Chris Arnade Tells the Truth About the U-Haul School of Urban Policy
In this must-listen interview with Jesse Singal, Chris Arnade discusses his new book, Dignity.
About 35 minutes into the interview, Arnade talks about what I’ve referred to as “The U-Haul School of Urban Policy” and why it’s a tone-deaf and ineffective response to the plight of the working-class in many of this nation’s troubled neighborhoods, cities, and towns.
I’ve transcribed the portion of the interview where Arnade explains why telling people to “just move” doesn’t work.
Jesse Singal: This idea that everyone is sort of, like a freely-choosing rational actor, and if there’s no jobs where you live, and there’s jobs 200 miles away you can just pick up and move there. I take it, the sense I got from your book, is you do not like that idea and you think we should put it to bed.
Chris Arnade: Yeah, I write a whole chapter on, I guess, “This Is My Home” I believe I call it. Yeah, you know one of the things I try talking about in the book is what I call “non-credentialed forms of meaning”. I think the broader theme I try to write about is, at a more philosophical level, is that we the elites only really value one form of meaning, which is the economic, and that’s generally correlated with how much education you have – how much education you have means how much money you make, and so all these other forms of meaning – so, faith, place, and race - are not really allowed to kind of, you know…those are things that you inherit without having to do anything. You’re just born in a place – and those mean a lot to people, and they should mean a lot to people, because you don’t have to do anything to get them. And, you don’t need any credentials to be a member of “Plattsburgh” or to live in the Adirondacks if your family was there for a few, three generations.
And so this idea that people, we should all just be economic migrants in our country, I think is really offensive and tells about how dominant we – how much emphasis we put on the economic…how much we let businesses decide how our society is shaped. This notion that somehow just being always willing to move, and being always able to move, is positive. I mean there’s just some people like…one of the things I always talk about is how part of the reason we do this is because we can’t really quantify the value of these other things.
How valuable is faith? How valuable is family? How valuable is, you know, living all your life in one place and having connections and community? We just can’t put any kind of dollar value on that, so we just say it’s useless. You know, I think it’s very valuable. I mean it’s all some people have. And to get at a much more pragmatic level – when you tell someone to move, especially in a dying town, you’re asking them to give up their one asset they own, and sell it into a falling market.
You know, that’s also just the reality of how moving is much different. And I say the other issue, I think, is it underestimates how important family is to some people. You know, one of the people I mention in the book I will never forget is a younger woman who I met in a McDonald’s in East L.A. – a largely Mexican-American neighborhood, who, and I met many like her – kind of young kids who…young adults who couldn’t go away to go to a better college, because they have to stay for their family.
You know, in her case, she was going to go to the East L.A. Community College because she was her mom’s translator. Her mom was first-generation Mexican-American and hadn’t learned English, and she as the oldest daughter was bilingual, and so her mom needed her, and her family needed her, so she was going to stay. And, I think there are so many instances I’ve met of kids and young adults who have to stay, or want to stay, because of family - what family provides for them or what they provide for their family. So, I think in many ways, you know, this kind of simple “just move” doesn’t understand the realities of a lot of the working class, and what they value, and what their daily life is like.
Listen to the entire podcast, and buy Chris Arnade’s book.
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