Suburban Ghost Towns

I have a friend looking for work in the corporate world. It's been rough, one of the reasons being she is competing for work with people at least 20 years younger than her.

We were musing about how far away we are from realizing the middle class dream of a steady and retirable job as well as that house in the suburban sky. Compared to our parents, our education far exceeds them; yet when it comes to actual middle class accomplishments, boy are we lacking.

Then I read this :

Foreclosures Spurring Blight In Central Valley

[...]
As California house prices soared, cities in San Joaquin County attracted buyers priced out of the San Francisco Bay Area. Developers built more than 30,000 new homes in the last six years. But with the spike in adjustable mortgage rates the flood of buyers turned into a flood of defaults - 11,000 in the county in the past 18 months.

Not long ago an overgrown area with a murky pool that Blackstone toured was someone's backyard paradise, but now foreclosure has taken it all away. There and at hundreds of other properties across the county, even the swimming pool has become a hazard - a source of mosquitoes and West Nile Virus.

County workers who used to patrol swamps and streams now do their work in neglected back yards.

It gets worse though. Those who believed they could gamble their future on a no-down no-interest loan that would balloon 5, 10 or 15 years down the road are now gone. As in war, it's the survivors who stay behind to cope with the neverending pain left by the wounds of the mortage meltdown :

But for neighbors the problem that really bites is fast-falling house prices.

Just-retired Corky Hine retired wanted to sell for $400,000. Now his home is worth $339,000 and his real-estate agent still can't get anybody to look.

"I already dropped it $60,000 (from the original appraisal price,)" Hine said. "She said 'There's like 500 homes for sale within a two-mile radius of mine, and 150 of them are in foreclosure within a mile or something.'"

For years now we've been hearing about the demise of the middle class, but a lot of us where either just coming out of college or barely entering the workforce when a lot of this sturm-un-drag took over financial and business news in the late 80s and 90s. Then tech and real estate bubbles distracted us from the issue along with 9/11 and the messy business of this pseudo war neocons called on their beloved terrorist threat.

Now the US dollar is worth jack shit. Of course, it has made US exports more palatable and more likely to close the trade gap. Yet, for whom is this good? Where is the trickle down of economics when foreclosures doubled in September as loan rates went up?

It certainly is not good for the struggling middle class people I know.

Bookmark/Search this post with:

| | | | |