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What do they do for a living? They most likely have rich parents in Asia who sent their sons to University in America, and who see no status in their children riding the bus, or else the cars are graduation presents. These aren't people who have student loans to begin with. They're not playing in the same league you are.
That was my immediate thought. CMU especially has a lot of scions of very wealthy East and South Asian families. They are paying tuition in cash (because as foreign nationals they do not qualify for federal student aid), their parents often purchase them condos to live in while here, and nice cars. It's not that they have awesome jobs, it's that they are already in the global 1%.
Another issue is moving to an area without having a job already and expecting to get a job for the pay you expect. Unless you have an in demand job, it doesn't work that way. You can't count on cheerleader lists or opinions of those that haven't been anywhere else or know anywhere else. You have to visit the area, set up interviews, check out housing costs, etc... before thinking that the grass is going to be greener from where you left.
Much of the pessimism is very real...and again, standards of living differ. Not everyone chooses to live the same way in regards to area, $$$, people, housing, etc...
You just described me to a "T", and for that I do apologize upon doing some more self-reflection.
I'll admit I'm selfish in some respects. It seems like the city socioeconomically is in a hot air balloon right now being lifted further and further upwards while many of us in the working-class are jumping up and down but just can't quite reach the bottom rung of the rope ladder that the creme de la creme of the "new Pittsburghers" are intentionally throwing down out of our grasp.
After watching Money Monster (a really sobering movie considering I also just saw The Big Short) I decided to stop in Greenfield on the way home to vacuum my filthy pollen- and dust-laden car. While there I observed two young (probably around 22) Asian or Asian-American males washing and vacuuming two new luxury sedans in the adjacent lane. I'm not trying to be petty, but when I was 22 and working full-time while trying to start paying down hefty student loans there was no way in hell I'd be able to afford to buy a new luxury vehicle. I kept to myself as I vacuumed, but I did wonder just what these two individuals did for a living here in Pittsburgh to be able to afford such nice vehicles at such young ages. Now that me and my partner are both 29 and both work in excess of 40 hours per week for paltry pay we're starting to feel burned out. It seems all we do is work harder and harder while slipping further behind socioeconomically as our wages aren't keeping pace with the cost-of-living here. As Millennials we were indoctrinated to study hard through school, work hard, persevere, etc., and success will surely follow. That hasn't happened (yet) for many of us, and for those of us who never see our "break" coming up could you honestly blame us for feeling irked watching as the city's renaissance surges upwards while excluding a huge chunk of the population?
Contrary to popular belief on this sub-forum anyone who isn't a socioeconomic success story in this city isn't as such because they're lazy, stupid, or intentionally underachieving. Pittsburgh DOES seem to have a plethora of entry-level AND upper-level openings, but it's slim pickings for mid-level opportunities. After seeing my partner work at the same company since early-2009 and "rise" to being a supervisor making only $13/hr. what would be my incentive to take a job for $10/hr. as a Junior Accountant in 2016 only to be making $14/hr. (probably more like present-day $12/hr. when inflation-adjusted) in seven years? You Baby Boomers/Gen X'ers who are haughty on here about we Millennials "expecting to get rich quick at 22" and/or "being impatient before putting one's dues in" should explain to me if you view my partner making $4/hr. more than he was seven years ago, an amount that is pretty much entirely devoured by inflation over the same duration, as being "putting in one's dues". If so, then how did so many of you buy into the East End in your 30's when housing prices here are generally $250,000+?
In regards to the kids with the fancy cars...maybe they have to wash/clean their parents cars in order to be allowed to drive them. Perhaps they live in a cheap apartment complex in Monroeville, never eat out, don’t have cable, skip Starbucks, and spend their money on cars. Maybe they are drug dealers. I try my best to, and fail often, not to compare my situation to others just by how I perceive it, as that is not always the full truth.
I would never think that someone who hasn’t had success is lazy. I listened to great TED Radio Hour episode last week, and part of it really stuck with me. It was about poverty and success, and continued optimism. Full link here (Mia Birdsong: How Can We Reframe Negative Narratives About Poverty? : NPR)
The quote was....But most people work hard. Hard work is the common denominator in this equation. And I'm tired of the story we tell that hard work leads to success because that story allows those of us who make it to believe we deserve it, and by implication those who don't make it don't deserve it....What if we recognized that what's working is the people and what's broken is our approach?
For your personal situation, I am not sure why it hasn’t played out better for you. I don’t know what the missing piece is and I am not in the position to analyze that from just reading web postings. Same for your partner. All I am able to do is tell you how it worked for me, and what I did. I will say that there was a time when I was around 27-28 years old that I had about $50 to my name to last two weeks after paying my bills and putting gas in my car. So I didn’t become this haughty overnight.
I don't believe that poor people are lazy, even poor educated people. I do believe that if you're college educated, childless, underemployed and (this is the big one) earning a middle-class living is a priority for you, you can make it happen. An X-ray/Radiological tech program at CCAC would set you back a few thousand dollars in student loans, and give you the skills to earn a middle-class income. If you don't have a bachelors, it might end up being covered by Pell Grant.
Again, not everyone has the luxury/free-time, but healthy, childless people with stable work schedule/housing/food/transportation do have options.
I don't believe that poor people are lazy, even poor educated people. I do believe that if you're college educated, childless, underemployed and (this is the big one) earning a middle-class living is a priority for you, you can make it happen. An X-ray/Radiological tech program at CCAC would set you back a few thousand dollars in student loans, and give you the skills to earn a middle-class income. If you don't have a bachelors, it might end up being covered by Pell Grant.
Again, not everyone has the luxury/free-time, but healthy, childless people with stable work schedule/housing/food/transportation do have options.
I disagree. Poor people are poor generally because they made bad choices. I was on the Greyhound Bus last night coming back from work in NYC. A young lady got on, headed back home to Altoona. She just got out of drug rehab and was describing to the man next to her how she already had two kids with two separate fathers. She kept trying to coerce the man into taking her out and buying her drink on her layover. Hopefully she doesn't reproduce again. Who is paying for all her rehab stints, kids, Medicaid, food stamps, bus tickets, etc? The childless, educated, underemployed kid however gets no help from the system. They are thrown into a sea of benefitless McJobs and have to fend for themselves. Stable, secure, upwardly mobile middle class careers are increasingly hard to come by.
My husband and I were both humanities majors and then got graduate degrees in education. It's taken us until our late 30s /early 40s to get comfortable (and we will never be those people with the big half million dollar Highland Park Victorians). Despite my humanities background, I've been able to hustle myself into tech-light. It has taken a willingness to say yes to things where my first instinct was to say no, I can't do that, I don't have the skills.
If you have a Carnegie library card, you have full access to Lynda.com, a very highly regarded resource for teaching yourself some very useful skills. You won't become a CMU-educated software engineer using Lynda, but you can teach yourself a lot of things that look dynamite on a resume. You'd be surprised at the number of jobs where they don't want or need a programmer, but it is essential for you to know how to maintain a content management system like WordPress or Drupal, or be able to tweak around the edges of someone else's front end code, or be able to figure your way around Adobe or AutoDesk applications. It also helps to know enough about code that you can talk to programmers in their own language even if you can't do that work yourself. That can help you get work in sales or quality assurance or customer support within a tech company. You'd be surprised at the number of recent college graduates who don't even have this level of technological skill. If you can demonstrate a facility with technology even if you aren't any kind of an engineer, you'll have a big leg up. I do assume everyone works hard until shown otherwise, but not all hard work is going to lead to the same outcomes. Knowing where and how to hustle within the economy that we have rather than the one you wish we had is an acquired skill in and of itself. Still not a guarantee of anything, but you can try and stack the deck in your favor.
South Side was certainly no longer very hip by 2009. The peak hip period for the South Side was the 1990s. By 2009 almost all of the art galleries were gone, and most of the artsy crowd which helped turn the neighborhood around were mostly in their 30s, if not 40s. The bro contingent was already pretty big. There was stuff I went to the South Side to do (brunch at Zenith, shows at Rex and Club Cafe, occasionally going to Lava Lounge), but I spent a lot more time going to places like Brillobox, Belvideres, or Remedy.
This is 100% true. I lived in South Side in 2009 and was in my full on bro phase of my life at that point, and spent Thurs-Saturday night out with my contingent of bros. There was nothing hip about us or those that we went there to see.
Pittsburgh DOES seem to have a plethora of entry-level AND upper-level openings, but it's slim pickings for mid-level opportunities.
I agree with this sentiment. It's easy to get in the door if you're content to stay at the bottom of the barrel,or if you have a specialized skill-set that can get you entry-level to the top of the barrel. Good luck trying to work your way up from an entry level position to anything in the middle though.
I'd actually guess more doctors and nurses live in Lawrenceville these days than CNAs and the like - you can't afford Lawrenceville on CNA pay after all. The ones I have talked to tend to live places like Sharpsburg, or commute from really far out in the suburbs.
You said above the nurses don't live there (something like that anyway). My experience, after years in health care, is that the lower the pay, the closer people live to their jobs. So I doubt there's much far-out suburb commuting by these CNAs. It was never that way anywhere I worked.
I disagree. Poor people are poor generally because they made bad choices.
I was in poverty my entire life until I met my wife, who comes from a genuinely middle class family and works in an industry that's moving us to the upper middle class. I was in poverty for about 3 decades because I was born into it, raised in a community where it was all that was around, and upon turning 18, lacked any of the educational or financial benefits necessary to start a stable, even modest working-class life. This in turn propelled me into unstable housing situations (once, my housing was "none"), and forced me into jobs that paid way below market for my skills because I could never afford enough education at once to become truly competitive. Getting into a trade helped, as did starting a parallel career in sysadmin and tech support that I could parlay into my main bread once the trade wasn't it anymore, but by the time I could finally "splurge" on things like a cheap associate degree, I found the education wasn't the panacea I was told it'd be, which in turn kept me earning piddling "salary". I went for many years with no healthcare and was uninsurable due to workplace injury, and the medical bills piled up. I can keep going about all the things that kept me poor, but this is plenty.
Another thing people who've never been the type of poor where you're collecting nickles and living off dollar store mac seem to miss is that when you are hand to mouth poor, the type of "bad choice" you keep making again and again is less "got myself knocked up and addicted to coke," and more like "I bought the cheap dress shoes and wore them to work too much, which put a hole in them because they're made of cheap synthetic crap, and can only afford the 7 dollar patch job instead of the 30 dollars for new ones." You don't even have the money to put up for SMALL emergencies, let alone big ones.
Another thing that people don't like to hear about is who is really wasting all the dough on drugs and booze. It's not the guy who bought one 40 to celebrate when he had an extra 2 bucks (and probably budgeted to the nickel to get it). It's the upper middle class who have the disposable income to blow.
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