My neighbor across the street has an outlet on her front porch. She uses it to plug in her Christmas lights in the winter, and her lawnmower in the summer.
In November Nicki, another neighbor, was using it to charge her phone.
Nicki works at the convention center. She’s part time and temporary, of course. So her schedule is irregular. She has to check in, every now and then, to see when she should come in.
Last November, that became a little bit difficult, when her electricity has been shut off.
Nicky and her husband, Tony, lived up the street from me. They do yard work. In the summer, they thwarted my efforts to grow flowers. In the winter, they did an impressive job of clearing away snow.
Tony had a landscaping business with a friend, until the friend was murdered by someone looking for money for drugs. Now, like his wife, he takes whatever work he can get, and struggles to get by.
In November, their electricity was shut off, and they were doing everything they could to raise money to pay the bill.
The electric and gas companies aren’t allowed to shut off services from December to April. So, November is the shut off month, when people scramble to pay their utility bills, so they’ll have heat and light as the days get colder.
I charged Tony and Nicki’s phones for them, sometimes, but they didn’t like to impose too often.
That winter, Nicki would stop by sometimes, asking for small favors, bread once, because they were out. (Just a few slices.) Cash for sanitary supplies. They’re expensive these days.
Tony and Nicki have made some bad choices in their lives. They both smoke. I would see Tony coming up the street, now and then, carrying a case of beer. Nicki had trouble with the law, she says because she took the rap for an ex-boyfriend.
But they were good people. I miss them, since they moved. They had to find a cheaper place. They couldn’t afford to live here anymore. Nicki was worried, because she’d have to take three buses to get to work.
I live in a suburb of a small town in the Monongahela Valley. The place where I live is one of a number of communities that grew up around the steel industry, then suffered, when the mills closed, and Ronald Reagan told the people who lived here to “vote with our feet” and move.
I spent most of my life in Pittsburgh’s East End. I’d still be living there, if I could afford to.
There is the problem.
Since the mills closed, the city’s biggest employers are the hospitals and the universities, “eds and meds”, we say here.
Most of the universities, and the biggest hospitals are located in the East End. Add to that the fact that the neighborhood is beautifully walkable. Public transportation is plentiful. There are a number of nice business districts, and the area became a very desirable, and very expensive place to live.
My last neighborhood, East Liberty, wasn’t always so pricey.
Back in the 1920s when my father’s family moved there, it was the place to live. A lot of prominent families had homes there.
The Kellys, as in Gene Kelly, as in “Singing In The Rain”, lived on Saint Clair Street in East Liberty.
By the 1950s, when my parents moved out, the neighborhood was changing. The old families were moving to suburban communities, while new families, often the children of immigrants, were moving in. They didn’t always know how to keep up their houses, and they had shouting matches in their front yards.
In the late sixties, several low-income high rises were built along Penn Avenue, the neighborhood’s main street. One of them was built over Penn Avenue, an original idea. But the architect never considered whether the residents would appreciate having traffic noises and exhaust fumes coming their way, all day every day.
Businesses along Penn Avenue closed. Homes went for less.
I came to East Liberty in the eighties and loved the neighborhood. It was walkable. There were plenty of buses. Most of the time I lived in East Liberty, I didn’t have a car, and I didn’t miss having one. I could walk or take the bus, almost anywhere I needed to go.
I loved sitting on my fire escape balcony, watching the world pass.
Then Whole Foods came to East Liberty, and the neighborhood started to change.
The low income high rises came down. New businesses came to the area. Housing rates, and my rent, went up.
Like a lot of people from the East End, I headed for the suburbs, for a community that had grown up around a factory that wasn’t there anymore.
Housing there was cheap, until a few years ago, when people noticed the community was also walkable, with plenty of public transportation, and it was a short commute to the East End.
Then the mortgage meltdown happened.
In 2008, seven families on my street lost their homes and had to move. I would see their things piled up for the trash; kids’ riding toys, Christmas decorations, bits of furniture they wouldn’t have space for wherever they were going.
The houses became rental properties. New families came and went, renters never stay long. Yards grew weedy. No one is going to take care of a yard, if they aren’t going to stay.
The housing bust was a boon to landlords. Hundreds of homes were, suddenly, vacant, and going cheap.
At the same time, people were leaving gentrified city neighborhoods, for blue collar suburbs, where rents were comparatively low.
I left my old community four years ago, because I couldn’t afford to live there anymore. My new neighborhood is much cheaper. It is also much less walkable. There is a bus, it runs every half hour, more or less. It will take me into the center of town in about twenty minutes, where I can get other buses, to get to other places.
Or, I can take the bus into downtown Pittsburgh. That will take about an hour and a half.
Nicki would have to give herself about two and a half hours, to make sure she got to her job at the convention center on time.
Free range children are commonplace in these suburban communities.
You see them zooming up and down the streets on bicycles, scooters or skateboards. They play football across yards, or bounce basketballs up and down the asphalt.
They roam freely, without parental oversight. Their parents are busy people, who don’t believe their children will be snatched up by strangers in white vans.
The threats here are real, speeding drivers, people with guns.
In 2016, there was a horrible shooting at a barbecue in a community a few miles away from where I lived. Several people were killed. I heard about it on the BBC, shortly after it happened, and I was terrified, because the shooters were still at large.
For ten days after that shooting, the children on my street stayed in.
Then I was watching out for skateboarders, dodging basketballs, and being panhandled for money and sweets.
Stranger danger doesn’t seem to be a problem for these children. Perhaps it’s because I’m a woman, with silver gray hair. But I am never seen as a threat.
When a new family moved in next door to my present address, their small son came to me with a slice of pizza and asked me to warm it up for him. Explaining that his family hadn’t bought a microwave yet.
I did, of course. I was mildly amused by it all. For the next year, I would see him and his brothers playing football in the street.
The next winter, when it snowed, one of them showed up on my porch and offered to shovel my walk for five dollars.
Better you than me kid. I paid him ten, as he did an excellent job. He and his shovel made the rounds of the street. I hope he did well.
That spring, he was back again. This time he asked for money for food. His father had left the family, and the cupboard was bare.
I knew it was possible I was being played. I also knew that I would rather be played than let a kid go hungry. So, I gave him what I had, which wasn’t much. But he was pleased.
A few days later, he and his brother were back, asking for food again. That time, I was out of cash, so I gave them some cans of soup and some frozen spaghetti dinners I’d been saving for an emergency.
I was not being played.
I kept food for them for several weeks, frozen pot pies, cans of soup, bread and peanut butter.
I charged their phones for them, too, when their electricity was shut off.
As the summer progressed, they began to do better. Occasionally, one of them would stop by and ask for a can of soda. I always obliged.
I only spoke to their mother once, when she came to ask if I was the person who left a note for her, complaining about the trash in her yard.
I assured her I wasn’t, and we had a brief discussion about the bumper crop of poison ivy that was growing behind her house.
Then she moved.
Her landlord, apparently, evicted her and her family so he could move in himself. He owns that house and the house on the other side of me.
None of the families who live in that house have stayed more than a few months. The landlord, I’m told, charges a high rent, plus an assortment of fees.
The last tenant moved out, because she’d gotten a better job, and could afford a larger house for herself and her six kids.
She was also having a problem, because her landlord was prowling back yards, watching her undress. That was, she tells me, why he evicted the other family.
Presumably, she paid for her car insurance, before the move. Her car had been sitting in the driveway for several months, because she couldn’t afford it.
Cars eat money.
Gas costs. Insurance costs. There are fees for a license and registration. There’s the annual inspection, and costs for repairs.
Even the most careful driver in the world will wind up, sooner or later paying for a parking ticket or a traffic citation. Especially, if you don’t have much money, and you couldn’t afford insurance this month, but you still have to drive to get to work.
A woman rear ended my car, as I was stopped at a light.
She got out of her big Chevy Suburban, came up to me and asked if I was all right. I said I was, and she went back to her car and drove off.
It’s quite probable she was driving on a suspended license, or no license at all. Or, possibly, her car was uninsured, or unregistered. But she needed to drive to get where she was going.
You see people walking along the shoulder of the road. There is no sidewalk, just a narrow space where the weeds are low.
I live near a beautiful park, but I can’t walk there. I can make it to the small shopping plaza a few blocks from my house. Then the sidewalk disappears.
There is a beautiful lake in the park, there are walking trails, a concert shell and a large playground. There’s also plenty of parking, because it’s needed. My neighbors’ kids played in the street in front of my house, not the park. It is not accessible.
Cars are essential in suburbia, where mass transit is scarce, and not all that reliable. Where sidewalks are rare, and pedestrians and drivers are expected to share the street.
Ride sharing services exist, but they are expensive. I tried to take Lyft to the airport once. It would have cost me more than two hundred dollars.
So, people spend money they might have spent on food or bills to maintain their cars. Or they risk hefty fines, by driving vehicles that are uninsured or uninspected.
The police shortage means fewer speed traps and officers prowling the streets. That’s something of a plus where I live.
There was a drug dealer in my neighborhood. I could see the cars pulling up in front of a house a few feet from mine. They’d stop for a short while, then leave.
On Super Tuesday 2020, he had a disagreement with someone, a wholesaler, a business rival or a customer, and there were gunshots.
There were cops all over the street. But I didn’t see anyone get arrested. Instead, it was business as usual, until covid hit.
Perhaps people were buying their drugs online. Perhaps the shooting scared customers away.
I know there were notices taped to his door, and now the house is empty. I don’t miss him, but I hate to see an empty house.
A year ago, an officer was killed by a man with some mental health issues, who had managed to get his hands on a gun.
The officer was a young man, new to his job. He had a girlfriend, who was about to be his wife, and a small son.
Every police officer in the county drove in the procession, following his remains from town to the coroner’s office, then, a few days later, driving in a long funeral procession.
Some of my neighbors put blue lightbulbs on their front porches as memorials.
In suburbia, the police are the people who hand out parking tickets, and bang on your door to tell you to move your car.
They’re also the people who sponsor the Easter Egg Hunt, or the Youth Basketball Program.
They are not well paid. Sometimes they are also part time and temporary workers.
They were happy to set up speed traps, or chase drunks out of the park. They don’t make enough to risk their lives.
My neighbor, the creepy peeper, is more likely to get caught by an angry husband than the local cops.
This is the new suburbia.
Lawns are mowed because the landlord and the code office insist on it. But don’t look for flower beds. People aren’t going to make the effort to plant and grow flowers, if they aren’t going to stay long.
Kids play in the streets, sometimes as late as eleven at night, because their parents are too tired or too busy to bring them in.
People will do without electricity, or heat, because they can’t afford them. They may do without running water, because, out here, the water company will shut off service too. LIHEAP will help with gas and electric bills. There is a separate agency to help with water, if you can find them, and deal with the paperwork.
Communities are not all white, or all Black. There aren’t a lot of LatinX people in the Monongahela valley, but the few who do live here, live, mostly, in suburbs like mine.
In my neighborhood Blacks and whites get along. I have yet to hear one of my white neighbors make a racist comment, even about the two boys who were throwing rocks at parked cars one night.
This is not the suburbia of “Leave It To Beaver” or “The Brady Bunch”. This is not kind of community sung about in “Pleasant Valley Sunday” or “Little Boxes On The Hillside.”
This is not the suburbia Donald Trump claims to want to defend.
This is the place where I feed my neighbors, as my grandmother did during the depression.
This is the place where people struggle to get by from day to day.
This is the suburbia nobody knows.