Thread by @LarryGlickman

Would love to know more about the history of housing values in Port Washington, where Scaramucci, described in this piece as the "working-class Italian American kid," grew up. /1
wapo.st/scaramucci

According to Wikipedia (citing Forbes), it is "the 418th wealthiest place in the United States as of 2017, with a median home sale price of $1,191,865."/2

In most of the profiles I've read of him, Scaramucci describes his upbringing as "middle class" and says his father paid for his private university education at Tufts. /3

According to the Mooch, his non-college educated father worked at Gotham Sand and Stone for 42 years and his Mom was a homemaker. /4

Today, it would be hard to imagine a single-breadwinner, working-class family affording a "middle class" lifestyle, including a home in an affluent area with great public schools and the ability to pay for expensive private college./5

Again, I haven't done the research, but my strong guess is that the Mooch (born 1964) and his family benefited from the strong public spending regime (funded by progressive taxation) during the era of what historians call the "New Deal order," which lasted through the 1970s. /6

These largely segregated suburbs, whose infrastructure, including home mortgages, was often publicly subsidized, helped enable the social mobility of the sort that Scaramucci experienced. /7

Scaramucci noted: "Ken Langone and I participated in that sand miner’s monument as you head into Roslyn dedicated to the Italian, Welsh, Polish and Irish immigrants who came to Long Island to dig out the sand bank."/8
libn.com/2016/03/30/qa-…