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That's one of my big things - a lack of property maintenance.
That cuts across all classes. The worst-maintained house and yard in my neighborhood belongs to a doctor who was unfortunately seriously injured in an auto accident years ago and apparently no longer works for a living or has the means to hire out the work. It's gotten so bad that the fire department has it classified as one where if it's in fire they rescue the guy and protect the adjacent homes. That's it. (HOA Board Chair is retired fire chief.) The house next to me is owned by an architect whose DIY deck repair has been ongoing for 4 years. (Yes, that's a violation of restrictions.) One house recently sold to our relief- it was starting to look junky outside and the owner, who'd been through a divorce and BK, wasn't maintaining it. None of these owners belonged to an ethnic group or "class" that might be stereotyped as sloppy or lazy.
If you stay in Maryland and venture beyond the Beltway there are still some some beautiful affordable neighborhoods in Rockville, Gaithersburg, Germantown. and Clarksburg. I myself have a spacious 3 br 2/2 bath garage 3 storey townhouse, 2400 plus SF, with front and back yards, fabulous pool and tennis complex, well maintained neighborhood ,HO fee only $91 month. Worth about 425K+. If it was in a close in suburb would be worth way more. All the stores you need are out here and beautiful parks. I can go kayaking on a lake 5 mins from my house. I'm sure there are plenty of "Everyday Millionaires" out here.
^^^^This..I would even say as far as Frederick, which of course has become a bedroom community of the DC suburbs.
Retirees are moving to Nevada from California to release the equity from their homes. They end up with a nicer house that’s much cheaper and they have money in the bank. Some people in the trades make more money than people with advanced college degrees depending on the field. Ask me how I know ((:
There are at least 2 ways to make decent money in skilled trades:
1 Get a union job. Union will take care of you, at least to some extent.
2 Be entrepreneurial. Start as a worker bee, eventually start your own business. This is harder than the first option, but it can make effectively an unlimited amount of money. It is more work and some of the work is in business management, not every skilled craftsman wants to or can take this route.
Oh, I hear birth rates are way down overall. You've been talking about moving, getting closer to that move?
Yes, going away party tomorrow. Then painting and cleaning, and house should go on the market in a couple months.
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Presumably you refer to the U of Maryland? Please consider that as a dispositive factor, meaning, that there's overwhelming benefit to settling in a university-town.
The meaning of “working class†is its own debate (literally – there’s a long-running thread on another subforum). But presumably in present context, "working class" refers to commoditized manual labor that's done by people lacking extensive formal education.
But the more pertinent issue is one of culture, rather than vocation. To give this an unavoidably (but usefully) snobbish tincture, here's a litmus test: is the radio-station in your car primarily tuned to the local classical music station? If so, that's indicative of being non-working-class... even if the driver is heading to a construction-site, and the vehicle is a F-250 4x4.
By my reckoning, the DC-Boston corridor ends, and "the Heartland" begins, in Frederick. There, and westward, one finds Appalachia, and thenceforth the Midwest.
This depends of course on the meaning of “conservative†vs. “liberalâ€, as well as “working classâ€. The aforementioned retirees might be secular, perhaps divorced and living as boyfriend/girlfriend instead of remarrying, and might take a “liberal†stance on the social wedge issues that have dominated the American political debate for 40 years. But they are “conservative†in the sense of the US Chamber of Commerce. The stock market matters to them, far more than does the price of a gallon of gas, or a gallon of milk, or the cost of child-care. Low taxes, especially on capital gains, matter far more than housing-prices.
Much of this litany (except for the penultimate sentence) refers to iconoclastic behavior, where the persons in question disregard expectations of the sort of lifestyle that's say expected in a suburban HOA. But what of "class"? If the fellow working on the car in the driveway is swearing in French or German, whenever his wrench slips and his knuckles hit a metal protuberance, that complicates the picture, doesn't it?
It has also been my experience, that a certain kind of "blue collar" person takes inordinate pride in having a tidy house, with a manicured yard, and a spotless driveway with late-model high-end vehicles. I find this sort of thrall of materialism to be... nauseating.
My own definition of “blue collar†or “working class†is a locale where the overwhelming majority of denizens have experience limited to the United States…. birthplace, language(s), culture, travel, world-view. For its antithesis, I refer shopping-centers and storefronts where the signs frequently don’t use Latin script, and instead feature Farsi, Korean, Armenian, Greek, Hebrew, Ethiopian and of course (my personal favorite) Russian. It doesn’t particularly matter to me, that the proprietors dropped out of 6th grade, or that most of the customers are cab-drivers, janitors, nannies, landscapers or carpenters.. I’m just tired of the unvariegated monotony of ‘Murika… Maybe the guy hawking oranges at the corner-stand was a medical doctor in Lebanon or Croatia or whatever, but he can't practice in the US, because of the labyrinthine requirements of the American medical cartel. But one of his sons is a physicist at CERN, and another is a philosophy professor at the Sorbonne. When they come to visit, several cars get stacked in the front yard, as the family converges... mostly old Toyotas that leak oil.
You could have written this about me, one of my fraternity brothers classified me as a "progressive redneck" about 40 years ago, and I think it still holds. Pistol in my pocket, but Birkenstocks on my feet. Radio in the quite old and somewhat disheveled looking Cougar is always on NPR. Strongly libertarian, very much pro-choice about everything, so long as force and/or fraud are off the table - free non-felon adults are sovereign beings and should run their own affairs as they wish with no interference. My point in regards to the OP is that at least some working class/farm areas, not dense enough to be called a town really, can not be characterized as the New York Times would like to characterize them - as a bunch of Bible thumping, redneck boobs with very limited intellectual horizons.
And where we live out in the country, many neighbors are the same. Guy we buy eggs from, is a higher-end Mexican Spanish/English interpreter, very bright guy, says he speaks about 5 dialects of Mexican Spanish. But looking at his house, you would not particularly think an intellectual lives there.
And to me there is nothing wrong with working on a car for maybe weeks on end in your driveway, here in the summer the weather and long days is conducive to it. If you are that worried about what your neighbor is doing, you guys live too close! If I see a hood up at the neighbor's place, my only concern is if he needs or wants help from me. And, yeah, when I am working on my car and bust my knuckles, I do swear in Russian.
A word of caution about moving from Bethesda to a working class community like Roanoke.
You will not be working and others will be. Your retirement is something that may be out of their reach or out of their parents reach. Will they make assumptions because you are from Bethesda. Hopefully you are not a govt employee with a hated pension.
A word of caution about moving from Bethesda to a working class community like Roanoke.
You will not be working and others will be. Your retirement is something that may be out of their reach or out of their parents reach. Will they make assumptions because you are from Bethesda. Hopefully you are not a govt employee with a hated pension.
Good point. If you go that route, just be standoffish and don't tell people you are retired. You are close enough to Langley that you can just hint "I can't talk about it" and maybe people will think you are CIA.
A word of caution about moving from Bethesda to a working class community like Roanoke.
You will not be working and others will be. Your retirement is something that may be out of their reach or out of their parents reach. Will they make assumptions because you are from Bethesda. Hopefully you are not a govt employee with a hated pension.
A word of caution about moving from Bethesda to a working class community like Roanoke.
You will not be working and others will be. Your retirement is something that may be out of their reach or out of their parents reach. Will they make assumptions because you are from Bethesda. Hopefully you are not a govt employee with a hated pension.
Absolutely.
Some of the pensions on here are utterly mind-blowing, and would be in top 10% or better of people in a place like Roanoke.
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And, yeah, when I am working on my car and bust my knuckles, I do swear in Russian.
