At the Client Dinner
I attended a client dinner in the fall of 2018 but honestly, the heart of the discussion could just as easily have taken place in 1950, yesterday, or a year from now. As it turned out, the client’s main investor was sitting next to me the entire night. I began wrapping my mind around what was said on the drive home, and frankly still feel unsettled about it.
The overwhelmed server forgot to place my order and rushed the dish when he realized the mistake. I’ve been a server for so long, I’ve accidentally done this uncountable times. I share this not to shame the server but to include how the investor very graciously shared his food with me while I waited. In fairness I want to point out that was an act of kindness he did not have to do. But that’s not what’s nagging at me.
After dinner the housing crisis came up. It was just like the movie, he said. He was discussing how flabbergasted he was to have been in the Las Vegas auditorium depicted in “The Big Short” when they realized the housing bubble was bursting. How his fourteen million dollar stake in construction equipment and assets was downstream from that bubble and going to evaporate. How the money kept disappearing and there was no stopping it. Going home to his wife from Las Vegas and being actually sick, telling her honey it’s all over.
The thing is, he said, it’s not politically correct to say what really happened.
Ah, I can tell you what happened, I said. The subprime loans were not political. But the idea of all the things that had happened before those loans took place was what was political and that’s what led to the crisis - the lack of access to education and economic savvy, the stifled socioeconomic mobility, the systematic denial of a seat a the table based on race, religion, gender - you name it - that kept people from being able to move toward economic parity with those who should actually have been given home loans.
He looked at me as he leaned back in disbelief with wide eyes, then leaned onto my shoulder and collapsed in a way that betrayed the beers he’d had, exclaiming Do you know how much more attractive you just became? I’m just kidding, I’m just kidding - but that’s exactly correct. She’s smart, this one; that’s what happened.
And then he went on to bemoan on how he lost - everything.
Except he didn’t, really, did he? He is still an investor in multiple pet projects and had just proudly relayed mounting a successful offense against an aggressive national company in the same market by threatening a smear campaign backed by a liquid $100,000 legal fund ready to pounce. He described being able to invest in the clients we were there for. He described taking his daughter on trips to see about a half-dozen college campuses the year before.
That’s not a man who lost every-thing. That’s a man whose ability to buy a yacht was perhaps delayed, or god forbid, denied. But that’s not the same as honey it’s all over. That’s not your daughter saving for community college and working the drive-thru after-hours, nor is it choosing between chemo payments or retirement. That’s not your home left standing like a coffin in the wind. And what of the the swath of my contemporaries who graduated into a recession that will chase our lifetime earning potential to the grave? The challenge of unrealized events is that they are opportunity costs. Those are difficult to measure because they don’t fully manifest. If we only account for the things we can count, we are missing most of what’s happening. What is the value of a job you never hold or an education you never receive? What is the return on an investment you can never make in the first place? What is the cost of financial instability? And when someone points to a loss they can* quantify, say fourteen million dollars, how can you ask them to see that perhaps other’s losses were equally, but differently, valuable?
As the conversation continued he repeated often how politically incorrect it was to describe the loan recipients as people who had no business wanting homes in the first place. It began to sound like a secret he felt he was in safe company to share. How housing isn’t something everyone should have. That the “politics” have changed and now everyone thinks they have the “right” to a home. And his raised eyebrows and upturned palms as he leaned back, gesturing into thin air were a sort of icing on the “these entitled people I can’t speak of because it would be politically incorrect” cake.
But, I countered, we just talked about this; it’s a continuation of the conversation we were just having. People were kept from exercising their full socioeconomic mobility, and don’t we all know?, that at such a high percentage of monthly cash flow, building equity is the best way to piggy back off one’s financial situation and become part of the American — no no no, he asserts over me, not everyone deserves to be a homeowner.
I still don’t understand why he felt the need to lean on me and say I was right at the outset if he spent the rest of the night vehemently demanding I was wrong. Some things are not to be known, I guess. Forgetting my place, I marched ahead: But, we know that housing should not be treated like a commodity, housing is not lipstick or iPhones, and keeping people as tenants who forever throw away their rent and never build equity keeps them from being the kind of people who can build their - and no no no not everyone deserves to be a homeowner.
At this, my boss was pulled from conversation with the man next to him and glanced with vague uncertainty about why the client just said “no” to me. This is, after all, a client dinner. My job is to make him happy, not to make him see. And so began the part where I absolved myself of opinions and become the smiling woman he leaned on a bit ago. So happy to hear what the big boys have to say over their after-dinner-drinks! This eased my boss’ concerns and he soon slipped back into conversation with the man next to him.
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Things meandered but the investor soon returned by discussing places where housing is treated the most like a commodity and how awful these places are to buy homes. How stupid would someone be to pay for a home in Southern California, in Seattle, in New York, he says, condemning the free market he’d extolled. These are not the places you buy; who in their right mind buys in places like this?? he insists, motioning vaguely to mean everything from here in downtown LA to San Diego. One wonders whether he imagines that people who move to these cities must forever be renters and never question why their landlords can be property owners but they themselves cannot.
At this point, my well-inebriated coworker whom they adored - a man with just enough innocence to be taken seriously and enough self-deprecating dopiness to be nonthreatening - chimes in: Well listen we know better than to own a home in Southern California, we know the economics of it are bullshit. His well-worn Joshua Tree baseball hat is sitting high on his forehead, and he habitually flicks it higher with his finger and then adjusts it back down as he continues: And my wife who worked at Wells Fargo and I know that sure, we “could” afford a home - in Compton - but my two very white very blonde children don’t want to live in Compton. He says it with a finger in the air, except it’s wobbly because he is tipsy and so is his integrity.
The investor loves this. He leans back with saucer eyes and a big grin before leaning forward to emphatically agree. Because it says in a round-about way something he had not outright, something about race and place and deservedness. It admits that in this country, sometimes doors are just closed to you because you didn’t make it to the head of the line. This admission from my coworker is a capitulation to “the way things ought to be”: vaguely feudal but with the terms of your servitude determined by so many that the lordship over you is diffused. Why you or anyone else weren’t higher on the food chain is not up for debate. It’s not even up for finishing sentences. You’re meant to concede defeat, leave the economic self-determination (which let’s be frank, means actual self-determination) to the winners like this investor, and not threaten his self-esteem by questioning why doors should open if he knocks.
My coworker claims to be a liberal and loves parks, hikes, the music of the oppressed. But behind closed doors or when his party affiliation no longer serves a competing interest of his own, he showed it is de facto racism to which he turns. Race, class, and income are by design, inextricably linked in today’s America. My coworker is as insidious as outright racists because when the time comes to move the needle on race in a way beyond lip service - to see other’s children with the compassion he reserves for his own - he does not. And to gain favor with this investor he intuited correctly that he should in fact flaunt it.
I am not suggesting he be forced to live where he doesn’t want to, and he surely doesn’t have to send his children to schools where they’d be the minority. The key thing here is that he can make these choices because he is high enough in the pecking order of this country to exercise choice in those matters. The poor have little say over where their children attend school, or to move if it means avoiding their children’s struggles as the minority in their classroom. The poor have little choice in where they live and must make-do. To have money is to have choice. When you thwart someone's economic advancement, you deny them agency in their own life.
What further troubles me about this exchange is that this investor fancies himself more powerful than he is, and does so in ways differently cancerous from my coworker. The investor’s sense of himself is as a big player, as someone who deserves more. He is mad because his perception is that people trying to move up in line nearly cost him his place in it. That a healthy economy means a growing pie for everyone to get a slice is a conversation for another time, and clearly anyone with an understanding of that would not be threatened by other’s economic success. That aside, what he doesn’t seem to see is that the people giving out the loans were responsible for the way the loans were given. Those people had one job and they were derelict in a way that nearly sank a nation. Yet the investor didn’t mention financiers once. He didn’t think their feckless issuance of predatory loans, their unchecked greed, their lobbying for continued regulatory rollback even today, and their ‘let them eat cake’ mentality had anything to do with leaving Las Vegas with his tail between his legs.
How can it be that a smart man cannot see the face of the thieves as they stand before him? Is it that he does not want to? Or is it that he aspires to what they have, and so sees himself as one of them? It is entirely likely that what terrified the investor when the market crashed was that he faced the possibility of moving closer to the back of the line. I have to wonder: if the investor realized he had more in common with the people being lied to about their qualifications for the loans than the people issuing them, would he still be so indignant?
The night went on. This conversation about knowing when it was smart to buy a home and when it was stupid (i.e. like how it’s so stupid in Southern California) was then piggy-backed by gushing praise for how he once owned an acre of land with a four bedroom, two and a half bathroom, three! - he stresses proudly - car garage when he lived in Houston, for only $150,000. Which as he called it was “a buck fifty.” It was such a great deal, so worth it! The language he used was akin to that of passing up a deal you couldn’t refuse. “Why of COURSE I want to double my popcorn size to get a free mega soda! Who wouldn’t at this price?!”
…You’d be forgiven for hearing this portion of the conversation and thinking he felt homeownership was reserved for those guided by the invisible hand and seeking economic choice for themselves, those who wanted to move up in the world with their equity. Except we already know that he doesn’t think certain people deserve building equity, he’s already told us it’s a dangerous thing that just about crashed the economy. When middle and upper class people do something it’s savvy. When people sold on the American Dream do it knowing it allows them footholds in a better life - no no no not everyone deserves to be a homeowner.
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The cardinal sin I committed was to transition from being a damsel in distress who had no dinner, to being a woman asking him to speak without ego about something it seems he’s tied his identity to. I can gather this from the way the rest of the night the phrase “socioeconomic” popped into his vocabulary. He used it another six or seven times in the next forty minutes. Each time as part of a clause which spun on the axis of “and I don’t care what you say, it has nothing to do with socio or economic whatever you call it.” Then he’d flourish with some other arrangement of nouns and verbs he thought made his point. I had stopped speaking after the last time he’d cut me off, but he spent the rest of the night circling these sentence fragments and assuring us all - himself included - I was wrong.
He was clearly unhappy I called into question the process by which one deserves to have choice over their own life. It strikes me as supremely insecure to not be able to look one’s luck in the face and call it by name. Things may indeed be the result of his labor, but to what degree was he also inheriting position and power? He points to his assets and calls them his hard work, and indeed for all I know, they may have been; but he speaks as if hard work is reserved for the white collars and not the blue. As if it’s so easy to be at the back of the line and only lack of willpower holds you there…which if it were honestly true, begs the question: why then should he have been so afraid to be nearly displaced and to start over, “with nothing,” farther back in line?
I must admit here to a cloying impotence. I have the sense this investor lives in a walled-off small town, insisting his view of the outside world is complete and accurate. It also feels as though I have traveled through other places he has not been, and when telling him what they are like am not only silenced but gaslit.
It seems only natural that he would disagree, argue even, when I remember that perception is reality and imagine myself in his shoes. But there is so very much at stake by him not leaving his vantage point nor listening to others speak from theirs. My impotence stems from not knowing how, in the short time I shared with him, to succinctly and effectively ask him to believe me. How to trust me for having been to these outside places or to be willing to travel himself to the life of the “other.” It is a simple enough exercise but only possible when your identity doesn’t hold your worldview hostage. When those are linked, traveling this way can feel so daunting as to feel irrational. I know because I have been there. To me, however, not doing it seemed more dangerous.
The world is not for walling ourselves in. Only the most fragile and weak things must do it and surely we are a stronger people than that. But I do not know how to ask people, comfortable in their false refuges, to be brave enough to join us outside in the full world. It is this question which speaks to all the -isms and the roiling troubles of many nations, which was at the heart of this dinner, and for which I have no answer beyond “please.”
The conversation dwindled as the evening grew late. The investor needed to return to his family waiting for him at the hotel. They were all in town from Seattle to see off his daughter. Thank GOD for the opera scholarship, he said, she’ll be costing us so much money otherwise.
Funny how who gets access to the money—given the money really—to study and live like they want is a blessing, a social good even, when it’s people who look like you, and is a thought-policing, politically incorrect social grenade when they don’t.
His daughter is starting at a very expensive private university this week, in LA, where we know housing is at a premium. It is safe to presume she won’t be homeless while doing it.