Half Changed World

The seller got back to us this evening with a counterproposal.  We’ve agreed on general terms, but her lawyer made some changes to the contract, so we want to run them by our lawyer.  So I can’t quite say we’ve bought a house, or even that we’ve got a contract do so, but we’re getting awfully close. 

I’m simultaneously excited and exhausted, and totally overwhelmed by the amount of work that we have to do over the next few months.  We’ve agreed on 60 days to close, but I’d like to get our current house on the market well before then.

Instead of obsessing here all the time, I’m starting a new blog, Feels Like Home, to post about the process of actually buying the house, selling this one, and moving.  It’s probably going to be fairly boring to anyone except those  — like Jackie— who are also going through the process (or plan on doing it soon).  But I think it will help me stay aware of the progress we’re making, not just the list of things that remain undone. 

I do promise to post some pictures.

As I indicated a couple of weeks ago, we may be moving.  We made an offer this evening.  We gave the seller 48 hours to respond, but I expect that she will accept: it’s a fair offer in a buyer’s market, and she likes us.  If she accepts, posting may become very erratic for the next month or so while we deal with all the logistics and get this house ready to put on the market.

Everyone we talk to seems to be assuming that we’re moving because we’re unhappy with the local school.  It’s certainly a factor, but not the only one.  Overall, I’d say that D’s had a pretty good year at school.  He’s learned to read (to the point that I find myself having to explain newspaper headlines), to count up to a thousand or so, to color between the lines.  He considers almost all of his classmates to be his friends, and was heartbroken last week when he was too sick to go to school to perform his role in the Black History Month skit.  (He was supposed to be the manager who hires Jackie Robinson.)

But we do have some frustrations with the school.  D’s teacher has been out sick for two extended periods.  That’s not something that the school can control, but it would be nice if they had sent a letter home saying something about it, rather than leaving me to interrogate D each day about whether she was back.  When I commented to the principal that it was hard on the kids for her to miss yet another day for training right after she had been out for 3 weeks, the principal got all defensive about it, instead of agreeing that it was unfortunate.  None of the kids in D’s class got awards (other than attendance) at the first honors assembly, because the teacher had been out and hadn’t submitted them, so the principal said that they’d have a separate assembly just for that class.  It didn’t happen.

I’m also frustrated by the lack of community.  Only a very few kids ever play on the playground after school.  The PTA is essentially inactive.  And in spite of D’s popularity — kids rush up to him at school to give him hugs — he’s been invited to exactly one playdate and one birthday party by kids from school.  (My guess is that this is a class thing — as Lareau discusses, working class and poor kids are far more likely to play with the kids next door than to go to an arranged playdate.)  And this might be ok if there were other neighborhood kids for the boys to play with, but there doesn’t seem to be much of that either.  T and I finally figured out that, having chosen a place to live based largely on its convenience and access to the metro, we’re surrounded by other people who chose a place to live largely on its convenience and access to the metro.  And our attempts to build community through drop-in-dinners have been a flop.

We’re also bursting at the seams a little bit.  I feel more than a bit silly and self-indulgent saying that, given that my parents raised 3 children to adulthood in an apartment smaller than this house, not to mention the vast majority of people in the world who live in smaller spaces.   But the idea of having a place to put the boys’ bikes that isn’t in the middle of the living room is really appealing.

Wish us luck.

Today’s book is The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining The American Dream, by Sheryll Cashin.  (I had actually requested it from the library, but not started it, when Bitch PhD wrote about it.  Dorcasina is also reading it.)  It’s a very interesting book, but ultimately one that left me somewhat frustrated.

The first section of the book simply reviews the facts about residential segregation in the United States.  Little of this section is new research, but Cashin lays out the facts in a readable conversational tone.  She points out that much of what we consider "integration" consists of small number of well-off minorities living in overwhelmingly white neighborhoods, as well as of neighborhoods that are in transition.    Very few whites — and even fewer whites with children — choose to live in neighborhoods that have a significant black presence, let alone that are majority black, even when such neighborhoods are less expensive than comparable majority-white neighborhoods.  (Cashin mostly discusses race in terms of black and white, although she notes that one type of stable integrated neighborhood is the multi-ethnic urban center.)  Cashin also notes that a significant number of blacks who could now afford to live in majority-white neighborhoods have chosen to live in majority-black communities where they are "more comfortable."

In the second section, Cashin makes a case that most of society is worse off because of the persistence of race and class segregation.  The ways in which poor urban minorities suffer have been well documented.  Cashin argues that middle-class whites also suffer because they have to spend more than they can afford and/or put up with horrible commutes in order to guarantee safe neighborhoods and decent schools for their kids.  (These sections echo some of the arguments from Perfect Madness and The Two-Income Trap.)  And for me, the most novel part of the book was Cashin’s discussion of how the problems of urban areas follow middle-class blacks into majority-black suburbs.  She spends a lot of time discussing Prince George’s County, MD, and why it still has mediocre schools and few retail shops, even though it is the most affluent majority-black county in the country. 

I found the third part of the book, in which Cashin discusses her hopes for the future, the weakest.  Cashin doesn’t really have much of a solution to offer to the problems she’s identified.  She calls for better enforcement of housing anti-discrimination laws, which I agree is a necessary, but not sufficient first step.  She supports school choice in the form of charter schools, but not vouchers, and talks approvingly of Raleigh’s busing scheme, but doesn’t directly address the issue that busing was a significant factor in pushing white families out of urban school districts.    She bewails our polarized political environment and the focus on suburban swing voters, but doesn’t discuss how gerrymandering penalizes communities that are geographically scattered. 

I like where Cashin’s aiming at; I just don’t see how we get from here to there.

Update: I really want to encourage anyone who is reading this in a feedreader to click over to the comments on this post and the next one.  If you’re only reading my posts, you’re missing out.

The NYTimes ran a bunch of letters in response to the article about childless cities.  One of them wrote:

"As someone who lived in San Francisco with two small boys, I think I know why there are few children in that city: It just isn’t a great place to be a kid.

My oldest son couldn’t learn to ride his bike on the hilly and congested streets. We didn’t have a backyard. And our neighborhood was barren on Halloween. (We drove to a friend’s suburban neighborhood to trick-or-treat)."

I grew up in the heart of Greenwich Village.  It was an amazing place to be on Halloween (the parade was over the top even then, and a 30 story apartment building is heaven for trick-or-treating), but overall it wasn’t a great place to be a small child (or to be the parent of a small child).  It’s true that someone always had to be with me if I wanted to go out to play, and I didn’t learn to ride a bike until I was an adult.

But it was a terrific place to be a teenager, because you could get anywhere without a car.  I started taking the subway to school in 7th grade.  I totally took for granted a diversity of people, of languages, of foods, of experiences.   Firefighters and drag queens were equally likely to be waiting on line in front of me at the supermarket.  And yet it was also a real community, where the butcher would have my parents’ order out for me without my saying my name.

One summer at camp, a kid made fun of me because I called McDonald’s "McDonald’s" rather than "Micky D’s" or "the Golden Arches."  I thought he was an idiot.  McDonald’s just wasn’t important enough in my life to warrant a nickname. Instead, I could make a passionate argument for why the Ray’s across the street from Jefferson Market library was the only one worth going to (inch-thick layers of toppings) and could go out to dinner in Chinatown with my Chinese-American boyfriend’s family without totally humiliating myself.

I have nothing against backyards.  I enjoy puttering around trying to grow tomatoes in our postage stamp of a backyard, and am sometimes envious of my friends who have yards big enough for swingsets or impromptu t-ball games.  But to say that San Francisco or New York is a bad place to be a kid because you won’t have a backyard displays an awfully limited view of childhood.

The New York Times had an article Thursday on the disappearance of families with children from otherwise thriving urban areas.

This topic certainly resonates around the blogs I read, from 11d to finslippy.  Lots of people have either moved out of cities or are struggling with the decision.  Between the cost of housing, and the low quality of many urban school systems, many sworn city-dwellers start to hear the call of the surbubs after a kid or two.

Res Ipsa wonders "is it necessarily a problem if there are neighborhoods or communities where there aren’t a lot of children?"

It certainly matters to those of us who value city living and who have kids.  I know I feel a stab of pain every time I see a family with young kids moving out of our neigbhorhood.  Their moving is one less family to advocate for the quality of the schools, one less family using the playgrounds and keeping them safe and clean, one less family with which my kids can spontaneously play. 

If you think (as I do) that our dependence on gasoline is a threat to both the world environment and to our national security, anything that forces people into suburban sprawl is a bad thing.

I also think it’s probably better for the education of poor kids in urban school systems when there are also middle-class kids in the same school systems, even if they rarely attend the same schools.  Having middle-class kids in the system brings both attention and money.  Affluent childless singles and empty-nesters may pay income and property taxes, but they tend to ignore the schools and — if anything — fight for lower tax rates.