So, Is It a Class Thing?

I was born and raised in Brazil; and there we talked a lot about class if not at all about race. In America it is the opposite; we bloviate a lot about race and ethnicity but we rarely talk about social class.

As can be gleaned from some of my previous blogs, the little burg I live in is once again faced with “developmental issues”. A land owner wants to sell one of his parcels of land to be developed into a big box store, specifically a Lowe’s. This parcel of land gives onto a very small and winding double yellow lined road called Isaqueena Trail, which up to now has mainly been developed for residential use. How to use said parcel and its neighbors has been an issue of contention in town for a while and details of the current debate can be read at http://www.nobigboxonissaqueena.org/ .

I’d love to call Clemson a college town, but it isn’t, it is merely an intersection of highways and double yellow lined roads at whose center lies a mid-sized, present day, American style university, or what David Hickey has recently described as a “big box of information”. Clemson is a place, like so many others, in the middle of nowhere, where young Americans come to finish growing up for four years; a place where they can do a lot of drinking, follow some mediocre sports teams, have sex, and show up for class every now and then. Like so many towns in this vast oil dependent country, it has sprawled without rhyme, plan or reason other than to accommodate a growing number of transient residents. Other than physical requirements such as housing and an array of familiar franchised restaurants to make the kids feel at home, big boxes of information also require a very specialized kind of labor in order to be able to hold on to the “university” label, the kind of labor that comes equipped with PhDs.

So let’s go back to the question of what kind of development should take place on Isaqueena Trail in Clemson-burg. Obviously, it is only a contentious issue because there are two social groups with very different sets of vested interests when it comes to how development should unfold in town. There is a group of people that does not want your average, natural-seeming [1] American style development to take place here; and then there is another group that does. This second group is comprised of land owners, average Americans who would not mind the convenience of big box store shopping at their doorstep, and, seemingly, the entire city council, since for them this kind of development is a way of getting tax dollars without the always unpopular raising of taxes on existing citizens and businesses.

The issue of development on Isaqueena has come up before when another developer wanted to sell a nearby site to Wal-mart. At that time, I was firmly against it and went to every council and planning board meeting to protest the establishment of a Wal-mart in town. The outcome of the confrontation between pro-Wal-mart and contra-Wal-mart factions resulted in what seemed to be a good and logical comprehensive plan for future development; one in which the town would develop in a sustainable way without giving in to rampant sprawl. Apparently though, Clemson’s comprehensive plan is just a meaningless piece of paper since it will be overthrown in order to allow for Lowe’s to come in.... But I digress. This time around, my instincts still remain firmly against such development; but except for sending letters to a mostly unresponsive council, I have not been as involved in trying to keep “natural-seeming” development at bay. By staying uninvolved, I have watched the events unfold as an informed outsider and have tried to look at the whole thing objectively, only to conclude that that’s not possible, and that this fight is a “class ‘theng’”.

Those of us against “development as usual” in the town of Clemson seem to be comprised of that overly educated labor class of which I spoke earlier; the class of people instrumental to the existence of “the big box of information” in the center of town and raison-d'etre of Clemson. We make up a social group with a certain set of preferences. We prefer to have sustainable, slow development in the hopes that eventually the town will attract small individually owned businesses designed for people with high human capital such as us [2]. Ours is a set of preferences for which we are willing to pay in the form of longer commutes to big box stores (let’s face it, we all use the damn things; it’s America, man), and, given our actions, in the form of higher future property and sales taxes. The motivations of the opposing group are also easy to discern: the developer wants to sell to Lowe’s in order to make quick huge profits, and the council wants easy present versus hard to come by future tax returns. And beyond the thorny issue of the property rights of the land owner, what remains somewhat of a problem for me as a socially conscious human being overly educated in post-structural theory is the question of how to accommodate the preferences of the group of people councilwoman Thompson hails from. The people who see nothing wrong with the way America looks and feels like. The people who prefer to eat at Olive Garden rather than eat at Villa Novella; what of their preferences?

Apart from all the very real urban and sustainability implications of our current modes of production and development, this Lowe’s thing in Clemson is also, most definitely, a very real class “thing”; and as class thing, it comes with all kinds of thorny power implications... [3]

[1] Notice I said “natural-seeming”. I am not saying that America’s developmental patterns are natural in an absolute way, if such an animal even exists; I am saying that sprawl has been, except for very specific instances, the very way this nation has developed physically and economically in the past, so it is only natural that municipalities feel the need to keep using this old model.
[2] Although, truthfully, I don’t see it happening since there isn’t enough of us here; hence the beauty of faith...
[3] Merci M Foucault...