Let me back up.
Despite this post boldly declaring that we were staying put in our smallish house because I had embraced a minimalist outlook (and the constraints of our budget), we actually moved a couple weeks ago. A series of events (some fortunate, some unfortunate, some neutral) led to us changing our minds and our circumstances, and now we're in a bigger space (more than one bathroom!!!) that really fits us well (a classroom for homeschooling!!)
The new house is very close to the old house. It's about a mile away, crossing one major city street. In fact, we can easily walk between the two. The differences between the two, though, are somewhat shocking.
That short jaunt put us in a different property tax bracket (ten times higher), a different alderman's ward, a different demographic make up (though both are pretty racially diverse), and . . . different dumpsters.
Well, actually, the dumpsters are pretty much the same. The city has dedicated alley dumpsters for trash, yard waste, and recycling. They look the same, plopped down behind houses, in both neighborhoods. But there is definitely a different dumpster culture.
The new house shares an alley with a very well-to-do block behind it. One of the first things I noticed when we were looking at houses was the immaculate state of the alleyways. Spotless! The alleyway behind my old house was frequently overflowing with illegally dumped garbage, a disgusting heap of disrespect and loss of hope.
I have dumpsters located immediately behind my house in both locations, and that means that I am legally responsible for keeping them clean. A recent local news story explores how frustrating this can be. I can get fined because my neighbors (or someone driving in from somewhere else and illegally dumping) leave the alleyway a mess.
This wouldn't be such a problem except for the house next to my old one is owned by this guy. Disbarred for immigration fraud, a former lawyer turned real estate "investor" has gobbled up a ton of very cheap houses in my former zip code, done the bare minimum to get them up to "code," and then rented them out with absolutely no oversight over who lives there or what they do. He's preying on low income individuals who don't have other housing options and leaving them to live in substandard squalor, disrupting neighborhood stability as he rakes in the money.
He has owned the house next to us for most of the time that we lived there. In that time, several families came and went. Many were great neighbors. Many were not. Some fought violently in the streets and left a litany of ordinance violations in their wake. Most were eventually evicted after the complaints stacked up and triggered the city's nuisance property process.
The tenants who were in this house most recently had been, to put it lightly, not great neighbors. They broke out our windows, fought constantly, dumped trash in our yard. There were also at least thirty people living in a two-bedroom house. The ongoing issues were one of the reasons we decided to move.
Ironically, they were finally evicted just one week after we started living in our new house. They also left me some parting gifts when I returned to do some cleaning this weekend.
I wish I could say that I was shocked, taken aback, completely flabbergasted by this. But it was not the first time (though I hope it is the last time) that I had to take a snow shovel and literally scoop up other people's garbage.
There's something intimate about garbage. Here I was scooping up bras and full, unopened canned goods. I found the cover of a Charles Dickens adaptation for kids. There were the toys that the children had played on for hours upon hours left in heaps.
It's weird to feel so much sympathy even as you feel so much anger. I had talked to these neighbors several times. Their kids had played with my kids in my backyard. I didn't want to see their life thrown into upheaval with an eviction anymore than I wanted to be scooping up the aftermath of that resolution, but I also didn't want to keep living next to violent outbursts.
I left the alley in better shape than I found it, but it still doesn't hold a candle to the immaculate cleanliness of the alleyway behind our new house.
I don't have any conclusions to this post. I don't know how to address gentrification, substandard housing, predatory slumlords, the instability of poverty, or my own place in it. I don't know how to feel about fleeing one neighborhood for a "better" one. I don't know what will happen to my former neighbors. I just know that the materiality of the dumpsters tells a tale of St. Louis in a way that makes all the statistics and handwringing very, very concrete to me.
While my new neighbors use social media to advertise alley way pick up posts of their gently used and unwanted discards, my old neighborhood will continue to fill up with the haphazardly displaced belongings of evicted tenants. And I will continue to not know what to do or how to feel about it.
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