest Puerto Rican population of any city on the mainland United States and Holyoke, part of the Springfield msa, has the highest percentage Puerto Rican population. In talking to my neighbors those numbers are about to increase. Of the 3.4 million people living in Puerto Rico today, an island already in the throes of a bankruptcy process and where out-migration was accelerating, how many will leave in the coming days, weeks, and months is anyone’s guess, but as full American citizens it is hard to imagine that many will not avail themselves of the option to ride or fly northward.

Their most popular destinations in the past include also storm ravaged Florida and Texas along with equally financially troubled Illinois and Connecticut. Some analyses show greater Springfield as having one of the most solid economies in the country…except in the area of growth where it stands in the “Lower 20”:


 

Prosperity though…”Upper 20″:

And what they deem the most important category, Inclusion, “Top 20”:

The growth in question here is economic growth not population growth, but if 5,000 or 10,000 people move to the area over the next few years looking for housing, excellent schools, and employment it could create some real growth in the overall economy.

As I compared the Silver Bullet development that is the MGM resort in the South End to the small scale infrastructural improvements in the North End the one thing both neighborhoods have in common is their dominant ethnic culture: Puerto Rican. Both have Boriqua owned businesses. Both have vacant lots and abandoned buildings. Both could easily accommodate an influx of hundreds of newcomers if given time to do so. 

Schools might be the weakest link in terms of immediate accommodation; the Springfield Public Schools are already the second largest in New England with a population at or near its all-time high. The city has aggressively built, acquired, and renovated schools in the last three decades all while experiencing middle class flight to the suburbs. Families with school age children might very well be the first to leave the island if schools and medical facilities can’t be brought back online quickly.

The weeks ahead could tell an interesting tale. I’ve always found it interesting, even perhaps slightly ironic that at the entrance to Springfield’s most Puerto Rican neighborhood there is a statue honoring the soldiers who fought in the Spanish-American war of 1898. In Spain the Generación del ’98 grappled with the decline of their country, its loss of empire, and conflicts between tradition and progress. The nation which inflicted upon them the defeat which created such bitter awareness of their circumstances is now engaged in the same process, and once again Puerto Ricans, willing or not, are participants.

Puerto Ricans Aren’t Immigrants

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Go to the WWLP website and watch the video or just read part of the transcript below:

   
 
Puerto Rico is part of the United States. Puerto Ricans are not immigrants. Understanding that is important to understanding why they behave differently as a group than other Hispanic people who come to Springfield. Being here is not a privilege for them, it’s a right, just as it would be my right to move to San Juan if I so chose. 

To review, Puerto Rico…part of the United States, Puerto Ricans…not immigrants.

Quiz: 

1)Is Puerto Rico part of the United States?

Yes           No

2) Are Puerto Ricans immigrants?

Yes           No