"The intricacies of that development’s proposal are less important here than the fact that that billionaire went to the town’s community foundation and told them that if the proposal passed city council, the local housing non-profit would never see another dime from him. His wealth, he thought, gave him the right to decide what was best for the community as well as for himself."
This is exactly how it plays out in international philanthropy, which is the field I work in. The Bloombergs and Gates and Fords and Hodges of the world get to literally decide what countries should do in their urban planning, public health, education, and whatever sectors they decide to be interested in at any given moment in time. It's astonishing.
Yes! That's why "rich people can just give a lot of their wealth to charity" misses one of many points: those are priorities they get to decide on, which might not be priorities society as a whole decides on, however contentiously or messily.
🫶🏻 It does, for me, provide serious reset on a regular basis. Part of why I include solace and spiritual reconnection (or whatever one calls it) as part of a fundamental human right to whole, vibrant nature.
This essay reminds me of Jay Farrell’s Billionaire Wilderness, but written in a more articulate and pithy manner. I have been thinking a lot about private philanthropy and the way we subsidize philanthropy with foregone tax revenues while allowing individuals and foundations to act without accountability. And, more importantly, its consequences for the provision of public goods.
Thank you, Chelsea. And thank you for the comparison! I've had that book on my pile every since it came out and STILL have not read it, though I've listened to and enjoyed interviews with him.
"the way we subsidize philanthropy with foregone tax revenues while allowing individuals and foundations to act without accountability" -- so well said.
This reminds me of the decade-long battle over public access to Oswego Lake in Oregon. The wealthy residents living on the lake still think the 400+ acre natural body of water formed 12,000 years ago belongs to them and they shouldn’t have to share a drop of it with outsiders.
Oh! yes, absolutely. And water access is so often a huge focal point of this issue because water is both a fundamental right (including the right to solace, I think) and a mark of economic privilege.
This was a timely read for me. I am taking a fundraising class and last week we explore the motivation of wealthy donors. I felt like our readings painted a picture of benevolent people, and that it was only rational to let wealthy donors into the decisions of organizations because of their monetary gifts. Something felt wrong while I did my readings, and I think your article captured that "Weird feeling" well - the entitlement to things because they equate their "well-earned" wealth with permissions and privileges that they "should" have. I'll share this with my class!
Oh, goodness, thank you! And thank you for sharing that experience. I was on a non-profit board for a few years and it was that dynamic that really got to me (though I mostly stepped down because what they needed were people good at event organizing and fundraising and I'm terrible at both and also hate doing both).
There was something I read a couple years ago that I wish I could remember the source of so I could share it with you. It was in a series of readings by and about refugees. This was from I *think* a memoir and the woman wrote about the interview for getting some kind of funding or grant for people who'd come to the U.S. as refugees. She articulated something I'd never been able to before, about how she'd had to learn to walk this invisible line between asking for money she needed, and seeming to not need it just *enough* that they felt she could be successful with it. Complicated idea, I should try to find it again, but it got to something about the psychology of philanthropy, especially when it comes to people being the recipients.
That sounds very interesting! Our class also has a lot of research in philanthropic psychology - we're studying the work of Adrian Sargeant, it's very insightful if you ever want to read his work, its worth some time!
The way my childhood faith community has succumbed to greed and entitlement just breaks my heart on the daily. It’s a grief that is amorphous and perpetual. I can’t understand how anyone can take a mystical book like the Bible and especially the words of Jesus and turn them into supremacy and wealth-hoarding and racism. It’s just …tragic. Thank you for teaching me so much about these issues and specifically about all the connections to private property. It’s heartening to read all the comments here (and the footage from the protests last week) to see how people are coming together around these ideas and values. Like the Bible says, “fill up the hungry, send the rich away”!!
Well, the Inquisition years weren't a fantastic time. (I just listened to a totally random thing about James I of Scotland's hyperactive terror of witches and how many died under his reign before he became king of England.) But I think *anything*, especially faith and belief, is vulnerable to being coopted for power and hierarchies and oppression. Even Christianity itself was in the very beginning! It is tragic, you're right, because what is beautiful and true and life-giving can always be corrupted.
But maybe that means the essential task is to find the true veins, the soil-connected, heart-opening streams and rivers of morals, values, ethics, and faith, and work to nurture them and keep them alive so that they are never truly overtaken. That's a beautiful life thing to do 💚💚💚
And I love seeing people come together around these ideas and values. It's hugely important. 💪
Nia, thank you. Literally every aspect of this is playing out in my communities. I have almost a full time unpaid job looking to spend $5 million moving our water system so that generational landowners can develop $3 million worth of land. The bill, spread over our community, will be $ 25,000 per household over the next twenty years, including folks with limited means. Meanwhile, we have second homeowners on the beach who could write a check. And then the nimbys who come out of the woodwork around every low income housing project, then whine about the restaurants only opening three days a week.
All I can say to all this is wheewwww. I hear you. Versions of this everywhere -- in your home, in my home, in everyone's homes. All this wealth could just ... do things. It could be employed for the common good.
I'm so glad to know how many people there are like you working so hard to steer this ship in a better, more life-sustaining and joyful direction. 🌊
Did you ever notice that when all these wealthy people cross over for their eternal dirt nap, they never seem to remember to take any of their stuff with them?
I always think of the conversation Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller had at a party given by a billionaire about the man's wealth. Joseph Heller said, "I have something he'll never have—I have enough."
How do you suppose they keep forgetting?! The pharoahs managed it. Or at least tried.
Whew. That Heller line. I can imagine Vonnegut's expression in agreement all too vividly. It really is a privilege, to be someone who knows they have enough. Thank you for that. 💚
Thank you for putting my jumbled thoughts into logical thinking.
At times I think it’s obscene to live on a road that is mostly populated by second home owners and short term rentals when Asheville has a housing crisis.
After Hurricane Helene a huge amount of our time went into getting the renters and the second home owners out by helicopter. The right thing to do but it was amazing to see the community regroup and clear the landslides when we didn’t have to attend to them.
Fortunately some of the second homeowners returned not once but twice with gas for our generators and canned goods and, amazingly, after weeks without, fruit and vegetables.
Not all second homeowners, right?! I know a lot of people who move back and forth between climates after retirement who have a very different relationship with their two communities. I thought about writing about the variations more, but thought it would be too distracting adding another thread.
It's really hard to balance these things out, though. My town has strict limits on short-term rentals within town simply to try to keep a handle on affordability after watching other towns in the state get eaten up by private equity purchases for short-term renting. I think there must be effective ways to write and manage these laws so that they benefit from the community. Somehow? But I'm not a policy maker.
I remember your posts on Notes about people coming by with fruits and vegetables. Beautiful to see that.
And yes! Nature is our teacher in all her variations! 🌱
So right! It is easy to generalize. In many ways, in the case of short term rentals, it’s a reflection of the great income inequality and in other cases, a local family has figured out how to make ends meet or send their kid to college by renting out the space above their garage.
We have yet to put in strict rules for short term rentals. Asheville had str rules at one point so Black Mountain got the inordinate amount of the str overflow in a tourist town where the “workers” can’t afford to live. It’s a tough topic. I’ve sat through Town Hall and Town Council meetings. I’m hoping we all meet somewhere in the middle so we get people housed. Particularly after a hurricane. 🌱
These issues affect communities all across the world, so I guess one good thing is different communities and geographies can have these conversations and talk about what kinds of solutions have or have not worked. And what kinds of barriers those solutions face -- our state legislature has tried to make these zone overlays (that provide for restrictions on short-term rentals within downtown cores and residential areas) illegal, which only makes the work more difficult.
Fiery! I picture you banging this one out quickly after reading a couple articles about the absentee Colorado owners. The way they are just obviously degrading the place but still view themselves as some sort of blessing to the locals… ugh. The comparison to the college music blaster was apt.
(And of course, I need to keep inspecting ways I fall into the same pattern!)
Thank you for posting audio of your articles! I’ve listened to the last couple. One suggestion here: add as a “voiceover“ instead of as “audio embed“. Substack doesn’t provide the same useful audio player for audio embeds as it does for voiceovers. If you do as voiceover, I will be able to skip back 10 seconds; forward 10 seconds; it will show up on my lock screen; all that jazz. Like any proper audio app. Audio embeds don’t get any of that.
Oh, thank you, Chad! John Lovie has actually recommended that before and I hadn't made the shift. As someone who listens to a lot of videos, podcasts, etc., I am very dependent on that 10/15-second skipback. My attention drifts shamefully when I'm listening versus reading (see also: why I don't do audiobooks).
I meant to say at the top, this is actually a revision of an essay from a couple years ago, though I revised it more heavily than I usually do for republishing. It originally revolved around Maurice Minnifield from Northern Exposure but that aspect doesn't have as much relevance as it did then.
I will say that the college music blaster did used to share her mom's homemade kimchi with us -- her parents lived locally -- and I will forever be grateful for that. We all have our good points!
Thought provoking and gets me thinking about Max Weber and the Protestant Work Ethic: only those few who are chosen by God will survive and thrive as evidenced by their accumulation of material wealth…land. That’s the way they thought. And so they built a nation rooted in those Puritan concepts of land and property, success and wealth. By extension, the thinking goes that those who have accumulated wealth are good (the rest of us are lazy or not smart enough) and they have a God-given right to be the ruling class. I don't subscribe to any of it but its woven into American society from way back when, nearly 400 years ago.
Absolutely it is and I'm so glad you reminded me of this. Believe it or not, I still haven't read Weber even though his thinking runs tightly through so many of these issues. It's how they justified a tremendous number of atrocities and pervades the whole colonial "well, we won" attitude (even though, if you really think about it, many of the Europeans fled that continent because they'd *lost* -- to wealth, power, and land grabs). The kind of thing Patrick Wyman said can't be said enough, about how weird and destructive this conflation of wealth with merit is.
It was required reading for anthropology majors and it has been a touch point ever since, helping understand what the heck is going on when it comes to western nationalism, meritocracy, the manufacturing and perpetuation of the American "dream", etc. Worth the read and not terribly long.
Maybe it was the clothes? Those outfits could not have been comfortable.
Just kidding. Kelly Brown Douglas's book "Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God" traces back this kind of thinking better than almost anything I've read, though she misses the land aspect of it all. She links certain "chosen of God" Christian thinking in England back to an idea of revering Anglo-Saxons (sends it back to the 1st century CE), showing how the Puritans brought that thinking with them, and she is very persuasive threading that idea of some kind of uber-human idea throughout history. (It's a pretty short book and, as she's an Episcopal priest, the second section is more about biblical teachings, which I admittedly gave less attention to but is still really interesting.)
There was a letter to the Slate advice columnist this week from a woman who "secretly" funded her friends IVF GoFundMe and now is concerned that they're giving the baby an "unusual" name. She had a weird name, suffered from it etc ... but the kicker is her real question "I funded it so don't I get a say?"
Um? Absolutely not. JFC.
Also, the same rhetoric about how service workers should be "grateful" is how not only this administration, but a lot of the members of the right-wing provincial gentry classes, are talking about other nations. There's a subreddit called "Shit Americans Say" that shows up on my feed and boy howdy. It's endemic through wide swathes of American society.
OMG. These kinds of examples never cease to amaze me, honestly! I can't remember where I read about this many, many years ago, might have even been in Miss Manners days, but the idea of having the right to control people through the money you might or might not give them is pervasive. It's astonishing and yet ... not.
And UGH on the expected gratitude from other nations. White saviorism rears its head except it really should be wealth saviorism. (See also: one of the reasons I stepped down from the local educational nonprofit.)
End of empire -- impossible to make it pretty but at least we can try to grow things.
I appreciated these concrete examples from your neck of the woods, knowing next to nothing about the details of local culture there. But as always, your observations resonate universally.
"Entitlement is a vague thing to try to pin down, an unvocalized feeling that one person, or group of people, has more of a right to exist, to take up space and air and attention, than other people. It is often accompanied by an expansive idea of ownership, a feeling that the fact of possession, whether of property or money or achievement or identity, implies a right to the unconstrained use of the thing possessed, no matter how the possession was gained or at whose expense it’s employed."
This is beautifully expressed, and it led me to reflect on how relative histories function within this ownership ideology. On the one hand, this "I was here first" rationale as in: I got to this resource, or idea, or official status, first. But then at the same time it ignores the question of who really *was* there first: who lives in that community and is invested in it; who lived there before the first settlers came; whose labor, sacrifices or other precedents your current ownership is built upon. And this deeper history can in turn be weaponized against recent immigrants lacking in local roots and social capital.
You mentioned achievement above as one of the rationales for a misplaced sense of entitlement. Something related that you often see is this expectation of gratitude for having "built" something (often a corporation, or new technology, or developed land), where any critique would imply a lack of respect for their entrepreneurial initiative. I can't recall where I saw this, but there's a recent piece that contrasts a culture of "making" (building) with a culture of care, arguing we need more of the latter.
But ownership has richer meanings too, like this video making the rounds. I love how he reframes as public wealth, with "hands off" not some manifesto for private property but a celebration of things owned in common: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86hnPrWozUo
Rick Steves, holy wow! That is so cool. I love that he brought Erdogan into it, yet another country and autocrat we should have been watching and learning from for years now. And the public wealth -- as you can imagine, the articulation of celebrating things owned and shared in common makes me want to cheer.
I also just came across Tad Staermer's work yesterday, and loved this short video on community as the core of resistance, and what protest really means: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdHESAqBOLg
And yes to the building of things! It's old hat now but worth thinking about all the successful companies for whom credit tends to go to one person, but which were built by the work of hundreds or even thousands. I was thinking of more individual fields--having had some issues recently with, shall we say, large-ego writers and public intellectuals, or those striving to become so--but it applies everywhere.
That "who was here first and who gets to profit" idea was something Erik Freyfogle explored in really interesting thought experiments in "The Land We Share." He used it to illustrate how it is that community, rather than ownership, creates value. It's something I'm always trying to find better ways to explain in my own words, but usually end up quoting him.
We all crave recognition, to be seen and understood and heard by others. How to balance that essential human need with interconnection, humility, and that culture of care you mention -- I am starting to wonder if that's truly the task of our time.
"We all crave recognition, to be seen and understood and heard by others." I'm so glad you acknowledged this, because I think a lot of (otherwise well-placed) social criticism overshoots the mark by dismissing the reality of individual ego needs like self-worth, agency, feeling valued and respected. Even if this flows into the social, we also experience these things as individuals who are not fully transparent to others. That doesn't mean we need an atomistic individualist society or one based on self-interest, but there has to be that balance you allude to above. Self *and* community.
I guess there's two different issues with "building." As you say, a narrow conception of building that only credits certain high-visibility individuals or types of accomplishment. But also, the limitations of a paradigm that celebrates "building" and "making" - measurable, visible accomplishment - at the expense of care work and caring more generally.
I wonder how they ideally coexist? We need to build things while caring for things, seems like they should be a balance. But I guess she's talking about how the dominant culture idealizes tangible "making" at the expense of ephemeral caring.
There's a way in which I can feel into a core of that for myself, being a mom and a writer, and as my kids are in their teen years now, realizing that all the caring I put into their lives in early years can feel ... lost. Unknown, unseen. And yet that's simply a reflection of cultural devaluing (even with the more obvious valuing like idealization of mothers, some kind of support for day care would be far more welcome and meaningful).
Very interesting dichotomy to chew over, which you always give me!
And yes, absolutely. I think it's essential to anything we want to do in the world to really learn that people need to be seen, and it's not an egotistical thing, it's fundamental to our species. I think it has a feedback loop with childhood, which actually makes childrearing even more important, and brings me back to Riane Eisler and her ideas--or others' ideas she wrote about--on how upbringing relates to authoritarian leanings.
"we also experience these things as individuals who are not fully transparent to others." -- beautifully put. It's one of the things I really liked about Graeber and Wengrow's "Dawn of Everything," the way the shifted focused in different cultures and societies over the millennia and how they reflected community interdependence and caretaking (or not) and individual self-actualization (or not). We need both.
Yeah, building and making is definitely better than destroying and ripping apart! And building can be an act of love. The way I read this critique is, first, what you just said about idealizing tangible, measurable creation over more invisible or ephemeral caring. And second, that an overemphasis or fetishization of building/making comes at the expense of preserving, sustaining, repairing, caring for what's already there; that a "culture of makers" is one that throws out old stuff on the rationale that you can just make new stuff. So there's a devaluing of history.
Maybe, too, though, the kind of making matters. Making vessels to eat and drink out of and carry things in is a kind of making that's also caring, and it can be done with an eye to tangible sustainability (like not using materials that extract too much or produce toxins). Making food, which will obviously be eaten.
And then, creativity isn't exactly efficient, which is one of the things I appreciate about it. When I've really worked on a piece of writing, there are hours and hours and hours of messing around and scrapping sections and lines that never make their way into the piece. But I think it's that process that makes creativity worthwhile -- all creativity, whether writing, art, dancing, scientific discovery ...
Maybe the question is more about where the line is between creativity and extraction. Or some version of those ideas.
Thanks for responding after so long! Please don't ever feel obligated to keep going if I continue; sometimes it's hard to resist following up. One quick afterthought to your last: that new book Abundance by Ezra Klein/Derek Thompson has been getting tons of buzz lately, and it's hard not think of this chain when I hear about it. I wonder how their policy wonk/liberal market-oriented take on "building and making" fits into all this. Maybe there's also a line to balance between functionality and extraction.
"The intricacies of that development’s proposal are less important here than the fact that that billionaire went to the town’s community foundation and told them that if the proposal passed city council, the local housing non-profit would never see another dime from him. His wealth, he thought, gave him the right to decide what was best for the community as well as for himself."
This is exactly how it plays out in international philanthropy, which is the field I work in. The Bloombergs and Gates and Fords and Hodges of the world get to literally decide what countries should do in their urban planning, public health, education, and whatever sectors they decide to be interested in at any given moment in time. It's astonishing.
Yes! That's why "rich people can just give a lot of their wealth to charity" misses one of many points: those are priorities they get to decide on, which might not be priorities society as a whole decides on, however contentiously or messily.
Thinking about this holistically all the time. I'm haunted within a haunted world.
But sitting by a river offers some sanctuary. Thanks for that.
🫶🏻 It does, for me, provide serious reset on a regular basis. Part of why I include solace and spiritual reconnection (or whatever one calls it) as part of a fundamental human right to whole, vibrant nature.
This essay reminds me of Jay Farrell’s Billionaire Wilderness, but written in a more articulate and pithy manner. I have been thinking a lot about private philanthropy and the way we subsidize philanthropy with foregone tax revenues while allowing individuals and foundations to act without accountability. And, more importantly, its consequences for the provision of public goods.
I look forward to reading more here. Thank you.
Thank you, Chelsea. And thank you for the comparison! I've had that book on my pile every since it came out and STILL have not read it, though I've listened to and enjoyed interviews with him.
"the way we subsidize philanthropy with foregone tax revenues while allowing individuals and foundations to act without accountability" -- so well said.
🙌
🫶🏻
This reminds me of the decade-long battle over public access to Oswego Lake in Oregon. The wealthy residents living on the lake still think the 400+ acre natural body of water formed 12,000 years ago belongs to them and they shouldn’t have to share a drop of it with outsiders.
Thanks for a great read!
Oh! yes, absolutely. And water access is so often a huge focal point of this issue because water is both a fundamental right (including the right to solace, I think) and a mark of economic privilege.
Lake and beach and river access for all!
"What's the use of me renting half the apartment if I can't sleep in it because you're inconsiderate?"
When they outnumber you, it's "democracy." When you outnumber them, they call it "the tyranny of the majority."
When you outnumber them it’s called a senseless mob 😅
Yeah, "mob rule"...
This was a timely read for me. I am taking a fundraising class and last week we explore the motivation of wealthy donors. I felt like our readings painted a picture of benevolent people, and that it was only rational to let wealthy donors into the decisions of organizations because of their monetary gifts. Something felt wrong while I did my readings, and I think your article captured that "Weird feeling" well - the entitlement to things because they equate their "well-earned" wealth with permissions and privileges that they "should" have. I'll share this with my class!
Oh, goodness, thank you! And thank you for sharing that experience. I was on a non-profit board for a few years and it was that dynamic that really got to me (though I mostly stepped down because what they needed were people good at event organizing and fundraising and I'm terrible at both and also hate doing both).
There was something I read a couple years ago that I wish I could remember the source of so I could share it with you. It was in a series of readings by and about refugees. This was from I *think* a memoir and the woman wrote about the interview for getting some kind of funding or grant for people who'd come to the U.S. as refugees. She articulated something I'd never been able to before, about how she'd had to learn to walk this invisible line between asking for money she needed, and seeming to not need it just *enough* that they felt she could be successful with it. Complicated idea, I should try to find it again, but it got to something about the psychology of philanthropy, especially when it comes to people being the recipients.
That sounds very interesting! Our class also has a lot of research in philanthropic psychology - we're studying the work of Adrian Sargeant, it's very insightful if you ever want to read his work, its worth some time!
Philanthropic psychology sounds like a whole lifetime of discovery just waiting to happen ...
The way my childhood faith community has succumbed to greed and entitlement just breaks my heart on the daily. It’s a grief that is amorphous and perpetual. I can’t understand how anyone can take a mystical book like the Bible and especially the words of Jesus and turn them into supremacy and wealth-hoarding and racism. It’s just …tragic. Thank you for teaching me so much about these issues and specifically about all the connections to private property. It’s heartening to read all the comments here (and the footage from the protests last week) to see how people are coming together around these ideas and values. Like the Bible says, “fill up the hungry, send the rich away”!!
ha, yes!
Well, the Inquisition years weren't a fantastic time. (I just listened to a totally random thing about James I of Scotland's hyperactive terror of witches and how many died under his reign before he became king of England.) But I think *anything*, especially faith and belief, is vulnerable to being coopted for power and hierarchies and oppression. Even Christianity itself was in the very beginning! It is tragic, you're right, because what is beautiful and true and life-giving can always be corrupted.
But maybe that means the essential task is to find the true veins, the soil-connected, heart-opening streams and rivers of morals, values, ethics, and faith, and work to nurture them and keep them alive so that they are never truly overtaken. That's a beautiful life thing to do 💚💚💚
And I love seeing people come together around these ideas and values. It's hugely important. 💪
Yes! I’ll join anyone in working to nurture those values and keep them alive 💙💙
Nia, thank you. Literally every aspect of this is playing out in my communities. I have almost a full time unpaid job looking to spend $5 million moving our water system so that generational landowners can develop $3 million worth of land. The bill, spread over our community, will be $ 25,000 per household over the next twenty years, including folks with limited means. Meanwhile, we have second homeowners on the beach who could write a check. And then the nimbys who come out of the woodwork around every low income housing project, then whine about the restaurants only opening three days a week.
All I can say to all this is wheewwww. I hear you. Versions of this everywhere -- in your home, in my home, in everyone's homes. All this wealth could just ... do things. It could be employed for the common good.
I'm so glad to know how many people there are like you working so hard to steer this ship in a better, more life-sustaining and joyful direction. 🌊
Did you ever notice that when all these wealthy people cross over for their eternal dirt nap, they never seem to remember to take any of their stuff with them?
I always think of the conversation Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller had at a party given by a billionaire about the man's wealth. Joseph Heller said, "I have something he'll never have—I have enough."
How do you suppose they keep forgetting?! The pharoahs managed it. Or at least tried.
Whew. That Heller line. I can imagine Vonnegut's expression in agreement all too vividly. It really is a privilege, to be someone who knows they have enough. Thank you for that. 💚
Absolutely! The Pharaohs deserve an A for effort.
Thank you for putting my jumbled thoughts into logical thinking.
At times I think it’s obscene to live on a road that is mostly populated by second home owners and short term rentals when Asheville has a housing crisis.
After Hurricane Helene a huge amount of our time went into getting the renters and the second home owners out by helicopter. The right thing to do but it was amazing to see the community regroup and clear the landslides when we didn’t have to attend to them.
Fortunately some of the second homeowners returned not once but twice with gas for our generators and canned goods and, amazingly, after weeks without, fruit and vegetables.
The Storm was a teacher.
Thank you for your teachings, Antonia!🌱🌿💚
Not all second homeowners, right?! I know a lot of people who move back and forth between climates after retirement who have a very different relationship with their two communities. I thought about writing about the variations more, but thought it would be too distracting adding another thread.
It's really hard to balance these things out, though. My town has strict limits on short-term rentals within town simply to try to keep a handle on affordability after watching other towns in the state get eaten up by private equity purchases for short-term renting. I think there must be effective ways to write and manage these laws so that they benefit from the community. Somehow? But I'm not a policy maker.
I remember your posts on Notes about people coming by with fruits and vegetables. Beautiful to see that.
And yes! Nature is our teacher in all her variations! 🌱
So right! It is easy to generalize. In many ways, in the case of short term rentals, it’s a reflection of the great income inequality and in other cases, a local family has figured out how to make ends meet or send their kid to college by renting out the space above their garage.
We have yet to put in strict rules for short term rentals. Asheville had str rules at one point so Black Mountain got the inordinate amount of the str overflow in a tourist town where the “workers” can’t afford to live. It’s a tough topic. I’ve sat through Town Hall and Town Council meetings. I’m hoping we all meet somewhere in the middle so we get people housed. Particularly after a hurricane. 🌱
These issues affect communities all across the world, so I guess one good thing is different communities and geographies can have these conversations and talk about what kinds of solutions have or have not worked. And what kinds of barriers those solutions face -- our state legislature has tried to make these zone overlays (that provide for restrictions on short-term rentals within downtown cores and residential areas) illegal, which only makes the work more difficult.
Fiery! I picture you banging this one out quickly after reading a couple articles about the absentee Colorado owners. The way they are just obviously degrading the place but still view themselves as some sort of blessing to the locals… ugh. The comparison to the college music blaster was apt.
(And of course, I need to keep inspecting ways I fall into the same pattern!)
Thank you for posting audio of your articles! I’ve listened to the last couple. One suggestion here: add as a “voiceover“ instead of as “audio embed“. Substack doesn’t provide the same useful audio player for audio embeds as it does for voiceovers. If you do as voiceover, I will be able to skip back 10 seconds; forward 10 seconds; it will show up on my lock screen; all that jazz. Like any proper audio app. Audio embeds don’t get any of that.
Oh, thank you, Chad! John Lovie has actually recommended that before and I hadn't made the shift. As someone who listens to a lot of videos, podcasts, etc., I am very dependent on that 10/15-second skipback. My attention drifts shamefully when I'm listening versus reading (see also: why I don't do audiobooks).
I meant to say at the top, this is actually a revision of an essay from a couple years ago, though I revised it more heavily than I usually do for republishing. It originally revolved around Maurice Minnifield from Northern Exposure but that aspect doesn't have as much relevance as it did then.
I will say that the college music blaster did used to share her mom's homemade kimchi with us -- her parents lived locally -- and I will forever be grateful for that. We all have our good points!
Thought provoking and gets me thinking about Max Weber and the Protestant Work Ethic: only those few who are chosen by God will survive and thrive as evidenced by their accumulation of material wealth…land. That’s the way they thought. And so they built a nation rooted in those Puritan concepts of land and property, success and wealth. By extension, the thinking goes that those who have accumulated wealth are good (the rest of us are lazy or not smart enough) and they have a God-given right to be the ruling class. I don't subscribe to any of it but its woven into American society from way back when, nearly 400 years ago.
Absolutely it is and I'm so glad you reminded me of this. Believe it or not, I still haven't read Weber even though his thinking runs tightly through so many of these issues. It's how they justified a tremendous number of atrocities and pervades the whole colonial "well, we won" attitude (even though, if you really think about it, many of the Europeans fled that continent because they'd *lost* -- to wealth, power, and land grabs). The kind of thing Patrick Wyman said can't be said enough, about how weird and destructive this conflation of wealth with merit is.
It was required reading for anthropology majors and it has been a touch point ever since, helping understand what the heck is going on when it comes to western nationalism, meritocracy, the manufacturing and perpetuation of the American "dream", etc. Worth the read and not terribly long.
I will move it up the pile, that's a strong recommendation even atop the recommendations I should have followed earlier. :)
Well shit, as if sexual piety and rape culture weren’t bad enough. Puritan legacies are special. 🙄
Maybe it was the clothes? Those outfits could not have been comfortable.
Just kidding. Kelly Brown Douglas's book "Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God" traces back this kind of thinking better than almost anything I've read, though she misses the land aspect of it all. She links certain "chosen of God" Christian thinking in England back to an idea of revering Anglo-Saxons (sends it back to the 1st century CE), showing how the Puritans brought that thinking with them, and she is very persuasive threading that idea of some kind of uber-human idea throughout history. (It's a pretty short book and, as she's an Episcopal priest, the second section is more about biblical teachings, which I admittedly gave less attention to but is still really interesting.)
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Thank you, Nia. As always, this is food for thought and a catalyst for conversation!
Got a lovely card from you today, Greg, too, thank you! Kindness knows best :)
There was a letter to the Slate advice columnist this week from a woman who "secretly" funded her friends IVF GoFundMe and now is concerned that they're giving the baby an "unusual" name. She had a weird name, suffered from it etc ... but the kicker is her real question "I funded it so don't I get a say?"
Um? Absolutely not. JFC.
Also, the same rhetoric about how service workers should be "grateful" is how not only this administration, but a lot of the members of the right-wing provincial gentry classes, are talking about other nations. There's a subreddit called "Shit Americans Say" that shows up on my feed and boy howdy. It's endemic through wide swathes of American society.
End of the empire is so so ugly.
OMG. These kinds of examples never cease to amaze me, honestly! I can't remember where I read about this many, many years ago, might have even been in Miss Manners days, but the idea of having the right to control people through the money you might or might not give them is pervasive. It's astonishing and yet ... not.
And UGH on the expected gratitude from other nations. White saviorism rears its head except it really should be wealth saviorism. (See also: one of the reasons I stepped down from the local educational nonprofit.)
End of empire -- impossible to make it pretty but at least we can try to grow things.
I appreciated these concrete examples from your neck of the woods, knowing next to nothing about the details of local culture there. But as always, your observations resonate universally.
"Entitlement is a vague thing to try to pin down, an unvocalized feeling that one person, or group of people, has more of a right to exist, to take up space and air and attention, than other people. It is often accompanied by an expansive idea of ownership, a feeling that the fact of possession, whether of property or money or achievement or identity, implies a right to the unconstrained use of the thing possessed, no matter how the possession was gained or at whose expense it’s employed."
This is beautifully expressed, and it led me to reflect on how relative histories function within this ownership ideology. On the one hand, this "I was here first" rationale as in: I got to this resource, or idea, or official status, first. But then at the same time it ignores the question of who really *was* there first: who lives in that community and is invested in it; who lived there before the first settlers came; whose labor, sacrifices or other precedents your current ownership is built upon. And this deeper history can in turn be weaponized against recent immigrants lacking in local roots and social capital.
You mentioned achievement above as one of the rationales for a misplaced sense of entitlement. Something related that you often see is this expectation of gratitude for having "built" something (often a corporation, or new technology, or developed land), where any critique would imply a lack of respect for their entrepreneurial initiative. I can't recall where I saw this, but there's a recent piece that contrasts a culture of "making" (building) with a culture of care, arguing we need more of the latter.
But ownership has richer meanings too, like this video making the rounds. I love how he reframes as public wealth, with "hands off" not some manifesto for private property but a celebration of things owned in common: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86hnPrWozUo
Rick Steves, holy wow! That is so cool. I love that he brought Erdogan into it, yet another country and autocrat we should have been watching and learning from for years now. And the public wealth -- as you can imagine, the articulation of celebrating things owned and shared in common makes me want to cheer.
I also just came across Tad Staermer's work yesterday, and loved this short video on community as the core of resistance, and what protest really means: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdHESAqBOLg
And yes to the building of things! It's old hat now but worth thinking about all the successful companies for whom credit tends to go to one person, but which were built by the work of hundreds or even thousands. I was thinking of more individual fields--having had some issues recently with, shall we say, large-ego writers and public intellectuals, or those striving to become so--but it applies everywhere.
That "who was here first and who gets to profit" idea was something Erik Freyfogle explored in really interesting thought experiments in "The Land We Share." He used it to illustrate how it is that community, rather than ownership, creates value. It's something I'm always trying to find better ways to explain in my own words, but usually end up quoting him.
We all crave recognition, to be seen and understood and heard by others. How to balance that essential human need with interconnection, humility, and that culture of care you mention -- I am starting to wonder if that's truly the task of our time.
"We all crave recognition, to be seen and understood and heard by others." I'm so glad you acknowledged this, because I think a lot of (otherwise well-placed) social criticism overshoots the mark by dismissing the reality of individual ego needs like self-worth, agency, feeling valued and respected. Even if this flows into the social, we also experience these things as individuals who are not fully transparent to others. That doesn't mean we need an atomistic individualist society or one based on self-interest, but there has to be that balance you allude to above. Self *and* community.
I still can't locate that recent article that contrasted an ethos of "making" with ethos of "care." But one of the inspirations is Deb Chachra's work on infrastructure, including this article - maybe you've seen it? https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/why-i-am-not-a-maker/384767/
I guess there's two different issues with "building." As you say, a narrow conception of building that only credits certain high-visibility individuals or types of accomplishment. But also, the limitations of a paradigm that celebrates "building" and "making" - measurable, visible accomplishment - at the expense of care work and caring more generally.
I wonder how they ideally coexist? We need to build things while caring for things, seems like they should be a balance. But I guess she's talking about how the dominant culture idealizes tangible "making" at the expense of ephemeral caring.
There's a way in which I can feel into a core of that for myself, being a mom and a writer, and as my kids are in their teen years now, realizing that all the caring I put into their lives in early years can feel ... lost. Unknown, unseen. And yet that's simply a reflection of cultural devaluing (even with the more obvious valuing like idealization of mothers, some kind of support for day care would be far more welcome and meaningful).
Very interesting dichotomy to chew over, which you always give me!
And yes, absolutely. I think it's essential to anything we want to do in the world to really learn that people need to be seen, and it's not an egotistical thing, it's fundamental to our species. I think it has a feedback loop with childhood, which actually makes childrearing even more important, and brings me back to Riane Eisler and her ideas--or others' ideas she wrote about--on how upbringing relates to authoritarian leanings.
"we also experience these things as individuals who are not fully transparent to others." -- beautifully put. It's one of the things I really liked about Graeber and Wengrow's "Dawn of Everything," the way the shifted focused in different cultures and societies over the millennia and how they reflected community interdependence and caretaking (or not) and individual self-actualization (or not). We need both.
Yeah, building and making is definitely better than destroying and ripping apart! And building can be an act of love. The way I read this critique is, first, what you just said about idealizing tangible, measurable creation over more invisible or ephemeral caring. And second, that an overemphasis or fetishization of building/making comes at the expense of preserving, sustaining, repairing, caring for what's already there; that a "culture of makers" is one that throws out old stuff on the rationale that you can just make new stuff. So there's a devaluing of history.
Maybe, too, though, the kind of making matters. Making vessels to eat and drink out of and carry things in is a kind of making that's also caring, and it can be done with an eye to tangible sustainability (like not using materials that extract too much or produce toxins). Making food, which will obviously be eaten.
And then, creativity isn't exactly efficient, which is one of the things I appreciate about it. When I've really worked on a piece of writing, there are hours and hours and hours of messing around and scrapping sections and lines that never make their way into the piece. But I think it's that process that makes creativity worthwhile -- all creativity, whether writing, art, dancing, scientific discovery ...
Maybe the question is more about where the line is between creativity and extraction. Or some version of those ideas.
Thanks for responding after so long! Please don't ever feel obligated to keep going if I continue; sometimes it's hard to resist following up. One quick afterthought to your last: that new book Abundance by Ezra Klein/Derek Thompson has been getting tons of buzz lately, and it's hard not think of this chain when I hear about it. I wonder how their policy wonk/liberal market-oriented take on "building and making" fits into all this. Maybe there's also a line to balance between functionality and extraction.
Thanks for the video - so heartening!
Putting this here, too, Lindsey, since you might be interested! (It's short): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdHESAqBOLg