Wonkette
LEHMAN BROS. WAS HERE: “One sad stretch of dusty road has seven vacant houses in a row, nobody around for a mile on either side. Where did they go? Who even owns the mortgages, if the mortgages could even be pieced together from the ‘collaterized debt instruments’ that brought down everything from mighty Wall Street investment houses to chickenshit little construction firms in the grandly named Inland Empire?” [LA CityBeat]
iz cun haz mah bahil ot nw?
I have lots of family who used to live out in the Palmdale/Lancaster sucktroplex. The whole place is the definition of unsustainable.
I’m Tom Joad and I approve this message
I’ll bet all those families who abandon their houses are moving to Nebraska.
Jesus and God own it, fuckin’ libruls.
Inland Empire is such a nice way of saying desolate hellhole.
can’t handle US america in the 1930’s.
off to middle earth.
thanks everyone, will text frodo et alia
…shit, by this time next week WE will all own those houses! Now that I think about it; if taxpayers own all these shitty mortgages then we should all get keys and be able mess up their bathrooms and raid their fridges! Dibs on any alcoholic beverages in the house!
Why does Ken hate “Inland America”? Our strength will be realized as Capt. Hazelwood’s blessing when the waters rise…
I’m read this out loud, cigarette in my lips. Bongos, and a hep cat on the sax. Yeah, man.
I wonder if this means that I can be the next John Steinbeck? JOAD 08 - coming soon to paperback
And Childress said nothing…
AngryBlakGuy: Take it, I get any abandoned porn.
WagTehGod: Heh. “sucktroplex.” That’s good
Great piece Ken. Environmentalists have been saying for 30 years sprawl was bad. It was probably fine until too many people thought the could COMMUTE to jobs. A few odd people out in the desert isnt bad…..A bubble on peoples homes. hmm.
What next, a food bubble? Did our cheap gas subsidies cause this? What if they were turned into grow houses, then they could be earning a profit while they sit vacant!
I hate when they scrape the desert, it takes decades to come back.
WagTehGod: The pack rats always take over first, before you can get to the porn, and make a nest of it.
WagTehGod: …damn it! I knew I left something out.
Ya San Bernadeno is totally screwed… but I think we can blame gawd for that.
My brother and his family walked away from a house in this area in 1997 that had been damaged by earthquakes. The framing of the house was parallelogramming. The insurance wouldn’t pay. Just walked away because it wasn’t worth the mortgage. I was amazed at the time. Also, he commuted an hour each way (with good traffic) to work. However, someone bought it for double what he paid for it.
Who is thinking up this stuff, who buys it, and who backs it with money? Unfuckingbelievable! I have no snark left. Any help here?
At first glance, I thought that was a photo of the Grid Iron on HWY 18 on the outskirts of Apple Valley. Ken, I have to ask. Do you live next door to my parents?
graceless: Childress, TX. I was there a month ago; it’s fine, they have a new Wall-Mart and a new liquor store. You drive thru that town and think…bye, one Childress left behind…
Then you arrive to Palo Duro, TX, and you learn there are Mejicanos de Amarillo and Mejicanos de Palo Duro, oh yeah.
As a high-desert escapee, I can identify. I’ve been in and out of that area for years, dating back to elementary school, then junior high and high school before making my final dash for happier places in college. My sister still lives up there; on a recent trip I had a hard time believing the furnace blast that hit me when I got out of the car. Keep in mind, I was in Iraq just last year. Which reminded me a great deal of Hesperia, just replace the meth labs with hookah rooms.
You know, it isn’t all bad, though. Sure, the exurbian stretches are depressing and painful, but go out to where it’s still unspoiled and I quite like it. I like the way the gravelly soil crunched under my boots, the faint howl of the wind, and the endless horizon that made me feel like the only person on Earth.
If you want to experience desolation-lite, go to Joshua Tree National Park. Not too far, and on the way back, when you’re jonesing for civilization, hit the casinos.
MarineMustang: No country for old men.
Speaking of walmart supercenters, here’s some palin-hater blizzle
Blingee made my computer crash once and it didnt process the money falling on the left side (earmarks from all the things to nowhere), but whatever.
“There’s usually a box of unwanted puppies out there, too, baking in the sun. They’ll be dumped at the end of the road soon enough, all of them, until they wander back to the blacktop and get smashed by a speeding pickup and eaten by the ravens.”
At first I was sad about the cute little dogs but then realize we will envy those run over puppies in our endless Avici hell of constant debate postponements and slow, ceaseless collapse of the economy.
Casinos.
We need like 45 new casinos in the next 4 years.
Burn baby burn….. came in the chain reaction…. It’s a disco inferno!
Sorry, that just gave me visuals of Starksy & Hutch, rollerdisco, and, randomly, “A Crack in the Edge of the World” by Simon Winchester, who maybe shares your worldview of California.
Location, location, locat…
In the desert no one can remember your name. Much like Palin next year.
MarineMustang: Joshua Tree, incredible! Stunning really. Great diversity of plants, too, they are just all lower than your head most of the time. The light makes all the difference….it took me a year to love the desert. Now I am a converted desert rat.
Hutch: No.
WhatTheHeck: make a way, lord, make a way.
And get rid of the witchcraft too.
In a related note, I’d like to recommend an episode of This American Life titled “The Gigantic Pool of Money”. A tranche of shit is really just an aggregation of worthless adjustable rate turds with a fancy French name.
Hutch: No Country for Old Walnuts!
Lately, the escapees are trying a new trick. From my desk outside, looking up the road, you can see the charred skeletons of two half-burnt stucco dumps of recent vintage.
Very late-70s NYC. Or Detroit, circa… every day for a generation now.
Amen, Ken. I used to drive from San Diego up to Mammoth every summer, driving up I-15 until it goes off to 395, and taking that up the rest of the way. It was just nobody once you got to 395, through those little sleepy towns of 100 people. It was pretty in its own forgotten, lonely way. We’d go from Adelanto up to Lone Pine without even stopping, because there was nothing to stop for. That was back in the early 1990s. This year I drove it again, for the first time in 10 years, and it was CRAZY. Tons of crap houses and malls everywhere. I was like, yo, who the fuck is buying houses out here? Who can afford this stuff? Turns out, nobody can. Sad.
That’s not the Inland Empire. That’s the desert. The Inland Empire is the big meth lab that is the Ontario, San Bernardino, Riverside area. If you want a really big mall and NASCAR go to the Inland Empire. If you want discount superstores and Indian Casinos you go to the desert.
runcrash: Berdooooo.
Dave J.: There is one place still that way, but in Arizona.
Nowhere, Arizona. A store that sells rocks. That is all that is there.
obfuscator: We finally got a tranche of the pi-iiii-iiiie.
Ken, those empty houses actually are owned by a group of those Mojave tortoises that wander the High Desert high, deserted, hauling their own shellhouses over the broken beer bottles and nuclear bunker waste of ruined Air Farce complex murder scenes, complex themselves, there in the hot dry Santa Anas that come down from the arid mountains while meek little wives thumb the edges of their carving knives and study the back of their husbands’ necks waiting for every booze party to end in a fight while hoping to get a full glass of beer in a cocktail lounge full of drunken homicidial turtles . . . .
Whoops.
Sorry.
I started channeling Layne through Chandler through Hunter S. Thompson . . . .
tell me about it. I can’t sell my own responsibly mortgaged house in the IE because there are 1000 moldering stucco monstrosities down the street. Tanks, lehman bros!!
runcrash: Really depends on who you ask. 15 years ago, I lived in the High Desert, you also had your Low Desert, *then* the IE. I came back in 2004, and all of a sudden the IE is Palm Springs, Temecula, and everything in between. The former IE has gotten all kinds of gentrified, to the point that I heard people calling it the West End (of the IE). So, I suppose Chino is back to its dairy farm and strawberry field self again. I wonder what’ll happen to all those McMansions out in Norco? The October fire season is fast approaching…
Dave J.: I was up there a few months ago in Lone Pine, hauling my nephew up Mount Whitney. There’s a town I think I could deal with.
MarineMustang: MarineMustang: It’s just about my favorite place in the world, the Mojave high desert. The people … well, a few of them aren’t that bad. The rest of ‘em have no fucking idea they’re in the desert at all. Either because of the meth, or it’s just a tract house at the end of the drive, could be Victorville, could be Corona, who the hell knows?
Lone Pine is wonderful. The whole Owens Valley and 395 through the Eastern Sierra, prettiest place in the world.
geeze ken. how do you keep up this pollyanna-ish reporting? (seriously) The descriptions are really interesting. are you nearing Road Warrior conditions out there? soon?
Ken Layne: I’ll be up in Bishop in two weeks with the woman’s family. I’ll poor out a 40 for you.
*POUR* out. Jeebus.
And all you East Coast elitists better not being enjoying any schadenfreude about this, as you sit stuck in traffic on 270 on your way to Frederick, or on 95 heading home to Fredericksburg. It’s just as unsustainable, only greener. Plus it snows in the winter, and everybody makes panicky runs to Sam’s Club to buy out all the milk.
“The suburbs have three destinies, none of them exclusive: as materials salvage, as slums, and as ruins.”
Cranky-licious, and a fun read too. I wonder the same thing when I see these neutron-bombed developments. Wonder what future archeologists will think when they dig this all up, other than “those people built really crappy, ugly structures.”
expatinOz: I like your kangaroo!
Seriously Ken, you’ve got to get out of there. You’re bringing me down. You’re bringing everyone down. Though when I’m feeling crappy I cheer myself up by driving out there and sitting in the car and thinking at least I’m not living here.
Next stop, Bombay Beach.