Ghost towns created by housing meltdown

[Liberal_in_LA]

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/construction_and_property/article3422322.ece

February 24, 2008

Cleveland: ghost town created by America’s loan scandal
Special report

**snip**

The new year is barely two months old and so far there have been 1,857 foreclosures in the Cleveland area.

Slavic Village has street after empty street of boarded-up houses, their roofs caving in, collapsed balconies hanging from the fronts of buildings. Some people seem to have just upped and left, leaving their belongings behind for the rats and vandals. Owners have put up signs offering their burnt-out homes for a $500 (£250) downpayment.

[TomInTib]

1. I wonder where all those people are going.

Really, where do you go when you have to leave a place such as that?

[Warpy]

7. You pile sleeping bags, air mattresses and your clothing into a car

and you head for anyplace you've heard there might be a job or two. You find sympathetic friends and relatives to take you in until the friction of overcrowding gets to be too much and you have to move on. You take whatever work you can get, live on peanut butter crackers with milk for the kids and try to save enough to rent a really bad two room apartment...one room if you don't have the kids. Or you just give up, dump the kids on your parents, and hit the streets with a bottle.

That's what they do and where they go.

[TomInTib]

9. And that just about kills me.

I have been homeless, myself.

But, thank God, I had no children.

[Warpy]

11. Same here, which is how I know what happens.

May all the criminals in suits experience exactly what they've put us through.

[madokie]

2. all I can say is we need some real leadership in this country

someone who is not afraid to call a spade a spade and shut down these obscene profits so many of our basic needs providers are making. this is bullshit after all this is our, you and I's country too.

[Selatius]

3. Those pictures look like something from hurricane Katrina.

I got folks back on the Mississippi coast. I can attest that in certain areas, the coast looks as bad as those pictures. There is little reconstruction with all the lawsuits against insurance companies and the reconstruction money frozen in Bush's bureaucracy.

"The money was just too good."

[ThomWV]

4. The houses in those pictures cleary had a lots of other problems, not loan related.

[Vincardog]

5. That is the way abandoned buildings look. They have to be lived in or they fall apart

[Liberal_in_LA]

6. Yes, It's amazing how fast houses disintegrate without residents.

[Warpy]

8. yeah, these look about 5 years gone

with deferred maintenance before that. People with jobs gone overseas did the best they could on low wage work at convenience stores and the like until they just couldn't make those payments any longer, let alone keep the place fixed up.

[wolfgangmo]

10. This would be a scandal ...

... if it weren't so damn common.



The uber rich have been waiting for this meltdown. Soon they will start to purchase what they want at the price they want.



By and by we will all be peasants. Just remember to teach your children how to sharpen their pitchforks.