Some vortexes suck more than others, I guess.
The Guardian has picked up on a story I saw earlier in The Washington Post, basically the same ol’, same ol’, about how some of The Beautiful People in Sedona would rather that the Help did not share their ZIP code.
It seems Sedona, like Santa Fe, Taos, Aspen, et al., is a few rooftops short of affordable housing for the worker bees who keep their fauxdobe hives filled with organic, free-range, GMO-free honey. Thus, some of the folks who fluff Swiss chard at Whole Foods or pillows at resorts keep getting rousted from local parking lots, state parks, or the national forest, where they live in their cars between shifts in the barrel(s).
One short-term solution being considered is a “safe place to park” program that would accommodate 40 vehicles (belonging to Sedona’s unhoused workforce, not itinerant bands of Travellers, meth cooks, and hookers). The idea is to provide bathrooms, showers, and a fixed location for workers who are already living in their autos wherever they can find a place to park them. A social-services organization would vet the “tenants” to make sure no Irish were sneaking in.
Jodi Jackson, who lives in an RV and works at a local coin laundry, told The Guardian: “We may not be housed and living in town, but we’re the ones who are doing your laundry, working at your gas stations, working at your restaurants — all of the lower-wage jobs – delivering your pizza, for God’s sake. We’re not bad people. We just need a little bit of help.”
Don’t we all, at some time or another? When I was a pup I occasionally brushed up against the rough edges of capitalism, newspaper style. It’s why I declined an offer of “casual labor” on the copy desk of the San Jose Mercury News — “casual labor” meaning “We don’t know exactly when we’ll need you, but it won’t be 40 hours a week with the usual bennies.” It’s why I decided to settle in Española instead of Santa Fe when I got the gig at The New Mexican.
As regulars here know, I don’t mind kipping in my auto now and then. But all the time? It was grating enough to watch the People of Money (© Ed Quillen) strutting around the Plaza when I had a roof over my head that didn’t come with wheels under me arse.
As I noted above, Sedona’s a familiar story: tourist town, short on affordable housing, long on Airbnbs, rising rents, and exploding home-sale prices, possibly overstocked with POM© and the sort of self-satisfied simp who muses over his venti green tea frappucino with a strawberry smoothie base, two pumps of caramel, three espresso shots, whipped cream and a caramel drizzle about how nobody wants to work anymore.
They want to work, all right; they just want homes to go to when the shift’s over, like everyone else.
• Editor’s note: The headline is lifted from “Blue Highways” by William Least Heat-Moon, who during a stretch of personal and professional difficulty kipped in a 1975 Ford Econoline while motoring around the country to see how other people were getting along.
Mad Blog Media 
Sedona has the only “blue or turquoise or teal” Mc D’s arches in the world. I was in Flag when that was chosen. What a hoot!
Flag’ has been suffering a bit under the People of Money™ too, yeah? I always enjoyed the small downtown pieces of it I’d visit a couple times a year as I traveled to and from Interbike: the Collins Irish Pub & Grill, Late for the Train Coffee, Beaver Street Brewery, and like that there.
We went there once, about 15 years ago, on our way to mountain bike around Williams, Arizona. We went into a restaurant after finally finding a place to park. Looked at the menu prices and got up and left. We had lunch in Flag. Seems thing have just gotten worse since then. It must be all the vortices sucking all the empathy and charity out of their brains.
But, this is happening in big cities all over the country. Something will break soon. One shouldn’t fuck with people who have nothing to lose.
“One shouldn’t fuck with people who have nothing to lose”. You nailed it POB. The dam is gonna burst at some point. I’m told that in the early 1920’s things were getting as they are today (1% wealth porking the rest of us ) and then WHAM – the for real mother of financial depressions hit and sorted some things out. This time? Gonna be a lot more painful cause this is a far more violent country.
I last visited Sedona in 2016, made the mistake of dropping in from the north end, and couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there. Got to my motel, walked to the Whole Paycheck for some grub, took it back to eat while lounging around the motel pool, went to bed, got up, and got gone.
Hunter S. Thompson’s 1970 campaign for sheriff of Aspen generated a number of solid ideas, not the least of which was to (a) change the name of the town to “Fat City,” and (b) rip up all city streets, recycle the asphalt into a giant parking/auto-storage lot out of town (and out of sight), and require that all public movement be on foot or via a fleet of bicycles maintained by the city police force.
I wonder how the Chamonixes, Zermatts, and Kitzbuhels of the world make it happen. It’s been ages but every time I was there, I knew for a fact I was the poorest slob in town. And I don’t remember noticing anyone sleeping in their car except for the occasional aspiring Krakauer working on a new line and a story about solving it.
I’ve never crossed the pond, or been a ski person, so it’s a mystery to me. With the exception of Santa Fe, I’ve been pretty successful at avoiding theme parks, and no matter where I was living or what I was getting paid, I managed to find housing I could afford, if only just barely. But I usually had a job in hand when I went someplace; I never started looking for a flop until I had signed on with the new outfit.
Gotta be a lot of factors at play, especially for anyone who wants to live someplace nifty but wasn’t born on third base. Investors buying up cheap properties and making short-term rentals of them; credit-card and/or student debt coupled with zero savings (who can come up with first, last, and damage deposit these days?). They probably owe on the vehicles they’re living in. A phone and a cell-service plan just to get hired and answer to the boss-fella. Ugly divorce plus child support. And how many people are thinking “job” instead of “career?” The first can go away fast; it usually takes some time to croak a career.
Shit, it wouldn’t take much of a shove to turn anyone’s Garden of Eden into the Grapes of Wrath. The lords seem to have forgotten their duty to the serfs.
Here’s another happy story of the American workplace, this time on the other side of the country, where the folks who maintain top-shelf properties live — and die — in shantytowns in the woods.
Yep. I love it when all these so-called blue, progressive places turn out to be only progressive when it comes to Looking Out For #1. NIMBY is alive and thriving in Santa Fe and up in Bombtown, as constantly attested by my pen pal Stephanie Nakhleh.
In other news from the home front, it turns out that Hatch the Cat is really the Killer Cat of Caerbannog. The dog is freaked out and the cat is staking out dog-free parts of the house. I hope this calms down. Soon.
I used to quip that Boulder loved the Third World until it moved in next door and started dating its daughter.
We were lucky (mostly) with mixing cats and dogs. But man, did we ever get a hissing match when we introduced young Turkish to Ike, a.k.a. Chairman Meow, who had just settled into the idea that ours was a one-cat family. Turk tried to join the Party, but the Chairman was having none of it.
Wheel estate, along with ‘vandominium’, have long been part of the jargon here in Hasbeen, Co.
Guys you should see the Charlie Foxtrot in Northwest Montana. Whitefish Montana average selling price of a house is 750,000 K. Rents at 2000 per month studio apartment. County’s average income is about 36000 per year. Between VRBO s and Airbnb, the service worker is priced out of the housing market. Plus the refugees (Those asshats that ruined another place) from CA, TX, and FL keep buying apartment buildings for investments and raising rents to cover the interest on loans. If the bubble ever bursts the economic dislocation will result in civil war. 1980’s Subaru’s and Teslas, Range Rovers, BMW x7 , and Audi what evers the economic disparity is unreal. The Inflation starts in the Ski and Resort towns and screws the rest of the area.
Yikes. Worser and worser. I recall a buddy at the Gazette pressing the boss-fella for a raise back in the Seventies. Boss-fella aims one thumb at Pikes Peak and says something very much like, “You lose $5 an hour for the privilege of looking at that every day.”
“Fuck that noise,” says my buddy, or a close approximation of same. “Hang a curtain in front of it, I don’t give a shit. What I need is money.”
This was the same dude who took his “bonus” check — $15 with the tax taken out — to the boss-fella and told him: “You can keep this. If the company needs the money this badly I don’t want it.”
Tourist/sporting towns, man. “Ranching the view,” my buddy Hal calls it. Thing is, you gots to work that ranch or the owners won’t let you live there. You’ll have to commute from Landfill, Septic Junction, or Toxintown, and share a singlewide Dumpster with six other fellas.