The Bunker

The time at which a city locality starts to act like an "idiot" cell is not hard to discover. Anyone intimate with an outstanding successful city district knows when this qualitative turn is in the process of occuring. Those who use the facilities that are starting to disappear, or veiw them with pleasure, know full well when the diversity and interest of a locality to which they are attached are on the downgrade. They know full well when segments of the population are being crowded out, and diversity of population is narrowing - especially if they are being crowded out themselves. They even know many of these results in advance of their fulfillment, by projecting proposed or imminent physical changes into changes in everyday life and the everyday scene. The people in a district talk about it, they register both the fact and effect of diversity's self-destruction long before slowpoke maps and statistics tell, too late, the misfortune of what happened. Jane Jacobs - The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Only 5 more days until we close on the house in Hamtramck. Before we drive out there to celebrate the New Year, I thought it might be fun to post something about all the quirky things I'll miss about Ypsilanti.


"Space Chatter" and Saturday morning Falun Dafa on CTN. I was wrong about Mickey Bogart. He represents everything left in Ann Arbor that is good.


Conspiracy flyers.


The perpetual yard sale on Forest. For the past 3 years, there has been a garage sale at the entrance to our apartment complex every weekend, Friday-Sunday. He even shovels the lawn on snowy days.


The best strip mall ever is on the northeast corner of Ford Blvd and Holmes. Grocery with a great butcher, laundromat, party store, hardware, video rental, clothing store and beauty supply all in one place.


Ypsilanti People's Food Co-op - even if they've stopped ordering all the things I really like.


The convenience of buying produce at the Ypsilanti Farmer's Market.

2 family holiday parties down, just 1 more to go. Our families have largely dropped out of the consumer Holiday Season™ in favor of having a potluck and enjoying(?) a few hours of surreal political discussion. Raspberry jam is the favorite flavor so far this year and my "liberal" aunt voted for George Bush. My cousin, a senior at the UofM, tried to stage an intervention, but he didn't even bother to register himself to vote, so she wouldn't listen.


Anyway, what I wanted to tell you about was this article Steve sent to me about the failure of the anti-consumerism movement, despite being popular (as measured by sales, of course).

What we need to see is that consumption is not about conformity, it’s about distinction. People consume in order to set themselves apart from others. To show that they are cooler (Nike shoes), better connected (the latest nightclub), better informed (single-malt Scotch), morally superior (Guatemalan handcrafts), or just plain richer (bmws).


The problem is that all of these comparative preferences generate competitive consumption. “Keeping up with the Joneses,” in today’s world, does not always mean buying a tract home in the suburbs. It means buying a loft downtown, eating at the right restaurants, listening to obscure bands, having a pile of Mountain Equipment Co-op gear and vacationing in Thailand. It doesn’t matter how much people spend on these things, what matters is the competitive structure of the consumption. Once too many people get on the bandwagon, it forces the early adopters to get off, in order to preserve their distinction. This is what generates the cycles of obsolescence and waste that we condemn as “consumerism.”

I really loved this house, but since we only need one at the moment, we've got to let it go. The pictures I took were really huge and impossible to link to individualy.


This layout is very common in Hamtramck. The "owner unit" on the first floor has a living room or bedroom to one side of the door, two bedrooms off a formal dining room, bathroom, and eat-in kitchen with a large pantry in the back. Stairs in the back lead to an upstairs apartment. The layout is roughly the same as the unit downstairs. I'm told the unit upstairs will rent for $400-450, about the same as the mortgage payment for the whole house.


Normally, paneling is a bad sign, but this was the nicest paneling job I've ever seen. As horrific as it seems, this house is decorated with paneling. The original plaster ceilings aren't covered and the medalion in the dining room is intact. Given that there are wood floors upstairs and marble windowsills throughout the owner unit, there are probably wood floors under the carpet.