Yesterday while driving around downtown at 5:30PM I noticed a few people walking home from work. I saw a man in a suit, a lady who works at a cafe I frequent, and a few other normal folks with business type bags in hand. It was then that I noticed that people walking all look the same. There is nothing substantial that one can do to appear better off, more wealthy, or more important than others while walking along the sidewalk. Sure, you can wear an expensive suit or a Gore-Tex jacket but those are subtle differences. Normal folks can’t differentiate between an Armani and Moore’s special at first glance. They can no better tell a Gore-Tex from a K-way.
If we look at people driving vehicles though it’s very easy to distinguish the perceived status of each (that they wish to present to us). The level of status each driver would like is quite distinguishable between a BMW and a beat up 88 Buick Skylark.
Related: As I was driving around looking at real estate in the city (there’s a statement to start some wild rumours) I noticed that very nice homes in the city are less distinguishable from their not so nice neighbors. In the city homes are closer together and size plays less of a roll when it comes to “nice”. Often the nicest homes are well done homes of moderate size. Sure, there are some beautiful large homes, but when they are surrounded by other nice homes and large trees their size plays less of a roll than their “niceness”.
If we head out to the suburbs we see that size is king. The larger the yard, the more car doors on your garage, the more square feet you have the larger your status genitals become. In the suburbs you also have rich with rich, poor with poor. The downtown however has a much healthier blend of folks.
So is our need to be seen as better than someone else (C.S. Lewis’ definition of pride) driving us out of the downtown? Do we move out of the city so we can be seen driving into it in a Mercedes? It might very well be. I think our pride and quest for status might very well be a subconscious cattle prod to urban sprawl.
Comments
Charlie - July 8, 2004 7:48 pm
"In the suburbs you also have rich with rich, poor with poor. The downtown however has a much healthier blend of folks."
It seems to me that this statement is true if you only judge the health of your "blend" by the amount of money the neighbours have.
I can't really picture myself saying, "You know honey, we live in a pretty great neighbourhood...sure those guys next door light all those fires and keep punching pedestrians..but at least they're poor!"
We moved from Charlottetown to Halifax and have been living downtown for two years, we enjoyed our place but decided to move this month outside the downtown to a more "green" location. You can take the boy out of the Island...
Dan James - July 9, 2004 11:25 am
I'm sorry Charlie. I don't quite follow your argument. Are you saying that people who aren't wealthy light fires and punch people?
Alan - July 9, 2004 12:19 pm
Isn't it a matter of the local association of value to the quality of the house? In downtown Kingston tiny but historically important properties cost the most and are most coveted despite the need of homeowners to come to grps with dealing with 170 year old stone work and restrictions on building renovations under the Ontario Heritage Act. If you check out the Heritage by-law for Charlottetown you will see that there are a very interesting selection of old buildings listed but there is very little civic pride in a general sense in the fact of those buildings. They attract little or no price premium. Informed homeowners like Peter O'Ruk have that sense and argue for it but there is not the general sense there that there is here on their value. So you are left with other factors to govern price and attractiveness like lot size and the nearness of malls.
al o'neill - July 9, 2004 1:00 pm
Charlottetown is incredibly egalitarian compared with Fredericton, where I'm living at the moment. You've got clear lines separating the student ghettos from the really nice, big, old houses, the subburbs, which are also as stark as the ones in Charlottetown are.
I think the desire to have some space and quiet drives people to the subburbs, not really thinking about the disadvantages, which aren't as apparent to most people. (lack of soul is hard to explain.)
So I think the result is the same, but the cause isn't directly about the need to have status, but status stratification is the end result anyway.
That said, downtown real estate is still bloody expensive :P
Jevon - July 11, 2004 2:55 pm
I was just about to write about something very similar, but I am at a smokey internet cafe, so I won´t.
Where I am in Spain, the burbs´don´t exist at all. Everyone lives on top of eachother as close to the central plaza as they can, and you can´t tell how big one apartment is from another (and the outside of the building seems to say very little about how nice it is inside). There are very few social ¨distinguishers¨ for the middle class. I think they key is that, while the rich live in massive houses outside of the cities, the middle class accept their middle-class´ness and live as well as they can, while not trying to fake their status. I don´t think you would catch many of them moving out to the burbs and away from their close friends... Because in this city of 150k people, if you want to see someone in the evening, you just stroll around the park closest to them, and they are usually there.