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Punks and housing
[Rod Dreher 03/13 06:09 PM]James from Phoenix writes: Just ordered your book and am anxiously awaiting for it to arrive and I love the thoughts expressed on your blog so far. I studied city planning in college and enjoy hypothesizing about new demographic trends. I do not know if you have addressed this in your book, but have you seen any trends among Gen-Xer's? I am from the first wave of Gen-Xer's to hit the housing market. Grew up as a punk in high school and grunge in college, yet now find myself conservative, active in church and raising a family in a modern style ranch house in the city of Phoenix. You'll never catch me in a pair of Birkenstocks and I hate pretty much anything associated with hippies. I don't know the politics of most of the people on these sites, but they are a great introduction to a growing number of Gen-Xer's who do not want to live in the suburbs. Check out www.atomic-ranch.com , www.modernphoenix.net, and www.lottaliving.com. These sites are the ones that I frequent and focus more on west coast and Phoenix area mid-century houses.
As the commute into central Phoenix is now about an hour away from the new subdivisions, many people are starting a reverse migration into Phoenix from the suburbs. Personally, I do not ever want to buy a new house. Other than the usual quirks associated with a 40 year old house (plumbing and electrical mostly), I have a well made house constructed of concrete block, a yard twice the size of what you get with a new house and have all of my shopping needs with five minutes of my house.
I, too, am in the first generation of Xers to get into the housing market, though my entry was delayed by living in NYC for five years, where I couldn’t have hoped to have afforded anything. When Julie and I looked for a house, we feared that all our grinching about not wanting to live in a far-flung suburb would be for naught. We didn’t have much money for a down payment, and just about anything in the city of Dallas was unaffordable. Because we are doing a homeschooling partnership with a small local Protestant school, we didn’t have to worry about the lousy public schools in the city of Dallas, which is why so many parents head for the burbs. So we bought a rehabbed 1914 bungalow in a gentrifying downtown neighborhood for a song. We seem to have gotten in on a reverse-migration wave as well. If schools aren’t a question for you because you homeschool, or can afford private school, then you might consider moving to one of these old, human-scaled neighborhoods in your city – if they’re still affordable. I love what Rachel Balducci and her family are doing. Her parents were part of a group of Catholic families in the 1970s who all put together and bought several houses in a blighted neighborhood, fixed them up and lived together in a sort of intentional community. Rachel, her husband Paul and their sons all live in the same neighborhood now. They say you just can’t replace the bonds of community that were laid down by their parents. I’ll write more about this in a bit.
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