Sociology. The older streets of your town with residential housing, how much of these buildings and houses are crippling to hold up as it was back in their days of glory with luster?
I was driving by some of these streets in New Jersey. Some houses are immaculate with architectural elements in Queen Anne, Edwardian, Victorian and Colonial styles. They are beautiful. Only when it’s kept in such condition that holds and stays like when they were built. As time goes by, the weathering, wear and tear of human use, the houses take a beating with an age in years. The buildings and houses stands erect while the ownership of them change hands. From big to small, there is a variety. Along with our economy, from up to down, they see many changes too.
The “American Dream” stays true to date. The possibility of home ownership is part of the dream. As we grow into adulthood, it is one of our goals in life to obtain a home for yourself, to start a family of your own, to have children run around in the house or backyard, to grow old in and even as an investment for future. If you are able to purchase a home, you are probably a step toward achieving this dream. However, many of us need to obtain a mortgage in order to step-by-step to fully own a home and call the dream a home-sweet-home. We work. We work and work, year after year. The dream gets closer as dawn arrives. When day breaks, it could be a sunny day you see bright light, or it could be a grey and gloomy day you see pessimism of whether you’ll make it to another day that is sunny. The days and months, the work and savings gets paid off, but the home gets older by the days we live in. We are lucky if we have additional funds to spare.
What do we do when our dream comes to fruition and like the boy from Pixar and Disney’s Toy Story who grew to the age of off to higher education in college? We don’t exactly know if the family stayed in the same town, anyhow, he left his toys for another child in the neighborhood. See, many of us do return to home, spend vacations, Thanksgiving, holiday seasons with family. The towns we lived in, the bicycles we rode around the streets in, sometimes we see them again and does it bring back memories of happiness and fun? I hope so. The only thing though is when it’s not and all you see is a rundown town, with lots of potholes, closed shops with no new tenants. Meanwhile, your familiar streets you hung out in, some homes, some houses, they still stand just like it used to be when you’re a kid and some have gone through a renovation in upgrading works. Like I said, lucky if we have funds to spare, savings we could use, gains in investment to use it for the home we grew in after about 20-years where our family would use the funds to do the renovation upgrading works. Some families continue to live in the same home, pass it on to a grown up child soon to be married with a new family of his/her own, while some of the houses we see around older towns are a mix and match of everything. Literally and physically, everything of a variety that looks awkward because the reality is not everybody is able to make an income to move up in the ladder of life, or having a family to do a complete head-to-toe renovation of a home. The mix and match gets older and older along with economic cycles of downs to the Great Recession of many foreclosures from banks that leaves the town standing still. With people moving away and out of the old to find new opportunities else where, the town still stands in a standing still state with no where to go. And, all we have left is a cold deserted scene of a western film with wind blowing on a dusty street.
Thoughts from Arnold 