My Airbnb Blues
Eighteen years ago, I wrote an ode to the town I had chosen to live in with my young children and husband for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Collingswood was a perfect place for us to grow, and we used our sweat equity as musicians to help in the renaissance that would blossom here soon after we bought our home. Now, my boys are grown with families of their own and I am a widow living alone in a house that contained so much of the angst, frustration, and love that only a boisterous family provides.
The 2008 financial meltdown by American banksters had wiped out everything I had, I lost my job, made a few bad re-financing deals to keep afloat, yadda, yadda…the same story of many boomers who were keeping up a middle class lifestyle with credit cards. My future definitely DID NOT turn glorious in the Age of Aquarius.
I financially got myself together (after slogging through many job interviews that ended with that now familiar look on the faces of interviewers — you are too old, you poor thing, to fit in with us). Slowly. Steadily rebuilding. My bank account stabilized. And I became an Airbnb host. It helped. A lot.
Now, my beloved town has told me to cease and desist welcoming guests in my sons’ old bedrooms. (My guests are mostly medical students who need a break on rent while rotating specialties at a local hospital, not wild, toga-party Animal House denizens.) The zoning board unanimously voted down Airbnbs to operate here. Many board members voiced concerns that Airbnbs would draw “the wrong kind of people.” And I wondered if back when I moved into town would my husband and I have been seen this way? Two struggling musicians with three children?
To revisit my commentary once again, brought back lovely memories and made me think if Collingswood has lost something along the way…
COLLINGSWOOD SINGS ITS VARIED CAROLS
WHERE VOICES BLEND IN HARMONY, RICH WITH
POOR, BLACK WITH WHITE — THATS LIFE ABUNDANT.
Aug 17, 2000
By Suzanne Cloud
In 1981, my husband and I moved to Collingswood in a sort of haphazard way. He was playing bass in a band in Aruba, and my assignment was to find us a cheap place to live — with my three small boys in tow.
I found a rental home in Collingswood via a Realtor/guitar player, settled in, and walked all over town to check out what I was getting into. Some cheesy storefronts on the main street proudly proclaiming used vacuum cleaners or electrical supplies for sale didn’t impress. Neither did the newsprint on local police arresting children for selling pumpkins illegally. But I liked the housing.
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Here was a town that had the rich and the not-so-rich living very close to each other. Stately dwellings along Knights Park, rowhouses by the PATCO High-Speed Line, and charming three-story twins on Haddon Avenue gave the place an equalitarian possibility that was wholly appealing.
It was a town with an ambiance of difference, in that none of the housing had what I and my husband (he would later become a real-estate appraiser) would call “that cookie-cutter look. “
The next year, we bought one of those twins for a song, and raised our boys in Collingswood, as the town confronted its past and future over the years.
When we moved in, it was a white town, but in time it morphed gradually into an integrated community. That wasn’t easy. As black folks from Camden started moving in, there was a racist backlash from some, with hate mail delivered to pertinent doors.
But the community confronted the issue head on after neighbors and clergy got together to welcome the demographic change rather than fear it.
Sure, there was a proliferation of “for sale” signs that seemed to pop up overnight on this or that front lawn.
But that cynical response didn’t overshadow the new joy at seeing two 6-year-old girls, black and white, giggling together on a park bench, or watching the colorful, multicultural horde of skateboarders taking over a medical center’s parking lot.
Situated between Camden and Westmont, Collingswood is finding its own niche, but without the context of class consciousness.
No gated communities of the walled-off wealthy here, but there is the sublime sense of being able to walk down the street and hear musicians rehearsing in duplexes, see small restaurants experimenting with sidewalk cafes, and find specialty shops that might have an African wood carving or an original work by an obscure artist for you to appreciate and maybe buy.
In 1982, when my husband and I pulled up to our house with a rental truck containing all our worldly possessions, he looked at the beautiful dogwood in the front yard and the overgrown garden and said, “Curb appeal, baby. “
Which to me meant that Collingswood could be a place to grow and prune and perfect the kind of environment where the offbeat, the entrepreneur, the transient who just might stay, and all the folks who make us diverse, innovative and proud could create a community based on quality of life and the collective good.
A lot can be accomplished when the rich live among the working class, black with white, Italian with Hindu.
Everyone pulling together with a common purpose, a common dream, and a zeal for heterophony encourages different voices that individually shine to harmonize with their neighbors, creating a quotidian song that exemplifies unity in diversity. Now that’s curb appeal, baby.
