I Live on Main Street, Too

I pay rent instead of a mortgage, and can only afford to live in Manhattan because I was lucky enough to get into a rent stabilized apartment. Without that apartment, I would not be able to afford to live here.

My salary has remained the same for years. Yet I pay the same increasingly higher prices for everything that everyone else on Main Street U.S.A. does. The one thing I don’t have to worry about is gas prices—I don’t own a car. I don’t need one in this city because it has a terrific public transportation system.

I also don’t have children. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have financial responsibilities to children, and other people in my life. I do.

When I take vacations, they are modest ones. I don’t have closets full of clothes like Carrie on Sex in the City. I don’t have a giant apartment like the folks on Seinfeld and Friends. My apartment is 450 square feet at the most. It is in a fifth floor walk up. It is comfortable, but there is nothing luxurious about it. There are only about a million of these apartments in New York City. This may seem like a lot to you. Trust me, it’s not. The people who live in those apartments are mostly like me. We live on Main Street, too.

I worry about my job outlasting the faltering economy like anyone else on Main Street. I’ve been disgusted with Wall Street since President Reagan, deregulation of the financial markets, and smarmy Gordon Gecko in the movie Wall Street standing in front of a bunch of fledgling stockbrokers intoning “greed is good”. The only difference between me and someone from Main Street elsewhere is that I can get on a subway train and ride down to Wall Street and shake my fist at the stock exchange for all the good it will do anyone.

I go to church. I spend holidays with my family. I like to go out for dinner and drinks with friends and dates with boyfriends. I worry about the environment and my health (although, unlike 45.7 million American people, I do have health insurance. For now), and know I need to volunteer more in my community. I yell at the television and shake my head at food prices at the grocery store. I own one winter coat. My closet is not full of shoes. I don’t have a flat-screen TV. I babysit for my neighbors.

Although I grew up in South Jersey in a Levittown-type development built soon after World War II, my neighborhood is near a town that has a real main street. It is exactly what you would picture it to be—tree-lined, with eighteenth and nineteenth century houses set back from a wide street. If you saw my high school you would laugh at the regularity of it—it could be the set for any film set in the 1950s (and was for the film Eddie and the Cruisers). My brother and I played outside with the other neighborhood kids until the sun went down, jumped in leaves in the fall, sled in the streets before the plows took away all the good snow in the winter, and stuffed ourselves with watermelon in our backyard in the summer. It was idyllic. I know that Main Street, the one most people imagine when they shut their eyes.

But even though I've moved to the middle of one of the biggest metropolises in the world, I am still a citizen of Main Street. Because what happens on Wall Street leaves me just as vulnerable as anyone who lives in a house with a backyard.

Am I happy about the idea of a bail-out? No. The circumstances surrounding it makes it a lousy solution so far. Main Street Americans are angry that the fat cats on Wall Street are going to be bailed out, while they lose their retirement funds, or homes because of poorly-structured mortgages. They argue that the government should bail out ordinary Americans, and put a moratorium on foreclosures. Offer us the low-interest loans, rather than the banks, who got us into this mess in the first place. They point to the rally on Wall Street and say "see, we don't need the bail out". The rally on Wall Street happened precisely because the market believes there will be a bail out.

As a Main Streeter, though, I have to blame myself for some of this mess. I slept through two and a half decades of deregulation, mostly because, and this is important, Wall Street had nothing to do with me. Or so I thought. As long as I had a job, and could pay my bills and live a decent life, I wasn't paying attention to what was happening to America's economy. Sure we griped about inflation, and recessions, unemployment and the usual things. But did we ever really ask why things were the way they were? I didn't. I just floated along in a happy little middle-class Main Street bubble. When we should have been showing up on the steps of the capitol with pitchforks and torches, demanding transparency, regulation, and oversight, we were busy running up our credit cards instead of saving.

As someone from Main Street, I think it stinks that we have to have a bail out. But I also know that if the banks fail, there will be no or very few loans to private individuals; no loans to small businesses, fewer loans to larger businesses, where many of us hold jobs. That person who was going to buy your house, won't be able to because they won't be able to get a mortgage of any kind. We have to start understanding that it's all connected. And yanking your money out of a bank and putting it under your mattress, while seemingly a good solution, is just plain stupid. You get robbed, or your house burns down, or there's a flood, and your done for good. Besides, the U.S. dollar is literally just paper until the global economy and financial market decides how much it's actually worth. So you can stuff your mattress with money all you want, in the end, it's not gold bouillons and could wind up being worth nothing if we, Main Street America, don't wake up, educate ourselves, and demand action and oversight.

I invite comment. If I'm wrong, call me out. Agree, disagree, let's talk.