Be Careful What You Meme For

As they are wont to do, a meme's making the rounds that both grossly generalizes and exaggerates an important sociopolitical topic and does nothing but serve its antagonists. The meme claims that a home in an unspecified location cost $230,000 when it was well taken care of in 2009, and a decade later had an asking price of nearly a million after it had been abandoned and fallen into a state of disrepair.

The kicker: "EMPIRE IN DECLINE"

Let's dissect this.

Setting aside the alleged market valuation for this home in 2019, Zillow states it was built in 2007. Its current abandonment is true and can be confirmed in real estate databases. Given this was new construction built just before the housing market crash, its initial asking price could be correct, but its current state is an indictment of that housing market crash, not the current housing crisis.

In all likelihood, the original owner took advantage of pre-Recession predatory lending and abandoned the home when they could no longer make payments, or when the home's tax-value dropped below what they owed. 

If this home were in parts of the West Coast, New Jersey, or Northern Virginia, the current asking price of nearly $1M could easily be believable. But if it were in the Rust Belt, the Midwest, or smaller cities in the South, $1M is a leap. It's actually in Detroit, and it's asking price is a gross exaggeration. The current price listed on Zillow is a mere $15,000, or roughly the cost of a used Kia on Carvana.

All of that is problematic, from the cost of housing in California and Colorado to the price of a ten year old Sorento. But most problematic is the fact that the maker of this meme chose to completely fabricate the scenario, exaggerating the current cost of a home by well over 6000%, when they could have easily made their case using current listings in Portland or Denver.

This sort of false flag does two things that don't help underfunded prospective homeowners: 1) it throws chum to the naysayers who will rightfully call this out as "fake news," but for all the wrong reasons, solidifying their claim that the housing crisis doesn't exist and any reference to it is just bad Photoshop, and 2) it normalizes exaggerated home values well beyond the West Coast and Long Island; it coerces even savvy readers into thinking, "if $989,000 is fake, then $50,000 is pretty damn good," when in reality, its $15,000 asking price is already too high. Detroit's Land Bank should be offering this home for free to anyone willing to make it livable. 

Memes are a quick and easy way to make a point, but unless they're completely factual they can do more harm than good. This meme would have, and could have, been a sturdy case if it had shown abandoned new construction built in pre-Recession Fairfax, VA with a price tag of almost $1M. Instead they chose to lie, either because they were lazy or because they knew lying would make their meme go viral. 

Either way, it does nothing to quell the reality of the current housing crisis.

The Bell Curve of Garbage

When Gertrude Stein returned to Oakland in the 1930s and found her home was gone, she famously quipped, “there is no there there.” It’s hard to imagine what she’d say about the Bay Area today. It’s impossible not to reflect with similar sentimentality when I return home to Virginia. My childhood house is still standing; the barn has collapsed, the land has been subdivided, and a cheap tract home sits where our chickens once roosted in a white out-building reminiscent of a Wyeth painting.

My grandparents recently passed away and their own farm is being eyed by real estate developers. It’s near the heart of Virginia Horse Country, much of which has been absorbed into the lifeless suburbs of Washington, DC. Of course the farm doesn’t need to be developed. It’s a fully capable farm. But there’s nothing historic about it; and today’s working farms are corporate factories with concrete warehouses.

Built in the 1970s, it’s a handsome Colonial reproduction. As a young architectural aficionado I’d sit on the bright shag carpeting of any room comparing the crown molding in my Elements of Design book to the details that circled above, shaded in the colors of the Nixon era: Harvest Gold, Robin’s Egg Blue, Pea Green. To date, the house is a time capsule of a decade quickly becoming history relegated to more books than memory, entirely untouched since it was built. At nearly 4000 square feet, any sane family should consider it more than enough. But today’s families don’t want wainscoting and a formal library; they want endless square footage and an open concept full of stainless steel appliances stretching to the front door.

What will likely happen is what’s happened in my own hometown two hours away where handsome estate houses sit amid the cul de sacs of indistinguishable McMansions that have eaten up their respective farms. Nearby are the cavernous concrete warehouses brandished with Tyson or Perdue. When you enter the idyllically named town of Pleasant Valley you pass its iconic schoolhouse and abandoned train station, but as you turn and approach the crest leaving the quaint village you’re faced with miles and miles of these factory farms belching steam, launching big rigs headed for I-81.

Pleasant Valley’s train station hasn’t seen service in over half a century, nor has the larger station in the nearby city of Harrisonburg. Both will soon receive a makeover with an obligatory coffee shop, maybe a brewery and a weekly farmer’s market filled with the cultivations of upwardly mobile hobbyists. Neither will ever see a train again; the tracks have been stripped for bike trails.

I don’t even need to say the word for you to know what I’m talking about. It’s both lost all meaning and become ubiquitous with America. It doesn’t just happen to our city’s cultural neighborhoods; it is happening to the heritage of an entire nation: the proliferation of sameness, driven by the age of social media and marketing algorithms that mine our data and merchandise mediocrity, coaxing us to strive for the swell of a press-board Bell Curve.

Never resigned to let what works work, we refuse to allow history to live in America. Instead, we memorialize it in historic districts. We don’t have artist colonies; we have loft condominiums named for the artists that once worked in those buildings. We don’t have Black, gay, or ethnic neighborhoods; we have flags adorned with Civil Rights leaders, rainbow crosswalks, and street signs with Chinese characters. We designate our authentic heritage with these tokens to quell the insecurities of those who’d rather forget who they’ve replaced; to tell them authenticity isn’t necessary when diversity has been brandished on a NPS marker. Too few people want to live authentically, and those who do are pummeled into submission by Big Box department stores and fast casual chains. At one time the authentic would flock to the distant corners of this country: Key West, Provincetown, rainy cities like Seattle and San Francisco, or Savannah or Charleston. But this sameness has found its way there too where bloated vacation homes in a style that can only be described as universal overshadow the legacies that the 21st century generation has deemed fit to be salvaged, often restored to unreal geometric perfection. It’s expected; there are no surprises.

These places are great repositories of history, but at best, that’s all they are now. When you start digging into their pasts and considering what it had been like when they were authentic, when they inspired some of America’s truly great early- and mid-century artists and writers, well that’s a sad rabbit hole to fall down. Provincetown’s and Key West’s artistic legacies are million dollar tiny homes and art colonies fashioned out of long unused fishing piers that only the most wealthy can afford to sustain. Once the inspirations for Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Jared and Margaret French, and Paul Cadmus; what now passes for art in these places is motel art doled out by wealthy retirees and, of course, the immediately ephemeral works of Instagram influencers hustling a Lululemon sponsorship.

Today’s society has even sanitized and monetized cultural misfits and ethnic minorities. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is part of a multi-billion dollar franchise studded with millionaire stars being lauded in a MasterCard commercial as a groundbreaking moment in Civil Rights. Drag queens, once raunchy underground performers, are now the stars of reality shows and headliners at children’s birthday parties. In either instance, the authentic realities of those communities are still being ignored. What has MasterCard or Disney done to curb violence towards Black people? What are mothers who hire drag queens like they’re circus clowns doing to challenge the proliferation of laws aimed at banning drag performances altogether?

As always, when authenticity rears its head, neither will even bother to look in the rear-view mirror.

America’s cultural consensus has always been in its status quo, but when the cultural mileposts were authentic, those who had less strived for more, and those who had more were interesting. Now the American Dream is to be a YouTube personality and sell an auto-turned single to Apple Music. It’s an air conditioned summer house where a family can stream Netflix from somewhere else, and the kids can play Minecraft.

A commercial for Kenzie’s song Paper has been running ad nauseam on Hulu. Of course, I had no idea who she was. No one did. That’s why she’s advertising her single during commercial breaks. She’s an 18 year old alum from the television show Dance Moms. The song is aggressively bad: the lyrics, her lack of vocal range, the expressionless look on her face that tells you she’s a child star in the age of social media. I mentioned this to an old college friend who has written music and now writes music with her daughter who has an amazing voice, and she immediately knew what commercial I was talking about. She and her daughter had had their own fits every time it aired. Her daughter will likely have a successful career in academia someday, but she’ll never make the kind of money generic pop stars make because she refuses to sell her soul on TikTok. But what’s worse is, she’ll only ever reach those with an academic interest in music. Because America’s status quo is no longer confronted by authenticity, freshman auditions for music programs are largely spent weeding out prospective students whose relationship with music is limited to American Idol.

Generation after generation, we look back at the past through rosy glasses and lament how much better things were. That hot take is universally criticised because, in many cases, they simply weren’t. But it’s time we start looking at the things that were, particularly art and culture. Well crafted oil paintings languish in gallery windows while bananas duct taped to walls sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. What’s even worse than that mere price tag (and the blatant money laundering in the professional art world) is the attention that these shams absorb. We are headed for an artistic and cultural dark age, if we aren’t already actively entrenched in it. But it’s flipped. While the Dark Ages, at least as they are popularly understood, were a rejection of progressive values finally enlightened by the Renaissance; ours is one driven by a false progressivism set out to look authentic online while pillaging it in the real world. It’s depressing to consider exactly how much worse it can get, but it probably will. After all, we’re no longer in the Wild West of the dot com era, we’re only in its Roaring Twenties.

Hands Off Chinatown

I've heard time and again how the newly proposed Sixers Center City arena at the beleaguered Fashion District Mall would be "good for Chinatown," almost as much as I've heard 10th and Market isn't in Chinatown, and both are equally insulting.

There's this "I know what's good for you" mentality in Philadelphia that has historically driven development in communities that never asked for it, often with questionable outcomes. If a new arena would be so great for business, why aren't any other neighborhoods begging for it in their backyards? Those who NIMBY casinos and stadiums out of their own neighborhoods are often the first to applaud those developments when they're proposed where they don't live.

To say other neighborhoods don't need the proposed arena's injection of business implies there's something wrong with Chinatown. Most scoff that it's a low income area, which isn't completely true or its entire story. It's an immigrant community with as much wealth as poverty. To attempt to lift its built environment to the pedigree of, say Old City, doesn't lift up its residents most in need, it displaces them, a false solution and the foundation of the both hailed and hated g-word.

Chinatown as a neighborhood isn't struggling. In fact, when COVID-19 blasted its way into Philadelphia, Chinatown was the first to respond. As a result, when pandemic-induced shutdowns ran roughshod through our neighborhoods, closing down countless businesses, Chinatown came out the other side bustling as it ever had been, if not more so. Those who claim Chinatown would benefit from an arena's business are either woefully unfamiliar with the neighborhood or, most insidiously, think Chinatown doesn't need more business, they're saying it needs new business, business that caters to a broader and more homogenized Philadelphia. 

Chinatown is more than just business. Like the Gayborhood or the Italian Market, Chinatown is comprised of homes, schools, and churches. In these cultural enclaves, businesses serve as byproducts of their denizens, not tourist attractions. That's not to say they're isolated or unwelcoming, but the dichotomy doesn't help a community's members, it alienates them. What's unwelcome are outsiders trying to alter what works well within community to quell the insecurities and discomfort of those who visit. You wouldn't go into a neighbor's house and start rearranging their furniture the way you like it on the off chance you might stop by again. 

As a community, Chinatown knows the intent behind the support for the Sixers arena more than any other in Philadelphia. The reason the arena's been proposed for 10th and Market is the same reason The Gallery, The Pennsylvania Convention Center, and the Vine Street Expressway were dumped there. 

To city planners and politicos who remember Philadelphia's darkest days, Chinatown is Center City's last perceived remnant of midcentury blight. Once wedged between Skid Row and The Furnished Room District's flophouses, they want it gone. Like the stunning movie theater at 22nd and Market that was completely ignored by preservationists because it had since become a strip club, Chinatown is guilty by its historic association with neighboring red light districts, and City Hall has been trying to eradicate it for 50 years. 

Chinatown, vibrant as it is, is a self-sustained community that hasn't succumbed to the sterilization and organization of redevelopment. That in itself should be enough to tell everyone else to leave it alone, especially in this era of progressively woke cultural awareness. But this is a 21st century American city, and xenophobia has managed to ferret its way into the most self-righteously progressive circles. In today's Philadelphia, anything that doesn't cater exclusively to the status quo must be reinvented, even when the status quo has literally everywhere else to eat craft burgers, drink local brews, and drop $50 on a candle making class. 

Despite the fact that all efforts to tame Chinatown's authenticity have been abject failures (see the aforementioned Gallery mall, Pennsylvania Convention Center, and Vine Street Expressway), City Hall is still willing to capitalize on the idea of Chinatown, as long as it becomes anything it never was. Like the rainbow street signs that cropped up throughout the Gayborhood just before it was callously renamed "Midtown Village," City Hall and the Sixers will undoubtedly flood the area with all the dragon-branded trappings of what anyone shopping for a Mogwai might expect to find when searching for a stock photo of "Chinatown." 

Look at DC if you want to see the future of our Chinatown: garishly stereotypical fanfare bordering on the offensive, fast casual chain restaurants, and a few authentic holdouts wedged between a Starbucks and a Smashburger like the lingering apartment house at the end of Batteries Not Included. 

It's either ironically aloof or deliberately hypocritical that those who support this Sixers arena are quick to point out that 10th and Market isn't technically Chinatown, right after rhetorically pondering why Chinatown doesn't want its business. Google Maps might not place 10th and Market within the confines of Chinatown's official borders, but after being boxed in by an expressway and the sterile walls at the ass end of a convention center, Chinatown's had nowhere else to grow. Early renderings for the Fashion District's redesign even show Chinese imagery illuminating the ceiling of its 10th Street underpass. The city, and those championing the Sixers arena, know very well that 10th and Market isn't just part of Chinatown, it's its gateway.  

The Sixers Center City arena might be great for business, but only those antithetical of everything Chinatown is. What's more, once Ocean Harbor and Four Rivers become a P.F. Chang's and a Panda Express, those who pushed for the Sixers arena will be lamenting the loss of one of North America's last great Chinatowns, a loss at their behest. And aside from mega-cities like Chicago or New York where downtown real estate is so valuable they're forced to build as densely as possible, America has repeatedly set precedents that downtown arenas do nothing positive for the neighborhoods they encroach upon. Even in Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Convention Center not only obliterated dozens of historic properties to make way for its presence, its expansion continues to eat away at what's left of the west side of Chinatown for its asphalt prairies, plaguing its lingering residents with noise from conventioneers who treat Camac Street like a suburban Walmart parking lot. When no large conventions are being held there, it's a ghost town.

Philadelphia might be booming on paper, but it has no shortage of developable real estate. The Sixers could have proposed an arena as part of the emerging Schuylkill Yards or Penn's Landing's waterfront redevelopment without upending a community. But City Hall and the echo chamber of those who don't live in Chinatown and rarely visit have hypocritically deemed this locale most fit, all because this neighborhood refuses to bend to their pressboard idea of 21st century American urbanism.

From the Gayborhood to Fishtown, from Spruce Hill to the Italian Market, this city has spent the last half century trying to eradicate anything culturally unique while claiming to be one of the nation's most diverse cities. There's isn't a more eloquently deserved word for this but "gross." 

Of course all of this should be moot. Ignore the bevy of land available for an arena along the Delaware River or atop the Schuylkill Yards (dare I even mention the mythical "Bellweather District" at the demolished Sunoco plant that will likely rival Chernobyl as a superfund site well into the 21st century?), and there's a perfectly great neighborhood surrounded by ample parking right on a subway line where a new Sixers arena won't bother anyone. And that's exactly where it is. 

What is Art?

Several years ago a friend of mine in San Francisco was complaining about “another classic car show” taking up space. I was instantly jealous. Not only was a car show set up in his neighborhood, but to see one in California, the capital of car culture, and in a city as wealthy as San Francisco? I can only imagine what amazing feats of artistry and engineering he was taking for granted. 

But his gripe also stuck with me, and it periodically rears its ugly head, particularly when one of my more artistically minded friends takes a swat at car culture. 

Stout Scarab

Automotive design is one of the most ignored, if not one of the most maligned art forms. When Maurizio Cattelan taped a banana to a wall, critics lined up to gawk at his outsider work of art. But when tons of gracefully bent steel and chrome are displayed on the streets of a major American city - for free - those same critics brush it aside as a problematic product celebrating traffic jams and climate change. The men and women who restore priceless pieces at the Philadelphia Museum of Art are revered as artisans. Mechanics are "grease monkeys."  

1948 Timbs Buick Streamliner

It’s true, art serves solely to inspire. And while the Stout Scarab and the Phantom Corsair are certainly inspirational, cars are first and foremost tools that take us from one point to another. It’s hard to consider automotive design an art form when your primary reference point is a parking lot full of indistinguishable crossovers. But it’s difficult to say how many art academics are aware of the Jonckheere Phantom or the Timbs Streamliner because there’s a willful ignorance in the traditional art world when it comes to artistic genres that blend artistry and purpose.

On the first day of my 10th grade art class, my teacher picked up a Swingline stapler and said, "everything is art". No statement has ever been truer. 

Jonckheere Phantom, or "Round Door Rolls"

It’s hard to ignore the political influences. The art world is significantly Left leaning while the automotive lobby is staunchly on the Right side of the political spectrum. But that’s not a complete assessment of either realm. Popular automotive outlets like Autopian and Jalopnik are considerably woke, and while galleries and museums might benefit from Left leaning initiatives, Republicans are avid art collectors. Still, both are propelled by the stereotypes of their perceived alignments. Trump paraphernalia is in no short supply at neighborhood car shows and the Concours oozes old money conservatism.

 

That’s unfortunate.

Phantom Corsair

Public art museums should be repositories of inspiration to be enjoyed by the masses, and the designs of Giorgetto Giugiaro and John Z. DeLorean should be held to the same esteem as the works of Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock. Sadly, in a world of growing polarization that traffics in pigeonholing people into undeserved buckets, art people are “smart” and car people are “stupid.” That’s not fair. To quote Puddy from Seinfeld, “I don’t know too many monkeys that can take apart a fuel injector.”