It's just business

Jack Deatherage

(5/2024) The county website offers a subheading in the "Maps" link where we can access another link to see who owns what in Frederick County. I check the site to see how much land someone owns, what the boundaries might be, what the state tax burdens are, how recently properties have changed hands and what they sold for. I have to admit I was surprised to discover who owns the lot the post office sits on. Out of curiosity I began looking at various properties around town -mostly rentals- and discovered many of them are not owned by people living in town, or in the state.

I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised. Many of the people I used to hang with moved out of state when they were ready to start families. As their parents aged out- died or went into nursing homes- the kids sold the old home places to out-of-towners who could afford the ever increasing housing costs here. I wasn't surprised that grandchildren of some of the better off Emmitsburg families, having moved out of state, are now buying up houses in town and jacking rents up by as much as 65%.

Growing up in families that survived the Great Depression and World War Two by taking care of family and neighbors down on their luck, it comes as a serious shock to me to see such increases enacted by the generation following me. "It's just business" I'm told.

As one of the recent applicants for a then vacant commissioner seat remarked during an interview, "We have a large percent of our population below the ALICE line..." (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed -earning more than the Federal Poverty Level, but barely enough to afford the basics where they live.)

A quick look at the 2023 ALICE report for Frederick County shows that 52% of the families in Emmitsburg are at the ALICE level of poverty. That's a single individual income of above $12,880 but below the ALICE Survival Budget of $47,220. (The DW and I wouldn't know what to do with $47,220 a year!) How are retirees, trapped below the ALICE level of poverty, supposed to pay the new rent increases? They aren't of course. They are supposed to move into publicly assisted rental units, which currently have waiting lists that number close to 100 applicants!

The DW and I are fortunate enough to carry no debt on our house or car, though both could use thousands of dollar worth of repairs- dollars we are currently putting into the community garden. We aren't paying hundreds a month for cable and smart phones. We don't have health insurance bills and rarely need to see a doctor. We don't dine out. We borrow books and movies from the library and seldom burn more than $20 a week in fuel for the car. Still, we're barely getting along on little more than half what ALICE says a working individual needs to survive in Frederick County.

We're very much aware how quickly our situation can change for the worst. We've seen family and friends who were much better off than we are, lose everything they'd acquired during their lives to cover the loss of good paying jobs, drastic rent increases, the onset of clinical depression. Stressful situations often led to declining health, poverty and mercifully- death.

Sometimes the DW and I are able to step up and help struggling family or friends. Sometimes other family members and a rare friend or so have helped us out of tight financial situations.

There is a saying circulating among conservatives and libertarians, "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times." -Michael Hopf's post-apocalypic novel "Those Who Remain". As a Boomer, the first generation that benefited most from the last strong men's effort to create good times, I can see the hard times a coming.

Dad rarely spoke of growing up in rural Tennessee during the Great Depression or what it was like to serve in the Army Air Corps during WWII. At best he'd toss me a book and tell me to read it. When I'd ask why, he'd say, "That's what it was like."

Mom on the other hand talked often about dropping out of school to work in a factory so extra money came into the house to pay the bills. She first paid the shop foreman five dollars each week to keep her job. After giving her mom the bulk of her pay she had a dollar fifty to spend on herself. She'd pool that money with the pocket change her sisters had to buy a record player and other items the family could enjoy the use of. She also helped care for her aged grandmother until the woman died at home.

Two of Mom's brothers severed in the European Theater during WWII. Both were wounded, both would get that "I've been in a hell you'll never understand" look when they talked about their experiences. (I saw that same look on the faces of Vietnam veterans dealing with PTSD.) Stronger people than I'll ever be.

I've been told by older relatives that my siblings and I were ungrateful for the sacrifices our parents made for us. My response has always been, "Before I can be ungrateful I have to be aware of the sacrifices." Having had more than fifty years to think on my parents' and grandparents' lives I now see how weak I am because of their efforts to give me a better, softer life than they had. Now I'm both ungrateful and grateful. Ungrateful because I wasn't prepared for hard times. Grateful that I might know enough to aid the current generation of youngsters in surviving the coming hard times as they are forced to become strong people.

Oddly, or maybe not, several physically and mentally disabled mentors have told me we need to gather together our families, neighbors and friends to create a community that stands a chance of surviving hard times. Going it alone rarely works, even for a strong person. To that end, First Sister now lives with us. She has useful skills- she can sew, knit, cook, deal with lawyers and accountants, and garden. Neither she or the DW are afraid of hard work. I bring to the table the ability to lie down next to hard work and catch a nap.

A thing I've noticed about many of my mentors- they seldom dwell on what "better off people" have. If they remark on the better off at all, it's usually in the form of a question- "How did they manage to get all of that, and what did we do wrong?"

When I remind them we were drunken... umm fools, and worse, they nod in agreement and move on to how we can improve things for our community. Envy and bitterness doesn't help any of us. If anything, I find those worse off than myself, but still working to make others lives better, more admirable than those who seemingly have everything one could possibly need. Call it familial or community responsibility- it's never "just business".