Raegan
7:30 AM
I wake up in my Brewerytown apartment, press snooze, think better of it, and start getting ready for the day. The routine is consistent: brush my teeth while I make my bed, wash my face, scold my cat for attempting to eat my plants. Today, there is a slight variation, in that I'm curling my hair for a date this evening and that the cat manages to snatch a bite out of my fledgling inchplant before I shoo her away. She yaps at me indignantly as I scoop her off of the windowsill, completely unaware that I am saving her from a stomachache, and clearly upset with me for it.
8:15 AM
I finish making breakfast and pour myself the first iced coffee of the day. I've recently been a big fan of savory hashes, so breakfast consists of grits with a few fried eggs, some seasoned potatoes, and garlic cream cheese together in a bowl. Highly recommend cooking diner food for yourself. I put on Democracy Now and watch as I eat.
8:45 AM
I rapidly pull the curlers out of my hair because I should leave now. I'm particularly proud of the skirt I'm wearing, which I made myself. I had never sewn leather before, but I loved the idea of repurposing my grandfather's vest into something I could wear to work and, the more I thought about the cow that gave us the leather, the more determined I became to ensure his sacrifice continued rebounding. I wanted to use every scrap of this leather to turn it into something, so there was less need for another cow to become leather. This one had become a vest long before I was even born, so it was easier to put out of my mind, but I still got a little sad whenever I thought too much about it. Also, the bottom hem wasn't even and that would bug me for the rest of the day. On the plus side, it has pockets
8:50 AM
I leave my apartment and start walking for the trolley stop. I keep my headphones in my ears, still listening to Democracy Now, but this does not prevent me from hearing a pair of men comment on my appearance as I walk past. I briefly regret dressing up for work, then carry on.
8:57 AM
The 15 Trolley pulls up to my stop on Girard and I hop in, taking a seat and reading a bit. I'm working through Babel by R. F. Kuang and enjoying it a lot. After riding the trolley for a little under 15 minutes, I hop out and head for the subway.
9:25 AM
I get off the subway in Center City and walk up the stairs towards work. It's finally getting chillier, which I'm grateful for, but this does not prevent me from stopping at Passero's Coffee for another cold brew. The point is to get the caffeine in my body as quickly as possible, not to warm up.
9:35 AM
I walk into my workplace, a university where I serve as a statistician. Most of my job includes helping faculty members as they conduct public health research, though today we are preparing for an upcoming conference that many of us are about to head to.
For the rest of the morning, I chat with my manager and fiddle with ongoing projects. At noon, we have a research forum in the conference room, a monthly event that our office hosts. Presenters discuss health food access, program evaluations, and GIS mapping of public trails. Turnout is good, though the pizza we ordered from Top Tomato is late. I stick around, ostensibly to clean up, but mostly to ensure I'm there when the pizza arrives.
Once it does, the remaining three of us chat about the conference and the election. My manager tells me not to help clean up but I help anyway because I want to use the excuse to procrastinate on the professional training work I'm planning for this afternoon. Eventually, I go back to my office and complete the tasks, getting myself one step closer to the new certification I have decided I need.
A few bureaucratic tasks and another informal meeting later, my day is complete.
5:00 PM
My manager leaves and I stay behind, watching YouTube videos about western esotericism and putting on makeup. My partner, who lives in South Philly and loves walking as much as I do, heads my way and shows up about a half hour later.
5:30 PM
My partner arrives at my office and I head down to join him. We continue walking our way up to Brewerytown, but decide our original Schuykill River picnic plan probably will not be the best idea given the chill. It's perfect walking weather, but sitting still and eating outside doesn't seem ideal. We walk northward, chatting about our days. He has just finished watching a video essay about whether Rome could have industrialized and we discuss its contents. I agree with the conclusion that, even given another 150 years of pax romana, it likely could not have industrialized, which is unfortunate because it had all of the necessary tools besides the information about how to put them together.
6:00 PM
We turn onto Spring Garden and, again, a stranger comments on my appearance but, this time, to point out the way I'm smiling. He says we must be doing something right and I agree-- nothing makes me happier than holding hands with someone I love and talking about interesting ideas.
6:05 PM
We arrive at La Chinesca, a restaurant in an old Jiffy Lube that I had passed but never visited. My partner had been there years earlier and it was unlike anything I had tried before. Upon informing the waitress that I am a vegetarian, she tells me about a pumpkin taco that isn't on the menu yet. Not only was it gorgeous, but it was delicious.
6:44 PM
Our phones both explode at the same time when the announcement that Liam Payne has died hits our collective groupchat. We stop to tell everyone we know as the waitress brings the check.
7:00 PM
The sun has mostly set, but there is still enough light to get us back to my house, another half an hour walk. We chat about the novel I'm trying to write, the murals we pass, and our relationship. Fairmount turns into Brewerytown and we admire the architecture of the older buildings, then lament the way our route changes when we cross Girard. On this side of the road, the old buildings are not maintained and increasingly bear notices of impending demolition. In the place of demolished houses, new construction projects spring up.
They seem out of place in this neighborhood. We travel down a beautiful brick alleyway back towards my apartment, marveling at the street art we see along the way, then pop out in another world. I know my landlord, the property management corporation who I give money to each month, is feeding off of the decay around us. I know my presence is helping. I once again voice my excitement for the day my lease ends and I can get out of the apartment I love in the neighborhood I love.
I think about the street where I grew up, in Mt. Healthy, Ohio, where four generations of my family lived. For eleven years, my sister and I ran around with neighborhood kids, our mother organized Fourth of July parades, and we walked to my Mammaw's house next door unannounced any time we needed one of her many hoarded trinkets. On Sundays, we would gather at my grandparents' house across the street, alongside aunts and uncles and random neighbors we had "adopted" for hours at a time.
After the Recession, my family scattered to winds. My mother sold the house and we packed up for northern Indiana while my father moved to a larger city in Kentucky with his new wife. My Mammaw and my grandfather have since passed away, with my grandfather leaving me the vest that became the skirt I was wearing that very moment. My sister now lives in Houston while I live in Philadelphia, and the two of us return to the town each December.
The street I grew up on is still there in Mt. Healthy, Ohio, but it no longer exists. My elementary school was torn down and I couldn't place even half of my childhood friends on a map if I tried. First, the area was desiccated, getting poorer and poorer while its residents ran off to places like Philadelphia in search of schools and jobs. Then, it started to be built back again, new and different, where the remnants of the old town were. It's kind of like that Noah Kahan song, where he declares that his hometown is for the record now because "the intersection got a Target and they're calling it downtown."
In our case, there was a downtown before. We had my grandmother's 60th birthday party there and bought fish for my sister's kindergarten teacher who lived down the street, but that version of downtown was killed in the interim. We watched it fade away in front of our eyes in spurts every time we came home for Christmas and now, in the same way, we watch it rebuilt.
I don't want Mt. Healthy to stay unchanging just for the sake of my memories. I want my grandmother's intersection to have that Target, even if it takes the place of the flea market where my grandfather used to go. I want that because I know there is no world where the flea market returns. It may be jolting for me to see a new smoke shop open next to the bakery that our family friends used to own, but it seems like the residents are happy to have something at all happening. Some of it, like the transformation of the defunct pharmacy into a new library, represent public investments, creating public goods. I'm just not sure the same can be said for Brewerytown.
Brewerytown is not yet where my neighborhood was fifteen years ago; the residents are still here. The financial pressures that pushed my community apart and into cities have knock-on effects that replicate the displacement process through different means. Landlords try to save money by ignoring needed work on properties until they are condemned, developers buy up the cheap land and build aesthetically pleasing new construction out of cardboard and popsickle sticks. And then, transplants like me show up. We can't afford the suburban homeownership our parents had at the same age thirty years ago, we have no ties to anywhere in particular, and we can pay higher rents than the people already in the neighborhood.
I left my PhD program to seek out my current job because, at the end of the first year, a pipe burst and my ceiling collapsed after months of telling my landlord and being ignored. I have moved every year for the past eight, each time thinking this would be the apartment where I could rest. I realized, in that moment in spring 2022, with water pooling and raining down all over me, that I was never going to be able to make my landlord listen to my concerns unless I had money. I just as quickly concluded that I was never going to have money if I stayed as an adjunct in political science. I pivoted my whole life in search of a better home, so the moment I got this STEM job, the very first thing I did was seek out housing where I would not have fleas or mold. I broke my lease, despite not being allowed to. I took out loans to move into this space. For a moment, I felt at peace and at home for the first time in my adult life.
But now, walking down the street with my partner, greeting my neighbors, I don't feel at peace. I feel profoundly in the way. I know my very presence in this place I worked to afford comes at the price of the neighbors I have come to know and appreciate. To have what I want, I must repeat the cycle of pushing people out of their neighborhoods, a human version of what the Recession did to Mt. Healthy. It feels as if I'm caught up in the machinery of capital, becoming a tool for displacement and unsure how to stop it.
The easiest thing to do would be to simply convince myself my presence wasn't hurting people. I thought of the policy wonks I knew when I lived and worked in DC, who thoroughly believed in supply-side economics, repeating mantras daily about how the rents would go down eventually if enough new development took place, how the real problem was regulation. Those communities displaced in the interim, they told themselves, were unfortunate but necessary casualties of progress. But I do not have that kind of faith in the market and I know from experience that, once a community is cracked apart and scattered to the wind, no amount of new construction will restore or "revitalize" it, even if the rents did come back down one day.
Members of my family often talk about returning to our hometown and clearly would like to. Maybe one day the jobs will be there for them. But, for me, I've lived in this city for years, with a partner and a solid group of friends and a promising career. I don't want to give up the community I've built to chase a community that no longer exists, but I often find myself thinking that's the only place I can go where I won't hurt anyone.
I'll sit there, staring at the wall, wracking my brain and scouring the internet for an idea of what a better person would be doing. A tenant's union is the obvious answer, but then I think of the logistical barriers: all the houses are owned by different people, I'm an obvious transplant who’s still new in the neighborhood, and it takes more time than I have to start one. Then, my brain reminds me that a better person would find a way to make it possible. A better person would be making time instead of making excuses. It reminds me that a real better person never would have moved to this neighborhood in the first place. A better person would have known to go live in some other place and gotten roommates or downsized or put up with a little mold if that's what it took. That's what it takes if you have conviction and it's not too much to ask when the alternative is pushing others out to make room for yourself in some cushy apartment. Now, the least I can do is get out and go find some place I’m not actively gentrifying before I've hurt anyone else that I claim to care about.
I love Philadelphia. I love my friends, my stupid trolley that's always late, and my little coffee shop where I spend too much money. I love that I can walk down the street with my partner and have strangers point out how happy we look and I love the art that's everywhere and I love my job here. I had no community until the winds blew me here and I built one with my union and my community organizing friends and my neighbors.
Now, I have a community and it feels like a different version of the place I grew up, with new faces but old, beautiful energy. I want to stay where that is and I want to be good for this city. I want my presence to help my neighbors instead of hurting them. One day soon, I will make that hope a reality. I can leave my neighborhood without leaving Philadelphia. I can find somewhere to make my home without hurting people, I’m sure of it.
In the interim, I return home with my partner in tow. We cuddle up on the couch and watch Hulu. We go to bed at a reasonable time. Then we wake up the next morning and do it all again.
