Overnight, another preserve of working-class American culture is rendered unaffordable to thousands of families — and to the hipsters themselves. Want to know the next move? Toll Brothers, the nation’s preeminent McMansion builder, has built a new luxe waterfront condo. Its ad features a preppy and distinctly unpierced blonde and the line: “Williamsburg, All Grown Up.”
“distinctly unpierced”
almost suspiciously so
Oh christ, they’re all going to move to Portland, aren’t they?
Yes. I know someone who moved up there just so he’d be able to afford a house.
Antzoulatos gathered pierced hipsters on the bare floor of his tenement living room and founded Gentrifiers Against Gentrification. They vowed to make common cause with Puerto Rican teachers and Italian bus drivers — who, not incidentally, gave Williamsburg the working-class edge that made it hip in the first place — and repulse the moneyed waves.
where was that repulsive webcomic somebody found about the trust fund kid showing how real he was by bonding with an actual working poor type, both drinking pbr? the kid talked about how he knew how rough it was since he worked 18 hours a day in a record store or something.
still, “pierced.” PIERCED, I TELLS YA!
i love when wapo does articles about shit like this & ‘kill whitie’
You have a really fucked-up memory of that comic, which made zero reference of trust funds or record stores.
he did say “or something”
They have that crucial disconnect from being down the coast, obviously
xx-post
You have a really fucked-up memory of that comic, which made zero reference of trust funds or record stores.
point being that the kid was trying to shore up his rep by demonstrating how he wasn’t just another middle class hipster type adopting the external characteristics of working class “real” people.
that kinda thing.
also,
Down Bedford Avenue, musicians play electronica on their guitars and a mime troupe reenacts the slaughter of innocents,
???
Madman drummers bummers and Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat
Yes. I know someone who moved up there just so he’d be able to afford a house.
Someone from SF buying a house in PDX and driving up our housing market? Never!
Actually I thought this was going to be about Colonial Williamsburg.
As I remember it, the gist of the comic was that the blue-collar guys make a comment about the college boy drinking cheap beer; the college boy says he makes $25k a year and doesn’t have health insurance, so it’s not like he’s doing so much better than them; blue-collar guys basically say “ok, I feel that.”
Which, just in itself, isn’t weird: we perceive social class differences between “college boy” and blue-collar workers that — at least at first — aren’t at all borne out economically. Plenty of college grads start off earning about the same as semi-skilled blue-collar and service-industry jobs.
What’s interesting is that the comic doesn’t seem to believe that the education helps eventually — that the advantage the college boy has is that he’ll very quickly rise out of that income bracket in a way that most blue-collar workers won’t. And you can class that aspect as either telling (it seems like a very common anxiety at this point, and I’m not sure it’s entirely without merit: a lot of the systems of employment where you progress up various ranks have fallen apart a bit!*) or just short-sighted and self-pitying (haha yes you make less money than a master carpenter now, but you are 25 and childless, and at the low end of your earning potential).
(* Not to mention the earning-value of a college degree being way down, especially in comparison to what’s paid for it: in flat economic terms, a person who’s $100k in debt for a masters in sculpture is in a far worse position than a licensed plumber, and it’s only his social capital that lets him work around that!)
nabisco is completely OTM here, unless kingfish is talking about some other, completely unknown comic that has not been posted to ILX.
Hmm, i think i might be melding the comic with the ilx/ilm/noiz reaction to it. i can’t remembe which subboard got a hold of the thing.
good thing I left wburg!!!
Yeah, I remember people being annoyed with it like that. There really was something about the comic that seemed vaguely smug and wishful-thinking, but I think people’s reactions to it — and the “trust fund / record store” memory of it — actually kinda bear out the artist’s point! I mean, geez, do you realize how much we reference “trust funds” in proportion to the tiny-ass portion of Americans who actually have them? There’s this assumption of privilege for the college-educated and for “hip” people with cultural capital, but the fact is that most of the people we’re talking about are just the new and future plain-old office-working middle class. And they’re not really in that great of a position: their real wages and buying power are less than those of, say, 1950s unionized factory workers; the system of signing on with a company who’ll keep you for decades and give you health insurance is kaput; and lot of how they’ve achieved this appearance of privilege is through mountains of debt, both for education and for all the consumer products that fit with their supposed class status.
how many of those people do you think have their educations or lives subsidized by their parents?
i think he’s saying: not that many.
Oh, there’s certainly a chunk who have stuff — education in particular — subsidized by family money. That’s certainly a form of privilege. But that’s post-war money that’s coming down to them: for a while, even middle-class families have been able to subsidize their kids like that, based on the massive earning and savings potential of the 50s-70s.
That money seems increasingly dried up. Someone’s middle-class parents might have been able to pony up to send her to a good college without leaving her with much debt, but let’s not kid ourselves that that necessarily leaves her set for life, or that a BA from a name school is going to lead to anything better than an office job with middle-class pay. And yeah, that’s a privilege — a secure $50k salary is more than most people get — but we surely shouldn’t act as if that’s being spoiled.
Also, yeah, I think it’s easy to overestimate how many people are getting subsidized by moneyed parents beyond education, especially compared to the way wealth used to get transferred: people aren’t so much getting the family house anymore! So in places like New York, you run into some heavily subsidized people. But by and large, I think it’s a statistically small contingent who are paying the rent on their kids’ big-city apartments and whatnot.
i think there’s something to be said for potential subsidization, ie downwardly mobiles/slumsters waiting til grandma/pa/mom/daddy die, so they can buy a whole lot of PBR!
And yeah, that’s a privilege — a secure $50k salary is more than most people get
*holds on to hers tightly, growls*
I genuinely think that the people in their thirties and early forties who are moving into these $1m condo units that are cropping up all over the eastern seaboard are going to wind up being the targets of some very violent unrest sometime in the next decade, unless they all end up getting soaked in the Boomer Retirement Blast Wave as well.
I think a lot of people will find that between rising college tuition, rising health care costs, longer lifespans, divorces, and a bunch of other things, their parents are going to be scrambling to pull off their own retirements, with no princely sums to hand down the line.
The “people in their early thirties and early forties buying into those $1m condo units” may be in for an even tougher time.
hee hee. remember all the noise that people like bill clinton and courtney love made about 13–14 years ago, talking about this generation would not have the same benefits or lifestyle of their parents?
that’s why i plan of dying of renal failure/kidney disease within the next decade.
yeah, that’s the more reasonable outcome, I think, especially when the market for goofball yupster housing is totally saturated and there’s no gen-y demand for condominiums that expensive.
the sad thing is all this shit seems due to hit the fan during the second or third year of obama’s first term! he doesn’t have a chance of getting re-elected because he’ll be that dude that lets all of us wind up in the poorhouse!
The “people in their early thirties and early forties buying into those $1m condo units” may be in for an even tougher time.
SCHADENFREUDE ROCKS
remember all the noise that people like bill clinton and courtney love made about 13–14 years ago, talking about this generation would not have the same benefits or lifestyle of their parents?
because they were talking about paying for the baby boomer retirements, the majority of which are still looming on the horizon. and i, for one, certainly will not reach the level of lower middle class “success” that my parents did.
how do i digged gold