impressionable youth

So I knew this whole experience was going to be different, but I guess I wasn’t so prepared for the effect it was going to have on me.

I just spent the past hour stressing to my friend Alex about how important the whole mission of this trip has become to me, however upon returning to Michigan in early September, how powerless I will yet again feel about the way I’m working (and to an extent, the way I’m thinking). It’s an incredibly overwhelming feeling, to believe so much in the need for various social, environmental, economic (etc.) justices vis-à-vis the built environment, but know that your work is pandering to something much more abstract. Never more than today have I understood the chasm between academia and mere mortality, and never more have I felt the two so irreconcilable. And it worries me to no end. Worries me that I will never have the kind of impact I want to have on this earth, worries me that I will never be able to ground my abstract tendencies, and worries me worse that I will constantly problematize the world around me, never seeing anything as working toward something better.

Today, for about five minutes, I was ready to drop out of school, give up on delayed gratification, for a few people who seemed so happy, so content, so resolved. These are people I am not normally familiar with. We are in Duluth, Minnesota, and today we did work with a local housing group called Common Ground, which is a land trust organization, that does a variety of things to bring high quality homes to individuals that normally could not afford them. That sounds a lot like Habitat, right, but it’s actually very different. A land trust, rather than selling the entire house and property to the owner, like Habitat, retains ownership of the land underneath the house, leasing it to the owner when they purchase the house. This both reduces the costs passed down to the owner, including not having to pay property taxes, and allows the homes to be of typically much higher quality than a Habitat home. Add in government subsidies, other grants, an array of product donations and pro-bono labor, and a $210,000 market-value home can be sold to someone of lower income for $145,000. And some of the benefits to affordability come in the way the house’s value changes over time. Because the land is not owned, the house instead actually depreciates in value, like any other commodity, and is therefore able to be re-sold to other low income individuals for even less. So the assumption is that all the equity is actually stored in the land, something that the land trust has control of. It’s a bit complicated, but you might be thinking, “wait, Sean, isn’t the point of owning a house to make an investment, to build equity, and by not owning the land, aren’t these people effectively making out like they would when purchasing a car?” Well, yes it is to build equity, and Common Ground actually has it written into their purchase agreement that any owner will receive the benefit of 30% of any increase in the assessed value of the home. This allows the homes to remain affordable once they are resold (one land trust home recently re-sold for $39,000, about 33% of its market value), and allow all savings from the subsidies, grants, donations and labor to be recycled and have even more of an impact on affordability. At the same time, the land trust is building its own equity (less 30%) by retaining the land. It’s an interesting system, one that is both encouraging and worrying.

So in the morning, I was hooked. I thought land trusts were the future of affordable housing, and they might very well be. But I’m still concerned that they reinforce ever disconcerting American spatial and material cultures. All these less fortunate people are able achieve is being able to have the same things that their wealthier brethren would have been able to afford on their own. Sure, it is a way of leveling the playing field, so to speak, but this specific land trust was doing nothing to begin to rethink the very obstinate way of the American Dream. To me, the concept of affordable housing has less to do with lowering costs to make better, nicer, bigger things accessible more people. Rather, it has more to do with the more value-driven issue of housing equity, something that privileges social change over a systematic material dependency.

We, as Americans, have a problem with cities that we cannot resolve, both personally and (as a result) logistically. We, as Americans, value too much our personal bubbles. We, as Americans, do not understand that grass was never meant for trimming. And as a result, we refuse to make certain compromises, compromises that might actually allow us to live equally wholesome lives in a much more environmentally and socially respectful manner. But instead, we live in an economy that has completely manipulated our value system; an economy that has completely structured the way we are able distinguish ourselves from, and often paradoxically associate ourselves with, everyone else; an economy that values quantity, often as a measure of quality, but always as a measure of privilege.

And so my academic dilemma. For five minutes today, my heart grew so big for the people I was surrounded by. Why? Because they were happy…certainly happier than me, and probably happier than they’d ever been in their lives. To those receiving these houses, a roof over their head is all they need, and a nice roof is even better. They have known what it is like to have little, perhaps even nothing, and are therefore incredibly grateful for such an overwhelming validation of their importance in this society. And every day the land trust employees and volunteers take pleasure in seeing someone else’s gratitude for all the work they do. For five minutes, their joy was enough to make me forget all the work we have left to do, the revolution that still needs to occur before I’m happy (which might be never). And, in all honesty, I’ve felt pretty empowered by the work I’ve been doing on the trip. Beside myself, other people actually believe I’m doing something valuable, productive, and even helpful! But, when I go back to the academic world, I feel like I’m going to effectively stagnate for another year, as I collect some pseudo-intellectual dust. Beside my own, I will no longer have such control of other people’s destinies, which is never enough for me to feel like I’m doing something valuable, much less productive. And as a result of this adventure, I feel like I will have even less incentive to work toward any sort of artificial abstraction most often required in something so important as a final thesis.

The world I am living in this summer is so unbelievably different than the one I have been living in for the past six years, and will be for at least another year. And to attempt to reconcile the two seems overwhelming and completely impossible. My personal and academic values are coming into deep conflict, at this very moment. The stress builds, my eyes grow bloodshot, tears are shed, and I eventually collapse in exhaustion.

The next day, I get up and ride 85 miles.