Empty seats and empty houses

“I’m not technically rich, but I do have a lot of [stuff] that I don’t need and I refuse to share with others.” — Maria Bamford

I can tell you precisely when it was that I learned the true meaning of wealth. It was 1:45 a.m. on Saturday, July 3, 1993.

I was at Veterans Stadium, watching a ball game.

The San Diego Padres were in town to play the Phillies on the last stop of their last East Coast road trip of the season. The first game of the series got rained out and rescheduled as part of a double-header the next day.

But it was still raining the next day. Hard. The first game was delayed for hours. It was supposed to start at 4:45 p.m. but didn’t start until an hour after that, and then didn’t end until 1 a.m. By then the rain had stopped.

The start time for the second game scrolled across the bottom of the TV screen: 1:25 a.m.

I read that in a bar in King of Prussia. I got in the car.

I arrived around the middle of the second inning. Parking was free and you didn’t need a ticket. You just walked in.

“Where do we sit?”

“Wherever you like.”

But it turns out that wasn’t quite true. The corporate box seats — the best seats at the Vet, closest to the field — were still off limits.

After the bars closed in South Philly at 2 a.m., thousands more people filled the stands to watch this surreal game played in the middle of the night.

And of course the game went extra innings. Phillies closer Mitch Williams drove in the game-winning run in the 10th — Wild Thing’s only hit, and only at-bat, of the season. The game ended at 4:40 a.m.

Wikipedia says there were 6,000 of us there for that game. But for the whole game, those corporate box seats sat empty. All 6,000 of us wound up with great seats, but we weren’t allowed to enjoy the best seats. The best seats had to remain unused.

Because that’s what big-time wealth means. That’s what it means to be the kind of people who own the best seats and the best everything else. It doesn’t just mean that what they get is better than what everyone else gets. It also means that no one else can use it, even when they’re not.

Diane Sweet describes the same thing here: “3.5 Million Homeless and 18.5 Million Vacant Homes in the US.” Sweet quotes from Amnesty International’s call for a moratorium on foreclosures:

Since 2007, banks have foreclosed around eight million homes. It is estimated that another eight to ten million homes will be foreclosed before the financial crisis is over. This approach to resolving one part of the financial crisis means many, many families are living without adequate and secure housing. In addition, approximately 3.5 million people in the U.S. are homeless, many of them veterans. It is worth noting that, at the same time, there are 18.5 million vacant homes in the country.