Although I wish my husband and I could live someplace rather more rural (we want chickens), we live in a subdivided neighborhood in something that could be called suburbia. Our city appears to have been relatively fortunate in weathering the recession, thus far: job losses began comparatively late here, and we haven’t heard of masses of foreclosures. Perhaps we haven’t been paying attention due to our focus elsewhere (we have a lot of animals to care for). Whatever it is, the recession is here now. It is living right next door.
Our neighbors’ house goes to auction today.
Our neighborhood is very, very mixed. I would venture it’s one of the most diverse in our city economically and racially. A few blocks one way from us, there are several streets of rental property – duplexes, mostly – where many immigrant families rent, and pickups and vans with logos for traditional blue-collar trades are common. My second language is helpful in this part of the neighborhood. A few blocks the other way, it starts looking kind of upscale; in between, we have a little bit of everyone.
Lately, our little cul-de-sac has started to change. We’ve had at least one incident where a man was caught snooping in a neighbor’s bathroom window – folks from three houses managed to spot him, stop him to talk, and call the police while notifying the people whose house was being cased. That type of thing hasn’t happened for us before, and we don’t know what motives he had. He was at the window while the lady of the house was there getting ready for bed; it makes me shudder to imagine.
A lot of folks have moved out of the neighborhood lately, so those who have lived there a long time, like our neighbors across the street, are starting to feel like foreigners in their own world. Just the other night, one of our neighbors said she barely knew anyone there anymore. Oddly, we only really got to know her after our state Democratic primary, when she and my husband ran into one another at a caucus site, and then we offered her an Obama campaign sign when I went to get one for our yard. She suddenly warmed to us at that point, and (much to my husband’s surprise) when we told her we had just married in California, she hugged us and said, "Congratulations!" Considering that this is a relatively conservative state and she is both black and quite religious, to be honest, we didn’t expect a positive reaction. The world is truly changing – for better in this sense, and for worse in others – in this neighborhood and this city.
Now, my husband has a real estate license. The first sign things might grind to a halt here was when he did some research some months ago and discovered that nothing – not a single property – in our neighborhood had sold in six months. Then, an apartment ("condo") complex well down the main road that had been selling some units put up signage that indicated an auction. Not long after, we saw evidence of a few evictions – all kinds of things on the front curb – in the duplex area of the neighborhood. Meanwhile, we watched the vacant house next door. The yard went unkempt. Drought came to stay, and the grass simply died, leaving patches of weeds dotting the blight. The pool turned murky green. And then, suddenly, a "for sale" sign showed up one day in the yard...and our neighbors briefly reappeared to move out belongings. A few weeks later, a random unexpected visitor asked my husband some questions about the house – and the news hit: he found it on the county foreclosure list.
We’re fortunate in so many ways. My husband survived a recent wave of layoffs. My job is relatively secure. We know that, for the most part, we belong to a fairly elite club where life is still rather stable and our lifestyle hasn’t yet been dramatically altered by external forcing in this horrible economic downturn. We are very thankful for that. But now the neighbor’s adjustable-rate mortgage has reset or recast, he’s just walking away, and the house next door gets some kind of new, unknown owner today. We know that a number of folks newly bought around us since we moved in a couple of years ago, and we wonder: which home will go dark next? What will this mean for our neighborhood? How bad will it get? Will we have to get used to men like the one who was snooping around the neighbors’ house roving the neighborhood? What's the best thing for us to do?
News reports and blogs have brought us the heartaches of this recession, and, watching these signs materialize locally, we’ve changed our viewpoints and way of life in response. Lately, our aging backyard fence’s need for repair seems more urgent. We’re more cognizant of which doors are locked when, where our dog is, and outdoor safety lighting. My husband, who parks in the driveway, is more careful about locking car doors. It seems strange to be checking the locks and strengthening the fence when my heart tells me we should be reaching out to our other neighbors. In spite of what feels like some foundation of security, I have new impetus to plant a vegetable garden (I’ve been lackluster so far – just the peppers and beans are in the ground, and it’s late for everything but okra). We eat out less, talk about leisure travel less, spend on luxuries a LOT less. Now the question, every time, is, "Do we really need this?" We focus on our health more than ever and have used the push to eat out less as an opportunity to work on eating more healthfully at home and get more exercise (I’ve lost 22 pounds as a result – another story). I’m back taking classes to enter a master’s degree program so that I can enhance our security and my employability...just in case.
We’ve worried as we watched The Recession, first cross-country, then from across the state, then across town. We know there are many, many people worse off than we are. At the same time, we read that a whole new wave of foreclosures may soon break. Now that The Recession has moved in next door, we wonder just how familiar with our new neighbor we’ll get. We hope, for everyone’s sake, that his residence is temporary.