Dogs & cats living in the streets. Mass hysteria.
At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son’s bedroom and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who’d moved to Windy Ridge from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, “I thought I’d bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen.”
In the Franklin Reserve neighborhood of Elk Grove, California, south of Sacramento, the houses are nicer than those at Windy Ridge—many once sold for well over $500,000—but the phenomenon is the same. At the height of the boom, 10,000 new homes were built there in just four years. Now many are empty; renters of dubious character occupy others. Graffiti, broken windows, and other markers of decay have multiplied. Susan McDonald, president of the local residents’ association and an executive at a local bank, told the Associated Press, “There’s been gang activity. Things have really been changing, the last few years.”
And it goes on. (It's Atlantic Monthly, so actually it goes on at intimidating length, but there you go.)
When I moved back to Massachusetts in 2000, the big trend in my family's town of Hanover -- as it was in the rest of the state, and the country -- was for people to come in and knock down quaint old houses that had been there for fifty or a hundred years or more, and replace them with these gargantuan McMansions that completely dominated the half-acre lot that the house stood on. And yes, inevitably there would be a couple of big SUVs in the driveway to match. The complementary trend was for developers to come in and build whole subdivisions of these Stepford neighborhoods, filled with aspiring young couples and the twinkling in their eyes of infant yuppies yet to grow up there.
A friend of the family is a cop in town, and told my mom that he was really worried about what was going to become of these neighborhoods a decade later -- which, hey would you look at the time fly, we're rapidly closing in on now. It wasn't anything about the subprime mortgage crisis, but he was close. His thinking was simply that these families were living way beyond their means, with both parents having to work full time jobs to make ends meet, and no one left at home to watch the generation of latchkey kids that were about to be born. Once these kids were old enough to start getting into trouble, the office predicted, these picture perfect neighborhoods were going to be hotbeds of gangs, drugs, you name it.
Okay, so maybe that's more than a little unfair to the kids, but he had a point. And with the stresses of the current mortgage situation, with foreclosures and vacancies and all the other fun things the Atlantic article describes, it looks like the predictions may be becoming more true and much sooner than expected.
The twenty-first century scares me when I think about it too much.
Comments