A Room With a Viewshed

Over the past year I’ve become increasingly aware of shelter pressure on the U.S. working class. Housing was not a subject I followed in my professional career, preferring to focus on cash assistance to individuals and state & local governments. A new two-part series in In These Times by Joseph Bullington pulls me in again.

The simple story is that wealthy immigrants are replacing residents in picturesque towns in the West. Call it the real Great Replacement. It catches my eye because it is exactly what is happening in my new home in Loudoun County, Va., and what I used to read about in tech-booming places in California.

In the West, well-off families are buying second homes to be closer to nature, providing what real estate mavens call a “viewshed,” which the development tends to destroy. Bullington calls it “Building nowhere out of somewhere.” Land is also consumed by the construction of pricey ski resorts and the prevalence of short-term rentals. (I have a pal who financed a huge house near the ocean that way.)

Meanwhile, the workers needed to service these people with house-cleaning, construction, etc. can no longer afford to live near where they work, and in some cases where they used to live all their lives. In the West, what have become upscale towns tend to be surrounded by out-of-sight trailer parks there the workers live.

Here in Loudoun, we have well-off suburbanites and farmers living high on the hog on the tax revenue from our boom in data centers. This same community resists housing regulation that would facilitate construction and new immigrants. They also oppose the new electricity infrastructure that would service more data centers and the utility needs of residents.

In both cases house prices and rents are driven up that force workers to live far enough from workplaces as to require difficult commutes. Or they crowd AirBnBs with multiple families. Or they live in their cars. To an extent, the in-migrants tend to be Democrats and the displaced ex-Democrats, a deliciously perverse political outcome that I doubt is sustainable. The liberalism of the Democrats does not extend to countenancing more neighbors. Where have we heard that story before?

The geographical segregation also creates problems for school finance, since local tax revenue, usually what pays for public schools, cannot be shared by different income classes.

Bullington reports that the service workers may not enjoy the legal protections of employment law, instead being taken on as “contractors.” The contractor relationship facilitates the exploitation of undocumented labor, not unlike the New York City high-end restaurant industry, another case of Democrats living at the expense of lower-income families.

Once getting clued into the difference between what their company is making and what they get paid, some of the more enterprising workers figure out how to make their own arrangements, as I did eons ago working as a temp typist, though their lives are still difficult. Being forced to move frequently, or doubling up in a residence with other families, obviously makes child-rearing problematic. Was that in the Moynihan report?

A moral of this story is to not fetishize small business persons as bourgeois. Every worker is a small business.

I reiterate that for Democrats, the only future remains class politics.