Seattle and the great bootstrapping myth

Do you deserve to live where you want? And I’m emphasizing the word deserve.

Upshaw: Make time to take care of yourself

In theory, I think most of us would say, “Yes. This is America. You can live wherever you want.”

But can you really?

I got to thinking about this as I read about new campaign proposals in the Seattle mayoral race. One idea floating around is to assist in people’s rent if they meet certain metrics.

For most of my life, my attitude toward this has been that you can afford to live where you can afford to live. Don’t we all think about how nice it would be to live in the neighborhood a few rungs up the ladder from where you currently are? If only I could afford it, I’d be in a modern masterpiece on the waterfront. But alas, I can’t afford that.

But what happens when most people can’t afford to live near the place where they work? Or, the only people that can afford it are from a certain class or certain racial makeup? Is it up to the government to step in and put its thumb on the scale for the little guy?

Here’s where it gets tricky for me. How do you place a dollar value on the privilege and bias we’ve all been talking about so much lately? Is it worth $100 a month? Maybe $1,000? What if you’re one of the people that still doesn’t believe in privilege? Should you be able to opt out of assisting the people who qualify?

My instinct is to push back against politicians that are dolling out freebies during campaign speeches to woo voters. On the other hand, I’m a recent convert to believing in white privilege. For the longest time, I would not let go of my own “hard work will get you there” origin story. I finally realized that both things can be true. I can have a strong work ethic and the table can be tilted my way by unseen forces.

So while I still don’t believe that you get to live anywhere you want just because you want to, I’m beginning to come around on the logic that there are legitimate reasons to give some assistance to people working just as hard, that don’t have the same inherent opportunities.

I have no idea what the dollar amount is, but I do want to live in a community where my neighbors are firemen and teachers and restaurant workers and not all tech workers and programmers. That seems reasonable to me.

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