Summer, 2017

It would have been impossible to convince anyone ten years ago that such would be the case, but the sprawling tract housing that surrounds most of America’s cities has been almost completely abandoned. It all started to happen ten years ago this summer, when the so-called subprime mortgage crisis spread into other housing sectors. Climbing oil prices, now understood to be caused by the peaking of worldwide oil supplies at the time, made interest rates start on a steady upward trend. Millions of middle class American families who were just scraping by saw the payments on their adjustable rate mortgages inch ever upward and beyond their means.

Some of these homes were selling for over half a million dollars, with large numbers of so called McMansions, homogenous, quickly-built, and heavily fossil fuel dependent, selling for millions. Many of these homes now fetch only a few thousand dollars. Usually they are disassembled and sold for whatever scrap can be salvaged.


The problem began when the heavy string of foreclosures left many suburban homes on the market at the same time that gas prices were creeping ever upward, making them unattractive. Many people could not sell their homes for less than what they still owed. Oftentimes this was close to the original sale price; a price almost no one was willing to pay anymore.

With almost unnerving predictability, once more than half the homes in a given neighborhood were on the market, looters would sneak in at night and yank all the copper wiring out of the home and sell this precious commodity for scrap. Rewiring a home is incredibly expensive and entails ripping the wallboard out so as to get access to the interior studs. Homes looted in this manner became essential worthless, since the cost or rewiring, redrywalling, and then repainting the interior of the house was almost never worthwhile.

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