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IN a musty coffee shop in the suburbs of Portland, Ore., a dozen people occupying scruffy couches peer into laptop computers, their screens casting a blue glow across pasty faces. They scroll through online job listings, availing themselves of free Wi-Fi, as they pass another drizzly afternoon in the temporary office of the age.
You run across this scene in town after town these days, from doughnut shops tucked into strip malls in Charlotte to vegan cafes in Austin. It has become commonplace, along with possessions piled curbside in front of foreclosed homes. Here is gloomy evidence of a national hunger for paychecks, fresh sign of the everyday calamity coloring much of the American experience.
And yet the same scene suggests the endurance of a psychic strength that Americans like to claim for ourselves, at least in the mythologized version of our history: Hard times create a collective response. The worst economic downturn since the Depression, its depth underscored by weak job numbers released Friday, has turned coffee shops into grassroots unemployment offices. People exchange tips on who is hiring and where to post résumés. They watch one another’s belongings. They share limited electrical outlets, rationing resources in the sort of mutually beneficial fashion that typically eludes elected representatives in Washington.
Over the past three years, as I have explored the downturn’s consequences in hard-hit areas of the country from the Pacific Northwest to South Florida, I have been struck again and again by the contradictions at play, competing visions of division and solidarity. Two hundred and thirty-four years into an American experiment launched in the name of the common good, it often feels, to me on the road, as if a battle is underway for the nation’s identity, a jockeying over the values that will govern whatever follows the Great Recession.
A great many people have lost faith in powerful institutions, from Congress to Goldman Sachs. Yet beneath the bitterness coloring national affairs — down at the level of neighborhood, family, coffee shop, tavern — a tenuous belief in the collective good remains, perhaps moderating national dismay.
Who are we? This question has grown resonant as Americans try to secure satisfying answers for themselves, reclaiming identities stripped by the downturn. The recession turned creditworthy homeowners into delinquents and commuting professionals into the jobless.
“I just want to get my life back.” Different versions of this sentence have landed frequently in my notebook — in Cleveland, where a former homeowner told me of camping in her car after she lost the place to foreclosure; in Newton, Iowa, where a man who had earned middle-class wages turning steel into refrigerators broke into tears as he described his inability to provide medical care for a sick child after he lost his job; in Portland, where an unemployed marketing executive struggled to imagine how she would send her teenage daughter to college.
Another regular notebook entry: “I never saw myself as the sort of person who would land on public assistance.” So said a laid-off sales clerk in Tucson who was thinking about applying for welfare. She echoed a former mortgage consultant now frying bacon bits at a Red Robin restaurant in Northern California.
So much is so clearly in disarray that disaster seems almost banal. In front of vacant Southern California strip malls that once held furniture showrooms and mortgage offices, people in gorilla suits wave signs at passing cars, advertising the lone growth industry: CASH FOR GOLD. In Phoenix, freeway billboards advertise BANKRUPTCY BY PHONE, the expunging of debt apparently as unexceptional as ordering a pizza.
In Boise, Idaho, Elias Campos, a laid-off carpenter, remembers getting a call from his bank last year promising to lower his credit card’s interest rate. He just needed to provide a recent paycheck. “I say, ‘Well, I don’t have one.’ ”
In Cape Coral, Fla., where irrepressible marketing aimed to turn hundreds of miles of canals into a modern-day Venice on the Gulf of Mexico, a sign updated the story:
PRICELESS REALTY, FORECLOSURES.
Foreclosed homes so fully dominate local offerings that agents have organized bus tours devoted to buying such properties. The mere existence of that enterprise underscores how badly the American proclivity for development has led the economy astray, while also affirming the sheer ingenuity of that proclivity.
Americans are prone to excess. This much seems inarguable now. We are prone to buying into toxic fantasies — the unfathomable wealth offered up by the New Economy; the unlimited rewards of real estate. Yet we are pragmatists and opportunists, in the best and worst senses, a people inclined to turn the remains of past folly into something better.
You see this in the once-forsaken downtowns of major American cities, a realm that has improved in reaction to the wasteful reach toward suburbia. Denver may be synonymous with Western sprawl, yet old brick warehouses downtown have lately been transformed into condos and eateries clustered around one of the loveliest ballparks in the land.
In Detroit, city leaders talk of razing whole neighborhoods lost to decline, while seizing on an opportunity to re-imagine the place. Urban villages may be linked by bicycle paths, elevating the role of two-wheeled transport in a city whose development (and subsequent unraveling) has long been tethered to the auto industry.
In Toledo, Ohio, a city that grew by making glass for the auto industry, factories are shifting into something with a potentially more lucrative future: manufacturing solar panels.
Faith in huge institutions oft-implicated in recent misfortune — the Federal Reserve, credit rating agencies — has clearly eroded. Yet in many communities, smaller institutions are taking matters into their own hands.
In Columbia, S.C., the police got tired of trouble at houses abandoned to foreclosure: teenagers drinking, vagrants camping out. They wearied of trying to persuade the legal owners — banks in Seattle and New York — to clean up the mess. So they went in themselves with plywood and nail guns, boarding up the strongest magnets for activity.
In San Mateo, Calif., near San Francisco, an aid organization called Samaritan House recognized that people were turning up at homeless shelters simply because they could no longer pay rent. The agency began handing out rent contributions. Later, the federal government began its own program, generating fresh funds.
On a March afternoon, Sameh Girgis arrived at Samaritan House to apply. A gentle man of 50 with a warm glow to his cheeks, he earned a master’s degree in mathematics in Egypt. He was sheepish about asking for a handout, but the alternatives included the street. A taxi driver now with too few fares, he was behind on his $950-a-month rent.
Mr. Girgis considered a homeless shelter. But he was raising a 16-year-old daughter alone, his wife having died of cancer.
“If it’s by myself, I don’t care,” Mr. Girgis said. “The problem is, I have a teenager. She wants to have a shower. She needs to clean herself. I love my daughter. She’s all my life.”
The details of his life were not easily contained within the boxes on the forms the federal government required.
“What’s your race?” a caseworker asked Mr. Girgis, who considers himself Egyptian.
“What’s that mean?” he said. “I’m black? I’m white? I don’t know.”
“Are you a veteran?”
“In my country,” he said. “I was an officer.”
Current housing?
“A one-bedroom apartment,” Mr. Girgis said. The neighborhood was infested by gangs. His daughter slept in the bedroom, he on a fold-out in the living room.
“Does the apartment have a pool?” the caseworker asked, and Mr. Girgis’s face now brightened with amusement. Did it have a recreation room? A fireplace?
“No,” he said, elongating the word, absorbing the cheap pleasure of irony.
Such questions could only be dreamed up by a faraway bureaucracy, not someone seated in front of him, taking in the sight of his sweat-stained T-shirt, his exhausted mien. He and his case worker sorted it out, securing a check to his landlord for a month’s rent.
But in some communities, the downturn has torn at the social fabric, heightening divisions. At a job center in Orange County, Calif., six people gathered early this year to discuss the looming expiration of their unemployment benefits. Most had worked in the white-collar world. One had been a stockbroker with a $250,000 annual income. Another had earned $60,000 a year as an executive assistant at a Jaguar dealership. Several were homeowners. Nearly everyone agreed that illegal immigrants deserved much of the blame for their failure to land another job.
What sorts of jobs had they been seeking?
“I would take a gardening job,” said a 58-year-old woman who had earned $24 an hour as an office manager. “I would clean toilets if I could, but I can’t take that job. Millions of people in California are illegal and they’re taking our jobs.”
A long list of factors went into explaining what had happened to the American economy so that former professionals conversant in spreadsheets and mutual funds were now chagrined to be denied the opportunity to scrub toilets. To a student of macroeconomics, the arrival of illegal immigrants seemed far down the list, somewhere after weak long-term job growth and the near collapse of the financial system.
But to unemployed people trying to divine a cause through the miasmatic haze of their own situations, the presence of illegal immigrants was the explanation they could see most clearly. You could spot them on street corners, waiting for work. You could see them crammed into rental homes, or hear their music blaring from pickup trucks. Joblessness was disorienting. Illegal immigrants formed the only putative cause that lived next door.
And yet to travel the United States in this age of insecurity, with the basic bargain of middle-class life seemingly under assault, is to marvel at the persistence of faith in some larger system; belief that hard work must be rewarded, if only out of common decency.
At a Duane Reade drugstore on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, an African-American cashier in his early 20s working the night shift complained that he and his coworkers had not been told in advance that the chain had decided to sell itself to Walgreen’s. “We didn’t even hear about it until it was on the news,” he said, sounding hurt.
Companies today change hands like poker chips at a casino, in response to millionaire investment bankers indulging words like “synergy.” Low-wage workers are generally no harder to acquire or unload than a crate of paper towels. Yet despite all that, despite economic dysfunction and narrow corporate interests, this young man was aggrieved because he had assumed something else: an almost familial relationship with his employer, a bond of mutual concern.
It was hard to know whether to feel sad in the face of this sentiment —pained that a pawn in a larger drama saw himself as important enough to warrant inclusion — or perhaps inspired that even at the lowest depths of the American workforce, faith in a shared enterprise remains.
You run across this scene in town after town these days, from doughnut shops tucked into strip malls in Charlotte to vegan cafes in Austin. It has become commonplace, along with possessions piled curbside in front of foreclosed homes. Here is gloomy evidence of a national hunger for paychecks, fresh sign of the everyday calamity coloring much of the American experience.
And yet the same scene suggests the endurance of a psychic strength that Americans like to claim for ourselves, at least in the mythologized version of our history: Hard times create a collective response. The worst economic downturn since the Depression, its depth underscored by weak job numbers released Friday, has turned coffee shops into grassroots unemployment offices. People exchange tips on who is hiring and where to post résumés. They watch one another’s belongings. They share limited electrical outlets, rationing resources in the sort of mutually beneficial fashion that typically eludes elected representatives in Washington.
Over the past three years, as I have explored the downturn’s consequences in hard-hit areas of the country from the Pacific Northwest to South Florida, I have been struck again and again by the contradictions at play, competing visions of division and solidarity. Two hundred and thirty-four years into an American experiment launched in the name of the common good, it often feels, to me on the road, as if a battle is underway for the nation’s identity, a jockeying over the values that will govern whatever follows the Great Recession.
A great many people have lost faith in powerful institutions, from Congress to Goldman Sachs. Yet beneath the bitterness coloring national affairs — down at the level of neighborhood, family, coffee shop, tavern — a tenuous belief in the collective good remains, perhaps moderating national dismay.
Who are we? This question has grown resonant as Americans try to secure satisfying answers for themselves, reclaiming identities stripped by the downturn. The recession turned creditworthy homeowners into delinquents and commuting professionals into the jobless.
“I just want to get my life back.” Different versions of this sentence have landed frequently in my notebook — in Cleveland, where a former homeowner told me of camping in her car after she lost the place to foreclosure; in Newton, Iowa, where a man who had earned middle-class wages turning steel into refrigerators broke into tears as he described his inability to provide medical care for a sick child after he lost his job; in Portland, where an unemployed marketing executive struggled to imagine how she would send her teenage daughter to college.
Another regular notebook entry: “I never saw myself as the sort of person who would land on public assistance.” So said a laid-off sales clerk in Tucson who was thinking about applying for welfare. She echoed a former mortgage consultant now frying bacon bits at a Red Robin restaurant in Northern California.
So much is so clearly in disarray that disaster seems almost banal. In front of vacant Southern California strip malls that once held furniture showrooms and mortgage offices, people in gorilla suits wave signs at passing cars, advertising the lone growth industry: CASH FOR GOLD. In Phoenix, freeway billboards advertise BANKRUPTCY BY PHONE, the expunging of debt apparently as unexceptional as ordering a pizza.
In Boise, Idaho, Elias Campos, a laid-off carpenter, remembers getting a call from his bank last year promising to lower his credit card’s interest rate. He just needed to provide a recent paycheck. “I say, ‘Well, I don’t have one.’ ”
In Cape Coral, Fla., where irrepressible marketing aimed to turn hundreds of miles of canals into a modern-day Venice on the Gulf of Mexico, a sign updated the story:
PRICELESS REALTY, FORECLOSURES.
Foreclosed homes so fully dominate local offerings that agents have organized bus tours devoted to buying such properties. The mere existence of that enterprise underscores how badly the American proclivity for development has led the economy astray, while also affirming the sheer ingenuity of that proclivity.
Americans are prone to excess. This much seems inarguable now. We are prone to buying into toxic fantasies — the unfathomable wealth offered up by the New Economy; the unlimited rewards of real estate. Yet we are pragmatists and opportunists, in the best and worst senses, a people inclined to turn the remains of past folly into something better.
You see this in the once-forsaken downtowns of major American cities, a realm that has improved in reaction to the wasteful reach toward suburbia. Denver may be synonymous with Western sprawl, yet old brick warehouses downtown have lately been transformed into condos and eateries clustered around one of the loveliest ballparks in the land.
In Detroit, city leaders talk of razing whole neighborhoods lost to decline, while seizing on an opportunity to re-imagine the place. Urban villages may be linked by bicycle paths, elevating the role of two-wheeled transport in a city whose development (and subsequent unraveling) has long been tethered to the auto industry.
In Toledo, Ohio, a city that grew by making glass for the auto industry, factories are shifting into something with a potentially more lucrative future: manufacturing solar panels.
Faith in huge institutions oft-implicated in recent misfortune — the Federal Reserve, credit rating agencies — has clearly eroded. Yet in many communities, smaller institutions are taking matters into their own hands.
In Columbia, S.C., the police got tired of trouble at houses abandoned to foreclosure: teenagers drinking, vagrants camping out. They wearied of trying to persuade the legal owners — banks in Seattle and New York — to clean up the mess. So they went in themselves with plywood and nail guns, boarding up the strongest magnets for activity.
In San Mateo, Calif., near San Francisco, an aid organization called Samaritan House recognized that people were turning up at homeless shelters simply because they could no longer pay rent. The agency began handing out rent contributions. Later, the federal government began its own program, generating fresh funds.
On a March afternoon, Sameh Girgis arrived at Samaritan House to apply. A gentle man of 50 with a warm glow to his cheeks, he earned a master’s degree in mathematics in Egypt. He was sheepish about asking for a handout, but the alternatives included the street. A taxi driver now with too few fares, he was behind on his $950-a-month rent.
Mr. Girgis considered a homeless shelter. But he was raising a 16-year-old daughter alone, his wife having died of cancer.
“If it’s by myself, I don’t care,” Mr. Girgis said. “The problem is, I have a teenager. She wants to have a shower. She needs to clean herself. I love my daughter. She’s all my life.”
The details of his life were not easily contained within the boxes on the forms the federal government required.
“What’s your race?” a caseworker asked Mr. Girgis, who considers himself Egyptian.
“What’s that mean?” he said. “I’m black? I’m white? I don’t know.”
“Are you a veteran?”
“In my country,” he said. “I was an officer.”
Current housing?
“A one-bedroom apartment,” Mr. Girgis said. The neighborhood was infested by gangs. His daughter slept in the bedroom, he on a fold-out in the living room.
“Does the apartment have a pool?” the caseworker asked, and Mr. Girgis’s face now brightened with amusement. Did it have a recreation room? A fireplace?
“No,” he said, elongating the word, absorbing the cheap pleasure of irony.
Such questions could only be dreamed up by a faraway bureaucracy, not someone seated in front of him, taking in the sight of his sweat-stained T-shirt, his exhausted mien. He and his case worker sorted it out, securing a check to his landlord for a month’s rent.
But in some communities, the downturn has torn at the social fabric, heightening divisions. At a job center in Orange County, Calif., six people gathered early this year to discuss the looming expiration of their unemployment benefits. Most had worked in the white-collar world. One had been a stockbroker with a $250,000 annual income. Another had earned $60,000 a year as an executive assistant at a Jaguar dealership. Several were homeowners. Nearly everyone agreed that illegal immigrants deserved much of the blame for their failure to land another job.
What sorts of jobs had they been seeking?
“I would take a gardening job,” said a 58-year-old woman who had earned $24 an hour as an office manager. “I would clean toilets if I could, but I can’t take that job. Millions of people in California are illegal and they’re taking our jobs.”
A long list of factors went into explaining what had happened to the American economy so that former professionals conversant in spreadsheets and mutual funds were now chagrined to be denied the opportunity to scrub toilets. To a student of macroeconomics, the arrival of illegal immigrants seemed far down the list, somewhere after weak long-term job growth and the near collapse of the financial system.
But to unemployed people trying to divine a cause through the miasmatic haze of their own situations, the presence of illegal immigrants was the explanation they could see most clearly. You could spot them on street corners, waiting for work. You could see them crammed into rental homes, or hear their music blaring from pickup trucks. Joblessness was disorienting. Illegal immigrants formed the only putative cause that lived next door.
And yet to travel the United States in this age of insecurity, with the basic bargain of middle-class life seemingly under assault, is to marvel at the persistence of faith in some larger system; belief that hard work must be rewarded, if only out of common decency.
At a Duane Reade drugstore on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, an African-American cashier in his early 20s working the night shift complained that he and his coworkers had not been told in advance that the chain had decided to sell itself to Walgreen’s. “We didn’t even hear about it until it was on the news,” he said, sounding hurt.
Companies today change hands like poker chips at a casino, in response to millionaire investment bankers indulging words like “synergy.” Low-wage workers are generally no harder to acquire or unload than a crate of paper towels. Yet despite all that, despite economic dysfunction and narrow corporate interests, this young man was aggrieved because he had assumed something else: an almost familial relationship with his employer, a bond of mutual concern.
It was hard to know whether to feel sad in the face of this sentiment —pained that a pawn in a larger drama saw himself as important enough to warrant inclusion — or perhaps inspired that even at the lowest depths of the American workforce, faith in a shared enterprise remains.
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