I’ve been going on little walks since freshman year. I might be gone for 10 minutes or an hour because I’m never actually going anywhere. I’ll wander aimlessly through the Old North End listening to half a podcast, turning back towards campus when I get hungry or bored. My little walks have been a comfort, a coping mechanism, a form of escape that I have always clung to. My dependency has been exacerbated by the pandemic. The landscape hasn’t changed much in the past couple of years, except for this fall when yard signs suddenly became prolific.
Make America Great Again signs, which feel old. Biden signs. Biden flags, which feel new. Yards with signs imploring passersby to vote one way or another on a state proposition, signs explaining local propositions. Lawns littered with signs for down-ballot candidates, sometimes including every single seat up for election, right down to county commissioner. I’m a senior Political Science major, and I’m still not quite sure what they do and why we vote for them.
There are signs that emphasize the slog this year has been: Fauci 2020, Any Functioning Adult for 2020, Nobody, Everybody Sucks, We’re Screwed 2020. These I find flippant, absurd. Plenty of people thought Grab Him by the Ballot was clever enough to earn a place on their lawns. There’s a couple of Byedon signs — a riff on the name Biden that is so much of a stretch I had to say it aloud a few times to figure out what it means.
One enormous house on a corner, with a fence so tall it would obstruct any potential yard signage, flies a Trump flag from a twenty-foot pole.
Driving home from King Soopers, I saw a slew of anti-abortion signs along a stretch of busy road that backed into brush. Only when I tried to figure out how I could take them down (Sprinting across the street during a lull in traffic? Pulled over with hazards on? In the middle of the night?) did I realize how much effort it must have been to put them there in the first place.
Yard signs advertising political candidates have been around since the 1800s — John Quincy Adams was the first presidential candidate to use them for an election. They boost name recognition and can be a worthwhile fundraising tool but aren’t all that effective at swaying results. A 2015 study found that yard signs could (at most) give candidates a 1.7 percentage point boost. In qualitative terms: not a very big one. In a presidential election, it’s highly unlikely that a yard sign (clever, or not, or trying to be) would swing an observant pedestrian’s vote. But with an election as fraught as 2020’s, it’s not surprising that folks are taking to their lawns. What is surprising is the variety of signs I saw walking around the Old North End.
Most neighborhoods in cities tend to be politically segregated. Much of this has to do with forced racial segregation, the product of decades of racist housing policies. But this alone cannot account for partisanship along neighborhood lines: there is evidence that people’s lifestyle preferences — such as employment, school choice, and recreation — affect where people choose, if they have a choice, to live.
I grew up in Washington, D.C., a city that overwhelmingly fits these trends. Biden easily won the city’s three (granted, measly and inconsequential) electoral votes by 92%. I knew approximately zero vocal Republicans growing up, but that’s not to say that they didn’t exist. The point is, if you are conservative in D.C., you likely aren’t going to advertise it. Certainly not on your front lawn.
D.C. is also one of the most rapidly gentrifying cities in the country. Since 2000, more than 20,000 people have been forced to move from their neighborhoods due to rising property taxes and rent. Public funds have been poured into “revitalization” efforts, mostly commercial and residential real estate developments, across the city. At the same time, little has been done to address the high rates of displacement, a direct result of these initiatives. The city government, cozy with developers, continues to fail to provide adequate and affordable housing for many of D.C.’s long term residents.
The neighborhood I grew up in has been majority white for decades, ever since the federal government displaced the then-integrated community to redevelop the land in 1926, less than a hundred years ago.
Exclusionary housing policies have endured. In 2017, a city proposal to build transitional housing in the area was met with significant backlash. The building was eventually opened in 2020, after negotiation with existing community members placed increasing restrictions on the structure and its residents.
This isn’t unique to D.C.; systemic housing inequality has shaped how and where people live across the country since its founding. Today this is often fueled by a largely white, wealthy antagonism towards affordable housing. And while the majority of city-dwellers tend to be liberal, the “Not In My Backyard” phenomenon persists.
In every way, my neighborhood in D.C. is visibly more uniform than the Old North End. Each street is dizzyingly similar, each house a red brick colonial, most yards featuring signs with liberal affirmations that are some spin on the same message: All Are Welcome Here.
Given the history of the neighborhood and its current demographics, I find these signs to be one of the laziest statements a person could make. You don’t need a lot of time or energy, you just kind of stick it where you want. As a form of performative allyship, it’s about as impermanent as you can get. Signs leave no lasting trace: a manicured lawn will be just as manicured when the signs have been removed. At least bumper stickers show more resolve — then you have to contend with scratched paint.
Even when signs have been stuck in the ground, they don’t really seem to mean anything. Sure, you can say anything. Yard signs now aren’t just limited to candidates or ballot measures. Allyship signs allow people to publicly profess their values, cement allegiances, declare what they claim to think and feel. These have ostensibly nothing to do with voting (which is okay!), but there’s nothing tangible about these signs. Okay, I see that your lawn ornament states in a confusing array of fonts: Black Lives Matter Women’s Rights are Human Rights No Human is Illegal Science is Real Love is Love Kindness is Everything. But as statements smushed together on a piece of reinforced cardboard, it just seems like a self-aggrandizing move to prove you have surpassed the lowest bar in the world: you believe in human rights.
This statement seems especially performative when all of your neighbors are doing it too, when it’s the neighborhood norm, the unspoken status quo. In my neighborhood in D.C., yard signs professing allyship stand in stark contrast to the vocal hostility to adding affordable housing in the neighborhood, despite the high need across the city. It’s like using a leaf blower to move debris off your lawn into the street. It sure makes your yard look nice, but you’re ultimately just contributing to a mess that someone else has to clean up.
So what does it mean to put a sign proclaiming that iN tHiS HoUsE wE BeLiEvE that you don’t care where your neighbor comes from or love <3 wins?
I think it does mean more when your neighbors aren’t all on the same page. In the Old North End, some sign placements seem more intentional — reactionary, even.
One yard offers a homemade sign that reads: My Biden Sign Was Stolen But My Vote Wasn’t.
A house with a Pride flag draped across its front sits opposite one flying a MAGA flag, in an emblematic show-down.
There are still full yards that say very little. There’s Better Together, which makes no sense to me since, in this particular moment, we should all be taking steps to be apart. There’s a house with a BLM sign placed right next to a CSPD sign, which feels the same to me as putting no signs up at all, since the statements cancel each other out.
On one block, every single house has gotten in on the game. A sign in support of the CSPD is flanked by a Black Lives Matter sign next door. The alternating allegiances continue with every other house, where CSPD signs mingle with those that have more liberal commitments. The whole thing is comically tit for tat. The house at the end of the block had a yard sign asking dogs to Please Not Shit Here, as if they wanted to get in on the game but didn’t want to make too strong of a statement. Apolitical enough to get invited to all the potlucks.
In the Old North End, certain signs have been cropping up that seem to have more depth. Signs that all start with “I am ready” and continue with statements like “to engage in the work to uproot, dismantle, and end racism” or “ to tell the truth and hear the truth.” These signs are made by Truth and Conciliation, a Colorado Springs organization committed to dismantling systemic racism. These signs stuck out to me because the language is active and personal, when so many other slogans sound passive and removed. I thought that folks who chose these signs would be willing to talk to me, so I left notes at their houses. Only one person got back to me, an older white man who didn’t want his name to be published, and we spoke over the phone. His sign read: I am ready … To transform our nation for all our relations and generations to come.
I told him I was interested in the assortment of signs in the neighborhood and what a stark contrast it was from my own back home in D.C. I wondered if he had put his signs up because of this variety. “Our signs aren’t up favorably or antagonistically,” he said, “it’s just sort of our statement. We tend to be private people. We are in our mid-sixties and this is the first year we’ve had a sign up in 40 years of marriage.”
So why this particular sign? “In part because of the election and because of Black Lives Matter, I don’t want to call it a movement, but an awareness that, to these white eyes, are a bit more evident. That’s not the word I want to use, but I’m not sure. We’ve both been in the military and we believe in protecting all Americans. Was it [the sign] a promise to myself? I think so. We’ve talked more with neighbors and family. Contributed way more financially and wrote more to elected officials. We need to do a lot more than we’ve been doing. We work full time, so it’s difficult to contribute time.”
On whether he would take the signs down after the election: “None of our signs are affiliated with a political party. They will come down when they are tattered and worn out. To be replaced with what, I’m not quite sure.”
I got to hear about this particular man’s intent, and some of it surprised me. I’ve spent this whole time belabouring the timidity of yard signs, but here is someone for whom putting up a yard sign took a lot. Some of the things he said reminded me of a lot of the people I grew up with in D.C., who contribute financially to liberal causes and express their tolerance publicly on their lawns, but whose work ends there. An article I’ve been citing throughout this piece is entitled “Liberal Guilt is Official’s Latest Tool to Build More Affordable Housing in D.C.’s Wealthiest Ward.”
This declaration (which almost reads like a headline from The Onion), might signify a possibility—and starkly highlight the need—for more tangible change. This man knew that he had been falling short, a sentiment I think many white liberals would be quick to agree with. If yard signs do indicate the motivation to do something more tangible, how can that energy be appropriately leveraged towards action?