The Illusion of Prosperity
Source: Unsplash/Randy Jacob
We work a tremendous amount, a deadly amount. For what?
For selfish freedoms that plunge the world into chaos and catastrophe? To fulfill our petty, materialistic desires? So we can shine for a second in the spotlight even if it means we leave behind a devastated stage for all the acts yet to come, acts written by poets and playwrights not yet known?
What is the point of all this work, all this toil, if in the end all we do is spoil ourselves and destroy the soil, the seat of life on the land? The promise of prosperity has been the point. But what has this prosperity brought us?
Mountaintop Removal Mine in Appalachia | Source: iLoveMountains.org
Where is our prosperity now, America? Is it in the Appalachians we’ve decapitated and dissected to reach into the bowels of the Earth and pull out coal? Is our prosperity found in the ways we’ve attacked nature? Or is it in the ways nature’s fought back?
We’re told we can find our prosperity in the city. We turn away from the destruction of the natural world, and we point our gaze to the ways the intentional impoverishment of the environment has enriched our cities in all their fleeting, fragile beauty.
Are Cities the Seat of Prosperity?
Of course, this supposed prosperity rests on the assumption that the natural environment and man’s built environment are separate and distinct – that plundering one for the purposes of the other won’t destroy them both. The climate crisis challenges this assumption.
If we ignore that and focus solely on the assertion that the urban center is the locus of western prosperity, then by assessing the realities of urban life, we can reveal what progress and prosperity have brought us.
If we take any of the metropolises or cosmopolises of the world and analyze them with intentionality, looking at the material world as it exists and not as we wish it to be, then we quickly uncover a pattern – a pattern replicated across the industrialized world.
Cities are but a microcosm of global society.
Cities reveal that the purported prosperity of our society exists at the expense of the marginalized and at the expense of the environment. While some live in lavish luxury, many more are mired in misery. While cities grow, ecosystems shrink. If we examine almost any major city, we’d see these exact impacts. But I’ll use my city, Seattle, as an illustrative example of the illusion of prosperity.
As I speak of prosperity in the context of Seattle, I refer to the metropolis of the Greater Seattle Area, which includes the surrounding towns and cities like Tukwila, Skyway, Burien, Bothell, and Bellevue. I cast this net wide because the differences between the communities that skirt the city reveal the illusion as much or more than the differences between the communities within the city itself.
The most apparent issues we see – within city limits and just outside of them – are wealth inequality, economic exploitation, and environmental degradation.
Wealth Inequality in the City of Seattle
Few things are more apparent than wealth inequality in this city. Seattle has been facing a homeless epidemic for over half a decade, and at the same time, multiple billionaires and some of the world’s most powerful, multinational corporations have come to call the Greater Seattle Area home. Meanwhile, the satellite offices of other notable tech companies connect the dots of this second Silicon Valley.
These companies and their chief executives bring billions into the city, and thousands of job-hungry engineers follow them. As these companies come and grow, they supposedly bring wealth and opportunity with them. But that isn’t all we find following them.
When these start ups are born, they are birthed under the pretext of problem solving – addressing a need and providing jobs while they do it. Some businesses follow through as promised. Others fail along the way.
Regardless, the promise of profit through solution-seeking is enough to bring fresh funds to the city – funds that all too often pad the accounts of the privileged instead of filling the empty pockets of poor communities who have lived in the city far longer than the titans of tech. In fact, the more money the city sees, the more long-time residents are forced out of the city or into homelessness if they exist outside of the emerging industries, which most of them do.
Mural on Social Justice with sign saying “This Building is Not for Sale” | Source: Unsplash/Sean Foster
The rise of high-income individuals alongside historic levels of dislocation and housing instability have been co-occurring for a while. The correlation and causation are well documented. This problem plagues cities across the country. Since the rise of remote work in the era of COVID-19, tech workers have unlocked the ability to live almost anywhere they like. Now, the same problem of rising housing costs has begun to afflict small towns too.
In Seattle, we’ve seen how the growing number of tech jobs has driven Black and brown communities out of their multigenerational homes and into new neighborhoods, often outsides of city limits. The areas they are pushed into tend to have even less access to resources and services than their previous communities. Not only does this make it more difficult to advance economically, they often go from homeownership to renting and lose what little generational wealth their families managed to accumulate in the process. At the same time, they lose a crucial sense of connection to their community and experience a related trauma, which Dr. Mindy Thompson Fullilove terms “root shock.” As gentrification worsens, root shock deteriorates the physical and mental health of those have who been displaced.
From Inequality to Exploitation
Just behind this obvious and growing inequality is the economic exploitation that supports these tech businesses. While some of the tech companies that drive Seattle’s wealth gap ever wider portend to reduce exploitation and offer opportunity, the reality is quite different. After all, at its basest level, software must still be run on hardware which must be assembled from components created with materials refined from resources extracted from the Earth – resources often extracted with oppressive labor practices and negative impacts to surrounding communities.
At every step of this supply chain, value is added to what was once raw earth. As labor creates ever more polished products, the laborers earn only a fraction of the added value. Thus is the nature of capitalism.
What’s perhaps more sinister is the treatment of baristas, servers, grocers, custodians, bus operators, delivery drivers, and the likes – those termed essential workers during the pandemic, those workers without whom our city would come to a grinding halt. It’s not our inherent reliance on these workers that’s the problem. The problem is the persistent undervaluation and mistreatment of people in these roles, despite the fact that they form the very foundation upon which everything else rests.
The crux of the issue comes from the low wages paid for positions perceived to be low skill. Not only are they performing essential services and thus deserving of wages commensurate with the value they add to society, which is substantial, but because of the unlivable wages they are so often paid, people in these positions must often work two or more jobs to make ends meet, which leaves them without the time or energy to get the training or education that would help them pursue higher pay.
Alongside this is the ever-rising cost of living, which has only gotten worse with inflation. This has pushed many low-wage workers out of the city or into shared living situations where they might still struggle to make rent. With a dearth of affordable housing options, this is a problem we are likely to see resolved soon.
One would hope that affordable housing would be a priority in a progressive city like Seattle, especially with on-going and expanding development. But whatever policies may be put forth by politicians, real estate is capitalism in its purest form, and developers are concerned first and foremost with profit.
The Emerald City Grows Gray
The result of profit-driven development is not only an utter lack of affordable housing options, it’s the creation of an Emerald city painted gray with drab, disconnected tenements without any semblance of green space. Nonetheless, Seattle has some of the best canopy cover among major cities in the States. But what else can you expect from a young city that sprong from a settlement submerged in cedar and shrubs?
When what is now the Central District of Seattle was first established as a colony for Black settlers in the 1880s by William Grose, the land was wooded. Now the tree canopy covers less than 31% of the neighborhood. A similar trend can be seen throughout the city. While we don’t have canopy cover data extending back to the city’s early days, it is clear from the data we do have that tree counts and tree cover is retracting slowly with little sign of stopping. This affects the health of Seattle residents in profound ways.
One of the most evident impacts is caused by what’s called the “urban heat island effect.” As concrete and asphalt poured, as trees and plants pulled up, cities grow gray; they become heat sinks. Cities soak up the sun’s rays during the day and can’t release the heat until the sun sets. As days grow longer and summer settles in, cities get abnormally hot. However, if you were to cover the same area with trees and green spaces, we’d see a much different result.
The benefits of trees have little to do, as some may suspect, with the shade they provide. It has much more, in fact almost everything, to do with a process known as transpiration.
As many of us learned in school, the lovely leaves of trees are constantly creating the food they need for fuel through photosynthesis. As light strikes the leaf, the plant uses carbon dioxide, water, and other nutrients to create sugar, and the plant exhales the excess oxygen. But the plants release more than just oxygen. They let off water too.
Just as sweat cools you down on a hot day or after a hard run, so too does the release of water help plants and trees stay cool. The hotter it is, the more they transpire, the more water they release. The tree does this for their own sake – photosynthesis works best at cooler temperatures – but the effect is the same: the air around the tree cools off too. The difference in temperature between a tree-lined street and exposed asphalt on a hot summer day can be over forty degrees. When trees are removed left and right, that has huge implications for the health of a city and its citizens.
Beyond the immense infrastructure benefits plants provide, green spaces are their own sources of health and happiness. Hospital patients with park views recover faster than those without them. In fact, just looking at a photo of a forest eases stress and alleviates anxiety. If you go for a walk through the woods or a park, the benefits are manifold: you lower your heart rate, you decrease blood pressure, you boost your immune system, and so on.
The benefits of living within and surround by green space are immeasurable. It’s precisely because of their economic immeasurability and the inability of the elite to profit off such spaces that they are torn down and replaced with dead, gray towers.
Is This What Prosperity Looks Like?
Yet it is these towers, these cityscapes teeming with tired souls barely scraping by, that we are told to look at as the bastions of prosperity. I ask you this, dear Reader, what prosperity? Where?
In the shopping centers filled with the produce of plunder? In the office towers overflowing with unhappy workers? In the schools filled with students subjected to unconscious conditioning for a life of labor?
Perhaps the prosperity is in the television sets and smart phone screens we stare at to escape the tedium and nauseum of urban living through mindless, endless hours of binge watching and social media scrolling, where we watch as others live out the happiest versions of their unhappy lives.
No. It’s not there either. Is it?
Where, then, is the prosperity capitalism promised us?
With rates of depression, anxiety, and a myriad of mental illnesses on the rise, it’s clear to me that there’s no prosperity to be had here. At least not in any meaningful sense of the term.
We may have greater gross domestic product than any other time in history, but we are poorer than ever before.
We can’t continue to live like this.
We must learn to look through the illusion of prosperity. We must seek satisfaction beyond the pursuit of property and profit.
It’s the only way we can save ourselves.
