Fresno’s been hit hard by the bursting of the housing bubble, where 12% of the homes there had some type of foreclosure filing in 2009. Few have benefited from this abundance of vacant homes like skaters. Cannonball, from the great new short film blog California is a place, shows how the backyards of Fresno have become one, big skater amusement park.
The New York Times has a nice interactive graphic that displays information from The American Time Use Survey which asks thousands of Americans to recall how they spent their time in 2008. Not surprisingly, the unemployed get an hour more of sleep each day than the employed and they spend a lot more time keeping the house tidy than people with jobs too. Read the full article.
If you’ve still got a job, it would also be a good time to buy a boat. Or just pick one up that’s beached in some slough.
If you’re looking for more clues as to how Depression 2.0 started, a good place to start is when the Republican-lead 106th Congress voted on November 5, 1999 to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933.
One Republican Senator, Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, voted against the legislation. He was joined by seven Democrats: Barbara Boxer of California, Richard H. Bryan of Nevada, Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Barbara A. Mikulski of Maryland, Mr. Dorgan and Mr. Wellstone.
In the House, 155 Democrats and 207 Republicans voted for the measure, while 51 Democrats, 5 Republicans and 1 independent opposed it. Fifteen members did not vote.
…”I think we will look back in 10 years’ time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930’s is true in 2010,” said Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota.
The New York Times has a slideshow of the new tent cities of California. Homeless enclaves have grown in places such as Nashville, Olympia, Wash., and St. Petersburg, Fla., but the situation in Sacramento has received extra attention following a visit from Oprah Winfrey. In Fresno, where the city estimates more than 2,000 of the cities 500,000 residents are homeless, the city planned to begin “triage” on the encampments soon, We’re treating it like any other disaster area, says Gregory Barfield, the city’s homeless prevention and policy manager. Read more about these new shanty towns in our midst.
It’s spooky, at night, to see so much darkness, to hear skittering, to keep an eye out for homeless people trying to break in and sleep, to listen for the sounds of desperate humans and animals. This is not a scene from a post-apocalyptic movie, it’s novelist Susan Straight’s description of her neighborhood in Riverside, California where the unemployment rate is 12.2%.
Take a look at the huge golden parachutes top financial execs have taken during the current industry melt down. For example, Angelo Mozilo, the guy who founded Countrywide Financial, retired with a $188 million parachute.
Tough times like these call for a real kick-ass resume.
Yale photography student Lucas Foglia has created an amazing portfolio of portraits of people who are re-wilding the way they live in the WildRoots ecovillage homestead of Western North Carolina and in other spots in the rural Southeastern U.S. Between the Depression 2.0, impending environmental collapse and all those broke-ass kids I see in my neighborhood, I’m thinking these ecovillage homesteads are the new TICs.
Perhaps the housing crisis can get worse. You know all those granite counter tops that were an ubiquitous part of the $300 billion dollar home improvement industry? Well… they might be radioactive. Gulp.
