My goodness.
In the end we can all cheer the Dollar Store and pretend Lakewood is reviving but I can promise that low-end retail will not save Lakewood. It is not the economic stimulus that will bring us back to solid fiscal ground.
Snobbery has nothing to do with this. If Lakewood does not attract retail or amenities that would cater to upper middle class or upper class people and continues to increase the draw of retail targeted at lower income people we will end up with a huge problem in the long run.
Like it or not, there needs to be some kind of rational balance.
There are many buried assumptions here, and, implicitly, there is also a 'chicken-and-egg' type of problem contained in this riff.
One daring way to unpack economic development is to come at it sideways and, in effect, come at it not as if what are, at the end of the day, merely 'economic persons' entangled in the flux of provision and consumption.
If this sociological approach is necessarily a bit oblique, it also gently gathers in data and analysis about how easily it is made possible in a wholly economic analysis to bi-furcate Lakewood into persons who go after life, in a sense, sub-optimally, and, other persons who fall into the lumpen optimal "upper middle class or upper class people".
Of course the obvious assumption hidden in this last prescription is that there is, then, a hypotheses chaining together simple posits,
richer is better than poorer
upper is better than lower
revival is best when it is oriented around richer, and upper
Methinks this implies also: prune some of the lemons rather than make lemonade with the lemons you have.
Hmmmm... Do we throw out the lemons that got Lakewood here?
***
This leads to incredibly tough questions the monkey has been posing to himself.
North/South divide in Lakewood?
Much day in and day out melting of classes in Lakewood? Where?
Quantification of how income is spent qualified by class and/or cluster?
But then what about deeper ways of knowing what else is part of the proposition of a Dollar this or that? People are not
their purchases.
***
Fantasy of Lakewood evolving to become more like culturally creative, leftist, third place, intellectual, cognitively complex, hip, green, activist,
[fill in blank of known exemplar suburb] ________________________ ?
(Did I FORGET to mention
diverse too?
***
In some ways its a zero-sum game. there's the taint (in my digger pluralistic radical headspace,) in some kinds of class-focused biases which elevate what used to be called, 'gentrification'.
Personally, I don't see it unfolding. People who intergenerationally 'get' Lakewood, who closely identify with the knotty and rough and tumble (but safe!) ambience, emerge out of a different affectual ecology than those for whom Lakewood is
merely the place in which they live and the location that serves as the current 'table' to catch only their most current
bet on a little more stability, security, ands future predictability.
This, alas, is the rad sociologists perspective. But, Lakewood also is the bundle of
different dreams about the future. It's different between: knowing what all the dreams are, and, what the elite dreams are; i.e. dreams of the elite be they discerned as matters of social class or richness (or 'thickness') of identity.
(...thinking here too that identity forms a kind of odd 'transference' and that the various
mirages form a kind of counter-transference.)
***
More simply, (phew!) maybe the platform for stability is every and any kind of smart match between socios and 'economos' which creates a little less anxiety, per force stabilizes, and, embraces the lower and lower middle classes rather than supposes something like a bus ticket would be, for Lakewood, part of the solution.
Never-the-less, the peeps with the gold do like to rule. The point of the
city that knows itself better than any other is to invert this;
the gold within the people rule.
