By jizz, there comes a time when a middle aged fella' should make some sorta' statement about the social economics of real estate. People are getting priced out of the new high rent developments, such as in East Liberty, while the greater North Side builds next to nothing on it's abundance of vacant lots. Go figure, by way of mucho demolition, where huge and elegant mansions stood, there are acres of useless weeds. No one has come up with a plan, in the mean time, to provide affordable housing for so many many low wage workers. They live around my part of town, elsewhere too. I have an idea, but first a little story.
One day back in the nineteenth century a young man got out of bed, in his sharecropper shack, and pined for a better way of life. He was not ungrateful for his job, frying potato curlies in a coal french frier. It afforded him a way of life, and he was proud of his work, fryer baskets in hands, that grease sizzling, potato curls turning that fragrant brown. And then there were all those burly settlers who so loved his curly fries. But the job didn't pay well, and he really needed better housing. He wished and wished, and because of his intense wishing and longing, some fine, glowing bastard invented the trailer park.
I am familiar with a shitload of trailer parks because I grew up in an Appalachian backwash a hundred miles north of Pittsburgh, where the Mason Dixon line jumps position and appears like the Flying Dutchman. It's a nasty backwash, in places. Mean spirited, some would say. But there came this mass salvation, in the form of trailer parks. I am proposing that the next wave of low wage housing be in the form of placing trailers on vacant lots, utilizing the existing shit pipes and rain drainage conveniences, and re-forming the trailer park, so honest fry cooks can afford a cool place to have a few beers and play country western ballads on their banjos. Nothing unreasonable is being suggested here. People need cheap digs.
One day back in the nineteenth century a young man got out of bed, in his sharecropper shack, and pined for a better way of life. He was not ungrateful for his job, frying potato curlies in a coal french frier. It afforded him a way of life, and he was proud of his work, fryer baskets in hands, that grease sizzling, potato curls turning that fragrant brown. And then there were all those burly settlers who so loved his curly fries. But the job didn't pay well, and he really needed better housing. He wished and wished, and because of his intense wishing and longing, some fine, glowing bastard invented the trailer park.
I am familiar with a shitload of trailer parks because I grew up in an Appalachian backwash a hundred miles north of Pittsburgh, where the Mason Dixon line jumps position and appears like the Flying Dutchman. It's a nasty backwash, in places. Mean spirited, some would say. But there came this mass salvation, in the form of trailer parks. I am proposing that the next wave of low wage housing be in the form of placing trailers on vacant lots, utilizing the existing shit pipes and rain drainage conveniences, and re-forming the trailer park, so honest fry cooks can afford a cool place to have a few beers and play country western ballads on their banjos. Nothing unreasonable is being suggested here. People need cheap digs.
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