Bubble Opportunity: A New Life for Public Housing?
3rd October 2008
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Most discussion of the mortgage crisis has been at the elite level — where it impacts banks, Wall Street investment houses, interest rates, liquidity. But on the street level, there are other, less obvious, consequences. Animals are abandoned as owners decamp; untended swimming pools breed mosquitoes. Abandoned dwellings in far suburbs don’t attract vagrants but they do get used by human smugglers as drop houses, since there are few neighbors to notice. Owners stop paying their HOA dues and maintenance is neglected, even as the dues escalate for those who stay behind. And much of the time there is no-one to do the work, due to the disappearance of the Latino labor-force.