Why Are the Richest Neighborhoods Always So Far Left?

Ann Arbor — One walk through Kerrytown and you’d think you entered a land occupied by a foreign power. Few American flags fly there. Streets and buildings are festooned with communist agitprop and pride progress flags. The politics seem to be a strange mix of pro-migration, LGBT advocacy, and hippie socialism.

It’s also the richest neighborhood in Ann Arbor. The most ruthlessly capitalistic. So why is it outwardly so far left?

You notice this ironic phenomenon in practically every American city. The biggest houses, the wealthiest urban neighborhoods, the kind with nice landscaping and home security systems, often have far left political signs out front.

The “in this house, we believe…” signs are the most notorious. A classic leftist meme with too much text and gaudy graphic design. A litany of ideological statements presented as unassailable fact, creeds of modern liberalism.

The most common variety reads something like: Black Lives Matter. Women's Rights are Human Rights. No Human is Illegal. Science is Real. Love is Love. Kindness is Everything.

The last sentence is key to understanding the mindset. Kindness is everything. Or, the outward performance of kindness. Seeming like a “good person.” Virtue signaling.

Before 2016, you didn’t really see signs like this anywhere. You’d only see rainbow flags in the established gayborhoods of major cities, not on every street corner.

After Trump’s first win in 2016, these signs and symbols started to pop up in all these neighborhoods. They’re reactionary, a response to the ascendancy of the populist right in American politics. In many ways, they’re status symbols of the coastal elite mindset.

Walking through Kerrytown, you see it all over. “Abolish ICE” signs in all the windows. Signs with big warnings claiming that ICE access is not allowed within that business. Signs for a protest group, “Ann Arbor Busineses [sic] United Against ICE,” notably misspelled.

Strings with little pride progress pennants draped across patios. Signs for “Mutual Aid Mondays” with big pink raised fists on them. Calendars with events posted like queer open mic nights and drum circles.

Little free libraries, too, the classic sign that you’re in one of these neighborhoods. Performative gestures that look nice on a front lawn but are never actually used. No one is actually walking around borrowing books from these. No one has ever been enlightened by a little free library.

And amid all of this, high-rise luxury apartments. Single-family home prices in the millions of dollars. Gourmet restaurants, fancy grocers, art galleries, boutique clothing and jewelry stores. Century-old bank buildings with old stone facades.

With all the commercial activity going on there, Kerrytown is practically an open-air shopping mall. Despite all the champagne socialism, it’s a hub of capitalist activity.

The thing is, it’s easy to talk about socialism when you have plenty of money. It’s only a few bucks for a yard sign, in fact. But when communities actually implement it, or embrace more capitalistic endeavors to loosen things up, these people balk.

These are the same communities freaking out over Ann Arbor’s new zoning initiative, mind you. The one that would allow for more housing and urban density, things that might actually benefit the community by leading to lower rents and housing prices.

It’s a threat to the ecosystem that keeps single-family home prices astronomical, however, and god forbid anyone touch their absurdly inflated property values. Socialism for thee, million-dollar homes for me.

There are, of course, plenty of baristas, waiters, and hourly employees staffing all these businesses. Many of them are leftists of a different variety, but actually poor ones. Their grievances are different from the propertied classes that frequent their establishments.

Their ideology just becomes a performative pastiche for these businesses. Clever guerilla marketing, ads in the window signaling the brand’s affinity for this desired class of customer.

The $9 latte crowd might fawn over a purple-haired transgender barista, and they surely enjoy the food cooked by the illegal Venezuelan kitchen staff. But that’s where it ends. Signs and flags, nothing real.

The ultimate irony, of course, is that it’s capitalist enterprise keeping this entire place running. Kerrytown is a business, a well-oiled money-making machine. Everyone who lives there, or works there, or visits, is a beneficiary of capitalist enterprise.

If things were more straightforward, that’s what would be outwardly celebrated. American flags everywhere, signs of the free marketplace of the American dollar that perpetuates the neighborhood's existence. Efforts to strengthen the marketplace and encourage new development would be celebrated, not restricted.

Instead, though, they worship stagnation. Keeping things stuck in the mud, keeping people limited to their identities and sexual behavior alone. Keeping the Boomers in their ever pricier houses, and everyone else out.

True change is coming, and it’s ruffling their feathers. Changes on a bigger scale that might actually benefit American workers and the economy, for once.

So they put up their signs, saying they want change, but not the way Trump is doing it, not in any way that actually matters. What they want, you see, is just the appearance of change, of virtue, nothing substantially new. To wail and gnash their teeth because things are happening, when they wish that nothing would.