Phenomenon that are consequences of the housing bust are the empty and nearly finished subdivisions that form ghost-town blight called Zombie Subdivisions. Property foreclosures aren't affecting only the suburban and city-scapes, as Teton Valley in eastern Idaho, a city of roughly ten-thousand has roughly seven-thousand vacant lots.
It's been said that it will take between seventy and three-hundred years to to build out the erstwhile farmland. Meanwhile natural habitat and migration lanes for grazers are being interrupted.
In 2009 there were $156 million in property foreclosures in Teton County.
(These numbers were supplied by a show, "This American Land", airing on PBS, so, that's however you feel about that.)
Maybe it's me, and maybe I'm too old (I did just yesterday find a white hair on my head), but I'm generally over the whole zombie fad sweeping the nation. It's like the tween-girl fascination with vampires, only with non-hipster party folks. But these zombie subdivisions are a rare "zombie" thing that does interest me.
The idea of a ghost-town that looks from the outside like the 'burbs, the insides a collection of barren sheet-rock, empty unfinished blight.
Think of how confused archaeologists of the future will be when they excavate these places. Not quite Pompeii or Herculaneum, 79 ACE's equivalent of Vegas and Atascadero being swallowed up by Mt. Vesuvio.
Maybe they'll mistake it for an ancient studio. Maybe it'll change their whole concept of where population centers happened to be. Maybe they'll just laugh and scratch their head and mimic Ishi and say, "Coyote, huh?" referencing the notion of the accidentally self-destructive trickster.
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