I’ve heard this in conversation with my friends and other people lately: “it doesn’t feel like a Depression.” Sure times are tight, and budgets are shrinking – but we’re not in breadlines yet, and the streets are not quite thronged with the homeless. Of course the people saying this are the ones who still happen to be employed. And Wonkette has torn into the ridiculous Peggy Noonan for expressing the same privileged and rather clueless lack of observation. Still, I have to confess that the crisis seems somewhat distant to me, even as the Dow plunges to ever deeper lows, and the newspaper headlines grow increasingly dire. I’m one of the lucky who are still employed in a more or less safe position, in a town that isn’t suffering too badly compared with the rest of the country. Overall, the visual signals of a shrinking economy are subtle: clusters of houses with brown overgrown lawns, empty storefronts sitting vacant, skeletons of perpetually delayed construction projects.
These are actually unfinished new houses. Gothic horror with a 21st century spin.
To fully appreciate how bad things have gotten, one should view all these indicators as integrated into a patchwork quilt chronicling our new Depression (isn’t it Great?). Here is an amazing series of photographs over at the Boston Globe. For an even more salient lesson, Time features the decay of Detroit.
One of my favorites from the set. I’m hoping that some sort of good can be gleaned from this housing-turned-economic collapse, like shuttering the massive unchecked sprawl and consumption in favor of a more sustainable, eco-friendly lifestyle.
The first photoset consists of mostly ordinary scenes, viewed through a photographer’s apocalyptic lens. As for the second photoset, E thought about forwarding that link to his stepfather, who grew up in Detroit and has lots of fond childhood memories. He decided against it.
A window overlooking a broken city.
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