Posted on 01/31/2015 9:42:01 AM PST by C19fan
I first encountered the upper middle class when I attended a big magnet high school in Manhattan that attracted a decent number of brainy, better-off kids whose parents preferred not to pay private-school tuition. Growing up in an immigrant household, I’d felt largely immune to class distinctions. Before high school, some of the kids I knew were somewhat worse off, and others were somewhat better off than most, but we generally all fell into the same lower-middle- or middle-middle-class milieu. So high school was a revelation. Status distinctions that had been entirely obscure to me came into focus. Everything about you—the clothes you wore, the music you listened to, the way you pronounced things—turned out to be a clear marker of where you were from and whether you were worth knowing.
By the time I made it to a selective college, I found myself entirely surrounded by this upper-middle-class tribe. My fellow students and my professors were overwhelmingly drawn from comfortably affluent families hailing from an almost laughably small number of comfortably affluent neighborhoods, mostly in and around big coastal cities. Though virtually all of these polite, well-groomed people were politically liberal, I sensed that their gut political instincts were all about protecting what they had and scratching out the eyeballs of anyone who dared to suggest taking it away from them. I can’t say I liked these people as a group. Yet without really reflecting on it, I felt that it was inevitable that I would live among them, and that’s pretty much exactly what’s happened.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
#36 I had to stop watching these shows too because of this. Kinda hard to talk about it to your co-workers “say did you see that show where 2 men were buying a home....”
Some of these shows do have actors pretend to be buyers. Years ago I saw a young couple (20’s) buy a home then run into problems remodeling it in order to sell. Turned out they worked in real estate and were just pretending for the show.
There was one show that showed a Canadian couple with kids rebuilding their home. One day I see that same mother doing her own show about remodeling and she clearly could not swing a hammer. You might have seen some celebs get involved in these types of shows.
Go to google and type Houston, zillow
I see some large lakes a bit north north west that have homes on the shore under 100k
What the author is driving at is that today’s Liberals are interested in feathering their own nests at the expense of the rest of us, be they poorer or richer. He writes that they use the levers of government to pull the drawbridge up behind them. He bemoans that these upper middle class types, they exist, have contempt for the free market. The article also points out that many people have poor reading comprehension or just cannot be bothered to read the article before commenting. Those people think the headline is sufficient.
That’s been happening in Houston for a long time. I don’t actually live in Houston but we all say we’re from Houston. We do live in Harris County. As a side note, part of the Houston City Limits is in Ft. Bend County to the south. I don’t know how that happened.
In Texas we have what’s called Municiple Utility Districts that are taxing entities. Developers sell bonds to pay for a water treatment plant and the home owner pays a monthly bill PLUS taxes until the bonds are paid off. That usually takes a few decades. So, if you live outside the city limits you more than likely pay MUD taxes. (People who move here from out of state freak out when they learn they have “MUD” water.) The up side to living in a MUD is the city is NOT going to annex you until those bonds are paid off.
A few years ago Houston annexed an area NE of the city called Kingwood. The MUD bonds had been paid off. The people tried to fight it but if a city wants to annex an area so they can collect taxes there’s nothing that can be done to stop it.
They say a hundred thousand people are moving to Houston every year. Very few actually move to Houston. They’re moving to the surrounding suburbs.
The fatal error of this pundit (and Obama’s attack on saving for college).
Americans want to join the Upper Middle Class, not rot in the lower classes.
Thanks; very interesting set up for infrastructure in the Houston area. To avoid annexation from Norfolk and Portsmouth, VA, residents in the surrounding counties petitioned the state for their counties to become cities which could not be annexed. If you look at a map of SE Virginia, most of the cities have very large land areas, a result of earlier annexation threats.
Toss in the contractors. It's big all right.
A few generations? I literally went from following a mule to Navy boot camp to find an easier way of life.
I've not a doubt that these folks are practicing the Dickensian " You must scramble up while simultaneously scrunching down", but we are losing sight of a couple of things here.
1. Consider the source: A self-admitted UMC liberal with an Arabic name, publishing in the ultimate conservative-hating online magazine, Slate.2. This is class envy all over again, just practicing on newly available data.
3. The people in the UMC are themselves perched on a slippery pole, as I and numbers of formerly well-paid, high-skilled "information workers" can attest. Management has been harvesting people like us with a McCormick combine for 25 years now, substituting younger people (using a "hand and fingers" org model -- one experienced hand who knows what he's doing, forging ahead as a "working supervisor" saddled with four, five, or eight noobs/babies/juveniles) or H1B/L1 green-card foreigners to cut wages, at least until the new people get closer to age 50. Then they get wiped out en masse by the requirements of the federal pension-benefit law of 1973, that impose sharply rising rates of pension contributions on employers in the "catch-up" phase of funding their employees' retirement plans.
Employers don't "catch up" on retirement contributions, they "fire up" instead, bellowing "corporate event!" (to cover their timely dismissals under federal law) as they slaughter their faithful long-term "knowledge" employees by the thousands.
I've known corporate senior managers who were comped largely on the basis of their efforts to "control out-year G&A expenses". They succeeded, firing almost their entire "knowledge-worker" base as of 1986, by the time they packed it in and sold the company in 1997, to minimize farewell packages due to over-50's as opposed to the 40-somethings who were left when the ball dropped. Neat, huh?
A house on my Houston street, more to the house price phenomenon in Houston that FRiend commented on above, that might have sold for $400K in 2005 was sold in 2010 for $650K, and just listed again (its elite PhD "knowledge worker" being sent God knows where by his S&P 100 employer) for about $850K.
Houston inside the Loop is being reserved now for "special" people who park Jags and Benzes in their portes-cocheres but whom one never sees at civic-club meetings; they're either still at the office at 7pm or they're wasted with fatigue and asleep in their racks.
They don't have time for kids a lot of the time, either, unless the wife gives up her career.
And finally, this phenomenon would not have happened without a rewrite of Houston "zoning" (Houston doesn't have zoning legally, but it does have land-use ordinances) a few years ago to allow "dense-pack" housing to be overbuilt on infrastructure designed for 1/6th-acre lots with 1500 Sq ft houses on them. Now it's 27 "units" (can you hear the rats squeaking in their cages?) per acre, with unknown consequences later for water, sewer, and power infrastructure. We've already established that parking is grossly insufficient, and the streets are too narrow, after people park on them up and down both sides, to admit fire trucks and such.... And are therefore grossly inadequate, with nowhere to go for more pavement, thanks to the developers who rampack-jampacked their condo blocks onto the old house lots.
In other words, the housing-price boom is entirely contingent on a piece of "New Urbanism" crony-capitalist market intervention by law, and the local District A representative who ramrodded the change through (a nominal "Republican", and we all know which kind) has term-limited out of office and has gone to collect his reward from the developers and speculators he made obscenely rich.
Or, as Mark Twain would have put it, "He has done absquatulated." With a sack of money, no doubt.
Texas law gives each substantial city an "extraterrestrial jurisdiction" or ETJ, which is an unconstitutional convenience for the billionaires who own the State government, to play games with city boundaries for their own personal gain.
Houston has a dictatorial-mayor form of government. If you are on City Council, your area's "capital improvements" are hostage to the mayor's pleasure (this is how Annise Parker got her nasty GLBT bill through Council -- just as predecessor Kathryn Whitmire got a similar bill through for her Montrose Catamite power-bloc, only to get the **** slapped out of her when a councilman with a pair of stones stood up to her and demanded a vote of the public, the whole public, and nothing but the public). Kathy lost that referendum 5:1, which is a measure of her gall.
The people who were annexed by decree in Kingwood suffered a lugubrious fall in police protection; formerly they'd been policed by the county sheriff and their County Constable's deputies, but after the annexation police response times blew up, as the City tried to extend their beat cops to cover a large area 10-15 miles up the road.
More jokes on you department: The local black Council member b*tched about having a bunch of white people dumped in his district and demanded they be "districted out". For the benefit of FReepers not living in the old Confederate States, it must be explained that this is not a laughing matter: The Federal Department of Just Us frowns on white voters being added to black sinecure political seats (it's called "diluting minority participation", and it basically means **** You White M************s.) So, posthaste, maps were drawn and redrawn, and His Black Omnipotence was appeased, and the Tax Play Victims in Kingwood were assigned to a City Council District 20 miles away in one of the most stupid-looking gerrymanders in American history.
Everything you said I already know about. I tried to build a house outside Waco city limits. There was no city water or sewage so the homeowner was going to put in a well and septic system. But since it was in the Waco ETJ we had to get building permits. We couldn’t build because city sewage is not allowed. The only way the man could build a house was wait for the city to run the water lines or pay for them himself. That was in 1986 and he’s probably still waiting.
So anyone in Texas who wants to buy some land to build on first make sure there’s MUD water. If not, then find out how far the nearest city and water sewer lines are because you’re probably going to have to pay to get them installed. If it’s more than you want to pay, don’t buy the land.
Don’t even get me started on lesbo Parker.
By the way, the people of Kingwood saw a drop in value of their property but they got a new tax.
the upper classes are now and always ruled America
Here in Dekalb County, Ga, I’ve witnessed the upper middle class mafia at work for decades. While the rest of the formerly top notch schools in the county went to hell due to overdevelopment of HUD apartments, certain areas
remained pristine.
The areas that escaped the HUD curse have public elementary schools that rival the best private schools.
If you go to a public meeting regarding schools in Dekalb,
there’s invariably some affluent turd that will get up and moan about hows this going to affect.... Fernbank, Oakgrove, Livsey, Austin, Vanderlynn, ( or one of the magnet schools that the well to do always seems to get picked in the lottery).
The same turds that complain about how “my area” (thats Mine! Mine! all mine!) is going to be affected
never express a rats ass worth of regret that everybody
else is getting screwed.
Anyone lucky enough to have a home in one of the golden school attendance areas here can count on their home being worth anywhere from 50 to 200K more then the comparably sized homes a mile away in a crappier school district.
The upper middle class bunch attend meetings like
nobody’s business. Dad’s a lawyer, physician, college prof. The money’s such that mom doesn’t work, or do the mom thing full time ( that’s what the au pair is for).
Consequently, mom spends all of her time at meetings that affect everybody, but only the chosen few can get off work to put in their two cents worth.
I tend to disagree with almost everything Slate says. This time, I think the author is right on the money.
Finally, those home shows. Almost everybody on those shows, straight or gay acts like the world is going to come to an immediate end if they can’t have granite counter tops in their kitchens. Bleh.
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