Boo!

Picture a dusty street, tumbleweeds rolling down as the wind whips up and a saloon door slapping in the breeze… but no people. It’s a classic “ghost town” from the Old West. The reasons are many: local mine is spent, railroad/Interstate took a different path, natural disasters, plague and pestilence, water just dried up, nuclear and other toxic contamination, etc. Whole societies have abandoned their homes when resources grew too thin to support communal living. We stare at the large statues on Easter Island and assume such events. Sometimes it’s the result of combat. The ancient Spanish city of Belchite was destroyed in the Spanish Civil War in the summer of 1937; folks left the ruins and in 1939 rebuilt their town a short distance away. Today, the old ruins – where films like Pan’s Labyrinth and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen were filmed – function today as a war memorial.

The modern definition includes all of the above, but expands to accommodate some more modern casualties: “A ghost town is a completely abandoned or semi-abandoned town or city. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economic activity that supported it has failed, or due to natural or human-caused disasters such as floods, government actions, uncontrolled lawlessness, or war. The term is sometimes used in a sense, including cities, towns, and neighborhoods which, while still populated, are significantly less so than in years past.” Wikipedia. Like the American “Rust Belt,” particularly after the economic collapse of the past few years. T he jobs are gone now, probably permanently. The statistic that seems to create that contemporary version of a ghost town is a population loss of 50% or more.

The March 27^th WallSt.com assessed residential vacancy rates as the relevant measure of population loss and identified the following American counties as the “biggest losers”: Lake County, Michigan (66% loss; 14,966 homes, population of 11,014), Vilas County, Wisconsin (62% loss, 25,116 homes, 21,919 of population), Summit County, Colorado (61%, 29,842 homes, 26,843 of population), Worcester County, Maryland (60%, 55,749 homes, 49,274 of populations), Mono County, California (59%, 13,912 homes, 12,774 of population), and the list rolls on, but you get the point. I’ve already blogged about New Orleans and Detroit – as the largest big cities to face population loss of 25% or more in the last decade – but constant reminders that the American dream is hardly automatic, often hangs by a slender thread and must be constantly re-earned, are all around us.

All of the above counties are economic refugees. They weren’t ripped by a hurricane, located too close to reactor meltdown or decimated by quake/tsunami slam or wiped out by a plague of raging cholera; at first the strangulation was slow, air squeezed out of their lungs a bit at time by foreign competition… then the Wall Street-created economic fall simply garroted them the rest of the way.

We can’t stop natural disasters, but we can reinforce our infrastructure and repair the largest and most obvious man made disasters waiting to happen. We can’t stop the ravages of global competition, but we can educate our children to provide vastly higher levels of value-added. We can stop plague and death-by-expensive-healthcare, and while economic realities will always have the notion of rising and falling values, we most certainly can tighten up regulations that invite economic chaos and punish the perpetrators who carelessly or intentionally fomented globally-crippling financial disaster. Too bad we’re doing very little about any of these “governable” arenas. I guess someone should tell the folks in Lake County, Michigan, Vilas County, Wisconsin, Summit County, Colorado, Worcester County, Maryland , Mono County, California, New Orleans and Detroit that were just don’t care enough; were going to cut the deficit no matter what. It’s always a question of balance… there is never a simple solution.

I’m Peter Dekom, and empathy seems to be in short supply these days.