wondering if other people who grew up in cities feel increasingly out of place in them now as they gentrify and the political and business powers that be increasingly try to smooth out the rough edges so that people have fewer and fewer places to be weird. was talking to my sister tonight and it turns out we both have been feeling similarly lol
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in reply to @margot's post:
i returned home to the city i grew up in after going to college/grad school elsewhere. in the year or two that i've been living here since then, it's been so disillusioning to watch this city grow increasingly hostile to homeless people. like i'll hear people repeat diversity training platitudes about how it's good the city is doing more for lgbtq+ rights, then without skipping a beat complain about the cops not doing enough about the people living in tents on the street. the careless heartlessness is just so confounding and agonizing to witness
it's utterly bizarre to me. like, the growing homeless population is clearly a problem, bc housing is becoming ridiculous, but they're not the problem, and there have always been homeless people in the city! it's as much their place as it is housed people.
like-- growing up of course you might be worried about a guy acting erratically, but the idea that you would just arrest them or get rid of them (somehow???) was so alien to me until i started hearing people talk about it here in the past decade or whatever
I grew up in a rural area so I cant weigh in, but that does remind me of an article in The Stranger where someone wrote a letter to the editor complaining about a gay man in a speedo walking around Green Lake. She said in the letter to "keep it in Cap Hill"
that's the thing, people talk about small town shit where everyone is in your business, but that's what cities are starting to feel like now!! who gives a shit!! let dudes walk around in a speedo!
it's all the downsides of constant surveillance with none of the upsides of community, lol
It's genuinely dog ass but they'll have to fuckin scrub me off the face of the earth before I give up city life.
on the one hand, i agree, but on the other, i keep thinking about kropotkin talking about how capital wants us to believe the value of the city lies in its location, when the value comes from the population and the workers, and capital is merely extracting that; and i wonder if the city life i want is something we can create elsewhere as well
(i don’t have an answer to this; it’s just something i’ve been struggling to reconcile)
Oh, I'm with you there. That interpretation by Kropotkin is large in my mind too, it's exactly why I care about the city. It's ours, really, all that infrastructure, the millions of tons of concrete, miles and miles of wire. We, physically, as a class, built it, and thus must assert our right to it. And surrendering all that work means we'd have to do it all again.
Probably that's the old street punk in me talking. :p
yeah. i don't think either conclusion is wrong, and like i said, it's something i'm struggling with figuring out myself. i guess what i worry about is whether its already ceding most of our resources to a fight on ground where capitalists have chosen, and where they have the most advantages. but idk!!
if there was an easy answer smarter ppl than me would've figured it out already lol