The Two-Income Trap - Elizabeth Warren [16]
The first night in the house, I just walked around in the dark and was so grateful. . . . At this house, it was so nice and quiet. [My sons] could go outdoors and they didn’t need to be afraid. [She starts crying.] I thought that if I could do this for them, get them to a better place, what a wonderful gift to give my boys. I mean, this place was three thousand times better. It is safe with a huge front yard and a back yard and a driveway. It is wonderful. I had wanted this my whole life.
Emily took a huge financial gamble buying a house that claimed nearly half of her monthly income, but she had made up her mind to do whatever she could to keep her boys safe.
Families like Emily’s have long acknowledged crime as an unfortunate fact of life, but the effect on parents has changed. A generation ago, there just wasn’t much that average parents could do to escape these hazards. A family could buy a guard dog or leave the lights on, but if the suburbs were about as troubled as the cities—or if crime wasn’t framed as a city problem—then the impetus to move wasn’t very compelling. Today, however, cities and suburbs seem to present two very distinct alternatives. When the car is stolen or the news features a frightening murder on a nearby street, families are more inclined to believe that the suburbs will offer them a safer alternative. According to one study, more than one-third of families who had left central Baltimore and over half of families who had considered leaving “were moved to do so by their fear of crime.”47
Ultimately, however, it did not matter whether there was a meaningful gap between the schools in the center cities and those in the surrounding suburbs, or whether the streets really were safer far away from the big city. It didn’t even matter whether there really was a crisis in public education, as the politicians and the local news might insist. What mattered was that parents believed that there was an important difference—and that the difference was growing.48 The only answer for millions of loving parents was to buy their way into a decent school district in a safe neighborhood—whatever the cost.
Bidding War in the Suburbs
And so it was that middle-class families across America have been quietly drawn into an all-out war. Not the war on drugs, the war about creationism, or the war over sex education. Their war has received little coverage in the press and no attention from politicians, but it has profoundly altered the lives of parents everywhere, shaping every economic decision they make. Their war is a bidding war. The opening shots in this war were fired in the most ordinary circumstances. Individual parents sought out homes they thought were good places to bring up kids, just as their parents had done before them. But as families saw urban centers as increasingly unattractive places to live, the range of desirable housing options began to shrink and parents’ desire to escape from failing schools began to take on new urgency. Millions of parents joined in the search for a house on a safe street with a good school nearby. Over time, demand heated up for an increasingly narrow slice of the housing stock.
This in itself would have been enough to trigger a bidding war for suburban homes in good school districts. But a growing number of families brought new artillery to the war: a second income. In an era when the overwhelming majority of mothers are bringing home a paycheck and covering a big part of the family