Guys in Basements

This week a few colleagues and I met with our local county planning board to look at the changing demographics of the area. We meet with them once or twice a year, usually getting answers to questions from the previous visit and posing a bunch of new ones. As a recovering social scientist, I probably ask the most questions, but they’re good sports about humoring me.  

For context, Monmouth County has a staggering disconnect between local salaries and local housing costs.  It’s the New York City effect. We have folks who commute northward to the CIty, and we have some very wealthy folks in the City who have summer homes here. That bids up the cost of housing far beyond what local jobs pay. It also creates a certain volatility in the cost of housing, because when an area gets popular among the very wealthy, money bulldozes its way in. That’s happening now in Asbury Park and Long Branch.  

Our students aren’t typically from the families buying luxury condos as summer homes. Our students are typically the ones whose families are being squeezed by the cost increases attendant to gentrification.

My question to the planning board folks the last time we met was about those families.  When new money comes in and bids up costs, where do the displaced people go?

The answer, at least for now, is invisible in the statistics.  Far fewer people seem to have left than one would have thought.  And counter to the popular narrative about people fleeing New Jersey because of high taxes, rates of out-migration were twice as high among the poor as among the wealthy.  It’s apparently a great place to be rich.

I was struck by how difficult it is, using very good numbers and with the best of intentions, to figure out just where people went.  It matters because I want to make sure that we’re providing classes and training where the people who need them are likely to be; if they’re moving, we may need to move, too.

Never one to be satisfied with only one dilemma, I threw out another one.  We know that there are what I think of as “guys in basements” in the community: men in their 20’s and early 30’s who are underemployed, a little directionless, and living with their parents. These are the men who, two generations ago, would have found well-paying unionized factory work, gotten married, bought houses, and raised kids. Those jobs are mostly gone now, and the ones that still exist have protected incumbents at the expense of newcomers, effectively shutting out anyone who didn’t get in years ago.  These guys aren’t temperamentally inclined to do the academic route -- if they were, they would have -- but they don’t really have a better idea, either. So they wait, biding their time for something good to happen by living at a home they couldn’t afford on their own.

Right now, they mostly avoid community college.  As I’ve mentioned before, the gender skew in our “over-22” age bracket is dramatically female.  If we don’t get the guys within a year or two of high school, generally speaking, we don’t get them at all.  

These guys -- to be fair, it isn’t only men, but that’s the missing group in our enrollments -- are hard to reach.  Their connections to institutions other than their families tend to be attenuated at best. And even if we reach them, we need to offer them something they’d find sufficiently appealing to risk trusting an educational institution.  

But my first question was, where are they? I’m looking forward to the answer to that one.

My question for my wise and worldly readers is slightly different. I assume that some colleges out there have been more successful at reaching the “guys in basements.”  What worked? Or, for those lovingly attached to guys in basements, what do you think would work? From a social science perspective, I’m aware that bad things happen when lots of young men are left directionless and frustrated; they’re easy prey for hucksters.  Also from a social science perspective, I’m aware of the positive effects on communities when young men get good jobs and go from “boyfriend material” to “husband material.” And from a college perspective, this is a group we haven’t served as well as we should. Any help cracking the case would be appreciated!