The Blue Model: A Recipe for Ruin

grey gardens communities

In five minutes, a discussion of my city government that illustrates a national reality.

I live in South Pasadena, California, a 3.4 square-mile suburban town that inherited extraordinary gifts from earlier generations. The core of the city (not the part I live in!) is made up of neighborhoods built at the height of the Arts and Crafts movement, and that architectural legacy has given us unusual beauty and grace — and an insane real estate market:

Similarly, a luxury hotel — built in the 1880s, rebuilt after an 1895 fire, and finally torn down during the Great Depression — left behind a bunch of great stuff:

We didn’t build any of this. The people who live here now have all of this because it was here when we showed up — built by people who have been dead for decades. Look at the sidewalk in front of that 19th-century stone shelter for carriage passengers waiting to be taken up the hill to the hotel, and you’ll see where this is going.

Our city council does social justice and climate activism, full stop. We have a climate action plan, and our mayor is pushing our small police department to respond to emergencies in electric patrol cars to stop the climate of the planet from changing. We’re fighting for a Black Lives Matter mural in a city park to confront the historical legacies of our racist society, we’ve banned plastic bags, we’re working to ban all single-use plastics, and see Item #5 on the May 18, 2022 council agenda: “PROCLAMATION DECLARING SUPPORT FOR AND STANDING IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE PEOPLE OF UKRAINE.”

Now, the conclusion is as simple as this. Here’s what the streets look like:

That’s the crosswalk at Fletcher Avenue and Oak Street, in the heart of that neighborhood of Craftsman homes. If you want to live in a house with a view of that crosswalk, you’ll pay somewhere between $2 million and $3 million. Here’s another view of it:

Beautiful, elegant, historic, tree-lined streets. Crumbling. Decaying. Unmaintained.

This street is, at the corner, twenty steps from City Hall, not fifty feet from the dais where the South Pasadena City Council passes its social justice resolutions and symbolically rebukes Vladimir Putin:

Look behind the brick building on the left: That white building with the red tile roof is City Hall, and the part of the building you can see in this picture is the council chambers. You can look out the window at a meeting of the South Pasadena City Council and see this street.

We inherited this extraordinary place, and we don’t maintain it. Previous generations gave us this gift, and we shit on it. We’re busy with our social justice activism, so we don’t have time for minor details like, I don’t know, all of the infrastructure of our community. We’re Grey Gardens Nation, Local Edition:

Grey Gardens Nation

This is America. This is our culture, our politics, our national government. The US Navy is working hard on pronouns:

And also:

See also this enjoyable rant on social justice warriors in Hollywood who are reworking characters and narratives — it’s Ghostbusters, but with women! — they didn’t create:

We woke up in a mansion. Look at it now.