Via South Knox Bubba and some internet perusal, I’ve reacquainted myself with MetroPulse, weekly alternarag of my former stomping grounds, and noticed an interesting article by one Matt Edens, a guy who was in a number of my undergrad classes. A presumed real estate listing for an Old North Knoxville house, the piece is really a springboard for reflecting on the whole remake/remodel trend in interior design and in particular Trading Spaces:
In thousands of subdivisions around the country, viewers tune in and then look at their off-white walls and beige wall-to-wall and imagine something better. “No wonder the show is a Heartland hit,” says [Virginia] Postrel.
Which, I suppose, is one reason the show leaves me a little mystified. My inner-city neighborhood might be in the heart of Knoxville, but it’s hardly the heartland. Parkridge preservationists, downtown loft lizards and Bearden Bobos live in Blue America, not the Red America of sprawl county. Instead of talk radio we have NPR, The New York Times rather than USA Today and, in place of Trading Spaces, we have the Pottery Barn catalog… And the backdrop, like Trading Spaces, is a subtle validation of the preferred habitat of blue America—notice, if you will, the bead-board wainscoting, the oh so wide planks of the pine floor, the faint ripples in the 100-year-old glass. In Red America homeowners sweat to inject a little character into their homes. In Blue America character oozes out of the walls.
Edens may be overstating the distinction. After all, a large chunk of the coastal bourgeoisie values a maverick aesthetic, which takes nineteenth century housing stock and gives it a makeover. Hence the number of South End apartments made to mimic exposed-brick lofts, or the number of nonsupporting walls knocked out of Victorian homes to open up the living spaces and kitchens according to modern tastes. Makeover and renovation mentalities can actually work in uneasy dialectic.
But what of Edens other point: that equating Blue state (urban-renovation mentality) with coasts and Red State (sprawl-makeover mentality) with the South and middle overlooks the Blue state mentality within the South? Yes and no. If Bearden isn’t closer politically and culturally to Brookline, MA than to Halls, then at least it’s in an analagous relation to its suburban counterparts in Knoxville as Brookline is to its less tony, more sprawl-oriented counterparts. (Bellirica?). And it’s easy for people in the urban Northeast to forget how the combination of mass media and upscale retail franchising has spread certain forms of bourgeois taste to a national audience.
What may yet still be a dividing line is the distribution of a real estate market: to what extent do a) high density neighborhoods and b) antique housing stock command a premium? From a Massachusetts vantage, Old North Knoxville should be the most desirable place to live, yet suburban and semi-suburban neighborhoods there command considerably more for well inferior housing stock. That may change and soon, but for now the sprawl mentality still holds in Knox County, Starbucks and NPR notwithstanding.
No comments have been added to this post yet.