Jobs OR Housing? – That Makes No Sense

 

About a month ago, a letter to the editor of the Leelanau Enterprise observed that the “Share the Bay” signs were a clever ploy on the part of the developer’s publicity campaign for the RV park/campground. I checked with Rachel Dean, the person I was pretty sure had come up with the slogan herself, in hopes she would write to the Enterprise to correct the wrong assumption, but she was simply amused that her idea had been taken -- mistaken, that is – as part of a commercial publicity campaign. 

 

The facts are these: Rachel came up with the slogan, ordered the signs, paid for them herself, and everyone who took a sign reimbursed her for it. It was a totally local, grassroots movement. 

 

Did the letter-writer make a “reasonable assumption”? That’s what he said in his defense when I stopped him on the sidewalk to give him the scoop, because I don’t like “misinformation” circulating in our community. Community, in fact, is the key issue as he sees it, and he finds the slogan, on the other side of the “Share the Bay” signs, “Build our community,” to be a wrongful use of the term. He says community means people who put down roots and commit to a place, not “transients” (his word). 

 

In the course of our brief conversation, I learned that the letter-writer thinks affordable housing would be a better use of the property in question. He says we need affordable housing for (his examples) “firefighters and teachers.” Well, county firefighters are all volunteer: they have other jobs, or they don’t live here. As for teachers, we won’t need teachers much longer if the school keeps shrinking, as it will continue to do without other kinds of jobs.

 

What I see, from having lived and run a business here for 28 years and having spent many a long, cold winter here (working a variety of part-time jobs over the years to pay my winter bookstore bills) is that Leelanau County’s economy has always been seasonal. Agriculture and tourism: that’s the basic economy. Because of farming and summer people and tourists, we have schools and libraries and retail and other businesses. And summer people and tourists provide jobs by keeping businesses in business. Even year-round jobs exist because the seasonal economy carries so many businesses through the calendar year.

 

How long would Northport have a grocery store without “transients”? (That’s a peculiar term to apply to tourists, anyway, isn’t it? And where do “summer people” fit into the equation?) Omena’s post office would have disappeared long ago, had it not been for the old Solley’s bookstore, and believe me, bookstores in these little seasonal villages – Northport, Leland, Suttons Bay, Glen Arbor -- only survive because summer business is good to us!

 

(A former landlord of mine told me years ago, “The key to a seasonal business is to keep it seasonal.” Lately I have begun taking what I call “seasonal retirement,” and at my age I make no apologies for that. My two younger sisters and most of my friends are fully retired. I’m not. And, as I’ve already said, I have spent many winters right here and know whereof I speak.)

 

One of the keys to a viable local community, it seems to me, is understanding its basic economy. Yes, we do need year-round local housing for workers, seasonal and otherwise, but we also need the jobs that seasonal visitors bring. Affordable housing without jobs isn’t going to have many takers. A Habitat house in Cherry Home for a woman whose job was in Traverse City couldn’t hold her long. Financially, it doesn’t work.

 

Another key is listening to what local people say they need, rather than coming in from the outside to tell them what’s good for them. Many of the supporters for the RV park/campground remember the old Timber Shores campground because they worked there, and some of their children worked there. They remember how much positive impact the campground had on the community they’ve lived in for two or three generations. 

 

I live out in the township, not in the village, and I’ll be far away when winter comes, but my bookstore is now launched into its 29^th year, and I can’t imagine moving it out of Northport. This is my home. I would not want to cast a deciding vote on the RV park/campground issue, and I am as concerned as anyone else that it be properly run, if it happens, to prevent any negative consequences for Grand Traverse Bay. Trying to force a choice between jobs and housing, though? That’s a non-starter. 

 

And if the choice were. Between a campground and condos, I’d vote for the campground any day of the week.

American Life as Salad Bar

A restaurant salad bar generally offers more variety than the house salad, but it comes with a price: Having been seated comfortably at your table, you now have to get up again, go through a line, and bring that loaded salad plate safely back to the table yourself. Instead of being served, that is, you must serve yourself. Well, if I wanted to assemble my own salad, I could have stayed at home.

There is a marvelous scene in the movie “Back to the Future” (one of my favorite movies), where actor Michael J. Fox, whose character has been transported back in time, drives into a service station for gas. He has grown up with self-serve gas stations and is astonished by attendants rushing out to fill his tank and clean his windshield. “Check your oil, sir?” they used to ask. Yes, really. A customer never had to get out of the car. Hence the name service station.

All forms of domestic travel and much travel overseas (unless one ventured far off the beaten paths) used to be similarly luxurious, though what was ordinary at the time was not recognized as luxury. Being checked in at the airport, having one’s baggage checked, boarding a train, ordering a meal in the dining car — you didn’t have to be a first-class passenger paying the highest price to be attended by personnel whose job was to take care of you. That’s just the way things were. Nowadays almost every aspect of American life that used to offer customer care is becoming or has already become a serve-yourself  maze. One after another, businesses are hurrying to eliminate staff and cut services, thus cutting costs but not — please note — cutting prices. You can go through a checkout lane that “lets” you scan all items yourself, but you don’t get a price break for doing it. Someone lost a job, and now you’re doing that person’s old job for free. 

Some people like the new way. Maybe you like it. Self-service eliminates the need to interact with other human beings, so maybe you feel more independent, more self-sufficient in this brave new world. Just whip out your smart-aleck phone and sail through life in a self-enclosed bubble. It’s just like staying home, isn’t it? Often it is staying home (shopping online), and when it isn’t, it might as well be (except that Siri is watching your every move and hears your every word).

(On the other hand, one-time luxuries such as manicures and pedicures, facials and massages, have now become part of everyday life for many Americans of all ages and stations of life. Could it be that we crave human interaction, after all? That we want to be, once in a while, cared for by others and are willing — if we can afford it, if we haven’t lost our jobs — to pay for the privilege?)

So far, not every alternative to self-service has vanished. Not only can I visit a retail store, I can even choose a check-out lane employing a real person. I can buy stamps at the post office from a real person behind the counter. And if I go to the right restaurant, I can sit down at my leisure while someone comes to take my order and brings me my salad. But how long will a world with alternatives last? 

An article in the most recent Atlantic magazine gives a chilling account of jobs being lost to robots in coffee shops and fast food restaurants, the very “service industry” where we were assured there would continue to be work for human beings even as manufacturing jobs were lost to robots! 

So consider trying this today, though of course you don’t have to: Wait in the lane for a human being to check your groceries. Buy your books in a bookstore and your stamps at a post office. Patronize the coffee shop or bar where your drinks are made by a human barista or bartender. Because how much longer will this kind of life be possible? You don’t want to do everything yourself, do you? 

Although you’re paying, I contend that it’s more than a commercial transaction when there are real human beings involved. The waitress may not have been waiting for you to come into her life, but she will be happy to bring your salad to the table. 

“No More New Clothes!”

Somewhere recently on Facebook I saw a post urging women to stop buying new clothes. Since I almost never do, having chosen a path in life that does not facilitate that kind of spending, I might have scrolled on by without a second thought. Ah, but the curse of a philosopher is to be never far from second thoughts on any subject whatsoever! And so the idea stuck in my mind. 

I don’t remember now the reasons given for the plea, though it seemed to have something to do with changing the world, rather as Lysistrata urged the women of Athens (it was Athens, wasn’t it?) to refuse sex to their husbands until the men agreed to put an end to war.  Perhaps the idea in buying no more new clothes was for women to show their independence from the fashion industry and to punish clothing designers for the narrow range of acceptable images of women in their advertising.

In the middle of the night, though, wide awake from a dream, I found myself musing on the radically changed world we might expect if, by a snap of her fingers, that one woman on Facebook could enact her scenario. Imagine that all American women (to simplify the story, only American women) were suddenly to stop buying any new clothes at all, either for themselves or for their families. What might we expect to see?

Clothing stores are empty, sales staff laid off, shopping malls dark. All those enticing jobs for teen girls and young women gone! (Your friends' children? Your grandchildren?) Well, those jobs are vanishing, anyway, you might say, with everyone shopping online, but the online businesses would go dark, too, remember, if selling new clothes is what they’re all about. Warehouses, factories, shipping facilities all close, and those jobs too vanish overnight. 

(Who are the people whose jobs have gone up in smoke? Can you see them in your mind’s eye?)

Now picture the scene at thrift shops and consignment businesses across the country. As secondhand shoppers, the wealthy and leisured still have a big advantage, for they don't need to fit shopping around a work schedule, as do the women who have always depended on secondhand clothing to make themselves presentable. So now we have consumers competing against each other for the most desirable used items, and those with the most time and money will come off best. Yet again. No big change there. 

But how about the supply of those desirable secondhand clothing items? Where will they come from? To see the problem, we need to look further down the road. 

When women with comfortable incomes no longer buy new clothes (while competing with women of lower incomes for the “nicer” used items), they won’t have as much used clothing to send out into the world. We can expect donations to thrift shops to decline rapidly in quality. In fact, it’s pretty easy to imagine the wealthy and leisured forming their own little clubs of privilege and circulating the best used clothing items among themselves, circumventing any need to mix with the hoi polloi at all.

A look beyond our own fortunate borders is in order here, too. Jobs for garment workers around the world — largely women at or close to the lower rungs of the economic ladder — disappear in large numbers, as do other jobs depending on the clothing industry. American women are no longer fashion’s slaves, but the real price of their freedom, as usual, is born elsewhere.

Let me step back at this point from my thought experiment to say that I have never been one to urge Americans to “Buy, buy, buy!” (One of my customers told me recently, “You’re a better friend than you are a business person.” I’d really like to be good in both roles, but I certainly don’t want to excel in the latter by sacrificing the former.) In general, Americans buy too much, much more than they need or can reasonably use. Shopping, whether online or in stores, and whether the shopper is buying new or buying used, can be an addiction, a way to self-medicate and avoid dealing with more difficult issues in personal and/or political life. 

I’ll go further and say that I do not regard unlimited economic growth as a cure for the ills of our soul-sick country, let alone the ills of a imperiled world. What’s touted as a solution is, as I see it, really part of the problem. Environmental degradation is a cost not usually figured into “growth,” but how can that make sense, when we live on a finite planet with finite resources?

No, no, I am not arguing for consumer spending as a cure for anything. Are we clear on that?

All I’m saying is that before we call for a movement — nationwide, let alone a worldwide — it’s a good idea to think through the consequences of what we’re asking people to do. Who stands to benefit, and who will be harmed? Are the probable consequences ones we really want?

There’s no shopping necessary to conduct a thought experiment. You’ve already got everything you need.