Pick a location and stick with it
The defining feature of the gentry isn't wealth, its a relationship to place
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I’ve been harping on the gentry versus the professional class for several posts now, and I promise this is the last one (for a while). But before moving I wanted to touch on one really essential difference between these two groups: Their relationship to location.
Simply put, one of the key features of the professional class is that members can move around frequently for better jobs. And many do. But for the gentry, not moving is an equally fundamental feature of the group.
Lets briefly break this down.
The reason the professional class involves a lot of moving around is probably obvious. In this paradigm, you go to college, maybe get multiple degrees, and then watch as companies compete for your labor. The professional class is often equated with things like doctors and lawyers — so, very high wage earners — but a really good example right now is tech employees. If you’re a programmer, you can go work in San Francisco, Austin, etc. Then after four years — when your stock options have vested1 — you move on to another company, possibly in another city.
The gentry is basically the opposite. Because they derive a living from things like local businesses or real estate, they can’t easily up and leave the minute a lucrative new job offer comes along. Here’s the explanation from The Atlantic article I’ve been citing lately:
Because their wealth is rooted in the ownership of physical assets, they tend to be more rooted in their place of origin than the cosmopolitan professionals and entrepreneurs of the major metro areas are. Mobility among major metros, the characteristic jumping from Seattle to Los Angeles to New York to Austin that’s possible for younger lawyers, creatives, and tech folks, is foreign to them. They might really like heading to a vacation home in Bermuda or Maui. They might plan a relatively early retirement to a wealthy enclave in Palm Springs; Scottsdale, Arizona; or Central Florida. Ultimately, however, their money and importance comes from the businesses they own, and those belong in their locality.
Location has been a theme of this newsletter from the get-go. Back in April, I explored how the need to chase better-paying jobs makes it impossible for people to live in family compounds. Later, I noted how my own family’s moving around over 150 years put us on a financially weaker path than our now-distant cousins who didn’t move. And in August, I cited research suggesting that physical proximity matters when it comes to building and maintaining friendships.
The underlying takeaway from all these posts is that moving around a lot comes with quality of life tradeoffs. For example, if you have to start over building a pool of friends every four years you’re more likely to experience loneliness.
But the gentry idea offers an alternative that is less itinerant and rootless. And the lynchpin of the gentry paradigm isn’t money. It’s location.
My previous posts on this topic have stressed how the gentry get their wealth from assets rather than wages. But being a part of the gentry isn’t just having a big stock portfolio or a bunch of Airbnb rentals. It’s not saving up enough cash to live on the interest, and then getting really into #vanlife. It’s not merely financial independence.
Instead, it’s deriving income from assets that are tied to a particular place.
Think of it this way: If you had enough money, you could either buy a whole bunch of McDonald’s stock, or you could buy a McDonald’s franchise. Both options could theoretically lead to financial independence, but only the latter is really a move toward the gentry.
Finally, it’s worth noting that the line between the professional class and the gentry is often blurry, but the thing that allows one group to move into the other is, again, their relationship to location. The dingbat, an apartment style that’s popular in Los Angeles, exemplifies this principle.
Dingbats were mostly built in the 1960s, and they’re basically an apartment built above a carport. A lot of people think they’re ugly or weird, though the resurgence of mid century modern style has given the lowly dingbat a bit of a popularity boost.
Whatever you think about this particular style of housing, I bring it up because many of these structures were built by middle class, mom-and-pop real estate investors. So, you’d have local lawyers or bankers with some extra cash who would buy the lot next door and hire a builder to throw a dingbat on the property. Suddenly, the wage earners are now earning money from real estate assets. They began crossing over from the professional to the gentry class.
This was exceedingly common at the time, and the result is that there are now thousands of dingbats all over Los Angeles. They represented a huge opportunity for middle class people to achieve greater financial independence2. But that opportunity was available because those people already had a connection to a particular location. And in taking advantage of that opportunity, they became even more connected to that location.
As they say in real estate, it really is all about location, location, location.
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Headlines to check out this week:
What Becoming a Parent Really Does to Your Happiness
“This relates to a second point, which is that there’s more to life than happiness. When I say that raising my sons is the best thing I’ve ever done, I’m not saying that they gave me pleasure in any simple day-to-day sense, and I’m not saying that they were good for my marriage. I’m talking about something deeper, having to do with satisfaction, purpose, and meaning. It’s not just me. When you ask people about their life’s meaning and purpose, parents say that their lives have more meaning than those of nonparents. A study by the social psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues found that the more time people spent taking care of children, the more meaningful they said their life was—even though they reported that their life was no happier.”
Though a fair amount of startup stock ends up relatively worthless.
The flood of dingbats into the LA housing market also helped keep housing costs low, which is one reason mid century LA had such a bohemian vibe. The world of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood or the Laurel Canyon music scene wouldn’t have been possible without the dingbats helping to keep the city relatively cheap. Today, dingbats remain one of the most common and affordable housing types in the region. They were really a win-win for everyone except architecture snobs. Unfortunately, a variety of building regulations effectively made them illegal to build, which is also why they’re so associated with the 60s and 70s. None have gone up since then.