In which the people who lie behind the numbers describe what has happened to life in the real Fishtown.
WHEN WE TALK about classes, we reflexively resort to stereotypes. It is hard to think about the white new upper class without envisioning big houses with Mercedeses parked under the porticos or to think about the white new lower class without envisioning broken-down cars rusting in front yards. But classes don’t work that way in practice. The rich and the rednecks are mixed in with other people who qualify for the upper class or lower class but are nothing like the stereotypes.
This is especially true of the members of the new lower class. Most don’t have anything obviously wrong with them. A better way to think about the new lower class is in terms of your own extended family or in terms of the stories your friends have told you about their families. At least a few relatives in those circles will be people who have never quite gotten their acts together and are the despair of the parents and siblings, even though they seem perfectly pleasant when you meet them. That’s mostly what the new lower class involves. Individually, they’re not much of a problem. Collectively, they can destroy the kind of civil society that America requires.
If one adult man lives with his hard-pressed sister and her family because he can’t manage to hold on to a steady job, that puts a lot of stress on the sister’s family. If many adult men in a community are living off relatives or girlfriends, that puts lots of stress on the community. A man who fathers a child without marrying the mother may be a nice guy who is sorry it happened, and he may be trying to do what he can to help out. But it remains true that only a small minority of unmarried men end up being fathers to their children. Children need fathers, and the next generation in a community with lots of children without fathers is in trouble. People who don’t go to church can be just as morally upright as those who do, but as a group they do not generate the social capital that the churchgoing population generates—it’s not “their fault” that social capital deteriorates, but that doesn’t make the deterioration any less real. The empirical relationships that exist among marriage, industriousness, honesty, religiosity, and a self-governing society mean that the damage is done, even though no one intends it.
That’s not to say that the new lower class doesn’t also have a growing number of people who are problematic as individuals. Alongside the men who say they want to work but can’t seem to hold a job are growing numbers of men who have no intention of working if they can avoid it, and who not only live off their girlfriends but sometimes bankrupt them. Alongside the men who fathered children by their girlfriends but make some effort to help are others who abandon their girlfriends as soon as they learn that a pregnancy is under way and are never seen again.
Alongside the women who didn’t get married but are trying hard to be good mothers are those who are the horror stories that workers in the child protective services exchange—mothers who use three-year-olds to babysit for infants while they go out for the evening; homes where the children are brain damaged because the latest live-in boyfriend makes meth in the kitchen sink; and the many cases of outright physical and emotional abuse by never-married women who are not just overburdened mothers but irresponsible or incompetent ones.
To people who live in working-class communities, none of this comes as news. But readers who do not live in working-class communities need something more than statistics. As a way of understanding what the last four chapters have meant for real people, and for understanding why I will argue in part 3 that the consequences are so bad, it is time to step back from the numbers and listen to the voices of real people who live in the real Fishtown.
FISHTOWN CONSISTS OF a triangle of blocks alongside the Delaware River about two miles northeast of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. It has no formal legal existence. Some people think it was named by Charles Dickens, derisively, when he visited Philadelphia in 1842, but one of the voices you will hear, local historian Ken Milano, has tracked down a newspaper reference to the area as “Fish-town” as early as 1808.1 The name may go all the way back to the Revolution, when the neighborhood was the center of the local shad fishing industry.
Its residents argue about Fishtown’s boundaries. Everyone agrees that it is bounded by Frankford Avenue on the northwest and the river on the southeast, but some say that the northeast boundary is Norris Street, while those who take a more expansive view say that Fishtown goes up to York Street, three blocks farther to the northeast. In either case, Fishtown is small, not much more than a mile long on any of its three sides.
In 1960, it had a population of 12,077, all but 20 of whom were white.2 Eighty percent of Fishtown men worked in blue-collar jobs, many of them the skilled jobs required by the specialty manufacturers that dominated the Philadelphia economy. Germans and Irish were the dominant ethnic groups in the nineteenth century, supplemented during the twentieth century by Poles and, in the 1990s, by an influx of people from other countries in eastern Europe. When the 2000 census was taken, Fishtown remained exceptionally white for an inner-city neighborhood—91.3 percent white.
Fishtown’s persistence as an almost entirely white inner-city neighborhood is unusual, and it has attracted attention. In the early 1950s, sociologist Peter Rossi surveyed Kensington District (the officially recognized Philadelphia entity that contains Fishtown) as part of the research for his book Why Families Move, and was bemused to discover that even though Kensington was objectively deprived, its residents liked the place. Indeed, of the four Philadelphia neighborhoods that Rossi surveyed, Kensington’s people had the fewest complaints about their neighborhood.3
In 1970, as the aftermath of the civil rights revolution created tension between urban whites and blacks in the North, Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Peter Binzen made Fishtown the subject of a book, Whitetown U.S.A.: A First-Hand Study of How the “Silent Majority” Lives, Learns, Works, and Thinks.4 Binzen portrayed a tightly knit, family-oriented, hard-drinking, hardworking, hard-fighting blue-collar neighborhood that felt persecuted by the government and disdained by the elites. But Kensington was still inordinately proud of its community, much to the exasperation of the social service establishment. “Kensingtonians are psychologically unable to face up to their social, cultural, and economic deprivation,” said one Philadelphia social services administrator. “Pride prevents them from taking advantage of social services. For them to accept these services might be to admit that they’re not all they claim to be.”5 The director of Temple University’s Student Community Action Center lamented that “nobody knows how to work in the white community. Kensington doesn’t want us there. It refuses to admit it’s a poverty area.”6
More than twenty-five years later, in the last half of the 1990s, Patricia Stern, a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, decided to make the remaining white areas of Kensington the subject of her dissertation. She began to spend time in a parish adjacent to Fishtown, served by a church that she called St. Jude (all the names in her dissertation are altered to protect privacy). During the most intense year of her research, she lived full time in St. Jude’s parish. In 2002, by then Patricia Stern Smallacombe, she completed her dissertation, “Why Do They Stay: Rootedness and Isolation in an Inner-City White Neighborhood.”7 It is a richly detailed ethnographic account, with many extended passages taken verbatim from field notes and interviews. Here, in the words of its residents, is how the dry statistics about the fictional Fishtown of the preceding chapters translate into the changes that occurred in the daily life of the real Fishtown.8
In the real Fishtown as in the fictional Fishtown, the decline began in the 1970s. In the case of marriage, we cannot tell how many adults were married in the 1960 and 1970 censuses—the census tract data tell us only what percentage of persons ages 14 and older were married—but we do know that in 1970, 81 percent of families with children under age 18 were still headed by married couples. Over just the next ten years, that figure dropped to 67 percent.
The traditional norm in Fishtown had not necessarily been “get married and then get pregnant and have a baby.” Quite frequently, it had been “get pregnant, then get married and have a baby.” But the shift from either norm by the time Smallacombe did her research had been drastic. Jenny, one of seven children of prosperous working-class parents who divorced when she was a child (the father had physically abused the mother), turned twenty in the mid-1980s.
I was twenty when I had [my son]. Nineteen pregnant and twenty when I had him. My older sister who was married at a young age was pregnant. I wanted to be married to the guy I meet, I’m going to get married and follow her footsteps. It didn’t work out. Then my younger sister, we were pregnant all at the same time, which was great, all three of us being pregnant. My mother didn’t believe any of us, that we were pregnant. The one was okay because she was married. It was okay for her.… We were all in competition. Me and my four sisters all had babies and only one did it the right way.9 (Emphasis in the original.)
By the 1990s, more and more girls like Jenny’s younger sister, still in their midteens, were getting pregnant. Carrie, a lunchroom staffer at St. Jude parochial school, had a sixteen-year-old daughter in a Catholic secondary school.
My daughter has been to six baby showers in the last four months.… There’s fifty-two pregnant kids in [the school]. Fifty-two. That’s bad. Not to mention the ones that already have kids.… Like I said, everybody makes mistakes and I don’t condemn anybody for making a mistake, but what’s happening here? Why are there so many? When I went to school there was some pregnancy, but I’d say probably four in the whole year.10
Why does it happen? Lack of information about family planning doesn’t seem to have been the problem. There are no testimonies in “Why Do They Stay” from young women who are surprised and dismayed about getting pregnant and no reports that their Catholic beliefs prevented them from using birth control. A lot of pregnancies just happened, in the same way they had in the past, except that the pregnancies were not followed by marriage. Some pregnancies were wanted—Smallacombe observed a certain amount of social status associated with having a baby.11 Many pregnancies were welcomed as a way to get out of the house, either by moving in with a boyfriend or by going on welfare. Christina Quinn, herself a single mother, talked about a friend who had her first baby at age fourteen.
I had a girlfriend when Joanie was born who had five kids. I was twenty-one years old and she had five children. I was like, “You’re crazy,” and she was like, “You’re late.” … She didn’t want to live at home. It was her way out of the house only to find herself back with her parents with five kids because the guy she was with wasn’t ready for all these kids. Neither was she, really, so her mother raised them. I see her every once in a while. She says that today—that her mother had to raise her children. She didn’t even know how to raise children.12
Not knowing how to be mothers is a big problem, says a fourth-grade teacher at a public school in St. Jude’s parish:
Two-thirds of the parents of children in my classes do not work.… Parents want kids to think of them as good parents, they want to “do” for their kids but do not know how.… Or, if the mothers are not strung out on drugs, they are mixed up with men.… The children know how to take care of themselves in that they’re streetwise, they can handle things out on the street. They learn responsibility, taking care of siblings. But, they don’t know the distinction between taking care of a child and raising a child.13 (Emphasis in the original.)
Christina Quinn’s friend’s five children are not the only ones being raised by grandparents. On the contrary, grandparents all over Kensington are raising their grandchildren. Sometimes these arrangements work well. A single mother named Marie talks about her son and their life:
Right now he’s on it [she receives public assistance for her son]. I collect a check for him which pays our board, and I work under the table. I bartend.… I know I can’t do it for the rest of my life, but as of right now I’m quite content with it. It pays our bills and we live very nicely on it.… Plus, I live with my mother who … he’s her world. He is her world.
Sometimes not so well:
Field note: Bonnie [told] the sad tale of the Burns family. She began by recounting how the grandmother went to court against her daughter who is on drugs to get custody of the daughter’s children. The grandmother won the suit, and the three grandchildren now live with her and her husband on Oak Street. Her daughter’s husband is no longer alive, died from a drug overdose. Nevertheless, Mrs. Burns’ daughter still comes around Oak Street. Bonnie said, “The kids, they love their mother. When she leaves, they are devastated.” Bonnie claimed that the grandmother does not want her daughter to come around because it confuses the children. She noted that the grandmother has a lump on her breast and is not taking care of it. Bonnie repeated the question she asked Mrs. Burns to her face one day, “Who’s going to be there for them kids if something happens to you?”14
Meanwhile, it’s not as if the women who are married necessarily have a breadwinner to rely on. Sister Carol, who runs St. Jude’s parochial school, explains:
I guess what I see … is a lot of women who are taking care of the whole kit and caboodle. They almost got an extra son at home, better known as the husband, if they have one.… There are women with two bags of groceries in their hands, children hanging onto both sides of their coats, and the husband with his computer game walking behind her down the street. There’s something wrong here!15
Which brings us to the question of male industriousness.
In the 1960 census, about 9 percent of all Fishtown men ages 20–64 were not in the labor force. In the 2000 census, about 30 percent of Fishtown men in the same age range were not in the labor force.16
The phenomenal growth in the proportion of working-age Fishtown men out of the labor force from 1960 to 2000 raises the possibility that we are looking at larger numbers of discouraged workers who no longer think they have a chance of finding jobs. But the male unemployment rates in Fishtown in 1960 and 2000 were not much different—7.3 percent in 1960 and 8.9 percent in 2000. When they talked about jobs, the people of Fishtown lamented the loss of high-paying factory jobs, but they did not say there were no jobs to be had anymore. They talked about men who just couldn’t seem to cope with the process of getting and holding a job.
Simon was one of the owners of a small factory located in Fishtown. Jenny, whom we met earlier, was his office manager. Phil was the quality technical manager. Simon was not prissy about whom he was willing to hire. He had a track record of giving chances to applicants with criminal records, substance-abuse problems, no high school diploma, and no work experience. He had a simple rule: He would give anyone a chance, but that person had to show up on schedule and do the job or he was out. Smallacombe inquired about the young men who hang out, apparently doing nothing.
Field note: I sat back in my chair and said with part cheek and part challenge, “Okay, what about the white guys on the corner. The white guys.” Simon said, “The white guys around the corner [across from his factory]?” I said, “Metaphorically, The Corner.” Jenny laughed—“The bums.” Simon clarified, “Those guys couldn’t work here, they can’t hold a job.… They’re not motivated to work.” Jenny said, “They’ll live on welfare, or any other income they got coming in. They don’t want to work.”17
Jenny had grown up around a lot of these guys, she said. They had no interest in holding a job or having a family, and now they were in their thirties.
A lot of them are sweethearts. They just don’t have the ambition. I think it was the way they were brought up, watching their fathers and their uncles hang on the same corner, and they just take the tradition. It’s a special feeling [at this moment she started hitting her hand on the table in a thumping rhythm along with each generation—indicated here by italics], that it went from father to uncle to kids and then their kids.… It’s a trademark.18
Ken Milano, shown that quotation, recalled the Sunshine Club.
When I was growing up [in the 1970s], we had the “Sunshine Club,” guys who were either not working or on unemployment. They were so proud of this fact, they had t-shirts made up—“Member of the Sunshine Club” or some such thing. The thing was usually to try and work during the summer down the shore at Wildwood [on the Jersey Shore], then get some stupid job for a couple of months just to get your time in to collect unemployment for the rest of the year, until summer rolled around again.19
Tammy, a native of Kensington who had become the president of the local credit union, reflected that the guys on the corner had helped mess up her brother.
Field note: Tammy told the story about how her brother was working at a fast food restaurant. Apparently, his friends on the corner felt this job was beneath him, and advised the brother to ask for more money from his boss. He did, and was fired soon after the incident. Tammy revealed that her brother has never held a steady job in which he was paid by a check since this experience. Instead, he works odd jobs, “under the table,” in the neighborhood to pay for what he needs—a TV here, something there.20
Welfare plays a big role as well. In chapter 9, I presented the graph showing rising disability among men, and observed that it was impossible that more men should be physically unable to work in 2010 than in 1960. Patricia Smallacombe noted that there are legitimate claims for disability payments because many men in Fishtown are in occupations such as roofing and construction where disabling injuries happen. But, she continued,
At the same time, there are other men whose injuries come about in more dubious ways.… These residents get by on this income and other family resources; sometimes they continue working under the table doing odd jobs. In addition, social service and health providers in the neighborhood observe a higher frequency of families getting into the [disability] system by giving their children medication like Ritalin for ADHD to qualify the child for government disability support.21
Even when the men can’t get welfare, the women can, and the men can live off them. Such men are known as “runners” or “fly-by-nights,” because they are constantly on the move, avoiding debt collectors, child support collectors, their girlfriends or children, or the police. They, too, are active in the drug trade, which exploded in the ten to fifteen years before Smallacombe arrived in the last half of the 1990s.22
Crime wasn’t a problem in the Fishtown that Peter Rossi and Peter Benzin studied. Fistfights were a common way of settling disputes, but one of the pluses of living in a tight-knit working-class neighborhood was a high level of honesty within the community. If somebody stepped out of line, people weren’t necessarily going to wait for the cops. “It used to be your car getting broken into was the only real crime, but everybody knew who did it,” Ken Milano recalls. “It was usually the huffers [glue sniffers], so you went to where they hung out, bashed some heads and found out who did it easy enough.” Even Fishtown’s gangs helped maintain law and order (of a sort), Milano said. “Most gangs were kind of like vigilantes—beat the crap out of thieves, dopeheads, etc.”
That kind of community cohesion had badly deteriorated when Smallacombe did her research. The changes in family structure meant that there were larger numbers of teenagers on the street and no one keeping track of where they were, and that had consequences. Marie, who lived near Pop’s Playground, well known as someone who tried to intervene in the time-honored ways, talked about the limits she now had to put on herself.
It’s just hopeless. There’s a handful of kids across the street. I sit there and I see them do these things and yes, I jump on them for certain things that I can. If they’re being destructive to property or something like that, yeah, I can. But if they’re sitting there and smoking weed, or drinking booze, and I know they’re only 14 or 15 years old, there’s nothing I can do about that. Nothing.… These parents know they’re not home but they don’t care. So why should I go out and put an effort into it when I’m only going to get retaliation on my home, my vehicle or my family? I’m not. There’s only so far I’m going to go.23
A kind of unreasoning destructiveness had come to Fishtown. Bob was a Kensington native who worked for the Parks Department as director of Pop’s Playground:
I don’t understand the destroying that goes on. Kids destroying areas that are for their benefit. I don’t understand it. For instance, tearing up the matting, breaking into the playground, destroy the bathroom earlier in the year. The drinking. Hey, people have drank in this playground for decades. But they never broke bottles or they always made sure everything was thrown in the trash can.24
And the vandalism had been accompanied by an increase in real crime, much of it targeted toward older residents in the community who are the most easily frightened—in one case that Smallacombe relates, the offender’s own mother. Her son needed the money for drugs.
Several Kensington residents commented on a change in parenting that they thought contributed to the rise in crime among teenagers. It wasn’t just that the parents weren’t home. It used to be that the parents didn’t have to be home. If a neighbor saw a child misbehaving, it was considered appropriate for the neighbor to intervene. The parents would be grateful when they found out, and they would take the word of the neighbor if the child protested his innocence.
Unmarried and divorced parents tend not to behave that way, Smallacombe was told. Instead, they tend to try to be the good guy with their children. Here is Marie again:
Then you hear why the discipline was only minimal—“Well, you know, I talked to them and they said this, that, and the other, and I figure ‘Maybe he’s right.’ ” And I’m like, “Well, no. You had the facts, you knew the facts, and now you’re just trying to make yourself look like you’re in the right.… You want to be the cool parent, the friend parent, the great parent that the kid does whatever he wants, however he wants, dresses great.”25
These parents also tried to show their devotion by sticking up for their children no matter what. Carrie again:
We had a neighbor [whom we called] “Not My Son Sue” because everything is “Not my kid.” … Somebody actually watched her son throw a baseball bat through a car window and she stood there and she said, “Not my son.” Twenty-five witnesses, including a policeman, and “Not my son.” You have a lot of that.26
A counselor at St. Jude, observing this kind of thing daily, saw a pattern: “Kids are more challenging, [with] less fear of consequences. Parents have given power to children and this is destructive.… Parents feel they are getting what they deserve … ‘I’m a rotten parent, I’m at work, and all sorts of excuses, so this is why I must deserve this.’ ”27
Fishtown had been an intensely Catholic neighborhood in earlier decades. Fishtown itself has two large churches, and the adjacent neighborhood where Smallacombe centered her fieldwork had the one she called St. Jude. As Smallacombe documents, it is hard to exaggerate the centrality of the Catholic Church in Fishtown’s past. The churches of Fishtown were much more than places where people went once a week to worship. They were social centers and the places where most of the children of Fishtown were educated. The Catholic worldview pervaded the worldview of Fishtown’s parishioners. The church’s teachings—among others, that the home is a domestic church—gave validation to the core values of Fishtown.
All of that had faded by the time Smallacombe did her research. The role of the church was by no means gone—during the year she lived near St. Jude, the closing of the St. Jude novena featured 20 priests and seminarians and about 1,200 neighborhood people in the procession around the parish.28 The church-run lottery, Chances, was still a major social event. The younger families who sent their children to the parochial schools were still active in the church. But for the rest of the younger generation in Fishtown, the connection with the church was growing tenuous even for those who went through the motions:
Field note: I took a shortcut to the church, following other parishioners down Rowe Street.… There was a family trudging in front of me—a man, woman, and boy. The man and boy were dressed in blue jeans, sneakers, and “Eagles” jackets with hoods, typical attire for most men at mass.… By the time everyone trickled in, there were about a hundred people. Older people and some younger parents in their 20s and 30s genuflected before entering the pews. However, I did not see any children performing this ritual, or saying any prayers for that matter. Most were standing around with their coats on throughout the service; they looked rather blank.29
Even the children who attended the parochial school did not necessarily form a cohort for transmitting Fishtown’s Catholic tradition to the next generation. Smallacombe concluded that “the same children who appear in Catholic school uniforms and comply with discipline in the school are more likely than their predecessors to be sexually active and drug and alcohol users even before they reach high school; these youths do not acknowledge the consequences of their actions as either morally wrong or potentially dangerous.”30 Sister Carol was matter-of-fact about the nature of the residual relationship of young Fishtown to the church: “There is a religious piece to it, though it’s not what it used to be. When things are tough, they grab for God. When they’re getting married, they want to be in upper church; when they’re in the hospital, they want nuns and priests there.”31
My use of the term lower class would not sound out of place to the people of Kensington. Some of them use it themselves, in contradistinction to family people, a label for people who made a decent living and took care of their children and their extended families. People who didn’t do those things were lower class. Angie, a lunchroom worker at the St. Jude parochial school, had recently moved across Trax Street, considered to be a dividing line between the family people and others. She was brought face-to-face with the lower class:
Now I live over there and it actually is a lower class of people.… Don’t get me wrong, there’s some St. Jude’s parishioners there and they’re just like us, but there’s more of a lower.… They’re a lower class. I’m sorry. They definitely are. It’s the nonworking, welfare, you know, where they don’t care. To me that … Welfare is not bad, but if you’re able to work you should work. These people, I feel, are able to work.32
For Americans who have been used to hearing about problems associated with welfare dependency and family breakup in terms of race, the testimony from the residents of Kensington serves as a useful corrective. The problems of the white new lower class sound just like the much more widely publicized problems of the black and Latino lower classes.
Field note: From the end of the table, Bonnie added her two cents with a story about what she called a “white trash” family living next door to her mother’s house in the Parish neighborhood. Bonnie vividly depicted a disturbing scene of underfed children in dirty diapers running around the house with no adult supervision.… Bonnie related this story with disgust and horror. I had never seen her become emotional about any such situation in the neighborhood before; she is far from shy about relating bad news and tales of delinquency and degeneration among white residents they all knew. This was personal, though. Everyone at the table fell silent.33
Fishtown has changed a lot since Patricia Smallacombe finished her fieldwork at the end of the 1990s. In the 2000s, gentrification came to Fishtown. It was an irresistible process. Fishtown had cheap housing compared to more fashionable neighborhoods, it was close to downtown Philadelphia, and it was reasonably safe. Juvenile crime and druggies might have become a problem by Fishtown’s traditional standards, but you still didn’t need to worry that you would be mugged walking home or that the convenience store would be robbed at gunpoint while you picked up a quart of milk late at night. And so first the pioneers—the artists and musicians without much money—started to move into Fishtown. In the last few years, affluent young professionals have expanded their beachhead.
If you go to Fishtown today, you will see a streetscape that is still much like it used to be, but with occasional differences. Bars that used to specialize in Bud and Seagram’s Seven and (if you insisted on food) pig’s feet and Slim Jims now have sophisticated lighting, bars glistening with bottles of every kind of boutique alcohol, and menus that you might find on South Broad Street.
Some of the abandoned factories have been turned into chic loft apartments. The five efficiency apartments in the house next to Ken Milano’s are being renovated—hardwood floors, exposed brick, shiny new kitchens and bathrooms—and will reopen with commensurately higher rents. Houses that were worth $30,000 in the 1990s are selling for $200,000 and up. Skyrocketing property values mean that even the family people, who mostly own their homes, will find it tempting to sell their homes, bank part of their profit, and use the rest to move to the suburbs where friends have already settled. The new lower class in Fishtown who now rent will be unable to afford to remain, and they will have to find new places to live.
And so the old Fishtown is fading fast. Ken Milano doesn’t see much to like in the new version. “With poor folks, you know what you got, or at least I do, as I grew up in these parts. New folks have all sorts of different ways of dealing with problems. It’s not a fistfight, that’s for sure. More like calling the cops on you and having your ass locked up, or worse, suing you.” Ken Milano still loves Fishtown, what’s left of it, but a few years ago he had to make a wrenching decision of his own. His son had just finished kindergarten at St. Jude’s, but Milano knew that the school at one of the Fishtown parishes, Holy Name, had closed in 2006, and he could see that enrollment was declining at St. Jude’s. He and his wife didn’t want their children to have to lose all their friends halfway through elementary school, so they transferred their son to St. Mary’s downtown. St. Jude’s priest was dismayed—“Ken, I’m doing everything I can to keep this school open and you’re taking your kid out?” But Milano decided he had to do what was best for his family. On February 28, 2011, the Office of Catholic Education announced that seven parishes would close their respective schools at the end of the current academic year because of low enrollment. One of them was the grade school at St. Jude’s.
In a few years, there will no longer be a “real Fishtown.” But there will still be thousands of working-class neighborhoods and towns across the nation. A dwindling number of them will be urban. Many more of them will be the working-class suburbs where the urban white working class has been moving for years. Others will be small towns in rural areas where the deterioration in the founding virtues has been spreading as rapidly as it spread in Fishtown.34 There is nothing abstract or merely statistical about the human losses that the deterioration has caused.