I turned east on E Street and cut across Fifth, the one-way main drag paralleling Fourth in the opposite direction. I was in the neighborhood Angela, Sam, and me had once called home.
When we first bought our house it was what realtors liked to call a ‘neighborhood in transition,’ meaning property values were low enough for a family starting out to leverage themselves a mortgage – as long as they didn’t mind drug dealers to one side of them, and nightly drunken brawls on the other. No biggie: I chastised the worst neighbors into minimally acceptable behavior after we finagled a mortgage out of my double shifts on the loading dock.
There’d been a reason for the neighborhood’s chaos, and for all the riffraff that used to infest Old Town. Round about the time we first came here, in a celebrated class-action lawsuit resulting from Stagger Bay’s refusal to pay General Relief to qualified professional transients, a federal judge forced the county to pay the highest disbursements in the state.
Welfare offices as far south as San Diego handed out flyers to their ‘customers,’ informing them of the windfall awaiting them up here. LA Cops passed out one-way bus tickets to Stagger Bay to the Southland’s homeless vagrants. The Big City, dumping it’s parasites in the lap of Small Town America: it was a historic mass movement of people; one that, curiously, was never discussed in the media.
The resulting influx of aid recipients was large enough Stagger Bay quickly had one of the highest per capita percentages of people on assistance in the nation. All those high payouts had almost bankrupted the city, and put its treasury into its current downward spiral.
Another side-effect of all those newcomers was a severe housing shortage. Rental owners capitalized on the tight market by subdividing existing homes into shoebox-sized apartments.
For a while it was a cottage industry for local landlords to buy one rundown Victorian after another, subdivide them, and pack them as full of Section 8 Housing Assistance recipients as topologically possible – slum-lording as a growth career. That income property boom led to severely inflated home prices; outside money had gobbled up a lot of houses too, ‘smart’ investors figuring Stagger Bay’s yokel tenants could pay their mortgages and property taxes for them.
Before we bought the house we’d gotten a lot of dirty looks from the old family locals – they assumed we were on AFDC, part of the invading unwashed horde of big city welfare barbarians that had crowded Stagger Bay to bursting.
I’d never been on the dole myself. When I was a kid me and Karl was all the way carnivores: we’d steal from you honest, to your face, like good thieves. But after I hooked up with Angela and had Sam, I’d always worked for a living – to my brother’s ridicule I might add.
Still, it had been an eternity since we bought our own little slice of the American Dream here, and there were few living-wage jobs in Stagger Bay anymore. Except, judging from what I’d seen on my bus ride in, for members of the construction industry.
I stood in front of the home that was ours once. The stucco exterior had been tan when we lived there. The new owners had painted it a bright chalk-yellow with light purple trim; it looked pretty nice, a stylish color scheme I wished I’d thought of when the decision had been mine to make. A Big-Wheel trike and other toys lay scattered around the well-tended front lawn.
A Ram pickup truck was parked in the driveway, twin to the one I’d once owned. The only difference? This truck was red and had a big shiny steel tool locker mounted directly behind the cab; my truck had been black, and I’d never been a toolbox kind of guy. Looking back, had to admit the Ram had just been a big boy’s toy; a status symbol to help me make believe I’d made the grade.
Studying my old house, I had the crazy notion for a second that all I had to do was step through the front door, and the past seven years would turn out to be a dream: Angela would be putzing around the kitchen, Sam would be watching TV or playing a video game, and both would smile at me as I entered, happy to see me.
I shook it off fast. I didn’t live here anymore, and never would again.