the timboucher experience

A story found via Ran Prieur which dovetails nicely into many of the themes I’ve been following: The Not-So-Great Depression, Placeless Living, New Nomadism, Carnival Culture, how crime and power work, etc.

Strange days are upon the residents of many a suburban cul-de-sac. Once-tidy yards have become overgrown, as the houses they front have gone vacant. Signs of physical and social disorder are spreading.

At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son’s bedroom and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who’d moved to Windy Ridge from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, “I thought I’d bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen.”

In the Franklin Reserve neighborhood of Elk Grove, California, south of Sacramento, the houses are nicer than those at Windy Ridge—many once sold for well over $500,000—but the phenomenon is the same. At the height of the boom, 10,000 new homes were built there in just four years. Now many are empty; renters of dubious character occupy others. Graffiti, broken windows, and other markers of decay have multiplied. Susan McDonald, president of the local residents’ association and an executive at a local bank, told the Associated Press, “There’s been gang activity. Things have really been changing, the last few years.”

Good times, here we come!! I heard that “Stay Mad” guy last night on [Bullshit Late Night TV Program #645] and he said something to the effect of “the government will have to burn down a million homes in order to raise the value everywhere else” and then went on to talk about how noone has “the balls” to just detonate a nuclear warhead somewhere in America.

Fucking freaky shit man. Maybe it’s on the YouTube.

• Song
• It’s not good to be home
• The Gathering of Birds
• Buy Nothing Day
• Look around America, at our sci-fi dystopia