Having just returned from a roadtrip "home", I feel a need to share some observations between where I currently live, the suburbs of Research Triangle Park, NC, the city of Lansing, Michigan, where I grew up, and Myerstown, PA, where my sister currently lives. Taken together, they make at least an interesting "slice" of America, if not a series of cautionary tales.
My family lives in the suburbs of Raleigh, having moved here five years ago from Lansing, MI, where I lived "downtown". We just returned Monday night from a 4th of July visit to Michigan with a stop at Myerstown, PA, where my sister lives. I was very much struck by the differences between the suburb I live in now, my hometown, Lansing, Michigan, and where my sister now lives, Myerstown, PA. I wonder if other people are seeing these contrasts as well.
Being a child of the city and having been very much aware of the paralyzing effects of an energy crisis, I made a point of living within walking distance to where I worked and went to school. Most people I knew at the time I was doing this during the 80s and 90s turned their noses up at living where I did, where the big old pre-war housing was, ( hardwood floors, tile, and 10 foot ceilings were "standard". Sidewalks also were standard, of course). I didn't contradict these suburbanites. Mainly because I knew where I lived was the best place around to live and I wanted to keep it a secret! I could walk to restaurants, a grocery store, the library, and the post office. I voted around the corner at an elementary school that was built in the earlier 20th century. There were two parks in walking distance.
In 2003, a year after I got married, my brilliant program developer husband was recruited for his dream job here in RTP, so we ended up just outside Raleigh. Considering that his skills were wasting away in Lansing, I don't regret the move, but for the life of me I don't understand how the "suburbs" can have any draw at all for most people. We are here because he can bike to his job if necessary. The houses here are twice the price of Lansing with about 25 percent of the value. There are no sidewalks in the subdivision we live in. A jogger was hit by a car about a block from our house. She died. Kids are bussed all over the school district to achieve economic equalization. The nearby school looks like a reform school and kids have to take the bus even though the school is close, because the street it is on is very busy and has no sidewalks. If they want to, kids can attend a beautiful turn of the century magnet school in Raleigh, (enrollment via lottery), and take the bus even further to their school. Our house, (minimal tile/maximal pergot, flimsy drywall walls, 7.5 foot ceilings with poor insulation), has risen in value about 5% per year, including the last year, in spite of the crash in national housing values. On the plus side, I could walk to several grocery stores if I wanted to brave the traffic with limited sidewalks. There is also a park that is maybe ten city blocks' distance away, but again, walking can be treacherous. Gas and groceries are as outrageously high here as they are anyplace else right now. The housing market is stable, so other than high prices, the only big indication of economic slowdown I see is that traffic is down during the "off" hours on the busy street next to our house and subdivision.
Needless to say, even after five years here, I still miss Lansing. I know that Michigan has been hemorrhaging money and people the past few years as the auto industry has spiraled down. When we returned to visit this July, however, it was pretty disturbing what I saw. First, my old neighborhood has actually become "the place" to live, "Old Town"-art galleries, coffee houses, host of the "Common Ground" music festival. I probably wouldn't be able to afford to live there now. There were beautiful new condos built on Michigan Avenue, designed for business on the first floor and residences on the higher floors, that matched the pre-war brick look of the older buildings there. On the other hand, every side of the city has at least one obviously burnt out building. This is new. The neighborhood on the southeast side of downtown has at least a couple houses per block that are abandoned and then a few besides that that are for sale. This is the neighborhood I lived in as a child as my dad worked through school while working nights at Oldsmobile. The neighborhood school where I went to vote, built of brick in the early 20th c, was taken over by a private business, as had at least three other well built schools that I saw in the sections of town where I had lived. Several gas stations were closed. Things were the same on the south side, my husband's side, of town, only worse. East Lansing, where I went to MSU, is pretty much unchanged save for a few new townhouses. I don't know about the prices there. The suburbs north and south of Lansing have quite a lot of housing for sale, and even in a lake community where my dad ended up building a "fancy split-level house" in the early 70s, looks "fatigued" and has houses for sale at pretty low prices. Outside the city there are some new apartment complexes out in the middle of nowhere that look very cheaply made. Unemployment in Michigan is around 8%, but I remember it was around 20% in 1980, and there wasn't anywhere near this kind of housing trouble and there has never been a whole lot of blight in Lansing. The blight is most disturbing to me.
On our return trip from Michigan, we stopped in PA to visit my sister in Myerstown. Myerstown is pretty small, but the near-downtown area my sister lives in has a lot of increasingly well maintained houses that are close together with the garages in the back, close to the street with sidewalks, and look to have been built in the 19th to early 20th century. My sister says there are probably 300 jobs within walking distance to her house. She has noticed that traffic has slowed down on her street, especially nights and weekends. The corner store has closed, but she attributes this to poor management rather than to disuse. She is within walking distance of a park, pool, hardware store, and library. The elementary school, also within walking distance, and which has full capacity of kids, is apparently going to be closed. A new elementary school is supposed to be built out of town and the kids are then going to be bussed there. My sister thinks the school board wants to centralize services and there is a bias toward "new". There weren't too many empty buildings or houses for sale that I could see in Myerstown. Nearby Lebanon actually had some rehabbing going on. My sister has also seen rehabbing in her own neighborhood since she moved there six years ago.
This is some of what I saw on my roadtrip and some of what I thought about it. It's my story and I am sticking to it.