Maybe Bruce Wayne could buy my house

I’ve been trying to distract myself into more positive thinking lately, and to that end like any good Gen-X nerd I turned to comic books and podcasts. The Fortress of Baileytude showed up on Post this week, so I was happy to listen to Mike and Andy break down the original Batman comics by Bill Finger and Bob Kane. Of course, because I’m a depressed middle aged woman who can’t quit examining her own navel, all I got out of the delightful discussion of The Bat-Man straight up killing people in his original Detective Comics run was days of examination of my own relationship to Batman. You should listen to Mike and Andy for yourself though, because in an hour they cover Bruce Wayne fighting vampires and shit. It’s pretty good.

The husband is dealing with insurers at the vacant house in Lake Claire today, and tomorrow I’ll be working with insurers at the place we rent near the Beltline. It’s been ten days since The Great Atlanta Pipe Popping of Christmas 2022, and we’re all just now starting to dry out and move forward. As I have moved through the city these past ten days, there’s been water running along gutters and sidewalks all downtown, making me look up at all those vacant office buildings and have to wonder how much the damage was. Thousands of square feet unoccupied, but each floor with several bathrooms and all the walls with the same lack of real insulation as most Atlanta construction means what, exactly? Tens of millions in damages? Hundreds of millions in damages?

It turns out I’m not alone when I look up at all the vacant buildings and wonder. Atlanta Magazine landed this week at all the damp doorsteps with a thick thump and only a few answered questions about the hollow towers all around us. I would link to the January edition of the periodical where the Peachtree Center towers figure prominently, but the publication model of Atlanta Magazine doesn’t allow for that kind of thing. It can be difficult to make money in Atlanta, so it’s also quite difficult to share information here sometimes. I can’t blame anyone for putting up walls around what intellectual property they’ve managed to build in the city, just like I can’t blame anyone for wanting to protect their physical properties. But I can note when it’s a damn shame, so I will. Go to the library or pull an Atlanta Magazine out of the recycling bin if you missed the series of articles this month that start on page forty.

Atlanta isn’t alone in this weird real estate moment, where the streets are full of our unhoused neighbors and I can’t sell a three-story house in a sweet family neighborhood. This video essay outlines the same problem in San Francisco as well as many of the problems facing conversion from office space to living space for all the empty buildings. Because so many people want to live in the city, every space is weirdly overvalued, often making tax-write offs more valuable than actually doing anything with the space.

One of the problems we ran into with the house that still won’t sell, of course, was that we bought it pre-pandemic, when the costs of repairs and renovations were half what they are today. Whenever I’ve felt overwhelmed by the insurance and repair costs and effort at the vacant house or the home we’re renting, I’ve taken a grim sort of joy in the fact that the water damage and remediation are NOTHING in the face of what the managers of the holding companies for those vacant office buildings must be facing. Nameless corporations will be paying through the nose to fix problems in buildings they held empty for the tax write-offs last year. This year, of course, the damage must be fixed (another write-off), or the buildings sold at a “loss” (what the damn things are actually worth) if the repairs and tax credits don’t line up properly.

If Batman showed up in Atlanta, I would try to sell him the house in Lake Claire. In fact, all Bruce Wayne would have to do to save Atlanta would be to go around buying up real estate at its ridiculous list price and then sell those same properties back to the owners, or to communities, at the actual real price the properties should be. The title of the Atlanta Magazine article I read this week was “Reimagine Downtown”, and sure, the idea of Teacher Village, a building that will allegedly be affordable to educators, is something we can all get behind. However, knowing what we know about the way American cities work, I doubt teachers will be able to afford apartments in any of the redeveloped empty buildings. Even if you deeded the apartments directly to teachers, they couldn’t afford the property taxes, and so would likely have to flip the units immediately.

Maybe if the unoccupied buildings are all redeveloped quickly enough, the market will be glutted and prices will fall. It’s that or we turn into NYC, where empty apartments and store fronts are nothing but places to park idle money, and we still have echoing or silent structures guarded in the dark from our still unhoused neighbors, who sleep on the sidewalk or die in the cold just blocks from crowded emergency rooms. People die on the streets in Gotham all the time, I suspect, just like they do here, and Bruce Wayne never did shit about that in any of the stories I read.

I bought every issue of all the Bat family comics from 2000 to 2002. I could probably draw some panels from memory of those gorgeous two color Detective Comics written by Greg Rucka at the turn of the century. I loved Chuck Dixon’s run on Robin and Birds of Prey so much I bought the Wednesday drops religiously, back in my single days. I once sticker bombed three separate cities with a home made “Batgirl was a Librarian” design, which was how we spread memes before social media was a thing. I stopped wanting Batman to be real around 2003, when adulthood caught up with me, admittedly a little bit late, after I had dated my first rich guy and I saw how our society really works. Once you understand Bruce Wayne could fix so much for the cost of the Batmobile, you understand it’s all a little gross. The biggest laugh I had in 2022 from anything to do with comics was a joke about the cost of housing in the HBO animated Harley Quinn series.

In my re-imagined downtown, we would have those affordable apartments in Teacher Village. We would have our unhomed neighbors brought inside every night for actual human care, and a lot of people would be paid fairly for that kind of work. Downtown would be just as nice as Midtown around Piedmont Park, which is to say that yeah, bad things would still happen, but they would happen less, because everyone would have a place to live. I really do hope this happens in my lifetime - it’s possible, I think, that America could become more Northern European if we just handed the reins over to Millennials before they turn into what Gen-Xers like me have become, a bunch of middle aged nerds hiding in old comics. I already fear many of the Millenials have emulated both the best and worst of Gen-X by inhabiting burns, those great temporary cities of the imagination that are torched at the end of a week in a fit of nihilistic joy over *almost* making the kind of community we want.

My own vacant building sits in Lake Claire today. I can’t invite our unhoused neighbors to live there, because they would trash the place beyond what the storms did. It’s a lot of money, to take care of things, and to take care of people, so we build walls around all our properties. There’s too much empty construction and no way to let people live in it, and Bruce Wayne just wants to shove criminals in vats of acid without a trial. I used to love Batman. Now I just want him to buy my house.