Ummm... No!

Barbara Ehrenreich's Fear of Falling, Blood Rites, and The Hearts of Men are among the finest works of sociology I have every read or ever expect to read. Which is why it is so very hard for me to read things like this--to which the only reaction is "that's simply not true!":

This Land Is Their Land: I took a little vacation recently... Sun Valley, Idaho.... I found a tiny tourist village... the boutiques were displaying outdoor racks of summer clothing on sale!... things started to get a little sinister... even at a 60 percent discount, I couldn't find a sleeveless cotton shirt for less than $100. These items shouldn't have been outdoors; they should have been in locked glass cases.

Then I remembered the general rule, which has been in effect since sometime in the 1990s: if a place is truly beautiful, you can't afford to be there...

And the essay has gone totally off the rails. The places she talks about: Sun Valley, Idaho; Driggs, Idaho; Jackson Hole, Wyoming; Key West, Florida; skybox "suites" costing more than $100,000 for a season; The Hamptons; Cape Cod; Telluride. Yes, Sun Valley, Driggs, Jackson Hole, Key West, The Hamptons, Cape Cod, and Telluride are beautiful. Yes, they are expensive--as are Vail, Aspen, Back Bay, the Upper East Side, Santa Monica, Pacific Heights, and La Jolla. But it is a truly impoverished person who thinks that those rich yuppie watering holes are the only truly beautiful places in North America.

The place I really want to go back to right now is the spine of the Canadian Rockies from the corner of Moose and Squirrel Streets in Banff to Malign Lake outside of Jasper. But Yosemite is always tugging at my heart. What's your favorite truly beautiful place to go that's cheap?

The essay continues. But what's the point?

All right, I'm sure there are still exceptions--a few scenic spots not yet eaten up by mansions. But they're going fast....

Of all the crimes of the rich, the aesthetic deprivation of the rest of us may seem to be the merest misdemeanor. Many of them owe their wealth to the usual tricks: squeezing their employees, overcharging their customers and polluting any land they're not going to need for their third or fourth homes. Once they've made (or inherited) their fortunes, the rich can bid up the price of goods that ordinary people also need--housing, for example. Gentrification is dispersing the urban poor into overcrowded suburban ranch houses, while billionaires' horse farms displace rural Americans into trailer homes. Similarly, the rich can easily fork over annual tuitions of $50,000 and up, which has helped make college education a privilege of the upper classes.

There are other ways, too, that the rich are robbing the rest of us of beauty and pleasure. As the bleachers in stadiums and arenas are cleared to make way for skybox "suites" costing more than $100,000 for a season, going out to a ballgame has become prohibitively expensive for the average family. At the other end of the cultural spectrum, superrich collectors have driven up the price of artworks, leading museums to charge ever rising prices for admission....

If Edward O. Wilson is right about "biophilia"--an innate human need to interact with nature--there may even be serious mental health consequences to letting the rich hog all the good scenery. I know that if I don't get to see vast expanses of water, 360-degree horizons and mountains piercing the sky for at least a week or two of the year, chronic, cumulative claustrophobia sets in....

[N]ow I flinch when I hear Woody Guthrie's line "This land was made for you and me." Somehow, I don't think it was meant to be sung by a chorus of hedge-fund operators.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Comments

[christofay]

Let's see how the Republican private militia Blackwater, mercs, Pinkertons, acts during this year's RNC "Council of our Elites" to see whether we still will be able to sing any Woody Guthrie.

[Bloix]

"What's your favorite truly beautiful place to go that's cheap?"

The Finger Lakes region is remarkably beautiful in all seasons.

[Bloix]

"What's your favorite truly beautiful place to go that's cheap?"

The Finger Lakes region is remarkably beautiful in all seasons.

[Bloix]

"What's your favorite truly beautiful place to go that's cheap?"

The Finger Lakes region is remarkably beautiful in all seasons.

[jerry]

The California Coast. And why do we still have a free California Coast? Because of arguably unconstitutional decisions and actions undertaken by the California Coastal Commission and constantly threatened by the rich and their realtors.

A very wonderful hike used to be found at the end of Cholla in Scottsdale. There was a cul-de-sac with a trailhead to the alternate Camelback trail. Camelback is of course the distinctive peak in the middle of Phoenix that gives the place 97% of its beauty.

The trail is still there, but the rich fuckers put mansions in all around it and then got the city council to eliminate street parking for the nearest 1/4 mile or more, and even then parking is very hard to find as you're right next to get this Brad mocker of Ehrenreich, the "Princess Resort". So basically, they've turned a public trail into their private trail.

Eliminate one more beautiful spot, gone to realtors and the ultra rich.

There was one victory recently. The momzers that live on Camelback itself recently had their petition denied to gate the one street that crosses Camelback and that is often used for the view.

Ehrenreich has a spotty record, but I think she has a valid point complaining about the gates.

[Fifi]

Sorry Brad, Ehrenreich is right on that matter of "landscape privatization" and it's a big part of the feeling of impoverishment that assails not just the lower rungs of society but even the upper middle class.

[Paul G. Brown]

Get on the Ferry in Seattle. Head north.

Don't get off before you get to Juneau. Then bum a ride to Elfin Cove, or Pelican, or Gustavus. Cheap cabins in Gustavus can be had for $150 a week. The yuppie place charges $250 a night. And we caught our halibut in the same place that supplied them.

One of the peak 'nature wonder' experiences in my life was eating berries lying on my back in four inches of moss in the temperate rain forest that rings Gustavus, AK.

In my experience, it's the rednecks who know where the beautiful parts of the world are to be found.

[trotsky]

Fully 15 percent of the yuppified state of California is federally protected wilderness, unmarred by the tools of the machine age. If Ehrenreich could get out of her car and walk for half the morning, she'd find quite a lot to admire, and she wouldn't pay a cent. Indeed, the reduction in future medical bills makes it nicely profitable.

[Robert Waldmann]

I will now defend Ehrenreich... OK I got it. The key phrase is "live there". Brad -- you can't afford to live in Yosemite or Banf. They are parks. You can't afford the bribes it would take to be allowed to build a house there.

You can afford to visit. You can't afford to own or rent with a lease.

In fact your point and Trotsky's is that, while the market system would condemn the non rich to never experiencing beauty, public ownership has saved the day.

Parks are one way in which market failures are solved. There are two reasons for public parks

1) people derive pleasure from knowing that unspoiled nature exists. We can't be forced to pay for this pleasure except with taxes.

2) It would be very easy to evade large fees charged to enter large open areas. A private non theme park would have to use intrusive offensive security measures to force people to pay enough to be profitable.

They can't allow people to have solitude while backpacking if they have to check if you have a ticket.

She's argues that laissez faire doesn't work. I mean she isn't a Trotskyite.

Now she is also complaining that rich people now have similar tastes to hers. This is too bad for her, but better for someone else (imagine what gas would cost if they all decided to buy personal 747s to tour the world).
However, the problem of rich people who want to own nature and keep others off has been rather important in the past oh 2000 years and it's worth remembering that unless we make sure that policy remains "the way it was after Teddy Roosevelt, when the Socialists took over."
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/paulkrugman/index.html

[shah8]

the key is being able to live in accessibly beautiful places.

Places like Alaska have many cheap and beautiful spots. Just not close to any jobs. Same with tons of places in the South, actually. So far as you're not talking about many areas of beachfront, where the Gulf side has been seriously subject to wealthy gating off public property phenomenon...

[Robert Waldmann]

Think Ehrenreich's article might have something to do with this ?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/15/AR2008061502137.html?hpid=topnews

[Jerry]

As a formerly academically-addicted grad student I gained a highly developed skill for enjoying beautiful places inexpensively (mainly through camping and hosteling - I'm a lifetime member). I liked Yosemite (camped illegally), the California coast (hostels with hot tubs!), the Grand Canyon (esp. Phantom Ranch), Rocky Mountain National Park, the Black Hills of South Dakota, beach camping along northern Lake Michigan, the Adirondacks, Mt. Dessert Island, etc.... Nowadays, I prefer a nice hotel room to sooth my aches after enjoying the outdoors.

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

Sorry Brad,

Ehrenreich is right. Just because the wealthy haven't managed to grab every nice place on the planet yet doesn't mean that they aren't gobbling them up at a terrific rate. Of course one can hardly blame them for wanting to live some place pretty, but the vast McMansion slums are another matter.

And about your office.

[John]

Maybe you're not old enough. In the early 60s my roommate was a rock climber and ski bum. His preferred spot was the Wind River range and the Grand Tetons. He liked them because they were beautiful and cheap. He was a member of an informal group that called themselves the Vulgarians. They played weird "instruments" like hoses and washboards (yes one can produce music with them) and drank Teton tea (tea laced with whiskey, a great way to get out of the sleeping bag in the morning).

Similarly I had friends that loved Taos. The air was crystalline, exactly as Georgia O'Keefe painted it. It was lovely and cheap. None of us had money but these were great places to be, and well off the beaten track.

I agree with Barbara Ehrenreich; the beautiful places first discovered by fringe rock climbers, ski bums, Sierra backpackers, not yet recognized artists, beginning poets, have been taken over by the wealthy and priced out of sight.

I regret it, and it pisses me off. The wealthy have means, surely they can discover their own places instead of expropriating them from my long ago friends.

[a]

Yep, Ehrenreich is right.

[andrew hartman]

ehrenreich is a professional hysteric. her method is to construct a straw
man, rant about how evil it is, and then knock it down with a maximum
of indignant flapping about.

why doesn't she just advocate locking up anyone with more money than she
has?

[SvN]

Bretton Woods makes a nice counterpoint. Set up decades before the famous WWII-era conference, it was intended as a railway "spa" resort at the foot of Mt. Washington (one of the highest peaks east of the rockies) for the über-rich. The place hit the skids in the 1930s and had been out of use for years by the time of the conference in 1944. That part of New Hampshire still has beautiful hiking and plentiful accommodation.

You can tell similar stories in parts of the Adirondacks and the Okanagan. Perhaps the point is that long after the property developers have sold off the land and the resorts have been abandoned, the natural beauty sometimes remains.

[ShortWoman]

Barbara has a great knack for writing. She does good research. She is willing to go through a lot for a good story. She often makes very insightful statements.

But she also has a great knack for coming off the rails about halfway to three-quarters of the way through any given work.

[piotr]

Locally, there are setbacks, like trailheads closed by homeowners who declare a road "private", or prevail upon municipality to decrease parking etc. But the number of trails and camping spots is not going down in my observation, and the rather sybaritic public is leaving the back-country of parks and public forests rather sparsely attended.

Now, complains about excessive prices in Sun Valley are a bit specious. One can buy stuff ahead of time and camp in national forests. In a tent, renting an economy Korean compact, driving sufficiently slowly when the roads is tough. (I assume flying in from the East Coast.) Once you do that, Jackson Hole is affordable. Wind River Mountains -- very affordable. San Bernardino Mountains -- affordability itself (I learned later that our motel was in an "undesirable neighborhood". Duh.) Etc.

[Slocum]

I actually think we have a pretty reasonable balance between privately and publicly owned beauty spots. Because private waterfront property is so valuable, the rich pay a lot in taxes to live there (or visit in weekends). As long as there is enough public waterfront available, I say let the rich buy up part of it and subsidize my enjoyment. Certainly, despite owning no Lake Michigan beach-front property, I have no trouble finding lots of places like this to enjoy:

http://www.visittraversecity.com/images/resized/empirebluff715.jpg

On the other hand, the locals up there would be much worse off if there were no rich people building and owning second homes, pumping property tax dollars in at high non-homestead rates, eating out, shopping, etc -- while sending no kids to the local schools.

And I've had the same experience in the western U.S. -- no shortage of beautiful public spots. So let the rich buy their little slices of heaven and pay the taxes; it's no skin off my nose.

[John Emerson]

Awhile back my brother tried to put his canoe in Lake Louise in the Canadian Rockies. He found that it's now a private lake, restricted to hotel guests.

Oregon has a law protecting the ocean beaches as public, and California doesn't, and the difference is enormous.

[David Spencer]

I have the paralyzing suspicion Ms Ehrenreich was trying to be funny; still, one should never underestimate the ignorance of urban sophisticates.

She simply has no conception of how gigantic this country is, nor of how much spectacular beauty there is in it.

The most amusing irony of this is that that her example (Sun Valley) is actually the best counterexample.

Had she ventured up highway 75 to the next town -- Stanley -- she would have been in the southern corner of 50,000 square miles of the most spectacular beauty in the country -- greater indeed than the Tetons, Yosemite or Glacier. She could buy a nice little spot in Stanley Basin, with nary a mansion to irritate her view, for a fraction of the cost of a studio apartment in Manhattan.

She could have driven all day in either direction from Stanley in spectacular and undeveloped beauty. (Only east or west, however; the next road north of Stanley is 150 miles away.)

Had she not wanted to venture north from Sun Valley, she could have continued up Sun Valley Road until it turned into Trail Creek Road, and gone to MacKay or Challis.

In short, she's willfully ignorant, and is willing to parade her ignorance. Of course, her readers are as ignorant as she. Thus does ignorance reinforce itself.

I live in New York, but grew up in the rural West. I hear this sort of silliness almost every day.

[otto]

Vermont: lots of shacks, not too many mansions, and the Green Mountains are great.

[Dave]

Hell, she can drive over the Galena Summit from Sun Valley and be at Red Fish Lake in about an hour.

[lemmy caution]

Ehrenreich's "dancing in the streets" is very good too.

[lemmy caution]

Ehrenreich's "dancing in the streets" is very good too.