“INVESTMENT CULTURE:” How EVERYTHING has become “an asset” (and why it feels like NOTHING belongs to us anymore)

I hope anyone out there reading this had a good Thanksgiving holiday. Winter has arrived: yesterday was the 1^st snow, and today-the last day of November-the temps have plummeted into the teens. I haven’t posted here since November 2nd, right after the Garage Betrayal.

Part of that silence was the move. Part of it was exhaustion. A big part of it was depression. But the biggest part of it was this weird sense that what happened with the garage—this supposedly small, local, bureaucratic thing—was actually connected to something much bigger that’s been gnawing at me for years. Its the same thing that’s made the city I so loved decades ago unlivable today, the same thing that’s made anything and everything so expensive that just daily living feels like its becoming almost impossible.

It’s not just about zoning and compliance forms. It’s about why it’s harder and harder for working-class weirdos to have any space—physical or mental—for our hobbies and obsessions. It’s about why the garage went away, why the toy aisle feels like a Wall Street pit, and why a grown adult can’t just collect slot cars and Hot Wheels without competing with people who treat everything like a side hustle.

That’s what I’m calling investment culture.

And no, I’m not claiming I invented the phrase. I’m sure it’s floating around out there already. But I’m going to try to make it do some work here, because it ties together the garage, the housing mess, the toy car hobby, the vinyl collecting hobby, and the way certain kinds of people talk about “justice” while pricing the rest of us out of our own lives.

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What I Mean by “Investment Culture”

Here’s my working definition:

Investment culture is a way of life where we’re trained to see almost everything—houses, garages, toys, hobbies, even our beliefs—primarily as speculative assets. Use comes second. Profit, status, and “upside” come first.

It’s that instinctive mental pop-up that asks:

• What’s the ROI on this?
• Could this be worth more later?
• How does owning this make me look?

Instead of basic human questions like:

• Is this useful?
• Is this fun?
• Does this actually serve anyone who lives in the real world?

Investment culture is what happens when the logic of a stock portfolio leaks into everything. Housing becomes an “asset class.” A garage becomes “non-conforming use.” Hot Wheels become “chase pieces” with auction comps. Original Aurora slot cars become “investment-grade collectibles.”

Life stops being something you live in and becomes something you curate and “optimize” for a hypothetical future. And as part of all this: beliefs and aesthetics turn into brands.

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The Garage Betrayal as a Crash Course

In my last post, I told the story of losing the garage I’d rented for years. On paper, it was all very boring:

• Landlord.
• Zoning.
• “Compliance issues.”
• Some convenient amnesia about lease history.

In reality, that garage was:

• Where I kept the ’56 I’ve spent years rebuilding with my own hands, alongside friends who are now gone (read: deceased)
• Where tools, parts, and projects piled up in that specific, lived-in way that only gearheads and hobby freaks understand.
• Where I escaped from the craziness of work and responsibility to use my hands and my head on the things that I loved.

It was a working-class kind of space: concrete, dusty, unglamorous—and absolutely essential. To me, it was utility plus meaning. To the people on the other side, looking through the lens of investment culture, it was something else entirely:

• A “liability.”
• A “non-conforming use.”
• A problem on a spreadsheet that needed to be “cleaned up” so the property could be more valuable later.

Notice how the language works:

• I didn’t have a garage; I had “unpermitted storage.”
• I wasn’t a long-time tenant; I was a “risk profile.”
• They weren’t erasing part of my life; they were “bringing the site into compliance.”

Investment culture loves that word: compliance. It sounds neutral and objective, but it almost always points in the same direction: away from messy, low-margin, human uses and toward something profitable—and sterile.

Nobody has to say, “We’re doing this for the money.” Instead, they just say:

• “We’re following regulations.”
• “We’re standardizing.”
• “We’re improving the neighborhood.”

The logic is dressed up as paperwork; the impact is deeply personal.

And the people who lose out? Those people look a lot like me and probably like you: working-class, hobby-obsessed, trying to carve out a little space in a world that keeps tightening around us.

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Slot Cars and Hot Wheels: Working-Class Fun

If you’ve been reading this site for any length of time, you know what my life orbits around:

• HO slot cars.
• Tomy AFX.
• Thunderjets.
• Drag City Raceway, this giant, sprawling diorama in my basement.
• Pegs full of Hot Wheels and Matchbox, baskets full of loose cars, tubs full of parts.

These things were never meant to be rarefied “assets.” They were designed to be:

• Cheap.
• Accessible.
• Durable enough to survive what kids do to toys.

Hot Wheels and Matchbox were the great equalizers: for a buck or less, you could own a car that, in real life, you’d never get within ten feet of. Thunderjets and AFX sets showed up under Christmas trees in houses where nobody was watching their portfolios.

We didn’t talk about “value.” We talked about:

• How fast a car was.
• How well it handled that one tricky corner.
• How cool it looked on the track or in your hand.

Drag City, for me, has always been a love letter to that world: a world where working people could afford to have fun, to build, to play.

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How the Toy Aisle Became a Trading Floor

Now look at what’s happened to the exact same stuff under investment culture.

You walk into a big-box store at opening time and:

• Grown adults are lined up at the toy section like it’s Black Friday for groceries.
• Pegs get stripped in one swoop because there might be a “super” or a “chase” in there.
• You see cars you know will never see a kid’s hand, never mind a track. They’re pre-sold to eBay.

Limited releases drop, and within minutes:

• Flippers have bought multiples.
• Listings are up with a 300% markup.
• Kids (and broke adults) never even knew the things existed.

On the slot car side:

• Old Thunderjets and AFX that once lived rough, glorious lives on basement tracks are vacuum-sealed as “investment-grade” museum pieces.
• New sets get positioned less as toys and more as “collector products.”
• Small manufacturers are forced into short runs, gimmicks, and artificial scarcity just to survive in a market skewed toward speculation.

The whole point of the hobby—cars moving around a track, banging doors on plastic guardrails, sparks in the pickup shoes—gets subordinated to:

• Card condition.
• Blister integrity.
• Recent auction comps.

Investment culture takes a $1 car designed for chaos and turns it into a tiny, four-wheeled financial instrument. It takes a plastic slot chassis and turns it into a commodity. And then everyone pretends to be surprised when the people who actually live this culture—the kids, the working-class adults, the lifers like me—can’t afford half the stuff we used to buy without thinking.

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Vintage Vinyl: Another Symptom

I’m still going to talk about vinyl here and there, but in this world it’s really just another version of the same story.

Records used to be:

• The cheapest way to get a ton of music into your life.
• Something you found in dollar bins and junk shops.
• Accessible even if you were broke.

Now they, too, are:

• “Assets” with catalog numbers and price charts.
• Slabbed, flipped, and flexed on social media.
• Pressed in absurd numbers of variants to feed speculative demand.

But if you squint a little, it’s the same story as the toy aisle and the garage:

• Objects that were meant to be used are turned into things that are meant to be held, traded, and admired from a safe distance.
• The people who built the culture—punks, weirdos, obsessive hobbyists—get outbid by people who like the idea of the culture more than actually living in it.

Vinyl is just investment culture at 12 inches. Hot Wheels are investment culture at 1:64. Slot cars are investment culture at HO scale, screaming around a plastic curve.

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“Luxury Beliefs” as the Moral Costume

There’s another term that folds into this same concept: “luxury beliefs.” This describes high-status opinions that sound compassionate, but the implementation costs other people more than they cost the person supporting them.

As I see it, luxury beliefs live inside investment culture. They’re the moral costume worn over the financial behavior.

• Luxury beliefs = the things they say to feel virtuous.
• Investment culture = the things they actually do to stay comfortable.

You see it when:

• People talk about “community” and “equity” while investing in the very trends that make actual community spaces impossible to maintain.
• People wring their hands about “kids these days” being glued to screens while adults are strip-mining the toy aisles for profit.
• Cities, developers, and management companies wrap everything in the language of safety, fairness, and progress while bulldozing the last cheap homes, garages, and storefronts where working-class fun used to thrive.

In that sense, the people who talk the most about justice and fairness are often the most influential practitioners of investment culture.

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What Got Lost (And Why I’m Still Angry)

Just to be clear: I’m not a communist or a socialist. I’m not against saving or investing. I’m not against people planning for the future or trying to avoid poverty, and I’m not against making money. I’m not calling for some noble return to living cash-only on a dirt floor.

What I’m angry about is this:

• We’ve lost the ability to let use value be enough.
• We’ve lost the idea that a space or object can have value simply because it’s used, loved, and shared—even if it’s not the most “profitable” way to deploy it.
• We’ve allowed the portfolio mindset to colonize everything and then call itself “equity” or “sustainability” or “justice.”

That garage was never anybody’s idea of a premier asset. It was something better: a place where a working-class hobbyist could keep a big, impractical dream alive.

The toy cars—Hot Wheels, Matchbox, Thunderjets, AFX—they’re not just collectibles. They’re equipment for joy. They’re the raw material of Drag City, of the stories and races and photos that end up on this site.

Investment culture looks at all of that and asks:

• How can we monetize this?
• How can we optimize this?
• How can we secure our upside?

And every time that question wins, something gets erased:

• A garage.
• A local hobby shop.
• A cheap apartment with a track in the spare room.
• A kid in the toy aisle who never even sees the cool stuff because it never makes it to the shelf.

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Why I’m Writing This Now

So why break the silence now, after the move, after the garage is gone?

Because I finally have a name for the thing that’s been humming under all these smaller stories: investment culture.

When I write about:

• Drag City and all the work it takes to build and rebuild it,
• The increasingly insane price of vintage slot cars and diecasts,
• The way physical space for hobbies keeps getting squeezed,
• The feeling of being pushed out of your own city,

…this is the lens I’m going to be using.

The questions I keep coming back to are:

• Who gets to treat life as a portfolio?
• Who gets frozen out when everything becomes an “asset”?
• What happens to the people who just want a garage, a basement, a workspace, and a place to build a track and race toy cars around a loop?

I don’t have a neat ending for this. There’s no “10 steps to reclaim your joy” here. Mostly, I just want to name the thing that’s been tightening its grip on everything I care about.

Investment culture is the invisible story behind a lot of visible ones: the Garage Betrayal, the pre-dawn peg hunters, the insane auction prices on old Aurora stuff, the disappearing places where regular people used to build their own worlds, either at 1:64 scale or at 1:1.

If there’s a point to this post, it’s probably this:

• Not everything we love has to justify itself as an investment.
• Some things should be allowed to just belong to us.

And maybe the most radical thing we can do, in a world like this, is to defend that idea—to keep claiming spaces, objects, and little plastic cars as lived realities, not speculative chips in somebody else’s game.

I don’t know what the future holds anymore. I’m balancing the yearning to leave this place that investment culture has turned into something I don’t recognize and don’t like, against the realities of my age, my skills, and my vocation. This may be the biggest decision I’ll ever make, and it may also be the last big one. All of that can make Drag City—and this blog about it—feel like background noise lately.

But the track’s not dead yet.

The holiday season is here, and I’ll be headed home for some long discussions with my family to see what choices make sense. In the meantime, I’ll post here whenever I have something worth sharing about the thing this site is supposed to be about.

As for you, dear readers: take care, and have fun whenever and wherever you can. You never know when it might end.