Recycling California’s Ghost Estates
Ghost estates aren’t just an Irish phenomenon. The US housing bust has left hundreds, if not thousands of empty developments strewn across the landscape. But not for long:
By day, it’s far too quiet at the site of a planned housing and retail development on a former Navy base in Oakland. At night, neighbors can hear the thieves come out. They rip out copper wire, haul away pipes and take anything else they can steal from dozens of buildings on the site, abandoned after Irvine developer SunCal Cos. fell victim to the economy.
And perhaps I’ve been playing a little too much Fallout 3 (which involves a whole lot of salvaging of the remains of a lost golden age), but there’s something slightly Raiderish and post-apocalyptic about this:
“I hear hacking and see scary bonfires in the middle of the night,” said Don Johnson, a retired Coast Guard employee who lives near the defunct Oak Knoll Naval Medical Center in Oakland.
Of course, one man’s thief is another man’s free capitalist. It’s tempting to see these thieves as agents of the Invisible Hand of the Market – free market decomposers – breaking down defunct structures and recycling clearly valuable resources back into the market.
The main question in my mind is how long before we start to see this in Ireland (if it isn’t happening already).
Via Global Guerrillas.
