bagnews on housing meltdown
One of my favorite stops in Left Blogistan is BagNewsNotes. Michael Shaw, the site's proprietor, is a clinical psychologist and a keen observer of the visual media. I've been commenting there on and off for years and recently tuned back in for his take on the big national conventions, because I didn't think I could trust my own take on the imagery I was seeing.
Today there's a post up commenting on this NY Times article on Merced, CA and the effect the housing crash has had on there. It boomed the highest and went bust the highest, with crazy numbers of foreclosures now underway. I saw this pic and was moved to comment:
The last picture is especially haunting. For me it evokes jim kunstler's "Geography of Nowhere". The cul-de-sac really is a dead end, the symbol of the idyllic suburban lifestyle grown cancerous. Master-planned developments, designed by companies with transparently bogus names like "Toll Brothers", ensure through a fractal complexity that everyone can live on a cul-de-sac. But when the fuel runs out -- and these things run off a volatile, too-rich mixture of cheap oil, subprime lending and short-sighted greed -- this is what we're left with. Ugly, blighted, useless asphalt that goes noplace and does nothing: the true face of a new American landscape.
Comments
What will happen is that human settlement will continue contracting back toward urban cores, and these once-farmlands will be reclaimed by nature, giving the cities greenbelts, or they'll be appropriated as community agriculture, providing valuable nutrition and education resources to urban residents.
Bill Clinton on the Daily Show put it well.