OH, THAT DEATH OF THE GROWN-UP: I’m living like a college student at 44:
Increasingly, New Yorkers are turning to slick, luxurious communal-living setups. In the dormlike buildings, adults well out of college share kitchens, living rooms and bathrooms, and everything from toilet paper to coffee to a cleaning service is included in the rent.
“All the little stuff that you would have to go out for and plan and think about, you don’t have to think about,” says James Jackson, 27, a Web developer who lives in a new communal building in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, operated by the co-living company Common.
Common’s Williamsburg property is its third and largest. It operates two oth er buildings in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and has space for 100 residents across the three properties. Since launching in October the company has received 6,000 tenant applications.
Once accepted — Common doesn’t perform a credit check but requires some sort of financial information as well as an interview — residents can show up empty-handed. Bedrooms are fully furnished, and even sheets and towels are part of the deal. Rent starts at $1,800 per room and includes all utilities and Wi-Fi.
The setup is similar at the new WeLive, an extension of co-working giant WeWork. It opened on Wall St. in May and will eventually be able to accommodate 600 residents.
Related: “The ‘struggle’ is not real: From tiny houses to my own lunch, poverty chic commodifies working-class life,” an author in Salon whines about her fellow leftists’ aesthetics and linguistic virtue signalling:
The term “struggle meal” seems to me to be related to the phrase-turned-hashtag, “The Struggle Is Real.” For anyone unfamiliar, Urban Dictionary defines “the struggle is real” as “a (generally) ironic saying often used in place of the saying, ‘first world problems.’ With irony, it has a comical effect of dramatizing a non-critical, yet undesirable situation.” Popular iterations of this phrase often relay the “struggle” as running out of shampoo before running out of conditioner, or of having to deny oneself a donut because swimsuit season is approaching. With rampant social problems like inaccessible health care, childhood hunger, and homelessness (just to name a few) existing in the developed world, it’s apparent that there is not enough irony to make the incongruence between the phrase and people’s real struggles to survive funny.
A cursory search for the phrase online reveals not only its ubiquity, but its fundamental ties to affluence and financial stability. There are any number of internet memes and items available for sale, such as coffee mugs, iPhone cases, and hand-lettered art pieces to be displayed in people’s home offices that indicate for whom the “struggle” is real. These items belie, of course, the reality that roughly twenty percent of Americans — nearly 60 million people — lack access to the internet and that another 45 million Americans live below the poverty line. The “real struggle,” as explained by this phrase, is one confined to aesthetics and whimsy, not survival.
It’s the linguistic equivalent of the ways mainstream society appropriates and commodifies working class aesthetics, like Mason jars, sweatbands, beards, thrift store clothing, and the like. This troubling trend even spills over into housing, with affluent folks trying on small, mobile houses from the Tiny House Movement as “proof”’ of how enlightened they are, having pared down their possessions to live more simply and happily. The crucial difference in these cases is that those who appropriate the items intrinsic to working class life and survival do so out of choice, rather than necessity.
As accessories, these items symbolize a part of the fend-for-yourself culture — of any race, ethnicity, or region — that has become strangely popular in mainstream society. Using or wearing these working class accessories lends the wearer a kind of can-do credibility that doesn’t come with white collar office attire — a rustic cachet without any of the hassles and struggles that comes with the lifestyle. Likewise, the people who use this language typically appear perfectly self-reliant (yet they are the ones who enjoy class, race, and, in the case of men, gender) privilege that is incongruent with the self-reliance working class people have to utilize in order to survive.
Congratulations – you just stumbled into the gist of Tom Wolfe’s “Funky Chic” article, written way back in 1970. As Wolfe noted, “Anti-fashion! Terrific. Right away anti-fashion itself became the most raving fashion imaginable . . . also known as Funky Chic. Everybody had sworn off fashion, but somehow nobody moved to Cincinnati to work among the poor. Instead, everyone stayed put and imported the poor to the fashion pages.”
Permanently, it seems. But then, the real meaning of “Progressivism” has been to freeze-dry attitudes among its believers for well over a century.
(Classical reference in headline.)