A couple weeks back, a lady came into my work and bought $40 worth of salmon so her dog could eat fresh fish on his second birthday.

In a few months, the 200 residents of the Mellott Trailer Home Park on North Atherton will be forced to relocate, as the owner feels the land could be better used for commercial development.

I can't help but think the two are related.

America's great, inasmuch as people can spend their money on whatever they please, be it Schnauzer-sized party hats or $600 Playstations. And I've sat in front of enough SimCity in my day to know that commercial property is much more of a boon to local economy than low-income housing. But when you live in a place where one person can drop nearly a full Grant on fish for her dog and 200 people with semi-portable housing are being swept away by a Fuddrucker's and a Kitchens, Etc., there seems to be an imbalance, right?

Though it stands in sharp contrast with their tolerance for errant beer cans in their lawns, most State College residents are accustomed to a fairly high standard of living. We have upscale clothing boutiques peppering the taverns downtown, several hundred jewelry stores somehow surviving in the otherwise paltry Nittany Mall, and, yes, at least one very high-end grocery store catering to all your canine culinary needs. As students living, like so many of us do, in overpriced, centrally located, Miller Lite-soaked squalor - it's sometimes easy to forget there's a town here with people in it.

But sometimes, I think it's even easier for a great deal of the people in the town to forget that the folks who check their oil or rent them DVDs live in State College, too.

When one of the most affordable options for family living in town goes away, where exactly do those people end up?

Many of the folks in the Mellott Trailer Park either walk or take public transportation to work, and for them, relocating may also mean finding new employment. And many of the trailers have been in the same spot for years now, meaning a relocation will require them to make new housing arrangements. All that, because State College, a town with a Chili's, an Applebee's and a Ruby Tuesday, needs a Bennigan's, and it needs it now.

But it's a terrible catch-22; when the more affluent State College residents squeeze out those less well-off, who will serve the affluent? If there's no affordable housing for low-wage workers in town, how will the new Bennigan's get its dishes washed or its trash taken out? It's a crime that the hardest jobs in our country are often left to those willing to work for the least amount of money, but to further insult the working class by replacing their homes with businesses which they likely could not patronize is far worse.

I don't begrudge the lady her well-fed dog unless she's stepping on someone to get Bowser his yum-yums (although I do think, when people are starving and there's a sale on Alpo, Bowser's got it a little too good). But the residents of Mellott - our fellow citizens - are being stepped on in favor of those with money to burn. And, in a town holding its own without all the added luxury an Old Navy might provide, displacing 200 of our friends and neighbors for the sake of commerce seems to me like bad business.