Summer,
2017
By Stephen Hren
25 April, 2007
Countercurrents.org
It
would have been impossible to convince anyone ten years ago that such
would be the case, but the sprawling tract housing that surrounds most
of America's cities has been almost completely abandoned. It all started
to happen ten years ago this summer, when the so-called subprime mortgage
crisis spread into other housing sectors. Climbing oil prices, now understood
to be caused by the peaking of worldwide oil supplies at the time, made
interest rates start on a steady upward trend. Millions of middle class
American families who were just scraping by saw the payments on their
adjustable rate mortgages inch ever upward and beyond their means.
Some of these homes were
selling for over half a million dollars, with large numbers of so called
McMansions, homogenous, quickly-built, and heavily fossil fuel dependent,
selling for millions. Many of these homes now fetch only a few thousand
dollars. Usually they are disassembled and sold for whatever scrap can
be salvaged.
The problem began when the
heavy string of foreclosures left many suburban homes on the market
at the same time that gas prices were creeping ever upward, making them
unattractive. Many people could not sell their homes for less than what
they still owed. Oftentimes this was close to the original sale price;
a price almost no one was willing to pay anymore.
With almost unnerving predictability,
once more than half the homes in a given neighborhood were on the market,
looters would sneak in at night and yank all the copper wiring out of
the home and sell this precious commodity for scrap. Rewiring a home
is incredibly expensive and entails ripping the wallboard out so as
to get access to the interior studs. Homes looted in this manner became
essential worthless, since the cost or rewiring, redrywalling, and then
repainting the interior of the house was almost never worthwhile.
It didn't take long for the
legions of formerly middle class, now homeless families to move into
these abandoned neighborhoods. Life for these destitute suburban dwellers
is almost unbearable. With no source of heat and the wintery cold pouring
in through broken windows, it's little better than sleeping outside.
No one will even consider buying a home anywhere in a neighborhood so
afflicted.
There are signs of hope,
though. Where they can be purchased cheaply enough, whole subdivisions,
oftentimes all financed and therefore now owned by our sole remaining
megabank, US CitiWachMorgan, are being purchased by entrepreneurial
organic farmers. The homes are disassembled and sold for scrap, and
you can see on what was once farmland sometimes only a dozen years before,
tomatoes, onions, grapes, and myriad other fruits, vegetables, and livestock
sunning themselves happily once again. These farms offer employment
to the squatters nearby, who often volunteer their work for a basket
of vegetables, and thus save themselves and their families from certain
starvation.
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