Hitting Bottom

This week the Census Bureau released figures showing that Americans are moving less, our mobility and "wanderlust" grounded by rising unemployment and declining housing values.  What's fascinating about this factoid to me is how it compares to the churn we're hearing and experiencing due to the turmoil in the housing and job markets - i.e., homeowners losing their homes to foreclosure, tenants being evicted from foreclosed properties, the newly homeless living in tent cities, immigrants returning to their home countries.  Basically, this must be the only "mobility" we're seeing these days.

Concurrently, folks keep waiting for the housing market to bottom out. In a variation on a shameless self-promotion post, I encourage you all to take a look at the blog Field Notes from the Bottoms, to think more about the notion of "hitting bottom" and how it reflects how we live, where we live, and who lives where.  The self-promo twist is because this is my partner's research blog on how poverty and low-income communities are physically and symbolically tied to low-lying places in cities.  It's rarely the rich folk living in the flood zones, in other words.

He can explain this much better than me, and does:

In my previous work, in low-income communities, as a resident services coordinator, and as a colleague of people in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction, the phrase “hit bottom” had a specific meaning...That is, for addicts and alcoholics, rehabilitation or “turning one’s life around” comes after realizing that you’ve hit bottom. [snip]

...as recent stories in the New Yorker and Slate have referenced...the phrase “the bottoms” is often used by the homeless and the very poor to refer to the worst off, the most desperate and exploitative places. It is a phrase I’ve heard in my own experiences, and these articles document, one that is frequently used to refer to part of Skid Row in Los Angeles.

...in exploring the language of how people talk about who lives where in the city, and its connection to the physical features of the land...I hope to highlight and emphasize the fact that very often people who find themselves in vulnerable or desperate situations did not “choose” them for themselves. Often, it has been working class and poor people who have suffered the most from poor city planning practices, badly or situated designed settlements, and, as we saw in New Orleans, catastrophic urban floods.

Where do you live in your communities?  What kind of environmental vulnerabilities do you face?  Any?  How do you or others in your town/city think about your neighborhood?  Does it have any kind of reputation, positive or negative?

When my boyfriend left this past week for this fieldwork, I rearranged some of our furniture in a spring cleaning mode. I've always loved rearranging furniture, as I've lived most of my adult life in small apartments, where changing around the layout was one of the few things I could do to make the space feel livable after awhile.  If we're not moving, and we've managed to hang out to our property and communities, how are we making the most of these spaces during this period?  How are we hunkering down and getting by?

Happy Saturday, good people.

(Photo of Scranton, PA by Steven T. Moga)