From the NY Times:
Indians Join the Wave of Investors in Condos and Homes in the U.S.
Arun Kumar owns three apartments in New Delhi, where he has carved out a comfortable life as part of India’s rapidly expanding middle class. Not long ago, he also became a global landlord, picking up an inexpensive three-bedroom house and a duplex nearly 8,000 miles away, in St. Louis.
For Mr. Kumar and other affluent Indians, American real estate is a security blanket. Faced with what some have considered a bubble in real estate prices in major Indian cities and a sometimes jittery Bombay Stock Exchange, they are joining a wave of buyers from other countries who see the recovering United States housing market as one of the best places to put their money these days.
The wealthy elite from China, Latin America and elsewhere have bought pieds-à-terre in glassy towers in Manhattan, luxury condos in Miami and homes along the West Coast. Law enforcement investigations have found that some foreign investors are using American real estate holdings, at least in part, to hide cash and other assets from authorities in their home country.
But many less-than-superrich foreign investors just want a safe place to put extra savings, and their investments tend to be much less grandiose than the trophy properties that have drawn most of the attention. And for Indians in particular, who long trusted in gold to protect their wealth, American real estate offers a “very, very attractive destination,” said Subir Gokarn, director of research at Brookings India in New Delhi.
Jed Kolko, chief economist at Trulia, an online marketplace for residential real estate, said the most popular property searches for people from India were in and around Silicon Valley, where technology firms heavily recruit from India; in the Boston and Philadelphia areas near universities that have numerous students from India; and in suburban areas of New Jersey and in Queens, where there are established Indian-American communities.
…
At the same time, the riverfront Newport area of Jersey City has emerged as popular with Indian buyers.On a recent evening, commuters returning home from Manhattan wove between the high rises, passing advertisements for Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa, an Indian reality dance TV show, and Raaz Specialty Indian Cuisine. A poster in the nearby train station for an Indian news website featured a riff about pani puri, a popular Indian street snack.
…
Irene Barnaby, a broker with Weichert Realtors in Jersey City, said her Indian clients generally spent about $600,000 to $800,000 on condos. Some buyers pay cash because traditional banks won’t give them mortgages without a credit history in the United States. But she has also created relationships with smaller banks that will lend money to her clientele.“They can get exactly what they want in this area,” Ms. Barnaby said.
Fast Eddie, wish you realized what these foreigners realize….u.s. real estate is not going down, it’s a great value right now.
More and more signs of wage inflation coming. With every passing day, it’s starting to look like I’m not such an idiot.
Btw, another guy left my wife’s department. This is insane. They are so understaffed now and it’s quarter end…..screwed.
“NEW YORK (AP) — People are quitting their jobs at a faster clip and that’s pushing small business owners to work harder to hold onto top talent.
Dance studio owner Andrea Bisconti has experienced the challenge firsthand. When Kellie Love, an instructor there, said she was planning to leave to start a business of her own, Bisconti decided to act. Love inspires students to keep coming back for more lessons and brings in more than a quarter of the studio’s revenue, says Bisconti, owner of a Fred Astaire Dance Studio in Willoughby, Ohio.
“My most terrible fantasy was I would see students walk out the door in droves and I would be scrambling,” Bisconti says.
As the economy and job market improve, keeping the best employees is becoming vital for small businesses. Forty-three percent of owners are working to keep top staffers, according to a recent survey by Principal Financial Group. The reason: A growing number of employees are giving notice. The Labor Department reported more than 2.5 million people quit their jobs in July, up from 2.3 million a year earlier.
The trend is expected to continue. Thirty-eight percent of workers plan to change employers in the next five years, according to a 2014 survey by the management consultancy Hay Group. That’s up from 30 percent in 2010.”
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/10/04/small-business-keeping-employees/16570407/
The Indian RE “investors” will be carried out on their shields, just like all the others.
They are just the latest suckers to get caught up in the grift.
Nah, they are looking at the investment opportunities in their countries and realizing the USA is a better option to invest their money. Simple as that.
Oblivion Dead Ahead says:
October 4, 2014 at 8:58 am
The Indian RE “investors” will be carried out on their shields, just like all the others.
They are just the latest suckers to get caught up in the grift.
fast Eddie should look for investment opportunities in India. more appropriate for his budget
Michael says:
October 4, 2014 at 9:09 am
Nah, they are looking at the investment opportunities in their countries and realizing the USA is a better option to invest their money. Simple as that.
Oblivion Dead Ahead says:
October 4, 2014 at 8:58 am
The Indian RE “investors” will be carried out on their shields, just like all the others.
They are just the latest suckers to get caught up in the grift.
Gotta love the seesaw of good/bad news coinciding perfectly with the seesaw of passion fruit
2
I guess you can just ignore yesterday regarding Chase moving 000’s of jobs from this area to the south/midwest
Yea, the quality of workers they need to be a leader just might leave nyc area and follow to these dead areas. If they do follow, they will be back in a few years. Transferring manufacturing (low skilled jobs) to low cost areas makes sense. High skilled jobs, not so much. High skilled want to be in desirable areas. Not next to corn fields with nothing to spend their money on and pig wrestling as the go to form of entertainment.
joyce says:
October 4, 2014 at 9:43 am
2
I guess you can just ignore yesterday regarding Chase moving 000′s of jobs from this area to the south/midwest
Michael, you’re a blogging pig wrestler?
Most transitions of low-skill back office employees are into low wage areas with high unemployment and few alternative employers.
Where Chase, or anyone else goes, isn’t telling of the next hot area, it’s telling of economic distress and a low wage workforce.
Why the hell would anyone run a call center in NJ for example? You’d be an idiot. Instead I’ll find a town in nowheresville where the major employer just shuttered, leaving hundreds or thousands unemployed, and then look for the local government to offer sufficient incentives to relocate the jobs there.
Jobs that are easily relocated into greenfield locations in the US can be just as easily relocated to other countries.
The Desi crowd will work anywhere however most prefer NJ do to their large community here. I get resumes all the time from programmers who is at Chase in Delaware or Amex in Arizona for example.
If you follow the industry closely, you’ll quickly see a bit of a scorched earth approach to finding locations. The minute a competitor or two come into a market, or the economy improves and makes hiring and retention difficult, the plug is pulled and the operation is moved somewhere else. I recently sat though a session on this led by an industry expert. The useful life of a new outsourcing market is 12 years, after which it becomes less economical.
You folks that point to jobs moving from point A to B are clueless, jobs aren’t moving from A to B, they are moving from A to B to C to D to E to F. In some cases a dollar more in wages is sufficient to shutter a location.
Go where Chase goes and you’ll be on the unemployment line in 12 years.
Lib, you live where the rich and famous live!!! Lol
Fast Eddie, notice that Ridgewood is on this list? Now you know why everything seems overpriced when you house shop in towns like Ridgewood? You are competing with some really wealthy individuals. Keep thinking they are muppets. The income stats don’t lie.
The Top 1%: Where the Rich and Famous Live in New Jersey
http://www.weichert.com/articles/top-10-wealthiest-cities-in-new-jersey/
Nowhere in my post did I say a new area was the hot location. I was responding to idiot and his wage inflation comments.
As soon as they are here for a two generations or so, they too will realize where the desirable areas are. They will realize they were living in areas that were undesirable to most Americans and will in turn want to be in the desirable areas (coasts) like everyone else.
Juice Box says:
October 4, 2014 at 10:19 am
The Desi crowd will work anywhere however most prefer NJ do to their large community here. I get resumes all the time from programmers who is at Chase in Delaware or Amex in Arizona for example.
Wasn’t directed at you, was just in general.
Yea, the quality of workers they need to be a leader just might leave nyc area and follow to these dead areas. If they do follow, they will be back in a few years. Transferring manufacturing (low skilled jobs) to low cost areas makes sense. High skilled jobs, not so much. High skilled want to be in desirable areas. Not next to corn fields with nothing to spend their money on and pig wrestling as the go to form of entertainment.
I’ve met quite a few workers at various levels in chase from bank tellers to VPs. I wouldn’t necessarily refer to them collectively as “high skilled”.
My last two hires were middle aged guys from NJ who were downsized. NY Life and Pru were there former employers. These companies are moving all of the middle class jobs out of here. I see resumes all the time, and do interview all the time, lots and lots of middle class guys. Luckily for them they have wives that work.
By the time the stats say that wage inflation is here, it will be obvious. We are in the early stages of this. A couple years it will rear it’s head and by that time home prices and rates will be rising. Yes, that’s right, the rise in prices will coincide with a rise in rates due to wage inflation. Laugh at me, but it’s coming. The signs are starting to show if you are willing to see them. You would have never heard of articles 10 years ago stating that small businesses are having trouble retaining workers. The economy is about to go on a tear when this built up consumer demand is let loose. Sure there will be a rise and crash, but doesn’t that always happen?
So I’m telling you, max out a loan right now for a good income property. However much the bank will give you, you should take. Take advantage of the situation. You are living in a time that is presenting you with an opportunity of a lifetime. A good portion of the consumer competition has been taken out over the past 8 years. Take full advantage. When they come back, and don’t tell me they won’t (economies always bounce back), you will be competing with a bunch of other buyers helping to create the next upward leg in real estate. Play in the market when there is less competition, not when there is more. So while the fast eddies out there complain and cry about the prices, go and take advantage.
joyce says:
October 4, 2014 at 10:36 am
Nowhere in my post did I say a new area was the hot location. I was responding to idiot and his wage inflation comments.
joyce (7)-
He ignores a lot. In fact, that goes a long way toward explaining his Candide-like ignorance.
“I guess you can just ignore yesterday regarding Chase moving 000′s of jobs from this area to the south/midwest”
There are high skilled positions at chase and that is what I was talking about. I’m not talking about people in service positions. If you are talking about 1,000s of low wage/low skilled jobs leaving NYC, not to lack empathy, but who cares.
Ben says:
October 4, 2014 at 10:49 am
Yea, the quality of workers they need to be a leader just might leave nyc area and follow to these dead areas. If they do follow, they will be back in a few years. Transferring manufacturing (low skilled jobs) to low cost areas makes sense. High skilled jobs, not so much. High skilled want to be in desirable areas. Not next to corn fields with nothing to spend their money on and pig wrestling as the go to form of entertainment.
I’ve met quite a few workers at various levels in chase from bank tellers to VPs. I wouldn’t necessarily refer to them collectively as “high skilled”.
Michael, working the wage inflation meme again. To date, he has yet to offer one shred of concrete evidence for this specious argument.
Classic troll.
#20 (previous thread) Eddie Ray,
Yes, yet again we are at “Lather Rinse Repeat!”
While I am always open to discourse on any topic by anyone, I thought you had agreed that you would ignore any post of mine that you would not engage in in meaningful discourse and not just the personal attacks.
Could we look at a clock and agree the time, probably not. The biggest hurdle to anyone having a discussion with you is summed up by your own words.
“Later, when I said I was dating a former NYC runway model, she gave me a strange look”
You never step away from the “the Judge’s ruling position”. While your argument may be cute and witty, it gets blown out of the water by three words “Words of Art”. Back in the real world “NYC Runway model” has a pressty If I book a person for a meet and greet that labels themselves as a” former NYC runway model”, I expect someone who has walked past Anna Wintor in Fashion week and not someone that took part in the Drag Revue at the Pride Parade or has walked Fido down a line in a matching costume at the NY pet fashion show. Both of which meet your criteria.
That is the bit that is frustrating. You know what “words of art” means so why ignore it. My only conclusion is that the fight before your imaginary judge is more important to you than the actual debate. This is a discussion board, not a courtroom. Where you and Michael really differ is that he is the first to acknowledge the other side has a point. You have to be dragged kicking and screaming and then it’s still a Touché because everything is a fight.
I likewise deal with a lot of people like you and while for the most part it is quicker just to massage their egos, sometimes they are beyond that and it’s better to just drop a hammer on them.
Back to ignore.
Ok, an article interviewing small business owners about how it’s getting difficult to retain employees means nothing? The article then gives advice on how to retain them. This is not evidence? Are you blind? It’s the beginning signs of coming wage inflation.
My wife’s place of employment losing individuals left and right in the past 6 months doesn’t mean anything? No one left the previous years. Back in 2011-2012 it was be happy you have a job. The tide is slowly changing. Embrace it and tke advantage of what’s coming.
All those people you claim have given up finding a job have become useless. They have adjusted to life without working. There is going to be a huge demand for workers due to these people literally giving up on finding work. Their skills will wither and they become useless. This is what is happening now. The economy is picking up steam and companies are starting to lose workers to competition. They will have to compete. They can’t say just be happy you have a job anymore. That’s won’t work, your competition will take your worker. This has a ripple effect. Thank the people you claim are the cause of the economy going to hell for this. What you fail to realize is that the economy has left these people behind. They are no longer eligible workers, they have become non-employable. This helps the rest of the people that were able to keep a job and their skills. Now that business is picking up, they have less skilled workers to compete with.
Yes, I came up with this all on my own. Didn’t read this anywhere and start regurgitating what I read. So go ahead and call me an idiot for the time being, but when this happens give me my respect. Till then, I’ll be waiting.
Oblivion Dead Ahead says:
October 4, 2014 at 11:12 am
Michael, working the wage inflation meme again. To date, he has yet to offer one shred of concrete evidence for this specious argument.
Classic troll.
#30 Chi (Previous thread)
There are different types of people here, there are the lurkers who never post and will never identify themselves. There are the majority who do post and have kept the personal and professional details off the board. There are the regulars who have identified themselves with bits and pieces of information over the years. There is the likes of Clot who is very pubic on who he is and has posted his address here and told visitors to pack a lunch. Then there is you. You fall into your own category. That person that started private, but is semi public as there is a client stream in here.
I don’t know if you bosses frequent in here. I would expect not as some of your posts would get you fired in other firms. The way you have railed on about your current and prospective clients is disgraceful. You are free to have those opinions, but not verbalize them in a public forum where you are an ambassador for your firm. That is one of the reasons I would never send anyone to you. I have a lot of co-workers were the US is a 3-10yr gig for them. They go home with a chunk of change from selling the house they bought, stock plans savings etc. I had one kid that just dropped $200K into QQQ in an eTrade account and got on a plane back to India. Do I really want to send him down to you to have him ridiculed in here the next day?
You will never get a job at a big firm as a background search will always link you here and you’ll get flagged as not worth the HR hassle.
It doesn’t really bother me that you call me an as$hole. Been called worse by better. I’ll just sit back and watch you continue to burn your brand with your own posts.
So I could care less about what real employment would be. The economy has adjusted and left those people behind. People who have the skills to get a job are working with a 5.9% rate. College graduate is at 2.9%. Doesn’t seem like college graduates are in the same mess as the “untouchables” who lack the skill or motivation to get a job. The “untouchables” are screwed. All they do is bring down the income avg to make it seem worse than it really is for actual workers.
The problem with firms now trying to move workers to low cost states is that the firms before them have poisoned the well. My buddy is being told he must relocate to Dallas and he has told them no effing way.
One firm (to rename nameless) moved staff to Texas and laid them all off the next year. As they had paid relocation expenses they did not have to pay severance.
I have friends in Charlotte who took the relocation deal down there years back. It was great with the big house and the cost of living for a few years. But them they realize that its not NYC and it has its own sets of problems. They cant afford to rebuy the house they sold and they will not be able to get a job back in the city. So they are stuck living in what they now call NASCAR He11.
I wonder what ever happened to the Charlotte real estate troll who was here pumping his red neck way of life and how more of us northern folk should relo down by him and buy one of his underwater flips.
I used to troll him with videos like this, those were the days.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LksuKTD8y0o
Speaking of relo Hertz CEO is out, I gather he won’t be playing golf in the morning and then heading into the office for a few hours in the afternoon.
Anyone want a programmer job in Bonita Springs Florida?
http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=hertz&l=Bonita+Springs%2C+FL&start=10
http://www.northjersey.com/news/business/hertz-to-lease-park-ridge-hq-building-1.1068068
I thought Detroit was dead. It’s all over for them. Lol
Looks like it’s in the early stages of coming back. Keep thinking the overall economy is not doing the same.
http://time.com/3204249/detroit-americas-emerging-market/
Large swaths of people unemployed
“I don’t care about them”
College grads working fast food
“2.9% headline number f the details”
30
Retard,
Your years late to talk about Detroit. Bankruptcy is the cure. As is foreclosure for the deadbeats… big and small. sorry ccb / moose
FYI that last remark was towards those defending the bailouts (then and now) while simultaneously using the terms deadbeats for individuals. Should have included jj too
but in 2015 we’ll see significant wage growth. no inflation
@MichaelRStrain: Guys, the absence of wage growth really is important. It suggests the Fed can continue helping the unemployed without risking inflation.
…and unemployment keeps going down
@RosenbergMerc: San Jose announces city-wide minimum wage of $10.15 will increase to $10.30 in January – among highest in nation. Affects about 55k workers.
@RosenbergMerc: $10 minimum wage approved by San Jose voters in 2012 included inflation-based increases each Jan. 1 (the first happened this year).
one of the national key protected wild animal 48; 34 families t25 and 78 genera and 153 species of birds, and against the rocks to kayak straight, fence, strain every nerve to sprint! t25 workout but after focus t25 all is a transplant from the touch screen mobile phone, game audio focus t25 has a characteristic very much, props hit an obstacle will disappear after. is counted as 60 points. t25 workout sun room, Like the t25 workout use of massage bathtub, from the Xiashan District Ma cable ferr
joyce (33)-
Let the trolls enjoy their circle jerk. They have actually managed to up things a notch, now citing personal anecdote and planted news articles as established fact.
The US is the least sick wildebeest in the herd of nations. We are all enmeshed in a death spiral of competitive currency devaluation that will end very, very badly.
Only thing that I saw most Indians interested in during my time in JC was which store had the cheapest Johnnie Black.
This is pretty much what I said earlier. You won’t know until after the fact, when the data reveals a pickup in wages. By the time wage inflation hits (my guess is a couple years-has always been end of decade) and the numbers say so, it will already be obvious and any chance to make money off it will be lost.
” (Sorry, but that’s reality.) We really won’t know until after the fact, if and when we finally see a notable pickup in inflation, and in particular in wages.”
“Wages and the Fed
By Paul Krugman
My inbox is already starting to fill up with predictions and demands that the Fed accelerate the pace of “normalization” because today’s jobs report was better than expected. But the case for wait-and-see actually remains as strong as ever, and maybe a bit stronger.
There are, as I’ve tried to explain, * two key points for Fed policy. The first is that we don’t know how much slack there is in the labor market. The second is that the consequences of overestimating slack and waiting too long to raise rates would be relatively minor, while the costs of underestimating slack and hiking rates too soon could be immense.
On the first point: we really, really don’t know how much slack there is. Don’t show me your new estimation method and claim that it proves that there is x percent of slack — there are lots of clever people doing clever estimates, they don’t agree, and nobody really believes in econometrics anyway unless it tells them what they want to hear. (Sorry, but that’s reality.) We really won’t know until after the fact, if and when we finally see a notable pickup in inflation, and in particular in wages.
On the second point: if the Fed waits too long, inflation might pick up for a while, and getting it back down to target would hurt (although the target really should be higher.) But that’s minor compared with the alternative, of raising rates too soon and then finding that we’ve entered a deflationary trap that’s really, really hard to exit. If you’re at the Fed, would you rather wake up and discover that core inflation has risen to 3 percent or that you’ve become Mario Draghi?”
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/03/wages-and-the-fed/
October 3, 2014
Wages and the Fed
By Paul Krugman
My inbox is already starting to fill up with predictions and demands that the Fed accelerate the pace of “normalization” because today’s jobs report was better than expected. But the case for wait-and-see actually remains as strong as ever, and maybe a bit stronger.
There are, as I’ve tried to explain, * two key points for Fed policy. The first is that we don’t know how much slack there is in the labor market. The second is that the consequences of overestimating slack and waiting too long to raise rates would be relatively minor, while the costs of underestimating slack and hiking rates too soon could be immense.
On the first point: we really, really don’t know how much slack there is. Don’t show me your new estimation method and claim that it proves that there is x percent of slack — there are lots of clever people doing clever estimates, they don’t agree, and nobody really believes in econometrics anyway unless it tells them what they want to hear. (Sorry, but that’s reality.) We really won’t know until after the fact, if and when we finally see a notable pickup in inflation, and in particular in wages.
On the second point: if the Fed waits too long, inflation might pick up for a while, and getting it back down to target would hurt (although the target really should be higher.) But that’s minor compared with the alternative, of raising rates too soon and then finding that we’ve entered a deflationary trap that’s really, really hard to exit. If you’re at the Fed, would you rather wake up and discover that core inflation has risen to 3 percent or that you’ve become Mario Draghi?
So, what did we learn about inflation from the latest employment report? Here’s wage growth:
[Graph]
Feel that wage-price spiral!
If you’re puzzled that a falling unemployment rate hasn’t translated into faster wage growth, well, that just reinforces the point that we truly don’t know how much slack there is. And does anyone think that wage growth was wildly excessive before the financial crisis? If you don’t, then you should believe that we need an extended period of tight labor markets just to get back to where we were.
There is nothing in this report to suggest that it makes sense to hike rates any time soon. In fact, I find it very hard to understand why anyone thinks rates should rise even in 2015.
* http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/25/asymmetric-monetary-risks/
It’s as simple as this. Is the job market improving? Bottom line–yes. Give it some time to reach wage inflation.
I already put my money where my mouth is. Late 2011, I made my bet and I borrowed as much as I could in anticipation of wage inflation coming 2017 or later. I borrowed as much as I could on a 30 year low cost loan with plans of inflation kicking the crap out of the loan at some point in the 30 year term.
Irene Barnaby, a broker with Weichert Realtors in Jersey City, said her Indian clients generally spent about $600,000 to $800,000 on condos.
Omg, is this the best legal theft maneuver ever invented? It’s so diabolical that it needs no description. I’m tacking $100,000 on to my sell price with a glossy line of bullsh1t attached – direct line to NY within walking distance; five major hubs minutes away; the whole st1nking line of sh1t.
I just thought of three major Oblama accomplishments:
1) Increased the number of people dependent on entitlements
2) Incited greater racial division
3) Used women as human shields to move personal agenda forward
gary (43)-
I would pay any amount of money to see you in a boxing ring with Michael.
I also imagine that anyone in your neighborhood who smelled cumin or coriander would call the fire department.
I would bet most of Gary’s neighbors would also think that cumin and coriander aromas are the smell of pot.
gluteus has made himself scarce here, as he’s prolly battening down for the arse-kicking Chelsea’s gonna lay on his side tomorrow.
Can’t wait to see Ozil try to turn on Matic.
These individuals don’t realize what I realize. Those people have become “untouchables”, they will not matter much in a few years. They will have been left behind, never to return. That slack will start getting tight real soon. Like I said, end of the decade at the latest with 2017 prob being the earliest.
“The Unemployment Rate is an ‘Inadequate Measure of Slack’
Jared Bernstein says there’s more slack in the labor market than you’d think from just looking at the unemployment rate:
…So why not just look at the unemployment rate and call it a day? Because special factors in play right now make the jobless rate an inadequate measure of slack. In fact, at 6.1 percent last month, it’s within spitting distance of the rate many economists consider to be consistent with full employment, about 5.5 percent (I think that’s too high, but that’s a different argument).
There are at least two special factors that are distorting the unemployment rate’s signal. First, there are over seven million involuntary part-time workers, almost 5 percent of the labor force, who want, but can’t find, full-time jobs. That’s still up two percentage points from its pre-recession trough. Importantly, the unemployment rate doesn’t capture this dimension of slack at all…
The second special factor masking the extent of slack as measured by unemployment has to do with participation in the labor force. Once you give up looking for work, you’re no longer counted in the unemployment rate, so if a bunch of people exit the labor force because of the very slack we’re trying to measure, it artificially lowers unemployment, making a weak labor market look better.
That’s certainly happened over the recession and throughout the recovery…
There’s still plenty of room, and plenty of time for fiscal policymakers to do more to help the unemployed (and with infrastructure, our future economic growth at the same time). Unfortunately, Congress has been captured by other interests. As for monetary policy, let’s hope that the FOMC listens to Charles Evans’ call for patience. Raising rates too late and risking a temporary outbreak of inflation is far less of a mistake than raising them too early and slowing the recovery of employment. And there’s this too: Unemployment Hurts Happiness More Than Modest Inflation.”
I’m not going to lie, you are one funny guy.
He would prob kick my ass with all that built up rage, but I would def put up a fight. I’m a fierce competitor. I never give up. He would have to put me out or give me the death sentence to win.
Oblivion Dead Ahead says:
October 4, 2014 at 9:19 pm
gary (43)-
I would pay any amount of money to see you in a boxing ring with Michael.
I also imagine that anyone in your neighborhood who smelled cumin or coriander would call the fire department.
Btw, I played soccer since the age of 4. Any time you want to take me on the pitch, bring it. I’ll break those ankles. During my time in high school during the 90’s, my public high school ranked no 2 and no 3 in the nation on the USA today top 20. I love soccer!!
Yes, it feels good to be part of a public school soccer program that was top 10 in the nation. This idiot has been doing being things since my high school days. You have any idea how competitive it was to have a starting spot on this squad. Talk about barfing in the garbage can during tryouts from exhaustion. Wasn’t illegal back then, if you wanted it, you fought as hard as you could to earn that spot, ton of talent watering at the mouth to take your starting spot. Don’t tell me about competition, lived through it.
Anyone who is a real footballer isn’t talking about his HS soccer days. HS soccer is a joke, even St. Benedict’s. The players themselves will tell you that.
And you, sir, are a troll.
…and prolly another wanking Gooner fan…although I doubt you can even properly kick a football.
BTW, where did you go to HS? If you say Columbia, better be ready for a barrage of questions verifying you actually attended. I can’t think of any other public skools that were highly-ranked nationally through the ’90s.
I also don’t remember you joining in the soccer talk here, which is also highly suspicious.
If you played at all, it was likely on some kick-and-chase outfit that couldn’t play its way out of a paper bag.
Def not a Gooner fan. Since Man U was the dominant team while I was growing up, I became a fan and have stuck by them ever since.
Kick and chase makes me want to puke. During the 90’s, most Americans were playing this type of soccer. They would play really physical and just kick and run. Hated it. Most south jersey teams were like this.
The programs I was in were incorporating a possession style game. Letting the play develop while patiently waiting to attack a hole in the defense. Really learned how to play the game well. I was not the best player, but I was a starter. Played with some great players.
Have fun,
http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/leonard-pitts-jr/article2518087.html
BOONEVILLE, Ky.
In a small office on the first floor of the Owsley County Court House, across the street from the Hometown Cafe, Johnny Logsdon, chief of the two-man police department, is talking with a reporter about life in this town of 82 people in the hills of eastern Kentucky.
Logsdon keeps his answers short. He acknowledges that drug use — methamphetamine, mostly — is a problem here, but insists it’s about the same as you’d find anywhere. He is much more interested in describing the department’s policy of free motorist assistance. “If they lock themselves out of their cars, we provide a service; we unlock it for them. Away from here, they charge $60 to $100. We just do it for free as a community service.”
It’s not that he is unfriendly, but there is something guarded about him, something that is constantly taking your measure. People here, he explains, have been burned before by media.
Indeed, people here are still talking about the story the New York Times ran in June declaring neighboring Clay County “the hardest place in America to live.” Which was positively complimentary compared to a piece the National Review ran six months before, declaring Owsley “The White Ghetto.” Reporter Kevin D. Williamson wrote that instead of contemplating their bleak reality, the people here escape it with “the pills and the dope, the morning beers, the endless scratch-off lotto cards, healing meetings up on the hill, the federally funded ritual of trading cases of food-stamp Pepsi for packs of Kentucky’s Best cigarettes and good old hard currency, tall piles of gas station nachos, the occasional blast of meth, Narcotics Anonymous meetings, petty crime, the draw, the recreational making and surgical unmaking of teenaged mothers, and death …”
“You’ve got to understand,” says Logsdon, “people shy away from reporters.” Sure enough, a worker at the Family Dollar store doesn’t want her name used. A woman at a medical conference in Hazard warns everyone in earshot in a loud voice that a reporter is among them. So it goes during a week spent wandering this county and adjacent counties discussing something America almost never talks about: white poverty.
Granted, America seldom discusses poverty of any hue, except insofar as conservative pundits and politicians use it as a not-subtle proxy for racial resentments among white voters. But white poverty is the great white whale of American social discourse, believed to exist but seldom seen.
As it turns out, our deeply racialized view of poverty bears no resemblance to reality. Though it’s true that African Americans are disproportionately likely to live below the poverty line, it is also true that the vast majority of those in poverty are white: 29.8 million people. In fact, there are more white poor than all other poor combined.
Owsley County (Booneville is the county seat) is the epicenter of that poverty. Median income here is less than $20,000. The obesity rate is 50 percent. Life expectancy: 71.4 years, more than seven years below the national average. With 36 percent of its citizens living below the poverty line and 98.5 percent of its population identifying as white, it is the poorest — and one of the whitest — places in America.
If people are wary of reporters asking about such things, it’s not difficult to understand. You get sick of being defined as a problem. Still, nobody denies there are problems here. Indeed, walk down Court Street talking to whomever will speak to you, and very quickly, a theme emerges:
There is nothing here.
You hear that, or some variation, constantly in Booneville. “That’s the thing about it,” says Mayor Charles E. Long, 94, nursing a cola at the Hometown Cafe. “When [young people] get through college, if [they] can’t find a job here. they have to go off. They go to Ohio or Indiana or Lexington or Winchester or Richmond. That’s what hurts.”
Even his own son left town, he says.
Nothing here.
“There’s no work,” says Carl Smith, lounging beneath a fan with a few friends at a car wash down the street. “We’ve got two or three factories built, but we haven’t been able to persuade any company to come in here and start any manufacturing.”
“Ain’t that much jobs,” says Billy Smith, a young father, shopping next door at the Family Dollar store. “I’ve thought about moving to Lexington or somewhere like that. More opportunities.”
Nothing here.
“It’s always been hard times,” says Lowell Morris, a retiree, holding court inside the cafe. “The geography is not good here. I mean, it’s hillsides.”
Nothing here. It’s a litany.
“The farmers that’s worked hard all their lives to build this place, they’ve all got the money,” says April Combs, 32. “But as far as the younger generation, we have no future. I don’t see none.”
She was raised, she says, in a family of bootleggers and marijuana growers, has had drug issues of her own, and has been in and out of jail for the last few years. She is sitting on a step out front of the Hometown Cafe with, it seems, no particular place to go.
“As of now, I’m homeless. I stay here and there. It’s a small place to be so homeless, but I don’t get a check, I don’t get stamps, I’ve got a medical card, but that’s about it. I don’t have many people that try to help me ’cause they’re barely able to help themselves.’”
What will she do? “I’m stuck between a rock and a hard spot,” she says. “Try to make a better life for me and then try to offer my kids something, ’cause this ain’t it.”
“The situation here in East Kentucky’s lousy,” says Dee Davis, founder and president of the Center for Rural Strategies in Whitesburg. “We’re the poorest Congressional district, we’re the sickest Congressional district with the lowest life expectancy. And you know, the irony is that this was forever one of the richest parts of the country in terms of mineral resources, and even beauty. What’s going on here is what happens in a lot of places where the economy is an extractive economy; as different communities around the world compete, it pushes the price of the raw material down. So if you’re not adding value to coal or oil or gas, what you’re really doing is that you’re in a competition with the rest of the world to deliver your commodity at the cheapest rate.”
The Center for Rural Strategies is a nonprofit organization that works on policy issues affecting rural communities, but it is probably best known for its successful fight against The Real Beverly Hillbillies, a reality show CBS announced in 2003 that would have taken real people from this hardscrabble part of the world and plunked them down in a Beverly Hills mansion for the amusement of the television audience. “Imagine the episode where they have to interview maids,” chortled a CBS executive.
Under pressure from Davis’ group and from media, the network backed down. But it would prove to be a classic case of a battle won, and a war well and truly lost. That program never made it to air, but Here Comes Honey Boo Boo certainly did.
In a vacuum, yes, Honey Boo Boo, would be fairly meaningless. But the show is not aired in a vacuum. Rather, it is aired in a country where art and scholarship have spent two centuries pounding home the idea that some of us are “white trash,” ignorant “crackers” and, most infamously, “hillbillies” — America’s unalterable and unfixable misfits. That perception has been arguably as daunting an obstacle for this region as have the economic realities of coal.
There is a remarkable consistency to the way citizens of the poor, white mountain South have been portrayed in popular culture and scholarship. In entertainment, they are narrowly defined as naifs whose very innocence and trusting nature insulates them from the conniving machinations of city folk (think Jed Clampett), as lazy sluggards (think Snuffy Smith), as big, dumb rubes (think Jethro Bodine) or as the personification of perverse evil (think Deliverance). Women’s roles are even more constrained: they tend to be either ancient, sexless crones (think Mammy Yokum) or hyper-sexualized young women (think Daisy Duke).
Get past John-Boy and the rest of The Waltons, and it is difficult to recall a sympathetic portrait of white Southern poverty in mass media. To the contrary, America has always bred a special contempt for the white poor. As far back as 1866, a Boston Daily Advertiser writer opined that “time and effort will lead the negro up to intelligent manhood, but I almost doubt if it will be possible to ever lift this ‘white trash’ into respectability.”
In 1957, the Chicago Tribune described an influx of “savage,” “vicious,” “depraved” newcomers from the poor white South under the lurid headline: “Girl Reporter Visits Jungles of Hillbillies.”
In 1963, Harry M. Caudill published what is still regarded as a landmark in the study of the poor white South, Night Comes To The Cumberlands. Yet even that book, which takes pains to document how poverty was imposed upon Appalachia by its isolation and the predatory practices of lumbermen and coal magnates, also indicts what the author seems to feel is the native inferiority of the people. Appalachia, writes this “defender” of the region, was settled by the dregs of England, “human refuse dumped on a strange shore.”
The thinking goes that the white South — and in particular, the poor white mountain South — is a land of primitives, a land of people who never quite evolved. “Our contemporary ancestors,” one author dubbed them. Another called them “yesterday’s people.”
Nor is the image of “yesterday’s people” solely yesterday’s concern. Consider the Hillbilly to English Translation Dictionary. Its cover depicts a woman with pigtails and a missing front tooth, clutching a scraggly bouquet. She is wearing a dingy white wedding dress. She is barefoot and pregnant. This was published in 2010.
There is no national advocacy group to defend the white poor against such libels as this, no analogue of the NAACP or the National Organization for Women to assert their dignity. You may malign them without a whisper of complaint.
The invisibility of white poverty, says Edmund Shelby, editor of the Beattyville Enterprise, is part of the problem. “Those of us who are aware of the issues facing Appalachians and those of us who speak out about those issues see that as one [thing] that has kept us in the position that we are in for so long. I think that can be said for a lot of poor populations, because if you can say things about people that dehumanize them, then there’s no need to help them raise themselves up in any way because, after all, using that stereotype, they are incapable.”
That invisibility is ironic. Although the War on Poverty is generally remembered for what it did and did not do for black people in the cities, it was actually Appalachia Lyndon Johnson had in mind when he launched it. The president was deeply moved when he toured this part of the country. So was his predecessor, John F. Kennedy, who created the modern food-stamp program as a result. Kennedy’s brother, Robert made his own sojourn here when he ran for president in 1968.
“People are still having a very, very difficult time,” said Bobby Kennedy. “There is considerable hunger in this part of the country. There’s no real hope for the future amongst many of these people who worked hard in the coal mines. And now that the coal mines have shut down, they have no place to go.”
Education innovation
Forty-six years later, the situation is much the same. The only difference is, nobody talks about it now.
Actually, that isn’t quite true. Though media and the public en masse have abandoned the topic, there is within the region itself a lively and ongoing effort to tackle poverty and its effects. For the last two years, for instance, self-described “theater practitioner” Robert Martin and children’s book author Anne Shelby (wife of Edmund) have collaborated to put on a play, HomeSong, which Martin says is “based off of oral histories, story circles, one-on-one interviews” allowing local people to tell their own story for their own consumption instead of always being defined by others. In August, a community college in Hazard hosted the aforementioned medical conference touting a program designed to help bring healthcare to underserved communities.
Dr. Tim Bobrowski, superintendent of Owsley County Schools, and Jim Evans, his counterpart in neighboring Lee County, have partnered to use technology to improve the services they offer their students. For example: Because it is difficult to draw teachers in certain specialties to the area, they have come up with a way to share one another’s in-demand teachers virtually. And kids here miss a lot of school because even a little snow makes steep mountain roads too treacherous for school buses. So Bobrowski has pioneered a program that “allows us to have our teachers at home teaching kids while they’re at their home, using the Internet to make this happen.”
There is, unfortunately, no tech solution for some of the other challenges students here face. “A lot of times,” says Evans, “parents and grandparents in this community don’t want to see their kids leave, they don’t want them to go away from home even if they have high academics. I see that quite a bit. … They feel like they’re going to lose that child once they break away and go to college, instead of encouraging and saying, ‘This is a good thing for you, we want to see you grow.’”
In one sense, you can’t blame them for not wanting their kids to challenge the world outside their mountains. That world can be cruel. Camille Hooker, a graduate student from Clay County, recalls going to school at the University of Kentucky, 90 minutes from home, and being told she talked funny and asked if she were intimate with her cousin.
Anne Shelby still remembers decades ago as a college freshman in Louisville when she excitedly spoke up in class about a Chekhov play only to have everyone break out laughing over her hill country accent. It felt, she says now, “like I had been sledged in the face.”
“I’ve actually tried to develop philosophical distance about it, but I find that in a situation where I’m confronted with stereotypes or with negative suggestions about where I’m from, I still get angry and upset and I don’t handle it very well. It’s very hard to do that, especially when you get so tired of it, and especially when it’s coming from places where you don’t expect it, like a lot of people that I’m friends with and would be aligned with about politics and interests and art and books and so on and then they are capable of saying the most insulting things, or the most ill-informed things.”
Jeff Hawkins recalls a TV program he saw some years ago. “They did a show on a family that lived out in the country somewhere, up in the head of a holler. And they showed a disabled child taking a bath. Then they showed the water hose that came off the mountain that is where they got their water from.”
The video was intended to dramatize the grimness of the family’s poverty. It was not, says Hawkins with wry understatement, “an attractive representation.”
These days, he is executive director of the Kentucky Valley Educational Cooperative, a consortium of school districts banded together to increase their purchasing power and provide teacher training, but at the time of this TV program, he was teaching high school. So he gave his students an assignment: re-cut the video and supply their own narrative. The kids, he says, had a different spin.
“They saw that the family who lived there was pretty creative because they had found a way to get potable water out of a deep mine and have it ran through a filter and into their house, because there was no way they could dig a well where they lived.”
In other words, where a TV network saw hardship, they saw resourcefulness. “I think for me, personally,” says Hawkins, “it’s about the difference in the way we present those two stories. We are not defeated. We should not look at ourselves as defeated. We have to acknowledge the challenges that we have, but we have to figure out how we’re going to get stronger moving through those.”
Poverty and race
The problem with the media, says Dee Davis, is that you’re “always turning up in ways that you’re either laughed at or you’re pitied. In some ways, being pitied is much harder because, look, we’re all Americans. It’s the land of opportunity. People can make it here, people can succeed. So when you’re stereotyped, when you’re put in a classification of being pitiful, you feel the derision, you feel the limits, you feel restraints put on your families, your kids, your neighborhood. And it’s painful.”
It is also familiar. Or at least, it should be. When you consider the markers of white southern poverty — meaning the poverty itself, the insulting stereotypes, the lack of opportunity, the lack of access to healthcare, the educational challenges, the routine media libel and what Martin Luther King, Jr. described as a “degenerating sense of nobodiness” — it is remarkable how many of them are also markers of the African-American struggle.
Not to overstate the nexus between white poverty and blackness. Race is its own universe and carries its own weights. As University of Kentucky political science professor Herbert Reid once sagely noted, “America does not hang its ‘hillbillies’ — it laughs at them.”
But if it is important not to overstate that nexus, it is also important to acknowledge that it exists, and that blinding African Americans and poor whites to its existence — dividing and conquering them — has long been a favored stratagem of American business and political interests. King said this plainly in a speech at the end of a 1965 march for voting rights: “To keep the poor white masses working for near starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War,” he said, “if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire a former Negro slave and pay him even less.”
In lieu of a living wage, in other words, poor whites were given the cherished social capital of whiteness. Said King: “If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man.”
While that social capital still has undeniable value, it is also true that there is a certain grim egalitarianism to poverty. Hunger feels the same in a white stomach as it does in a black one. It was in hopes of making this point, illustrating this sameness, that King launched his Poor People’s Campaign, a massive demonstration in Washington that was to have united the black poor with their white, Hispanic and American Indian counterparts to press for redress on the thing they had in common: their poverty. But then King went to Memphis where a white supremacist shot him in the face. And one of the great tragedies of American history is that from that moment to this, no one else has really tried to make King’s point.
To travel in eastern Kentucky, to drive down roads that twist like a snake having a nightmare, to pass the sagged-in barns and rusting trailers, to roll though tiny “nothing here” towns beneath mists that shroud the verdant hollows and mountains that stare uncaring upon the comings and goings of women and men, is to be haunted by thoughts of what might have happened had anyone picked up the gauntlet King dropped.
People here often tell you they want to die in this place. They say this even after telling you there is nothing here.
“You know,” says Robert Martin, paraphrasing a speech Anne Shelby wrote for their play, “if you look at the quality of life index, we don’t score very high. We don’t have museums, and we don’t have this and we don’t have that. But how many points would you get for our streams and for people who show up at your door with a casserole and say, ‘Call me if you need anything.’ How many points would you get for being able to grow up in a place where your parents and their parents grew up?”
There is a stubborn toughness in the kind of love for place those words express. It is a toughness that finds its mirror in the toughness demanded of all the people struggling in all the “nothing here” places all over the country. It is a toughness that rebukes the artificial stratifications of race. “All life is interrelated,” said King.
And surely, he would have welcomed “yesterday’s people” as co-authors of tomorrow’s hope.
OWSLEY COUNTY, KENTUCKY
$20,000
median income
36%
live below the poverty line
98.5%
of population identifies itself as white. It’s the poorest — and one of the whitest —places in America.
10.5%
unemployment rate
50%
obesity rate
71.4
years life expectancy
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/leonard-pitts-jr/article2518087.html#storylink=cpy
If only we could tax the rich more, then we’d have the money to fight this poverty.
Grim, unmod post with Ebola -Wash Post link
There are high skilled positions at chase and that is what I was talking about. I’m not talking about people in service positions. If you are talking about 1,000s of low wage/low skilled jobs leaving NYC, not to lack empathy, but who cares.
You obviously missed where I said I met a VP there as well. Not the sharpest tool in the shed if you ask me.
I thought Detroit was dead. It’s all over for them. Lol
Looks like it’s in the early stages of coming back. Keep thinking the overall economy is not doing the same.
I double dare you to invest in anything Detroit related. Let us know how that goes.
troll (54)-
Name the school, name the club, or you’re just trolling.
Not surprised you’re a front-running ManU fan.
“The programs I was in were incorporating a possession style game. Letting the play develop while patiently waiting to attack a hole in the defense. Really learned how to play the game well. I was not the best player, but I was a starter. Played with some great players.”
I’m fairly certain Passion Fruit played for the Ladybugs in 92.
I’m pretty certain he just looks at nekkid pics of CR7 and plays with himself.
…not that there’s anything wrong with that…
[23] fabian
So where’s the hammer. As you so accurately pointed out “I’ve been called worse by better” (or words to that effect).
Only two people ever tried to use this much projection on me in “argument”, and the one who even used it to the degree that he said I was projecting, was shown to be a complete loon.
I insulted you because you made an absolutely outlandish, indeed nonsensical, statement regarding law and politics, and one I have never heard from your “betters” in MSM, which should tell you something. I felt it wasn’t worth even addressing. Apparently, you felt the same way.
BTW, how did you like the game on Sunday? I enjoyed it thoroughly.
[60] clot,
Geez, ease up. Better to be a ManU fan than a Gooner. Though I did help a Gooner who is also a regular at Toon matches to get an internship interview with my judge (you know, the one that doesn’t exist).
Truthfully, 99% of the Arsenal fans I meet have been all right. Even the guys in my club don’t mind Arsenal. They ask me why I am so down on them and I tell them “The first gooner fan I met initially struck me as a complete a-hole. Been sour on them ever since.”
[48] michael
“He would prob kick my ass with all that built up rage, but I would def put up a fight. I’m a fierce competitor. I never give up. He would have to put me out or give me the death sentence to win.”
I want to see you and Clot go cage match. I think everyone here can relate. I’ll bring the popcorn and fruity drinks.
[10] grim,
Seems my friend’s observation kicked the hornet’s nest re: Chase. FWIW, other outlets report that Chase is no longer leasing space down here, they are buying the buildings and the A-Z facility is pretty big. Admittedly, there is a capital-based reason for this, not that they think Wilm RE will be hot for decades to come.
Is that meant to be a rebuttal? No, but absent some other details I’m not privy to, it seems like a pretty substantial investment in the area. I will concede that, while I have no idea what is going in there, I doubt it’s a call center. I will also concede that the income level of the jobs lost from A-Z’s relo from the area probably won’t be fully made up by Chase.