Carol (accountant/neighbor right across the street) e-mailed to ask if I’d heard Sunday morning’s gunshot fusillade. She was awakened by the racket, too (for me, it was just another sleepless night; she actually has work she needs to be awake for), and she called the cops. They told her several other people had called in a shots-fired report.
Hm. I thought it was firecrackers. Our idiot legislators have legalized fireworks, and so every one of their fellow morons—and we have more than our share of those in this state—has run out and stocked up on every incendiary device one can now get one’s hands on. The Safeway, if you can imagine, is selling fireworks that will blow your fingers off and scorch your eyes blind. But by golly, we wouldn’t want Big Brother robbing our kids of a nostalgic childhood experience!
Oh. Sorry. Back on topic:
Firecrackers. Pretty Daughter‘s teenage kids were outside—I could hear them laughing when I got up to investigate. And an unmuffled car with a boombox, exactly the description of Pretty Daughter’s girl child’s boyfriend’s vehicle, roared off down the street forthwith.
The gangbangers around here favor automatic and semiautomatic weapons. This was not one of those. If it was a gun, the person was using an old-fashioned six-shooter, and that is so unlikely in this neighborhood as to defy credibility. Also, the reports—about twenty of them—were not as sharp as pistol shots.
But Carol is pretty sure it was a gun. And Sally was up that night, too—her lights were on; she turned them off and apparently went back to bed after the dust settled. I imagine Sally, who’s been around the block a few times, also called 911.
Damn, but sometimes one tires of living in…shall we say, a socioecomically mixed neighborhood. Those slums west of 19th and north of Dunlap really do affect the quality of life in adjacent middle- and working-class neighborhoods. And as the economy slides deeper into actual depression for low-income workers, who now comprise the largest numbers of permanently unemployed Americans, the area to the west is getting worse and worse. Really, none of the grocery stores and other retail establishments that serve our neighborhood are safe to patronize now. The Albertson’s has been hopeless for a long time, but the Sprouts across the road from it used to be OK. Now I won’t go into either shopping center. The Ranch market has taken the place of the defunct Food City in serving the Latino population—it feels a little safer because most of the customers are families, and because the proprietors have hired a security guard to patrol the parking lot.
But really: who wants to do their grocery shopping under the gaze of an armed guard?
I love my house, I love my immediate neighborhood, and I love my life in the central city. BUT… Do I really want to spend my old age dodging bullets?
This brings me back to the possibility of buying one of the hugely devalued houses in the new tracts up against the White Tanks mountains. One thing you have to say about an old folks’ “community” (snark) in a new settlement occupied entirely by middle-class whites: not a lot of gunfire will be going on there. Consequently, not a lot of cop helicopters will be rending the quiet of the evening hours (you can set your clock by the 11:00 p.m. cop fly-by here).
I’d love to have a beautiful new house like the models out there. But on the other hand, how could I live without choir, without my friends, and without seeing my son at the drop of a hat? And how could I get by without enough adjunct teaching income to take up the financial slack?
By way of wasting time when I should be working, I tricked out a little pro-and-con analysis. Listed twelve items in favor of living in Trilogy and twelve agin’ it. Then assigned a value to each, according to how important it is to me, subjectively. The result was a little surprising:
I expected the point spread between the pro’s and the cons would be a lot wider, much heavier in favor of staying put where I’m as happy as I’m ever likely to get. But there’s only a four-point difference between the reasons to move out there and the reasons not to move out there.
Some items, of course, are huge: dodging automatic fire stacks up just as heavily as being able to see my son on short notice. Others are more ambiguous: I don’t consider a new house to be especially important, especially given the solid construction and pleasant ambience of the 40-year-old house I’m living in. To my mind, the absence of rambunctious, noisy teenagers is not necessarily a good thing; hence the relatively low “7” on the pro side.
Judging by these dozen criteria, it’s almost a toss-up whether I stay in the increasingly violent inner city or follow my kind to the Holsum Bread suburbs.
Realistically? I can’t afford to live out there. Certainly not while I’m tethered to the upside-down house M’hijito and I got ourselves into: to pay that bill, I have to have a job, and the only work I can hope to get is part-time adjunct community college teaching. There are no community colleges within sane driving distance of the White Tank mountains. Plus no matter how much “greener” construction might save on the utility bills, a $218/month homeowner’s association fee is out of the question.
Which, yea verily, brings us to the homeowner’s association. Notwithstanding phenomena like Dave’s Marina, Used Car Lot, and Weed Arboretum (now mercifully replaced by the tidy accountants across the street), I do not want to live in an HOA. I like to hang my laundry on the line…the last thing I need is some supercilious association telling me I can’t put my sheets out on the back porch. Or, more to the point, that I have to spend $350 to $500 I can’t afford to replace a dryer I don’t really need or, now, even want.
Guess I’m your basic trailer trash, eh? Looks like this is where I belong.
😉
How long have you lived there? Was it always like this or did the neighborhood deteriorate over the years?
Well….ahem…it IS more interesting for us if you stay put. You’re much more entertaining than NCIS, CSI, and Criminal Minds….and we can feel nice and safe reading about your “adventures” from afar…. 😉 That might be worth a point or two…
@ Stephen: I’ve been in this neighborhood (tho’ not in this particular house) about 17 years. Truth to tell, the neighborhood is probably better than when I first moved in, an event that occurred during the last Great Recession: the savings & loan crisis. Crime rates in the area (as in the city and state) are actually down. My little corner is much improved since Dave moved out, and before the Crash hit, several young adults with small kids bought houses on this street at inflated prices. Now they’re stuck here (awwwww….!), and they’re good at keeping up their homes and forming young-couple networks. This is excellent: we need more of them. Thanks to the young people, houses that were looking a wee bit tired (not to say “exhausted”) have been spiffed up and given emerald-green lawns upon which small children frolic.
My neighborhood forms a buffer zone between an area of upscale historic homes surrounding a very nice park (to give you an idea: houses over there are still selling in the $500,000 to $750,000 range) and an increasingly seedy (not to say “desperate”) group of tenement blocks. The apartments, which the city fathers apparently were…uhm, we shouldn’t say “bribed,” ohhh no…to allow developers to install, were junk when they went up and now are dangerous slums. No one who lives there is safe. A couple of years ago, one of the residents shot and killed a police officer who naively knocked on his door. As I recall, he injured a couple more of ’em, too.
So we get the benefit of the rich folks’ lovely district and the…well, the drama of the rock-bottom SES housing to the west of us.
It is, as sandra observes, always interesting.
When I was a young thing, we lived in what is now called the Willo district: an area of unique and beautiful historic homes that the developers were trying to trash. Because it was close to the downtown courthouse and lawfirms and also close to a regional medical center, it became a lawyer’s and doctor’s ghetto. The clout attendant on the associated affluence and political connections saved the area, and the houses are now spectacularly expensive, depression be damned.
In those days, though, it was, like my present stomping grounds, surrounded by slums and in the district with the highest per-capita drug use in the city. There was literally never a dull moment. I had an editorial job in the Graduate College at the GDU, where the place was run by a Big Nurse sort of Alpha Administrative Assistant, the She Who Was the De Facto Boss.
One day she told me she had come to look forward to Mondays, because at the start of every week I would always have some new wild story to entertain the staff. Burglaries, rapes, attempted rapes, prowlers, cat burglars on the roof, drunken schizophrenics, confused cops, demented city council members, rabid homeowners, a crusading newspaper publisher, homeless mentally ill taking up residence in the homeowners’ cars…it was a nonstop circus.
Well…plus ca change…
Selah. 😀
My only disagreement with you is that I now have the total inability to live on the same block with teenagers and their stereos.
Blaring rock music sends me into a psychotic rage.
Any amount of HOA fees is now worth it to me for the blessed silence.
In college, I lived quite close to the mean streets of Oakland — maybe our little nook could have been called the grumpy streets — and nighttime gunfire was not unusual.
At our rural property, the gunfire usually occurs during the day (if at all), as various shoot some skeet, sight in their rifle for deer season, or dispatch some critter.
For me, I’d vote for Midtown. More color and fun. And screw the HOAs.