The “New Poor” class face years of unemployment in “Slumburbia”.
“Call them the new poor: people long accustomed to the comforts of middle-class life who are now relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives — potentially for years to come. 6.3 million Americans have been unemployed for six months or longer, the largest number since the government began keeping track in 1948. That is more than double the toll in the next-worst period, in the early 1980s.”
“Nobody is home in the cities of the future. Huge developments are empty, with rising crime at the edges, and thousands of homes owned by banks that can’t unload them even at fire-sale prices. Christopher B. Leinberger
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
predicted that the catastrophic collapse of the new home market could turn many of today’s McMansions into tenements. Dirty flags advertise rock-bottom discounts on empty starter mansions. On the ground, foreclosure signs are tagged with gang graffiti. Empty lots are untended, cratered with mud puddles from the winter storms: Slumburbia.”
