by Tom Gazdag

Created on: February 18, 2007   Last Updated: April 19, 2007

The words fell from my friend's lips with an impact like iron. Not that she knew it. It was one of those moments in a life that is so organic, so absolutely without pretense, it can only use time and experience for its full meaning to take hold.

"I think I'll skip the french fries," she said, her face corked in the way you often see anyone's when they are considering nickel-and-dime budgeting. "Maybe next week."

I don't remember what we had for lunch that day, but I reckon my appetite may very well have suffered a bit. My friend, you see, was not dieting, nor did she have any health-related qualms about not partaking in french fries.

She simply couldn't afford them. A professional, an office worker in New York City with a college degree from a respectable university, and she simply could not spare the funds for this most minor of indulgences. What did this portend? Was it merely bad money management? Or was it something far more ominous, yet another symptom in a country-wide syndrome that few are willing to acknowledge?

The methodical and gut-twisting death throes of the American middle class.

And make no mistake about it, you can easily use New York City as the absolute snapshot example of the paradigm at work. In the wake of massive deregulation, slashing of housing subsidies, a swarm of housing developments, and good ol' fashioned gentrification, NYC is well on its way to becoming a playground for the rich. And what of the pre-existing middle class families who have largely occuppied its outer burroughs? Many of them have seen their livelihoods shipped overseas, the manufacturing/industry jobs that sheltered generations of their ancestors sent somewhere where pesky things like unions and living wages won't obstruct the big shots. And what is left over? Jobs that either won't pay the bills or demand degrees that are increasingly expensive to get.

By the year 2030, you'll need a doctorate to bag groceries.

Perhaps the easiest way to think of it is like this. Forty years ago, a poor person was someone with quite literally no income to speak of. And yet, with the presence of your friendly neighborhood Skid Row, they were often able to cling to the margins of society. But in today's New York City, a person with a college degree making $30,000 is brutally poor, and I would daresay, on the true cusp of poverty. And with the near death of the Single Room Occupancy, where are people on the fringes to go? Indeed, how and why is it possible for someone working full time and making 30 grand to be in a predicament where local housing grows further and further out of reach?

It is becoming painfully obvious that the situation must be addressed, or we run the risk of becoming little more than some variant of the feudal manor, a variant in which those of us making less that $250,000 annually will have to huddle together into increasingly cramped and co-habitated quarters (think of those crazy kids you may know who live 4 to a room downtown), while probably working in the food services sector, waiting on the elites of the city by day and remembering the good ol' days, when the middle class had a right to live and thrive, by night...by tearful, tearful night.

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