Parts 2 & 3: Disposable Neighborhoods and the Loss of Place
This is parts 2 and 3 of a 7-part series about how so much of this country has come to look and feel identical, and what that standardization means to our communities, our well-being, and our ability to generate a dynamic, living culture.
If you didn’t catch Part 1, you can read it here or listen to it here.
2. Where are you going?
If you’ve recently opened Airbnb you’ve probably seen the search bar at the top that says, “Where are you going?” And beneath that a button for “I’m flexible”—the message here being take me somewhere, anywhere, so long as it’s not here.
This feels like more than classic American restlessness or basic wanderlust. While seeing the rest of the country and beyond is a formidable American tradition, there is something going on now that feels more desperate, more like gasping for air, more (if you’ll kindly permit the hyperbole) akin to a starving animal sniffing out its next meal.
It’s surprisingly easy to forget, and worth our time to remember, the fact that we’re living through a crisis and that everything a short time ago was entirely different from how it is today. Once you consider the sweeping, pandemic-induced transformation of our daily lives that has recently occurred, it’s not hard to imagine why we might be searching for something, anything, to distract us.
An incomplete list of changes and challenges from just the last 19 months includes:
Shortages of necessary items like toilet paper combined with spiraling inflation and persistent labor shortages
Mass closures of small businesses, a crisis that is still unfolding: according to the Financial Times nearly 40% of small retailers reported they wouldn’t be able to pay rent in November
Daily isolation of remote work involving endless Zoom calls and Teams messages and the muddying of work/life hours, paired with working parents forced to somehow also watch and/or school their kids
Paranoia and intense fear of others: who might carry the virus, who might be unvaccinated, who might believe things I don’t
Algorithmically jiggered social networks that intentionally provoke intense emotional reactions and which have now largely replaced in-person communities
That’s a lot, and superseding it all, of course, is the very real fear of dying and the grief of those who’ve lost loved ones.
3. What strange convenience is this?
While the real economy—by which I mean the one that produces and transports the things that feed, clothe, and care for us—is at a breaking point, the stock valuations and profits of the largest corporations have continued to soar. For the wealthy, this means massive valuation increases to both their stock and real estate assets. For most people, it means only that home ownership has become an impossibility, even as rents continue to climb.
In addition, as the categorically non-essential laptop workers have been unchained from their offices and freed to work from anywhere, neighborhood streaming services like Airbnb are now front and center, offering the convenience of instant residence in cities, towns, and villages around the world.
But should neighborhoods be convenient places to use?
If I show up unannounced in a neighborhood one day and abruptly leave three weeks later never to return, use is certainly the right word.
For this to be a workable reality, it must assume among other things that the neighborhood already exists intact without me—that it is full of people doing the hard work of making it an interesting place to live. In other words, interesting neighborhoods don’t make themselves—they are made by the people who live there, and this drive to improve it necessarily stems from a sense of ownership and connection to a place.
As an outsider momentarily stepping foot in that same place, I am largely a taker. My expectation is that the neighborhood will instantly bend to my needs. It must have the type of coffee shop I like, the restaurants I prefer, the indefinable charm I demand. And if it doesn’t, or if I simply get bored, I’ll leave.
Granted, my dollars may provide some temporary support to locally owned businesses, and if my Airbnb is locally owned, perhaps a local resident as well. Whatever the underlying issues of the area, however, I’m ignorant to them and may even be contributing to them.
My exchange with the place, then, is strictly a financial one.
I bring none of the intangible but nevertheless essential qualities to the table that long-term residents do, who must by necessity care for the quality of the air, the schools, the parks, the bus service, and so on.
This is not to say that all travel is bad, or that no neighborhood should ever welcome travelers. Nor am I saying that these apps shouldn’t exist or should never be used. There is certainly a way to regulate them so that they support rather than detract or transform a neighborhood—though for their part these companies have fought and largely avoided these regulations for years.
A thriving neighborhood can potentially absorb a fair number of itinerant travelers and remain relatively intact. But there is a tipping point after which the neighborhood begins to hollow itself out, becoming not a place that supports the lives of the people living there, but a holograph meant to project that reality.
The more homes and rentals fully devoted to travelers and itinerant laptop workers, the fewer living spaces available to locals, displacing long-time residents with transient ones. The neighborhood risks becoming a dead space, artificially propped up with faux-authentic bars, restaurants, and coffee shops—all of which often leverage the reputation that same neighborhood acquired in its previous iteration, when it was a place people lived in and could rely on to provide them with the necessities of daily life.
Perhaps this isn’t altogether different from classic gentrification of the kind we’ve seen over the last forty years, but it feels different, at least to me: far stranger and more intensely concentrated, as we’ve now begun to consume neighborhoods and cities in the same manner we consume clothing, electronics, cheeseburgers, and content.