Poor Little Rich Folks

A good friend of mine has her own architecture firm in New York, and much of the time, she says, she’s basically a therapist. She gently guides her clients through the psychic crucible of their town house renovations and ground-up Hamptons construction, trying to make sure they suffer no mental breakdowns in the process. This is the emotionally fraught life event that the sociologist Rachel Sherman in her book Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence chooses to focus on. In particular, and with what she describes as considerable difficulty, she found 50 young New York parents and interviewed them about their renovations as a way to see what they thought about their wealth—or at least how they talk about it.

It’s a good time to be rich in New York. Tax rates are historically low, so is crime, and the White House is occupied by the most pro-wealthy-person president ever elected. The costly renovations that many of Sherman’s subjects describe are to combine two or three presumably already very nice apartments into one, yet the author finds these people wracked with doubt. On one level, this isn’t surprising, because they’re human beings (and New Yorkers). Sherman’s goal, though, is to find out what is distinctive about their neuroses. “Although images of the wealthy proliferate in the media, we know very little about what it is like to be wealthy in the current historical moment,” she writes.