If I Had a Hammer
On what it takes.
It’s been just over two years now since I moved from the Mid-Hudson Valley, or at least when my mother’s lease on her Poughkeepsie apartment expired and even on paper I could not proclaim residency in the region I was born and spent the vast majority of my life in, my actual exit more like Fall 2021 when I went off to the fancy college I wouldn’t be able to afford to finish. A little under a year after finally leaving by technicality, I started the newsletter you are reading about Mid-Hudson politics and socioeconomics. Which poses a common question: why am I still interested in this?
The Mid-Hudson is where I learned about how our world works— and more often, how it doesn’t. It’s where my mom returned in 2014 after a two-year excursion to Los Angeles, down a marriage and with bank accounts drained, back in the same town where my sister and I were raised. This time instead of owning the hillside gravel driveway home that would one day be the focus of one of my articles, she rented a two-bedroom house wedged between an abandoned hospital and the local heating oil company that owned it. I was the one who got my own room.
But the world hadn’t given her the time or money to dawdle. Every day she would drive an hour, two hours round trip south to the greener pastures of Westchester County to teach other children, the children of the upper 9.9% who American society is designed for. Somers, Mahopac, whoever was hiring that year. She would leave before I woke up, get back around dinner, eat, take enough Benadryl to sleep, and do it all again the next four days. Because that is what needed to be done. That’s what capital demanded of her.
A few years later, her stellar credit and breakneck saving paid off, and she was able to put down a deposit on a house about half a mile away. It too was far from the center of town and also backed up to the abandoned Marathon Battery Plant, one of the Mid-Hudson’s many Superfund sites, but it was ours. Her kids all had their own rooms, even if the floor plan didn’t say so. Mine was a corner of the ‘70s wood paneled basement, with a curtain for privacy by my bed. I remember how much I marveled at having that much space. We’d be there for less than a year.
When things would fall apart again, she beat out more than 40 other applicants to be the one to rent a house. Like hell would her youngest have to change school districts in the chaos of the pandemic. That house had wires hanging from the ceiling, a finicky water heater, shrubs growing out of the rain gutters, and the 30-year abandoned remains of a hair salon in the basement, yet was a barely manageable $2,450 a month. Between that and the number of applicants, the housing market during the time of COVID simply did not make sense. But it would assuredly, all go back to normal soon. I got into college unexpectedly a few months later.
My mother had an incredible degree of resolve, something made more poignant because of her own childhood. She had given us a good deck of cards when I was born, two parents with stable government jobs, a house with decent equity, sure their commutes had to be a bit longer to make the math work, but it was very different from the profound trauma that came along with being raised in poverty. And yet slowly things all came apart, trust was put in the wrong people, poor decisions were made with the best of intentions, and eventually I graduated from the same high school she graduated from, in the same city she was from. She had gone in a circle. And yet there was no option but to continue forward, to survive. There was no pause button, no moment to rest or cry.
I write here because I think a lot about those days. I think of how everyone I keep in touch with from high school either lives with their parents or had to move far away to afford their own place. I think of the Manhattan two bedroom 40 blocks from where I write this now that the custody agreement shuttled me to, occupied by five people, then six, then eight, and the sirens I’d hear every night because 65th cuts across the park and York Avenue has all the hospitals. I think of my mother’s mother, raised daughter of the affluent largest employer in the City of Hudson, who went from teen pregnancy, familial shunning, and impoverished single motherhood in the City of Poughkeepsie to navigating the patchwork corporate ranks of IBM and finally law school. Class of ‘04, just after I was born. To the women who kept moving forward, my mother Kristin and my grandmother Judith, whose economic security was hard-won because there was no other way, thank you for treading a path for me.
I am from a people who climb steeply and then inevitably, are driven back down into the muck. Some may presume they merely drew a bad hand, but that’s pretty inevitable when the deck is missing all the high cards. I grew up when one in three nonresidential buildings were abandoned, enforcing that oppressive consciousness that you are the product of the people who couldn’t leave when the opportunity for economic advancement did, and that in turn the deck is stacked against you. The best hope for our future, it was drilled into us, is that we found a way to leave. I wasn’t really the type expected to. Yet I did.
I left the place behind, but not the pattern of precarity, and it’s not just college. I’ve been housing insecure to varying degrees for varying lengths of time since my early teens. Even now, I live in a combination of sketchy sublets the landlords aren’t aware of and couch-surfing with friends who frankly just feel bad for me. I don’t have a college degree or formal training in anything I do. I’m not a sociologist, or a journalist, or a data scientist, nor do I have much of an interest in being any of these things, but I’ve made a point to read what I can and do my best to apply what I’ve learned to the itch that I can never quite scratch. In being here reading this, I thank you for supporting me in that endeavor.
Upcoming this month:
Election Model Retrospective - More in-depth explanation of my election model and a general debrief on what worked and what didn’t
When The World Stopped Making Sense - A quantitative analysis of economic stratification and gentrification in the post-COVID Mid-Hudson, and the most research I’ve done for any piece to date