Photos Courtesy base10
So here we go Raleigh, settling into the denouement of the latest Wall Street crack dream gone sour, insulated to an extent, but living still in the… ruin would be a tad strong… damage, yeah, that’s it.
No news here. Raleigh has a history of trend-setter status when it comes to overbalanced top-down housing fads, viz the late US auto-fueled shopping center suburban nightmare, launched by Cameron Village as much as anywhere. The latest investor-led failure would be the soggy fizzle following the de-facto coast to coast cry “we must save the cities” ... downtowns ... which the Urban Land Institute, GM, Standard Oil and various subsidiary Federal agencies expended many decades and much energy stomping in order to reap pennies on the dollar after the fuel cost, distance curves crossed – utterly predicable disingenuousness. My little town—just another sucker, pulled along by the sweet siren tune of profits, profits, profits gone sour, done in by predatory crack pipe mortgages and financial over-reaching, ostensibly be paid off by those voters who had nothing to do with the mess except for silent, ignorant complicity. Justice? Nope, not in this realm of “just us” ... “us” being the greedy pigs who roasted the whole deal.
Let it come down. A Depression-type reality check might be just what the overfed infantile US “citizenry” could do well with. The correction/recession coming due via Market Forces sounds about right to me. The people of Cuba survived deprivation of their needs after the US embargo, urban gardens and all. Put that quarter acre ‘burb plot to use for something other the family Shih Tzu.
Idle cranes stand like buzzards, perched over a guhzillion bloated stalled condos all across the nation in the aftermath of the latest “visionary” thinking, done in by dried-up credit. The banks that survive are holding their cards close to their vests, stung by too many stupid loans, a great percentage of which were commenced with pie in the sky expectations of the late boom-boom real estate hustle lasting “forever”, yet exhibiting the novel and unexpected characteristics of any other garden variety bubble economy/ponzi scheme, say, that Dutch tulip thing, the electronics splat, or any other of the greed buttons the deluded fools fall for—every time. Come on Charlie, one more kick at the football, I promise I won’t pull it away.
The “blame someone” thinking of this nation is so out of hand that in some markets mammoth builders are suing the very financial institutions who enabled themselves to blunder into the current tar pit, whining about a turn of the chance that all investments are to a greater or lesser degree. Boo hoo.
Enough mean spiritedness. This is the time for clear-headed thinking, how to best salvage something out of the wreck. Perhaps it may be bad form to quote oneself, but there is no point in repackaging that which I said before, in my ex-position at the Newsweekly whose name we don’t speak, remember?
Downtown housing. Oh, I know now I’ve gone over the edge, talking all sorts of loony stuff, but that’s me—crazy like that. Geez, people actually living downtown. What a concept. And I’m not just talking about $300,000 condos. There aren’t that many people positioned to play that game, and the ones that can don’t generally avail themselves of walking life and hanging out. No, I’m talking about subsidies to make housing affordable to those who actually make cities purr—are now forced to live in threatened ghettos—you know, the regular Joes, including artists, musician and writers, the ones Raleigh seems to despise despite pretty words to the contrary.
It is called “habitat creation.“ It works for woodpeckers and it works for people. You build a place for human critters to live and, whadaya know, sooner or later they have to eat, buy shoes. You know, live. And it is not just 25 times a year like some bloated, hideous convention center—residents are there all day, all the time, all year. Plus they just might do more for the community than wake with greasy hair and a hangover, flick a butt on the street and catch a cab to fly back to Dubuque.
So, in the wake of the latest manifestation of a dream to transform Raleigh into something it doesn’t have in its soul, I repeat myself: Raleigh has never been Tribeca, it is light-years away from glitz and glamor, not that she doesn’t possess a certain provincial sort of style. So with that and reflecting on all those likely to be newly unemployed Wachovia people who maybe out of a crib, let’s think about this condo thing in a clearer, updated light and put the resources where they are needed. Pie inna sky don’t pay the rent, bo. So here goes, Peetee’s vision for Raleigh in this brave-new-world-order, post-money economy.
Since the market for the luxury “estate condominium,“ (a bit of etymological vandalism that hurts the ears even to utter) has swirled away in a cloud of pointed fingers and fake money, well, by golly, some novel redrafting is in order.
Perhaps the investors and the city should consider rolling at least the distressed stalled condo properties, either individual ones or en toto in the worst of cases, to Downtown Housing Improvement Corporation, DHIC, who have done a fine job putting roofs over heads in an atmosphere somewhat, shall we say, hostile to regular working stiffs. The costs of the DHIC’s and other ones are similar, ten of millions, and the sales would recoup some of the losses and put the labor and materials toward that which they were designed, instead tearing the fucking things down or letting them stand empty. Many of the units that have rolled were purchased for rental investments. So screw it, DHIC would be doing what is turning out to be a common-place practice: finish them, fill them, or fell em and walk away.
I know this sort of talk verges on heresy and insurrection and by recent developments will be met with howls, squeals, of dismay from the classist swine who would submit that “those sorts” are not the type of persons that the new downtown Raleigh “wants” (read, “they” have to rub shoulders with) but face it, in the altering demographics of the post-money economy, “those sorts” are just as likely to be you and me. Affordable housing might be the only type of housing that will be, well, affordable. Cutting up old downtown buildings for rental is a time-honored Raleigh tradition. This time around, there seems likely to have been little intervening period of well-heeledness.
Days later
Forget what I wrote. The above seem to be, upon reflection, rife with all sorts of legal and financial drawbacks. Let’s keep those who created the mess: lawyers, elected officials and financial institutions, out of the process and opt for a simpler, more elegant, less costly solution arrived at after consultation with a higher-level employee of one of the developers.
Encourage the developers and the banks to simply write off as losses these monuments to over-reaching, walk away and leave them standing empty. In the post-crash economy unfolding in front of our eyes, there will be ample need for low income housing, i.e. a nice dry squat in a somewhat finished building. I’ll be at the Bloomsbury, The Old Crank (tm) in the Duncan Grant.
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