Dopecentury XXXIV --- A Horizontal Border
This short fiction is part of Dopecentury, an experimental project where I attempt to channel the aural aesthetics of Dopesmoker into written text. (Dopesmoker is the legendary stoner-doom metal masterpiece by the band Sleep, of which it is said: “the monotony rarely becomes tedious.”) My plan is to listen to the single hour-long track of Dopesmoker while writing each of these “Dopecentury” entries. And repeat that 100 times. See the Dopecentury project page for more details.
The east side of the city had been slums for as long as anyone could remember; the poor drawn to the east for a thousand years by the opportunity to homestead without interference from the authorities of the city; the land was rotten, low-lying swamp speckled with small barren hills, but for that reason it was cheaply or freely had, even though it was within walking distance of the city center (at least initially, before the slums in the east grew vast).
The slums expanded eastward because the rotten land lay that way; the wealthy had long ago claimed and built up the coastal western side, but the east was left empty, deemed not worth the expense of draining and developing; so the poor had it to themselves for generations; tightly-woven and sprawling; low-slung homes made of clapboard or mud or plywood, or corrugated steel — whatever materials could be had at hand at the time of construction; the older part of the slums closer to the center city tended to be of mud brick that sat down among the puddles and the refuse of the narrow dirt streets that wound about the homes in an endless irregular web; atop the mud brick homes there were often a second and sometimes third layer of omes — built of newer, lighter materials like plywood — that were built when a newcomer with slightly more resources was willing to pay a long-time resident in order to not live in the farthest reaches of the slum.
The farthest reaches were far indeed; the slum had been there so long that it had expanded beyond the edge of sight from the center city; and lacking any kind of direct transportation network, traveling into the far parts of the slums required many many hours winding through the tiny streets in which only residents were assured of not getting lost.
The slums were not a great place to live, but there were worse in the world; at least here every family could get their own home; and the communal life was strong and healthy, a necessity when neighbors literally live on top of other neighbors.
And perhaps that’s why the rich people of the coastal developments began to get designs on the area; at first it was just speculation based on economics: prices were rising in the upscale neighborhoods, demand was strong for more housing and neighborhoods conducive to wealthier people; those people wouldn’t deign to move anywhere close to the slums (“please! Even if we had a nice place down there, where would I do my shopping? Where could I buy EVOO or a decent avocado?”) unless there were not just housing, but a whole neighborhood of wealthy-person amenities too accompany the housing; developers understood this, and in many ways longed to acquire slum land and redevelop it; but it never penciled out: the chief problem being draining the swampy land; that was really a municipal-scale project and it didn’t seem like the city was going to take it on any time soon; there was also the cost of managing the fallout from large-scale displacement of generations of slum dwellers: that would require hiring expensive public relations firms to make sure that didn’t blow up in the developer’s faces; it all added up to negative profit, unfortunately.
Except that it is the way with humans that when it comes to profit, there’s always a visionary; one particularly clever young developer kept eyeing those gentle hills that speckled the landscape of the slum land; often of a weekend, she would hire a pedicab and get a ride to the top point of the closest hill, and walk the winding streets that covered its surface, counting her footsteps and silently taking measurements for herself; soon she had a plan.
From the neighborhood that included the closest hill, she hired a few local residents to travel through the area of the hill and knock on doors; she enabled her representatives to offer people who had houses on the hill up to twice as much as the general value of their houses if they would vacate; a small fortune to the slum dwellers, but still barely petty cash for the real estate development company she worked for; as soon as the residents moved out of a house, she had a crew of local teenage boys tear the place down; within a matter of months she had stripped the hill nearly bare and she controlled more than seventy percent of the land on the hill; in the lower parts of the slum they looked up at balding hill of dirt and scrap metal in wonder: what was going to happen up there? Perhaps a landfill?
But the visionary developer had been working hard on phase two of her plan: while the city wouldn’t ever pay to drain the swampland below, maybe she could get them interested in a municipal project of much smaller scale: an off-ramp from the highway that formed the inner border of the slum to the hilltop land she had cleared; it turned out to be surprisingly easy: a matter of two legislative seasons, some minor local lobbying of city council representatives, and a few donations just this side of bribes, and soon a raised highway ramp was being built right over the closest part of the slum connecting the ring road to the hilltop; conveniently the city could use eminent domain to drive piles to support the off-ramp down through the houses of the slum it passed over.
Within a few years, high-end condominiums were going up on the hill, along with grocery stores, coffee shops, small restaurants, a whole small neighborhood was erected on the hill; and about half-way down the slope of the hill, a wall was built with concertina wire spiraling around the top of it, cutting off the new neighborhood from the surrounding slum; power, water, and communications were all run in conduit and piping that clung to the underside of the off-ramp, so the new neighborhood did not have to rely on the ad-hoc water and power systems the slum dwellers had built and relied on; (everything except sewer, of course — the sewer pipes the new hill-top neighborhood channeled out through the wall, and down into the swampy water table below the slum).
The new hill-top neighborhood was exceedingly popular, since it was still reasonably inexpensive (a concession to those who had a view of the slum from the east-facing sides of the buildings), had a close-knit neighborhood feel (something that accompanies living within a wall topped with concertina wire), and was mere minutes from the city center by vehicle.
The success of the new neighborhood was not missed by other developers; soon every hill within sight of the center city was being cleared as fast as possible, and a network of raised highways built over the slum to connect the hilltops together.
The slum residents were not stupid; they saw what was happening and fought back as best they could, protesting at city council meetings, organizing strikes of essential workers, laying down in front of bulldozers, all the things they could think to do with the limited resources they had available.
But the city council saw opportunity in those hill-top condos to create a massive new source of property taxes, since the slums yielded almost nothing in property taxes; the council soon passed a bill declaring any land at an altitude of greater than the height of the statue that topped the capital building to be a “free development zone” where anyone not paying taxes had to vacate their homes in favor of the development of tax-producing real estate; by the altitude requirement, these free development zones consisted entirely of the hills that speckled the slums (with the one exception of a bluff overlooking the coast that was explicitly carved out from the requirements in a subsection all its own).
Within a matter of a decade, a whole city of neighborhoods rose on the hilltops of the slums; dozens and dozens, all connected by raised roads that never in any single place descended for access to the local roads of the slums; a new border was added to the city, uniquely among borders, it was horizontal: above the line was one city for the wealthy, and below the line was a wholly different city for the poor.