From Paradise To Gated Ghettos
Mar 30th, 2010 | 10 responses
Where I live in semi-rural Riverside County in Southern California, what once were upscale housing tracts where homeowners associations enforced beautification codes are now crime-infested gated ghettos.
My son, whose job takes him throughout the county, described the malaise six months ago and I thought he was exaggerating. Not, in the least, it turns out.
My area has been clobbered by the housing market collapse beginning in 2007 and the rate of foreclosures of first-ownership new homes ranges as high as 50% in some subdivisions.
Many of the abandoned homes are broken into by squatters — prostitutes, drug runners, illegal aliens, gangs and other dredges of life. Some are rented but the once manicured lawns have gone unmowed and unirrigated.
The situation is so quirky that people qualifying for Section 8 rental assistance vouchers are living in 5,000-square-feet homes with marble kitchen counter tops and vaulted ceilings.
The county and cities, equally financially strapped, have no funds to enforce building code violations although a few are tracking down lenders and owners for fines ranging up to $1,000 per day. Where once a police car drove by once a day and night, they’re on call 24/7.
And the new first-time owners who remain have seen the $440,000 they paid for their new homes now worth $170,000.
The situation may never improve. One expert believes as many as 25 million suburban multi bedroom and bathroom homes of 5,000 square feet or more embellished by baby boomers will be forsaken by their children and grandchildren whom he predicts will prefer living in smaller quarters in cities closer to their jobs.
For a more detailed account of what originally was considered a homeowners’ paradise and now transformed into a gated ghetto in my neighboring city of Hemet, click on this story in today’s Los Angeles Times.
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EPILOGUE
What I see in the housing market collapse is a staggering economic blow to the working middle class. Their earnings have been stagnate for three years. The gap between them and the affluent is widening while the gap between them and the federal poverty level is shrinking. No longer can a home be a family’s nest egg for retirement. Unless this trend is reversed, America will be a nation of two castes — the haves and the have nots. Just thinking about it sucks dry the natural optimism in me. Sad but true.
Cross posted on
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10 Responses to “From Paradise To Gated Ghettos”
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This sounds like a revisitation of how people felt circa the early and mid-1990s, not only in California when I was still there (earlier).
Gates? Walls? If it can keep criminals confined, it can keep undesireables out of “nicer” communities.
(Cue Michael Lind)
[I got my copy for $2.99 on clearance]
http://www.amazon.com/NEXT-AMERICAN-NATION-Nati…
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45/006.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/issues/2004/01/…
etc.
“now transformed into a gated ghetto in my neighboring city of Hemet”
My girlfriend in LA experienced the same transformation in Moreno Valley. The park where her daughter played is now unsafe at night and infested with gangs, etc..
“in semi-rural Riverside County in Southern California”
Jer, that part of the Inland Empire is destined for more growth (all the way to Temecula, where it may merge with San Diego metro growth beyond Escondido, filling in what remaining gaps there are), but you can expect to see continued decline as the population increases. You'll see Baby Boomer retirees in the future but you'll also see the kids of people now — a large immigrant mix and a continuation of the divergence in future prospects of the skilled versus the unskilled.
Wrong… Their earnings have been stagnant for at least 30 years…
Cheap Labor Conservatism rules…
Some people built a godawful behemoth of a mansion a quarter mile away from me about a year before the housing market went south, and this monstrosity interrupts what for 20 years was a beautiful natural horizon, beautiful sunsets, etc. To make matters worse, the owners seem to have no interest in landscaping, planting trees, etc. plus they like to keep outdoor lights on all night. Why do they even want to live in the country? Don't get me wrong, it's a beautiful house but what's the point? There is more than one kind of ghetto – and money minus any aesthetic sense is definitely one of them.
Hey, Don — don't neglect the thread about state debts.
Jerry–
It's easy to make a link to your own website at the end of your posts here. It looks like this:
[A HREF="http://remmersreport.blogspot.com/"] Reader comments are welcome on The Remmers Report [/A]
Where I put the square brackets [ and ], you should replace with triangle brackets < and >.
Don't forget the quotes around the web address after the equal sign!!
Reader comments are welcome on The Remmers Report
Jer, here's a “solution.” I found this especially noteworthy when I encountered it because I had talked to someone in Atlanta who advocated something similar for the Balkan and other refugees we have hosted.
“Imagine a federal program that would help poor and working-class Americans to move not from crowded cities to suburbs in the same general area but from crowded states to low-density states where homes are cheaper and the general cost of living is lower. Compare the proportion of homes that a median-income family can afford in Kansas City (82.1 percent) with the number in Boston (51.3 percent), New York City (42.1 percent), Los Angeles (40.2 percent), and San Francisco (10.3 percent). The people who moved would not be the only ones to benefit financially. If the coastal areas did not replace those lost workers with migrants from elsewhere in the country or the world, wages there might rise as the labor market grew tight; and financial barriers to home ownership would decline even in big coastal cities.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/issues/2003/01/…