Last week while I was at home, supposedly having MLK week off like I do every year, and working on my own exhaustion and burn out, the cops killed one of the Stop Cop City protestors. I had heard there were to be actions downtown Friday in response to the protester’s death, but then it turned out that COVID had come for our house at last, starting with the teens. I had about two and a half days where I was still operational, running to CVS, getting the tests done, making everyone eat home made chicken soup before it hit me. Our house was not alone in our respiratory infection - NyQuil and the generic equivalents were out at two drugstores and the Ponce Kroger at the end of last week. If someone coughs in Atlanta right now, assume it’s the flu or COVID.
Saturday night while the streets around my workplace were full of furious young people determined to make the death of their friend more news, I was inside, knowing we were all COVID positive. Sunday someone tried to call me from Inmate Phone Services, but I missed the call because I was burning up with a fever. Monday I found an urgent care that would take our insurance wholly with no co-pay, and went to get the only packet of anti-virals our house would need. The kids both bounced back after about forty-eight hours of sickness with nothing more than over the counter meds, but I laid in bed on Monday feeling like my bones were glass and my face was made of cement.
By the time I looked at my phone on Tuesday, I had missed two calls from Inmate Phone Services. Prisoners can’t leave messages because someone has to accept the call. There’s no way to know who was calling me, or exactly from where. I checked on my closest friends via text, because COVID took my voice. I have no idea who was calling for help.
I did manage to stay awake all day Tuesday, and I might do that again today, my phone close at hand in case someone reached out again. I want to know who called me, and I want them to know I didn’t pick up the phone because I was sick and asleep when they called both times. I’m really sorry, and I hope you got the help you needed, or will call again.
The city is burning up with respiratory infections, which wouldn’t be so bad if people weren’t forced to go to work sick. The city is burning up with protests, which we wouldn’t have so bad if the city council would just listen to the people who live here. Cop City has been a very unpopular idea from the beginning, and insisting it has to happen just like making people go back to work when they’re sick. Big corporations can push those ideas through, but everything will just get worse, and all you’ve done is make everyone angrier and more tired.
I’m lucky enough to have sick days and insurance, and kids who have recovered quickly. I’m on day three of anti-viral medications that I almost didn’t go get because I was worried about the cost. I still feel really bad, but I have hope that I’ll get better.
I don’t know who called me from Inmate Phone Services, but I suspect it was someone swept up by the cops last week who needs help. Keep calling, if you read this. I don’t have much of a voice this week, but I’m keeping the phone close so I don’t miss your call again. I’m too sick to do much, but I am paying attention. The virus took my voice, but I’ll be as much help as I can be, as soon as I get back on my feet.
Thursday, January 26, 2023
Thursday, January 19, 2023
You Can Look Stupid When You're Having Fun
I went to a reading last week at Dad’s Garage for “A Night At The Sweet Gum Head”, a great book about Atlanta night life in the 1970’s and 80’s, with a focus on a groundbreaking drag club. Local history is extremely difficult to write, and I admired how the author artfully covered some of Atlanta’s more notorious and entertaining figures from my childhood when the book came out in 2021. The author read some of his work in progress on another bit of Atlanta history that has national impact, and I was so happy some of my friends had convinced me to attend. I needed a night out, and challenging material, and the reading provided both.
Also at the reading were some really good poets, and the theme of the night was one of Atlanta gay club subculture. After the reading, I was talking to some friends, and one of the authors came up to say hi. Someone introduced me, and I could tell the poet was confused as to why I (a giant cisgender woman) was there. I introduced myself and was nervous because of the racy theme of the readings, so after I said my name I meant to say “I hope to see more local gay poetry like yours available” as a compliment, but what came out of my mouth was “I hope to see more local gay porn available”, and even the author, who had just been reading about fisting or something, looked a little shocked. Because I was too embarrassed to fix my mistake, and we were inside an improv venue, I then decided to double down and stick to the bit with a completely straight face. I just went ahead riding my embarrassing verbal slip as if it were intentional for another awkward minute or two. There are likely now a few people in town who think I’m some sort of edgy activist trying to get gay porn into local libraries or something. I’m not, but fuck it, there’s always been a fine line between the racier Harlequins and soft core anyway. Eventually I’ll meet the poet again and we can laugh it all off, I hope.
One day I’ll be able to talk to people without shoving my whole foot down my throat, and then broadcasting my mistakes. That day is not today. What I actually said was way more embarrassing and possibly professionally damaging, so the quotes presented here have been edited. I swear on the grave of Truman Capote, the spirit if not the letter of the truth has been represented here. The gaffe happened because I was tired, and outside my comfort zone, and I was just a few days away from my annual January vacation week. Me then riding the gaffe into the conversation was one hundred percent the result of poor socialization though, but I think Capote would have enjoyed the whole thing immensely. What is Southern Literature but an embarrassing bit of history overlaid with self-serving mythology anyway? For a few years now, I’ve made a point of taking the week of MLK Day off. Not only is traffic more intense around the national holiday in Atlanta, but I tend to work through the December holidays as much as possible, so by mid-January I need the break. The need for a week off was especially pressing this year, with the water damage from the winter weather and unsellable house pressure becoming so unbearable that my two full work days before the week off were full of errors. I probably should have just called in sick, but so much needed to be done before I left for a week. I still showed up those last two days, and did my job, if much less than at my best. The guilt of mistakes made Thursday and Friday a week ago haunt me, if no one else. It’s like I started stumbling the night of the author reading, and couldn’t recover out of exhaustion until the end of the week.
I love my job, but I think it might be hurting me. This is more often the case when working for non-profits than not. I know the signs of burnout, the confusion, the late starts to meetings. What I really need is a vacation, but like everything else that’s on hold until the house sells. The husband has suggested FMLA, which I could easily get with all that’s going on, but I’m trying to hold that option in reserve. We can’t afford any missed paychecks anyhow. I truly do want to keep my position at least until I’m fifty, or longer if I can. The only question is how much my own professional pride – a dumb, stubborn sort of pride that means I agonize over dumb mistakes likely no one else will remember a week later – can take.
Which leads me to wonder what sort of work I’ll have at all between fifty and seventy-five. My goals between twenty-five and fifty have mostly been accomplished, and my youngest child will graduate High School just a few months before I hit the half-century mark. I could just continue to push forward at the job I love, pushing to help make the city easier to live in the best ways I know how, but there’s a big question of how to handle the stress in healthy ways over decades. I’m looking for answers, and I have just a few more years to find the key that will help me stay more than eight years, my current record with a single employer. Like a lot of people in my generation, my work history is checkered with organizational lay-offs and long stretches of contract work. I’ve never really had the opportunity to work for an organization more than five years, except for the international corporation I had eight years of before leaving sick with the knowledge that corporate America was not for me.
Someone I was once quite close to leaves Atlanta tomorrow. He’s striking out for Portland, like my sister did, like others I know have in recent years. I know he’s making the right decision for himself, and I’ll see him again. I’m still here fighting to make Atlanta better, but for how long? I feel like the city is right on the edge of something even bigger and more beautiful than it has ever had before, if the empty office buildings can get converted to housing. I can stay, and watch the dirty south become a little shinier and better, or I can leave when my daughters no longer need me to hold their hands daily, and homestead in a state safer for young women. I could live in a state where my job would be protected when I make a dumb verbal slip at a reading, should it come back to bite me in the ass professionally. There are states where I can publish stories about my life more truthfully, without fear, the way the poets I heard at the reading do.
I admire the way the author of “A Night At The Sweet Gum Head” was able to relay a truthful story about Atlanta without fear or over editing, even though he admitted in the talk after that he struggled with what to publish and what to keep private. That’s something I wrestle with too, constantly, even though I largely publish just for myself. The comedian Michelle Williams once said “Blogs are a conversation no one wanted to have.”*, and I’m okay with throwing these posts out once a week solely as a form of personal record keeping. I need to keep track of my own mistakes, so that I can figure out how not to repeat them. I need to find the keys to managing stress better, both personally and professionally, so I can quit shoving my foot down my throat. Local history, at its best, shows us how much better we are now than we were in the past. I hope that’s true of my own writing, too.
*“Joke Show”, Michelle Williams. 2018, Netflix
Also at the reading were some really good poets, and the theme of the night was one of Atlanta gay club subculture. After the reading, I was talking to some friends, and one of the authors came up to say hi. Someone introduced me, and I could tell the poet was confused as to why I (a giant cisgender woman) was there. I introduced myself and was nervous because of the racy theme of the readings, so after I said my name I meant to say “I hope to see more local gay poetry like yours available” as a compliment, but what came out of my mouth was “I hope to see more local gay porn available”, and even the author, who had just been reading about fisting or something, looked a little shocked. Because I was too embarrassed to fix my mistake, and we were inside an improv venue, I then decided to double down and stick to the bit with a completely straight face. I just went ahead riding my embarrassing verbal slip as if it were intentional for another awkward minute or two. There are likely now a few people in town who think I’m some sort of edgy activist trying to get gay porn into local libraries or something. I’m not, but fuck it, there’s always been a fine line between the racier Harlequins and soft core anyway. Eventually I’ll meet the poet again and we can laugh it all off, I hope.
One day I’ll be able to talk to people without shoving my whole foot down my throat, and then broadcasting my mistakes. That day is not today. What I actually said was way more embarrassing and possibly professionally damaging, so the quotes presented here have been edited. I swear on the grave of Truman Capote, the spirit if not the letter of the truth has been represented here. The gaffe happened because I was tired, and outside my comfort zone, and I was just a few days away from my annual January vacation week. Me then riding the gaffe into the conversation was one hundred percent the result of poor socialization though, but I think Capote would have enjoyed the whole thing immensely. What is Southern Literature but an embarrassing bit of history overlaid with self-serving mythology anyway? For a few years now, I’ve made a point of taking the week of MLK Day off. Not only is traffic more intense around the national holiday in Atlanta, but I tend to work through the December holidays as much as possible, so by mid-January I need the break. The need for a week off was especially pressing this year, with the water damage from the winter weather and unsellable house pressure becoming so unbearable that my two full work days before the week off were full of errors. I probably should have just called in sick, but so much needed to be done before I left for a week. I still showed up those last two days, and did my job, if much less than at my best. The guilt of mistakes made Thursday and Friday a week ago haunt me, if no one else. It’s like I started stumbling the night of the author reading, and couldn’t recover out of exhaustion until the end of the week.
I love my job, but I think it might be hurting me. This is more often the case when working for non-profits than not. I know the signs of burnout, the confusion, the late starts to meetings. What I really need is a vacation, but like everything else that’s on hold until the house sells. The husband has suggested FMLA, which I could easily get with all that’s going on, but I’m trying to hold that option in reserve. We can’t afford any missed paychecks anyhow. I truly do want to keep my position at least until I’m fifty, or longer if I can. The only question is how much my own professional pride – a dumb, stubborn sort of pride that means I agonize over dumb mistakes likely no one else will remember a week later – can take.
Which leads me to wonder what sort of work I’ll have at all between fifty and seventy-five. My goals between twenty-five and fifty have mostly been accomplished, and my youngest child will graduate High School just a few months before I hit the half-century mark. I could just continue to push forward at the job I love, pushing to help make the city easier to live in the best ways I know how, but there’s a big question of how to handle the stress in healthy ways over decades. I’m looking for answers, and I have just a few more years to find the key that will help me stay more than eight years, my current record with a single employer. Like a lot of people in my generation, my work history is checkered with organizational lay-offs and long stretches of contract work. I’ve never really had the opportunity to work for an organization more than five years, except for the international corporation I had eight years of before leaving sick with the knowledge that corporate America was not for me.
Someone I was once quite close to leaves Atlanta tomorrow. He’s striking out for Portland, like my sister did, like others I know have in recent years. I know he’s making the right decision for himself, and I’ll see him again. I’m still here fighting to make Atlanta better, but for how long? I feel like the city is right on the edge of something even bigger and more beautiful than it has ever had before, if the empty office buildings can get converted to housing. I can stay, and watch the dirty south become a little shinier and better, or I can leave when my daughters no longer need me to hold their hands daily, and homestead in a state safer for young women. I could live in a state where my job would be protected when I make a dumb verbal slip at a reading, should it come back to bite me in the ass professionally. There are states where I can publish stories about my life more truthfully, without fear, the way the poets I heard at the reading do.
I admire the way the author of “A Night At The Sweet Gum Head” was able to relay a truthful story about Atlanta without fear or over editing, even though he admitted in the talk after that he struggled with what to publish and what to keep private. That’s something I wrestle with too, constantly, even though I largely publish just for myself. The comedian Michelle Williams once said “Blogs are a conversation no one wanted to have.”*, and I’m okay with throwing these posts out once a week solely as a form of personal record keeping. I need to keep track of my own mistakes, so that I can figure out how not to repeat them. I need to find the keys to managing stress better, both personally and professionally, so I can quit shoving my foot down my throat. Local history, at its best, shows us how much better we are now than we were in the past. I hope that’s true of my own writing, too.
*“Joke Show”, Michelle Williams. 2018, Netflix
Thursday, January 12, 2023
I currently pay over $100 per day in rent. This is the story of why.
Until I was about 9 years old, my parents were renters. We moved every year, sometimes more than once in a year when I was little, depending on my dad’s job or whatever drama my mom was into. My parents only became homeowners because Ronald Reagan told all the poor whites like my parents that they should own homes, and made home ownership possible through a combination of HUD loans and new cheap suburbs off interstate exits in what were recently cow fields. This was part of a larger effort to get poor white people out of cities in the 1980’s and it worked. I was to spend the rest of my childhood isolated from social services, after school programs, and streets with sidewalks. Some years later, one of my sisters entered a rehab program after her own childhood ended, and discovered several of our former neighbors from the cheap aluminum sided HUD neighborhood all in the same program. Moving us out of the city in the 1980’s didn’t shield us from drugs or violence, it just limited our access to taxpayer benefits we really could have used, and kept us from opportunities we sorely needed. I vowed I would raise my own kids in a proper city after being robbed of the experience.
When it came time to start my own family, I had been renting near Little Five in Atlanta for several years, and it made sense to buy in the neighborhood. The husband came to our marriage with an inheritance from his grandmother, and we bought a tiny converted warehouse just off Dekalb Avenue, the perfect starter home. For years after our mortgage and taxes all together were only $880 per month, a figure that seems laughable now. I loved that loft, but the husband soon came to regret the purchase. Technically we were in Inman Park, but once the heroin dealer moved in a couple of units over, the illusion that we lived somewhere really nice was often punctured by police calls on the condo complex, and memorably, a body being taken out once or twice. I didn’t like it, but I knew the heroin dealer and would wave hi to him as he hung out in the parking lot. I enrolled our small daughters in self defense classes for children and kept a close eye, because otherwise I loved that place. I lived in the warehouse loft longer than I’ve ever lived in any one place in my whole life - how could I not love that kind of stability?
My real problems with the first home we owned were the condo board that did nothing to remove the heroin dealer, and the asshole who owned the brown lot that was next to our condo. I successfully took the landowner next door to court for his illegal dumping, a battle that took years with the (at the time) very dysfunctional codes enforcement office of the city of Atlanta. I also tried to be part of the condo board, but there were several neighbors who would oppose any sort of improvement because they were hardline fiscal conservatives. These neighbors would not spend a dime for lawyers to evict the heroin dealer. No money for lawyers to address the illegal dumping in the brown lot next door. No money to address the ongoing parking problems, etc. etc. We also outgrew the place after about a decade; it really was tiny. The final straw came when a new owner of the brownlot next door built a house two meters away from our wall – we owned an end unit – and did about 40k in damage to the unit we owned in the process. The husband and I successfully collected 20k in the builder’s insurance, but a lawyer we had to pay on our own (again, I can not stress how much our condo board sucked) advised us that we would have to spend 15k to collect the other 20k in damages. We gave up – it was time to move anyway. We marked the price of the condo down 20k and sold the thing.
We chose to rent for a year in between selling the Dekalb Avenue condo and becoming homeowners again. The sale of the first house didn’t profit us. By the time everything was said and done, we broke even on the money we poured into the place. We had enough in the bank after the sale that we could pay off the husband’s law school loans and pay for me to get much needed dental implants in Costa Rica. We looked for an entire year for anything in the same school district that we could afford, but we were victims of what architects call “the missing middle”. All the homes at the time in our school district were either out of reach or just as tiny as what we had left. Eventually we thought we scored by buying the house in Lake Claire that became our biggest mistake.
I remember, vividly, the gut feeling I first had entering the place for the first time – a strong sense of dislike. I actually have the email I wrote the realtor apologizing for how negative I had been in our first walk through. Another reminder to always, always trust your gut. I let myself be talked into the purchase because everyone told us this house was a great investment, and the husband really wanted it. I had always loved our tiny loft on Dekalb more than he had, and he had let me talk him into our first house purchase, so I let him talk me into our second. Of course, COVID had a huge role in ruining the investment, and having to be at the house all the time for two years made me dislike it even more. The pandemic put the husband out of work or underemployed for 18 months, and then when full employment came back, the cost of the fixes the fixer-upper needed had all doubled. The husband will have lost his inheritance on this one bad investment, and it’s not really his fault. Everyone really did believe in Atlanta real estate as a way to safely park and grow money - it had been, for lots of people who also had inheritances, until the world changed. The Lake Claire house just re-listed. People are looking at it again, and I’m not allowed, nor do I want to be, anywhere near the process. I’m too honest. Someone is going to see that big house, at that location, at that price, and think they too are making a score. The house will be a score for someone who wants to pour money into it, who wants to raise their kids in a great school district and has the kind of cash to make the place livable. But just like we didn’t have the 15k to sue the shitty developer who still owed us 20k in Inman Park, we didn’t have whatever it would cost to keep the giant Lake Claire wreck going for some miniscule payout in another five or ten years.
My two experiences in home ownership have, therefore, pretty much convinced me I’m probably not meant to be a homeowner. Generations of my family were renters in city apartments or houses before World War 2 (and many after). Those who have owned homes have experienced grief similar to mine. Houses are always ending up devalued because the neighborhood changed, or there’s a natural disaster, or the home falls into disrepair after ruinous medical debt. After the construction damage to our Dekalb Avenue loft, I thought I had moved into a home in Lake Claire where construction damage wouldn’t happen to me again. Alas, building behind us happened almost immediately, causing run-off issues twice. I was too tired from battling with the previous place to try fighting construction damage again. I ended up just concentrating on remediating the problem myself, because it cost me the same amount in labor and time. Houses are nothing but heartache, and I’ve had enough.
The rental townhouse we’re in now might be expensive, but it’s on the landlord to fix the water issue from Christmas. The rental town house has a condo board, I’m sure, but that’s none of my problem. I had hoped not to move the children more than twice under the age of eighteen, given my own background, so I’ll pay over one hundred dollars a day in rent to prevent changing their public school district as I’ve now moved them three times. This place is stable, and has all the opportunities of a city, and it’s stability and opportunities I’m after as a parent. There isn’t even a heroin dealer to wave at in the parking lot here. It’s worth more than one hundred dollars per day to stay where the kids can walk to everything they could possibly want or need. I will fight to my last breath to make sure my two girls can graduate from the school where they’re enrolled. They’re true Atlantans, through and through, conceived and born and raised so far here. I won’t screw that up by making them graduate High School somewhere else.
I don’t think I’m meant to own a house, and as soon as someone takes the Lake Claire home off our hands - through purchase or, as is increasingly likely, foreclosure - I’ll be extremely relieved. The monthly payment on my recent homeowner nightmare is/was even more than we pay to live in the rental, and don’t get me started on the energy costs. This last adventure in homeownership has bankrupted me in every way but the legal one, and that’s not something that’s off the table for 2023. The American Dream, as I once had someone from Europe tell me, is what happens when you’re asleep. I’ve always been an insomniac.
When it came time to start my own family, I had been renting near Little Five in Atlanta for several years, and it made sense to buy in the neighborhood. The husband came to our marriage with an inheritance from his grandmother, and we bought a tiny converted warehouse just off Dekalb Avenue, the perfect starter home. For years after our mortgage and taxes all together were only $880 per month, a figure that seems laughable now. I loved that loft, but the husband soon came to regret the purchase. Technically we were in Inman Park, but once the heroin dealer moved in a couple of units over, the illusion that we lived somewhere really nice was often punctured by police calls on the condo complex, and memorably, a body being taken out once or twice. I didn’t like it, but I knew the heroin dealer and would wave hi to him as he hung out in the parking lot. I enrolled our small daughters in self defense classes for children and kept a close eye, because otherwise I loved that place. I lived in the warehouse loft longer than I’ve ever lived in any one place in my whole life - how could I not love that kind of stability?
My real problems with the first home we owned were the condo board that did nothing to remove the heroin dealer, and the asshole who owned the brown lot that was next to our condo. I successfully took the landowner next door to court for his illegal dumping, a battle that took years with the (at the time) very dysfunctional codes enforcement office of the city of Atlanta. I also tried to be part of the condo board, but there were several neighbors who would oppose any sort of improvement because they were hardline fiscal conservatives. These neighbors would not spend a dime for lawyers to evict the heroin dealer. No money for lawyers to address the illegal dumping in the brown lot next door. No money to address the ongoing parking problems, etc. etc. We also outgrew the place after about a decade; it really was tiny. The final straw came when a new owner of the brownlot next door built a house two meters away from our wall – we owned an end unit – and did about 40k in damage to the unit we owned in the process. The husband and I successfully collected 20k in the builder’s insurance, but a lawyer we had to pay on our own (again, I can not stress how much our condo board sucked) advised us that we would have to spend 15k to collect the other 20k in damages. We gave up – it was time to move anyway. We marked the price of the condo down 20k and sold the thing.
We chose to rent for a year in between selling the Dekalb Avenue condo and becoming homeowners again. The sale of the first house didn’t profit us. By the time everything was said and done, we broke even on the money we poured into the place. We had enough in the bank after the sale that we could pay off the husband’s law school loans and pay for me to get much needed dental implants in Costa Rica. We looked for an entire year for anything in the same school district that we could afford, but we were victims of what architects call “the missing middle”. All the homes at the time in our school district were either out of reach or just as tiny as what we had left. Eventually we thought we scored by buying the house in Lake Claire that became our biggest mistake.
I remember, vividly, the gut feeling I first had entering the place for the first time – a strong sense of dislike. I actually have the email I wrote the realtor apologizing for how negative I had been in our first walk through. Another reminder to always, always trust your gut. I let myself be talked into the purchase because everyone told us this house was a great investment, and the husband really wanted it. I had always loved our tiny loft on Dekalb more than he had, and he had let me talk him into our first house purchase, so I let him talk me into our second. Of course, COVID had a huge role in ruining the investment, and having to be at the house all the time for two years made me dislike it even more. The pandemic put the husband out of work or underemployed for 18 months, and then when full employment came back, the cost of the fixes the fixer-upper needed had all doubled. The husband will have lost his inheritance on this one bad investment, and it’s not really his fault. Everyone really did believe in Atlanta real estate as a way to safely park and grow money - it had been, for lots of people who also had inheritances, until the world changed. The Lake Claire house just re-listed. People are looking at it again, and I’m not allowed, nor do I want to be, anywhere near the process. I’m too honest. Someone is going to see that big house, at that location, at that price, and think they too are making a score. The house will be a score for someone who wants to pour money into it, who wants to raise their kids in a great school district and has the kind of cash to make the place livable. But just like we didn’t have the 15k to sue the shitty developer who still owed us 20k in Inman Park, we didn’t have whatever it would cost to keep the giant Lake Claire wreck going for some miniscule payout in another five or ten years.
My two experiences in home ownership have, therefore, pretty much convinced me I’m probably not meant to be a homeowner. Generations of my family were renters in city apartments or houses before World War 2 (and many after). Those who have owned homes have experienced grief similar to mine. Houses are always ending up devalued because the neighborhood changed, or there’s a natural disaster, or the home falls into disrepair after ruinous medical debt. After the construction damage to our Dekalb Avenue loft, I thought I had moved into a home in Lake Claire where construction damage wouldn’t happen to me again. Alas, building behind us happened almost immediately, causing run-off issues twice. I was too tired from battling with the previous place to try fighting construction damage again. I ended up just concentrating on remediating the problem myself, because it cost me the same amount in labor and time. Houses are nothing but heartache, and I’ve had enough.
The rental townhouse we’re in now might be expensive, but it’s on the landlord to fix the water issue from Christmas. The rental town house has a condo board, I’m sure, but that’s none of my problem. I had hoped not to move the children more than twice under the age of eighteen, given my own background, so I’ll pay over one hundred dollars a day in rent to prevent changing their public school district as I’ve now moved them three times. This place is stable, and has all the opportunities of a city, and it’s stability and opportunities I’m after as a parent. There isn’t even a heroin dealer to wave at in the parking lot here. It’s worth more than one hundred dollars per day to stay where the kids can walk to everything they could possibly want or need. I will fight to my last breath to make sure my two girls can graduate from the school where they’re enrolled. They’re true Atlantans, through and through, conceived and born and raised so far here. I won’t screw that up by making them graduate High School somewhere else.
I don’t think I’m meant to own a house, and as soon as someone takes the Lake Claire home off our hands - through purchase or, as is increasingly likely, foreclosure - I’ll be extremely relieved. The monthly payment on my recent homeowner nightmare is/was even more than we pay to live in the rental, and don’t get me started on the energy costs. This last adventure in homeownership has bankrupted me in every way but the legal one, and that’s not something that’s off the table for 2023. The American Dream, as I once had someone from Europe tell me, is what happens when you’re asleep. I’ve always been an insomniac.
Thursday, January 05, 2023
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)