Last night I went with my friend to pick up his son from his weekly tutoring. As a New York City public school student, he is taught a No Child Left Behind mandated lesson plan. This is geared to guarantee that the largest number of students pass the Bushian tests. Naturally the bar is set low, so the education department can claim this unfunded mandate is a great success. It's Not! But that is another diary.
If you are particularly bright as this child is (he is trilingual, English, Italian and Mandarin), the school day is rote learning so some parents augment the teaching with some additional enrichment which gets me in a backwards way to the point of this diary.
The real estate bubble here in Manhattan.
The tutor and I chatted for a few minutes, I told her I was a broker a comment which invariably elicts a painful "Is this market insane?"
This woman who is a teacher in the NYC public school system lives in a fairy anonymous and modest East Side building. She bought her apartment years ago and says in a million years she could not afford it today. She tutors students when she is not teaching to augment her income which I imagine is also quite modest.
We talked for a few minutes and she told me it was particularly difficult to get by on the salary paid to NYC teachers. She said, young colleagues (mostly female)are assisted by their families, live in humble surroundings and /or commute long distances. If they can't get additional money from the family, I asked, she shrugged and said "let's not go there."
Wasn't George Bush going to be the education president?
After we left, I started to think where are all the good, decent, hardworking taxpaying people going to live? Where are the teachers, doctors, nurses, dentists, journalists, policemen, firefighters, engineers, lawyers, accountants--whoever, whatever--the non rich--where are all these people going to live?
Not in Manhattan. Unless they purchased long ago, they have all been forced out. Period. They are all commuting long distances to service our needs. It is no longer possible for even a high earning professional to live in Manhattan. As I said in an earlier diary, Manhattan is now an enclave for the super rich.
Tough shit a lot of you might think. People have worse problems than a miserable commute. I agree. But step back for a moment and look at the consequences of the insanity that is going on in this and other American cities.
I think something is really broken when so many of these good people, the people we count on day-in-and-day-out to perform their life-enhancing and life-saving services for me, you, our children have been, quite literally, shown the door.
They have all been priced out--and soon we are going to pay and pay dearly for the consequences of this reality.
This is not a sky-is-falling diary. It is a simple observtion and another sad reality of the life many people are living in America today.
The real estate bubble and the havoc it has caused is only the most glaring symptom of a problem that is big and getting bigger.
