Virginia Postrel
As Plano Goes…
… so goes the nation? Commentators around the country have been debating that for months. If only they understood what the booming Dallas suburb is really like.
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Despite its income statistics, Plano is no isolated enclave, and most residents are fairly typical of the broad middle class—so much so that businesses that aim too far upmarket can get in trouble. When the Shops at Willow Bend opened in 2001, featuring stores like Escada and Armani, Planoites stayed away. “[Developers] found out that fashionable women in Plano shopped very happily at Kohl’s and Stein Mart,” Hunter explains. “Even the more affluent pockets of Plano are still to a great extent working-class. They’re just a more affluent section of working-class.”
If you measure class in dollars, that may sound delusional, which is why Hunter laughs after she says it, revising it to “middle class.” What she means is Planoites work for a living, and they have middle-class attitudes. Indeed, Plano made national business headlines this March when Wal-Mart—a place no self-respecting member of the coastal elite would enter—opened a prototype store there (“Shabby Chic,” June 2006). “If plasma TVs, microbrewery beer and fancy balsamic vinegar sell in Plano, those items could turn up in other affluent communities,” explained an Associated Press story. Reporting from the Wal-Mart, Washington Post style wag Hank Stuever described Plano as “embodying everything both dreamily enviable and vaguely unnerving about modern paradise.”
That’s not to say that Plano is untouched by social snobbery. “People of Plano would often decide your class on which part of the city you lived in,” says a former resident who now lives in Austin. “Plano had an extremely snotty side to it that really got to us as kids growing up there.” But everything is relative. Hunter’s husband, John, who was one of the few kids at Highland Park High School with an after-school job, says he appreciates his new hometown because it lacks the Park Cities’ old-money “culture of entitlement.”
In fact, Plano boomed because it’s cheap—the Stein Mart of towns. It allows residents to live a scaled-up, globalized version of the family-centered life of the postwar suburbs, a twenty-first-century Wonder Years. While you can find a $7 million estate in Plano, you can also buy a perfectly reasonable vintage ranch house, possibly with a pool, for less than $200,000. From that address, you can send your kids to excellent public schools. By contrast, on Kaus’s modest street in Venice, a tiny two-bedroom, one-bath bungalow was recently on the market for $754,000, making it one of the cheapest houses in the area (and the schools are lousy).
The economics of Plano change the sociology and the politics. Plano is more conservative than Silicon Valley at least in part because its cheap real estate and good public schools support a more traditional lifestyle. Many families don’t need a second income to live a comfortable middle-class life. Mothers can stay at home or work, often part-time, for personal fulfillment and luxuries like family vacations. These educated women also provide a safety net in hard times, like the tech crash. You don’t have to be work-obsessed to live in Plano, and at least in some circles, a work-oriented life seems rather eccentric. Life is about family, friends, and church.
For outsiders like Kaus and Rich, the area’s most important social networks are the hardest to understand: Plano’s ubiquitous churches. Religious practice is an unquestioned part of the background of life and a source of friends and meaningful activities for both parents and kids, just as it was in old-time Peoria. “Youth group is a great way for a preteen to stay busy and not be bored and thinking up things he can do,” says Stacey Lanius, who belongs to the same midsized Methodist church as the Hunters. She contrasts Plano with Fresno, California, where she spent most of her childhood. In California, her friends would say, “You go to church ? That’s something my grandmother does.”
Plano residents tend to assume that everyone belongs to a religious congregation—if not Christian, then possibly Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist—because that’s the normal thing to do, and the city’s religious marketplace, like its food markets, has something to suit every taste. Asking a new acquaintance what church he attends, or even inviting him to come to church with you, is meant to be innocuous, says Lanius’s husband, John, a lawyer. “It’s not so much evangelizing as it is networking.”
So, as Kaus suspected, Plano’s culture is, generally, tolerant. Most Planoites would never ostracize the irreligious, if only because that wouldn’t be polite. But they also don’t really understand resolutely secular people—just as the New York Times has trouble grasping that smart, good-hearted, well-educated people can be conservative Christians. Cosmopolitanism, in both varieties, has its limits.
Where are those limits in Plano when it comes to gay rights? That’s the question that started the whole debate.
Here, again, Kaus and Rich are both right and both wrong. They are right that most Planoites are not, in Kaus’s words, “wildly exercised about sodomy.” These solidly conservative, mostly Christian families are not about to launch a pogrom against their gay neighbors. “I have yet to know somebody on finding out that an educator or volunteer was gay in Plano to say, ‘Oh, gosh, I can’t have them working with my child,’” Kelly Hunter says. “I have known them to say that about the mom who drinks before she goes some place.” By the standards of twenty years ago, and certainly by those of Peoria, Planoites are positively accepting.
But not persecuting gays is not the same as treating them as social equals who can marry, raise children, and walk down the street holding hands without risking opprobrium. Plano is a “don’t ask, don’t tell” place. Gays are welcome as colleagues and neighbors, as long as they’re discreet enough that the kids don’t notice anything unusual. Even a lawn sign opposing an anti-gay-marriage ballot measure can qualify as “broadcasting” if it leads a five-year-old to ask uncomfortable questions about the couple down the block.
Plano residents aren’t “wildly exercised about sodomy,” notes a gay friend who last year moved from Dallas to Los Angeles, “but most anti-gay people aren’t. They are wildly concerned with making sure their kids never hear the word ‘sodomy’; never ask, ‘Mommy, what’s a drag queen?’; and never have to deal with anything even remotely related to sex. Ever. Period. Until they are eighteen. If then.”
He exaggerates, of course. But Plano parents want to determine when and where they talk to their kids about sex, and they assume that explaining that some men fall in love with other men is “about sex.”
“We don’t have control over a whole lot in the world, but hopefully the education of our children is part of it,” Hunter says. “We don’t live in a bubble, but we’d like to live in a reasonably safe place.”
Gay-rights advocates who want to make progress rather than merely excite their base (or, in Rich’s case, simultaneously scare and flatter their readers) need to figure out how to make their cause play in the new Peoria. Brokeback Mountain is indeed ratifying a revolution. But in child-centered Plano, its subject matter is still rated R.
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