In defense of affordable neighborhoods in Phoenix, and California


As someone who has a fascination with the history of Phoenix, and Los Angeles, I often hear comments about neighborhoods as being "nice" or "used to be nice" or are becoming "nice". And while I rarely hear someone come right out and describe what they mean by "nice", but I know what they mean - no poor people live there. In other words, these areas aren't affordable to anyone but the rich.

If I do make the mistake of implying that people are being snobbish, they always assure me that they aren't rich - it's the other people higher up on the hill that are rich. And then of course if you talk to those people, they just keep pointing, and so on, and so on. I've met many more people who confess to being poor than confess to being rich. But I can tell if people have been really poor. And since I've been poor, and have lived in affordable neighborhoods, I have a perspective that many people don't have. Everyone needs a place to live, even people who aren't rich.

Time-travel with me. When I first moved to Phoenix, at 19, I needed an affordable place to live. I was scrounging by on a minimum-wage job that was only part-time. I've shown people the neighborhood, and also the one I lived in when I was going to ASU, and they shudder. My friends are all older and wealthier now, and most of them have always had enough wealth to go to restaurants, bars, concerts, etc. I have rarely met anyone who has lived like a "church mouse", mostly living on rice and beans, and making every dollar stretch until it screamed. I lived in affordable neighborhoods in California and was only able to move out to the suburbs of Phoenix in my mid-thirties, buying the house I'm still in, and hopefully will be until I don't need a place to live anymore. I've been lucky.

Many people aren't as lucky as I've been. I made a good choice of parents, and they sent me to college, and I was able to earn the kind of income that gets you into a "nice" neighborhood. You know the kind: with garages that protect shiny cars, an association that leaves little notes on your door if you haven't taken care of your weeds, rules against working on your car in the driveway.

No, of course I'm not rich, the rich people are north of me, and they can point to the real rich people, etc., etc. And yes, I'm glad that I can afford to live in a "nice" neighborhood. But when I couldn't afford it, this wouldn't have been nice at all, just too expensive. Everything can't be Beverly Hills.

Image at the top of this post: The Saguaro Apartments in 1981, 4205 N. 9th Street, Phoenix, Arizona. Affordable to me when I first moved to Phoenix.
If you liked this article, and would like to see more, please consider becoming a patron of History Adventuring on Patreon. If you're already a patron, thank you! You make this happen!

 Click here to become a Patron!
History adventuring posts are shared there daily. The basic tier is a dollar a month, and the PhD tier, which includes "then and now" photos, billboards, aerials, videos, and super high-definition photos, is five dollars a month, and is discounted for seniors, veterans, and students.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more