Residents
Despite the stigma attached to them, dingbats are inhabited by a diverse populace who end up living there as a consequence of any number of circumstances. Some are there as a temporary situation, until superior housing opens up or becomes affordable, and some live in dingbats for years on end. In cities like Vancouver, B.C., however, there is little stigma attached to dingbat living, as the dingbat is present in almost all neighbourhoods of the city regardless of their general socioeconomic class.
Writer Gary Indiana says of L.A. dingbats,
" are not so much déclassé or redolent of actual poverty as they are an architecture of transience, of three-month leases or month-to-month rentals, in some ways ideal for the dicey professions so many Angelenos follow: illegal hair salons, "therapeutic massage" and a spectrum of feast-or-famine jobs in the entertainment industry, from acting to video editing. One can move from dingbat to dingbat on an income scale that slides up and down, and the very flimsiness of these buildings, which are usually supported on stilts on at least one side to make room for carports, encourages the idea that residing in one is invariably temporary, that the people inside are waiting to bottom out and segue to a Skid Row hotel, hoping for the right Richard Neutra to come on the market or looking for something in between—a guesthouse in the hills, a Silver Lake triplex with a long-term lease, a bungalow in Atwater Village."
Read more about this topic: Dingbat (building)
Famous quotes containing the word residents:
“Most of the folktales dealing with the Indians are lurid and romantic. The story of the Indian lovers who were refused permission to wed and committed suicide is common to many places. Local residents point out cliffs where Indian maidens leaped to their death until it would seem that the first duty of all Indian girls was to jump off cliffs.”
—For the State of Iowa, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“In most nineteenth-century cities, both large and small, more than 50 percent—and often up to 75 percent—of the residents in any given year were no longer there ten years later. People born in the twentieth century are much more likely to live near their birthplace than were people born in the nineteenth century.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)