The City, part whatever

They loom over the yard, the new townhouses, and Old Lady Mabel's yard too. Beige pressboard, they popped up in two weeks, built by workers who don't speak the native tongue and are willing to work on holidays and weekends for less pay than the few manual laborers left who were born here. They do a better job, too, with fewer expectations, because they're grateful, and they don't qualify for unemployment.

The parts of the yard they shadow are not so large, nor so significant. They leave in sun the persimmon and the apricot, the raspberries, the grape and the fig. What they shadow is so much larger. They are selling for half a million dollars, these new townhouses that are built where the old Head Start was, and after that the revival church. Old Lady Mabel's house never sold for that much. Maybe ten thousand, back in the day. They don't cast a shadow on her yard, to the south of them, and the neighborhood is grateful because she has been gardening in that yard for long enough that the soil is rich and crumbly and black, and anything she plants springs up in a few weeks time as lush and nourishing as Eden. She tends her rows hunched over in a flowered housedress, white-haired and slow, dark brown skin and sweet grandma voice telling you what crops she likes to plant in which seasons. "I do love the sound of chickens", she says, smiling, passing bundles of collards and mustard over the fence to her neighbors, "Always have, since I was a girl".

The townhouses don't care whose yards they oppress with their height and their sameness. They don't care about Old Lady Mabel and her stories. The people who build them don't care, because they are working and it's a paycheck to help feed their families. The investors don't care, because real estate is a surefire way to maximize their investments. Real estate never loses. Right? Right?

In the neighborhood, neighbors who bought at market peak couldn't sell their houses for what they paid, but maybe the new townhouses will change all that. Half a million! That could bring housing values up for everyone! Make our homes worth more than we paid for them, so much more. So we can leave. So we can get the hell out of the shithole neighborhood with the old lady who grows her own food and the crazy people with the chickens. A grand or so extra taxes per year is so worth it, if we can refinance and buy that Prius we've been wanting to go with our green lifestyle. And maybe the new neighbors will be the kind of people we've been wanting to live near, people with nice things, clean things, and no dirt in their yards. Maybe, just maybe.

Maybe all those good things will happen, and the new neighbors will pay their half-a-million dollars to move into those new green-construction townhouses, and everything will be so clean and so nice, and the new neighbors will complain to the city about the chickens, and the new neighbors will drive the property values and the property taxes up until Old Lady Mabel and the crazy people with the chickens can't afford to live here anymore, and the neighborhood will be so nice then, won't it? We can have such lovely dinner parties.

Or maybe, just maybe, the people with nice things, clean things, lovely earth-friendly things won't be able to look twice at those half-million-dollar townhomes with green construction and no yards, and they'll sit vacant for years, until the investors pull out and the contractor goes bankrupt and property values continue to slide and maybe the city will step in and force them to lease it to the Headstart program, or maybe they won't, but either way Old Lady Mabel will keep on growing her garden, and the crazy people with the chickens will go on trading eggs for greens. And no one will buy a Prius, or get out from under their mortgage, and the neighborhood will never, ever, get any better.