Two articles I read today have me thinking about my social status and the cost of my daily conveniences:
“I was an undercover Uber driver” in the Philadelphia CityPaper is one of the more humane descriptions of the true cost of a $5 livery ride. Emily Guendelsberger’s prose is accessible and the charts are legible. Particularly good though is her use of the word caste here: it affects both self-awareness and reinforces her findings regarding UberX’s broad societal effects.
And then there’s this article, also anecdotal but even more scathing. It’s more nakedly concerned with race as a factor in gentrification and income inequality. The money quote, screencapped and highlighted all over Twitter, is worth dropping in its entirety here:
We just did a place on Nostrand Avenue. People are not even there yet. We put in $600,000 and everyone was laughing at us. “It’s crazy, you’re over there. A building for yuppies, white people? It’s not going to work.” The building was full of tenants — $1,300, $1,400 tenants. We paid every tenant the average of twelve, thirteen thousand dollars to leave. I actually went to meet them — lawyers are not going to help you. And we got them out of the building and now we have tenants paying $2,700, $2,800, and they’re all white. So this is what we do.
Emphasis mine: it’s worth teasing out who, to this speaker – the young Hasidic hustler – are people?
One of the many tweets linking to this article contained my first observed instance of the phrase plaid-collar migration, which is a fine, fine description of young, rich millennials earning a mint in the slab-desked open offices of “digital product development” in this city.
As I’ve grown more affluent and ascended into the plaid-collar caste, I’m finding myself more often on the bad side of these things, taking Uber rides to my apartment in a gentrifying slice of uptown Manhattan. I’m not the one doing harm per se but am clearly benefiting from harm visited upon others. It is an uncomfortable position, and I don’t know how just yet to move from it.