A few years ago, I was living in Scottsdale, Arizona. I was able to see the effects of the real estate implosion in graphic detail as Phoenix was one of the hardest hit areas in the country. Coming from the Northeast, I've never seen anything as scary as the amount of empty buildings I saw all around me. You just don't see empty stuff back here due to the population density, and also due the Yankee propensity NOT to spend. But out there, they even had a name for them. They called them "see throughs." At times, it reminded me of The Omega Man.
Perhaps responding to the cinematic quality of it all, I felt motivated to document it. Endless commercial real estate properties with absolutely no one leasing them. Most of them brand new. Most of them empty, shimmering in the 115° heat. To me, it was what malinvestment looks like. I tried to burn it into my mind. Meanwhile, everyone was at the mall, where everything seemed just fine.
Just after I left Arizona, the motherboard on my Apple laptop broke down and I put the whole project on hold. Lately, I've been working on it again. It's even more surreal now.
If you're curious why it ends with "Fractional reserve banking is stupid," it's because I'm selling the line as T-shirts now. Let me know if you want one.
Deja vu for me! I lived/worked there in the mid-late 80s... the landscape was similar--tho perhaps not to this extreme. Scottsdale Airport was the boondocks with lots of empty commercial space, housing developments being built at every compass point.. remember the 80s S&L crisis and the Keating 5? One difference between then and now was interest rates, of course. And lending standards were still strict. This from wikipedia is interesting:
ReplyDeleteThe market share of S&Ls for single family mortgage loans went from 53% in 1975 to 30% in 1990.[2] U.S. General Accounting Office estimated cost of the crisis to around USD $160.1 billion, about $124.6 billion of which was directly paid for by the U.S. government from 1986 to 1996.[1] That figure does not include thrift insurance funds used before 1986 or after 1996. It also does not include state run thrift insurance funds or state bailouts.
The federal government ultimately appropriated 105 billion dollars to resolve the crisis. After banks repaid loans through various procedures, there was a net loss to taxpayers of approximately $124 billion dollars by the end of 1999.[26]
The concomitant slowdown in the finance industry and the real estate market may have been a contributing cause of the 1990–1991 economic recession. Between 1986 and 1991, the number of new homes constructed dropped from 1.8 to 1 million, the lowest rate since World War II. [2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis
Thanks for sharing your project! k
hey thanks so much k. small world. funny that the airport was the boondocks back then. it's pretty built up now. trying to upload an HD version, but it's taking forever. more to come.
ReplyDelete