Abstract
Weirdness is not a criterion many sociologists use when selecting their cases. Plenty of us study the marginal or the extreme in order to get some purchase on social processes that would be difficult to see if we were looking at something more modal. But weird cases—the ones that don’t fit with established theory and make us question our own senses—can be highly useful. They push us to reevaluate baseline assumptions and reveal how contingency is often missing from static models. They are also fun.
John Joe Schlichtman’s Showroom City: Real Estate and Resistance in the Furniture Capital of the World is a fun book with a weird case. Its subject is High Point, North Carolina, a city of around 100,000 that bills itself as the “Furniture Capital of the World.” High Point doesn’t make much furniture—at least not anymore. While it was once a manufacturing hub, deindustrialization and the move of production capital investments to the developing world has left it factory-less. Yet it has retained its moniker and not gone the way of other depressed mill towns. Why? The book details how the transformation of High Point’s downtown into a series of furniture showrooms essentially saved it from total decline. The weird part is that these showrooms, and the downtown more generally, are vacant 50 weeks of the year. The other two weeks they are filled by a biannual furniture festival, which briefly enlivens the space and is the major economic engine that keeps much of the city going.
Schlichtman has spent two decades studying High Point. This includes years of ethnographic observations, working in High Point for two years in various furniture industry and non-furniture industry jobs, and over 100 interviews with local civic leaders, residents, visitors who come for the furniture festival, and urban planners. There are also analyses of land use history and local newspaper reporting. All of this work shows; the book is an exhaustive account of High Point’s historical development and present-day growth politics. Schlichtman is to be commended since deep-dive studies like Showroom City aren’t easy to pull off.
The book is populated by a large cast of individuals, firms, and civic groups who benefit from High Point’s position in the global commodity chain as well as those who don’t. Local politicians and world-famous planners—Andrés Duany is a main voice in High Point’s recent planning—share their ideas about the future of the city. What becomes clear is that there is a profound tension between those who want to keep High Point as a showroom city (mostly those who own the downtown real estate) and permanent residents who would like to have a more typically functioning downtown. Civic leaders are generally caught in the middle, offering confused ideas that often default to the benefit of capital. But it is this overall friction between use and exchange that draws out the book’s most fascinating contributions.
Indeed, High Point confounds. Its downtown looks new, gleaming, and clean with a great deal of capital from across the world pouring in to maintain it. As of the writing of the book, “the private equity firm Blackstone Group owns a majority of downtown” (p. 15). Yet there are no pedestrians, no cafes or restaurants, no public spaces in which locals can sit, walk their dogs, or play games. The real estate surrounding downtown—where permanent residents live—is losing value and seems to be in danger of becoming derelict. Can a place be gentrified if there are no gentrifiers present? Can a place be economically dynamic but socially ossified? Crummy fast food chains with cracked asphalt parking lots are not supposed to abut architecturally ambitious glass and steel office and exhibition buildings. And yet this is how life in High Point goes—its weirdness is on full display.
To make sense of these seeming contradictions, Schlichtman draws on sociology, geography, history, and even architectural theory. In earlier parts of the book where he traces High Point’s development, Schlichtman shows that the region’s history of furniture manufacturing was an obvious strategic advantage, allowing it to beat back challenges from Chicago and Dallas, which were also seeking to be the centers of the furniture market. High Point’s proximity to manufacturers meant that transportation costs were negligible. But there’s more to it than path dependence; there’s also the will to profit. As Schlichtman notes, “When High Point leaders got nervous about their market position vis-à-vis other cities, they built” (p. 76). Throughout the 1960s, local furniture businesses constructed bigger and bigger showrooms, turning the city’s downtown into a glass case that’s almost always empty.
The descriptions of High Point throughout the book make it sound like EPCOT. But if the city is a theme park, what about the workers that keep it going? The book documents how a decades-long focus on the few weeks of the year when thousands of furniture industry visitors descend has warped permanent residents’ sense of time and opportunities for employment. Their ability to reproduce themselves is structured by the showroom, meaning the time in between furniture festivals is somewhat aimless and financially precarious. Collective efforts to shift the built environment of High Point—and also the temporal rhythm of life in it—to cater more to permanent residents have emerged in fits and starts over the last 20 years. And Schlichtman is cautiously optimistic about these plans and the city's future, arguing that a new generation of civic leaders has learned the lesson that “without strong action their downtown economy would consistently encourage the extraction of a community’s wealth for the benefit of a select few” (p. 316). I’m not sure Blackstone can be easily defeated, especially when there are so many differing alternative visions of the future of downtown, which are documented in the book’s last two empirical chapters. But I’ll defer to Schlichtman since what is absolutely clear is his knowledge of and care for High Point.
Showroom City makes some key interventions into the sociology of real estate. In particular, it explicates the relationship between small cities and broader market forces, revealing that the meaning of community is contingent on “glocal” factors of local history and global capital. It will hopefully encourage more studies of weird places. In the book’s forward, the great Harvey Molotch writes, “I have never been to High Point, but this book makes me want to go, just to see a thing like this could be in the world” (p. vii). When I finished the book, I felt the same way—here’s to the weird!