- CAPITALISM IN PLACE
- GALLERIES
- Imagining Bel Paese
- Revisiting Rome
- Staging Emilia-Romagna
- Consuming Milan
- Unhoused City
- Transnational City
- Racialized City
- Greenwashed City
- Georgia Heritage
- Mississippi Heritage
- Florida Heritage
- Regional Heritage
- New Mexico Desertscapes
- California Waterscapes
- New York Landscapes
- New York Streetscapes
- ¿Auténtica Oaxaca?
- Authentique Quebec?
- ¿Auténtica Cuba?
- Authentic New Orleans?
- In Progress: Jacksonville
- CONTACT
PLACE: HOME AS COMMODITY
The answer is capital. To explain how and why capital is the Coltrane of place I will turn from the internal moments of place formation to the larger totalities that buffet them at every turn. In other words, I will put the place called home in dialogue with capital and capitalism. I propose to do this by sharing with you my family's history of real estate ownership. What follows is the story of how two generations of Steffens have dealt with a question that goes to the heart of the commodity form under capitalism: how do we who are born into a world not of our own making, a world saturated by this form, negotiate the contradictory unity of "use value" and "exchange value" embedded in the commodity? More to the point, how do we negotiate this contradictory unity when the commodity in question is our home?
I'll begin with my parents, both of whom came from white middle-class families struggling under the stresses and strains of the Great Depression. Dad grew up in a 1,484 square-feet, 3 bedroom, 1 bath house, eight miles west of downtown Los Angeles, into which were squeezed his mother and father, three brothers and sister. The house was built in 1924 and must have been brand-new, or nearly so, when they moved in. You can see his father seated on the living-room couch along with me and my brothers in the polaroid above. Our beloved "Gramps," as we called him, had a florist shop on Wilshire Boulevard, a few blocks away from where the family lived. He opened it after his first business, a milliner's store, went belly up with the collapse of the ladies' hat trade during the Depression.
Dad was born in 1926. He spent his teenage years dreaming, as he later told me, of the day he would escape from the overcrowded, tense goldfish bowl of his youth. In dribs and drabs over the years, Dad let me know that his devil-may-care father who was my joking-smoking-drinking-singing grandfather was often in trouble with the bank over delinquent mortgage payments and the like, which introduced an undercurrent of marital friction to home life. Dad saw this as a personal weakness in his father rather than a structural byproduct of the Depression, and it left him with a fierce determination to be an "adequate" man who would never fall short in his duty to provide for those who depended on him. At the time this struck me as an excessively harsh verdict on Gramps and an impossibly severe standard against which to measure his own worth as a man. It still does all these years later, when I am older than the man seated next to me on the couch. (FIY, When my son and pregnant daughter-in-law asked me what I would like to be called by our first grandchild, I said "Gramps.")
World War II was Dad's ticket out, his portal to independent manhood. Before finishing his senior year at nearby Loyola High School, a Jesuit institution for Catholic boys, he enlisted in the Navy, serving during the war as an ensign stationed stateside. If Japan had not surrendered after the US dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and if the US invasion of the Japanese mainland had gone forward as planned, my father would been part of Operation Downfall. As luck would have it, military service ended up opening rather than permanently closing opportunities for him. It enabled him to go to college and medical school, where he continued to work hard in pursuit of his dream. In 1950 the Saint Louis University School of Medicine, another Jesuit institution that brought his Catholic education to a close, gave the 25 year-old vet its stamp of approval. Ensign Steffen was now Dr. Steffen.
Mom's childhood home was 2,000 miles away in New Orleans. Built in 1900, it was a 1,906 square-feet, 3 bedroom, 2 bath house, about five miles from the French Quarter. Her father, whom my brothers and I called "Pops" but never really knew, was a salesman for DuPont, frequently on the road and away from home. My maternal grandmother was a classic New Orleans type. When I visited her at the Catholic nursing home where she spent her final years, she regaled me with stories about her French family, the LeLandes, their aristocratic ancestry and their magnificent sugar plantations tragically undone by the Civil War. She was particularly fond of a medicinal pull off her ever-ready bottle of bourbon which, as she assured my brother Dan, was "good fo' ma' angi-i-i-ina." According to Mom's brother, my favorite uncle of all, my grandmother felt she had married beneath her station and never let her long-suffering husband forget it. This unsettled domestic environment was made even more difficult by the co-dependent relationship that developed between her and her youngest son, a "schizophrenic," as he was diagnosed at the time, who went off the rails after his return from the Korean War, and required close supervision in group homes until his death.
As the eldest daughter born in 1930, Mom was called upon to serve as the family's full-time mediator/conciliator/fixer, a thankless job but one she was good at, having the sweetest disposition of any human being I have ever met. Ask any of my brothers, they'll tell you the same thing: we are all unrepentant mama's boys. Determined to be financially independent of her parents and as free as a practical young woman could be at that time and place, Mom entered a nursing program right out of high school, landing her first job as a RN at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. There, in 1951, she met my father, a war vet and newly minted doctor from LA who was doing his internship at Charity. In rapid-fire succession, they wed, said adieu to New Orleans and lit out for sunny Southern California, which was the great unknown for Mom. Dad was her ticket out.
So when I came tumbling into the the world eleven months and five weeks later, blue as a berry, according to Mom, who attributed my condition to her chain smoking, one could say that the experience of big Catholic families, cramped living quarters, chronic financial worries and festering domestic discord weighed heavily on my parents' dream of the kind of life, family and home they hoped to create together. They wanted a big family—four boys separated by six years are proof of that—but the rest of it they could happily live without. Shared by millions of married couples after the war, my parents' dream came from deep wells of lived experience but was mediated by the property market. Real estate remained a through line of their married life from the moment they took their vows until the day they died, Dad on August 10, 2019, and Mom three weeks later.
When Dad returned to LA with his new wife, he began a residency in dermatology at UCLA. Looking for a home of their own and setting their sights on the suburban enclave of West Covina, which was a thirty-mile drive from the campus, due east on Interstate 10, they eventually bought two houses, one to live in, and the other to repurpose as an office for his medical practice. Attached to this second property was a garage apartment that produced rental income. This union of residential and commercial property would grow stronger as the years passed. Why did they choose West Covina over West LA, where Dad grew up, or so many other suburban enclaves that were mushrooming throughout the San Gabriel Valley? The answer, I believe, is to be found in the city's official website: "As a result of remarkable expansion during the post World War II building boom, West Covina became America's fastest growing city between 1950 and 1960, with the population increasing 1,000 per cent from less than 5,000 to more than 50,000 citizens." What better place for Dad to hang out his shingle and for Mom to undertake her crash course in motherhood than America's boom town?
My parents dove headfirst into the post-World War II real estate market. By 1960 the medical practice was going full steam, which enabled them to sell the West Covina starter home and buy a true mansion, at least by the pre-McMansion standards of those days, located in a hilly part of adjacent Covina, a short distance away. This was a step up in every conceivable way: 3,441 square-feet, 5 bedrooms, 5 baths, 3 acres, topped off by "an amazing city-light view" of the valley and San Gabriel Mountains, as Zillow described our former home in a recent listing. Nor was this jewel the only property my parents added to their portfolio that year. They also made their first serious foray into commercial real estate with the purchase of apartment complexes in El Monte and Monterey Park, two cities east of downtown LA which were on the threshold of explosive demographic growth. This buying spree was spurred by my parents' increasingly complicated financial situation, if complicated can be stretched to include making too much money. As the income generated by the medical practice grew, my parents were lifted them into higher and higher tax brackets, incentivizing their search for tax write-offs. They found a gold mine of them in the business-friendly, accelerated depreciation schedules for rental property enacted in the 1950s. Their investment strategies were tailored-made for the IRS tax code of the Eisenhower-Kennedy-Johnson years.
Life was good on top of the hill with the million-dollar view, or so it seemed. But ten years later, at the age of forty-four, Dad hit the reset button. By then I was a college freshman in La Jolla, far enough away spatially and emotionally to be largely oblivious to the restructuring process unfolding at home. Dad announced his retirement, closed down the practice, sold the big house, packed up all of the family's belongings and moved Mom and my brothers 90 miles east to the desert resort at the base of Mount San Jacinto. Palm Springs, famed home of Sinatra and Hollywood movie stars, would be the new base of operations.
The Steffen Boys and Gramps, Hartley Street, West Covina, 1958. From left to right: me (with the pistol), brother Dan and brother Mike. Brother Mark is in the bassinet. When my father went through the old family albums many years later, he made sure to identify the new addition by name and with an arrow.