A Rock To Tie A String Around

We currently rent a house in a neighborhood where most people own their houses, or so it appears. By merit of living in this neighborhood, our neighbors make automatic assumptions about us, most of them positive. For one, they assume we are much wealthier than we actually are. They (they referring to the string of families on the block who also have toddlers and thus we spend a lot of standing out in the lawn time watching the kids play) are constantly surprised that I work. And even more surprised that I work for survival and not just for something to fill the time or give me a sense of fulfilled civic duty.

They also assume that since I am but a lowly high school teacher/writer that my husband must be the CEO of some major company or vice president of a bank. He can’t just be a normal guy with a normal job, he can’t be that.

We don’t live in Beverly Hills by the way, not even close. But our humble little west side neighborhood had recently attracted a flock of families that in previous years would have looked at living in Beverly Hills type neighborhoods and because of the current economy, they ended up here.

Most of my neighbors are also Catholic, and their kids go to private Catholic elementary and preschools. By merit of the fact that we’re not Catholic and I teach in a public school, they have all assumed that we must be the only other logical choice: Jewish. Which I suppose technically we are, my husband’s family has ethnic Jewish roots, but they were never religious Jews. My family is about as British as you can get so I’m enjoying the misperception, Jewish is much more interesting than British. But the neighbors are extremely careful to explain to me whenever their kids go around selling candy bars for the their classes, that if I don’t feel comfortable contributing, there’s no pressure to buy the chocolate bar. Good to know, unfortunately I really like chocolate.

I walk the neighborhood with my son and I feel like an imposter. I know I’m probably reading into the situation a fair amount. In the immortal words of Dr. Phil – if you really knew what people thought of you, you’d be surprised how much they don’t. But I feel like I’m keeping up a ruse by merit of living here.

As I walk my neighborhood, however, it occurs to me that I’m not the only imposter. In a three-block radius, there are probably five homes up for foreclosure, five more that are up for sale and have been for a year or more. A house down the street has been on the market for over two years, the price has been slashed in half, and still no one’s buying. Even my fancy neighbors who bought out one of the little houses and turned it into a two-story mansion – they confided that they were running out of money so the wife was waiting tables at night to pay their mortgage.

So, I suppose I wonder who the real imposter is? Is it me, who only rents on this side of town because I’m friends with my landlady? Or is it them, who can’t afford to live where they wanted to live, so they moved to the West side, only to find out that they can’t really afford it here either?

Like I said before, I don’t live in Beverly Hills. In fact, thanks to a History of LA class I recently took at Northridge University, I found out that my little neighborhood has historically been known as the slum of Santa Monica. It was the place that all the black and brown people lived when they couldn’t live in the Santa Monica city limits. If you went about four blocks toward the ocean, the property values escalated dramatically, even though the houses looked exactly the same. This precedent goes back to the fifties and sixties. And while I would like to think that this kind of perception has changed, it’s still much cheaper to buy here than it is four blocks away.

Hence, my new fancy neighbors. They moved in, tore down the original houses, and built mansions that barely fit on the property boundaries. The original houses are dwarfed in comparison, and are starting to resemble the service quarters to the estate of the not-quite-rich-enough-for-Beverly-Hills Crowd.

It’s not really anyone’s fault. Well, maybe it’s the fault of the ever-elusive economy that we’ve all been forced into the position of living as imposters to our former lives. Things we were able to afford for our entire adult lives suddenly are unreachable. Situations we were able to remedy by cutting back a little or working a little more in the past are suddenly now red alert financial crisis because there’s no extra money, nothing to cut back on, and no extra work.

I have faith it’s all going to get better. I also think the only way that it’s ever going to do that is if we start living the lives we can actually afford.