Why People Stay Amongst The Ruins

 I remember a conversation with KH from about 40 years ago about why people did not leave Anderson for greener pastures. I thought they had mortgages and roots in the place, and change is not easy. Now, it looks like there is support for what I always thought.

Why people stay after local economies collapse − a story of home among the ghosts of shuttered steel mills by Amanda McMillan Lequieu (The Conversation) is about a different kind of factory town, but that is a minor difference.

Its collapse was devastating to people living in the neighborhood, Simonetta told me. As mill after mill shuttered in the last two decades of the 20th century, people began to leave to find new work – mostly service jobs – located far from southeast Chicago’s economic depression.

As we stared at the silent street, I asked them, “Why did you stay?”

Christopher paused, then said simply, “We had the building.” The couple owned their three-story row home outright after decades of paying off the mortgage. Sure, it had some crumbling corners and the roof sagged, but it was theirs. These four walls remained solid during and after the topsy-turvy years of economic collapse. More than just a form of equity or material space, this building was the foundation for their stability.

Forty years later, a generation and a bit more, I am not so sure this explains people younger than me. They do not own their homes, they do not have a profession or skills for higher-wage jobs, and unions are not what they were. What I have seen working with are people with high school diplomas or GED certificates for a bit more than minimum wage. Maybe COVID kept them in place, too. They have not got the means to go elsewhere, there is no elsewhere that does not have the same kind of work for them.

I got in a short conversation last week with a guy about my age who I work with, He does not vote because this is such a Republican state that his vote is meaningless. I do not understand the logic, but I understand the fatalism. It was the kind that fed my depression and made suicide seem like a good idea. People see what the Republican Party has made of this state, they do not believe in a possible change in the state or their lives.

There are all kinds of prisons. It is the ones that we make for ourselves that are the worst.

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