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Google Street View bubble tourism
Saturday, September 18 2010
Gretchen, Nancy, Linda, and Sarah the Vegan took all four of the black dogs and went for a hike somewhere in the Catskills of Greene County today, leaving me behind to mop up loose ends with David's new site (among other things). I've been sitting on my ass in front of my computer so much lately that I've found myself taking more baths. I took one yesterday and another one today.
In the evening Gretchen and the dogs came back from many hours of hiking and she didn't feel like making dinner. She also thought I should get away from my computer for awhile, so she assigned dinner-making to me. So I made burritos, taking advantage of a bag of very large whole wheat tortillas I'd bought at Adams some weeks ago. I also cut up and fried a large summer squash along with a little bit of eggplant. By frying the hell out it, I was able to reduce its bulk to a manageable volume, one I could possibly eat tonight and the next few days. (Gretchen does not eat squash in any amount, though she doesn't find it as objectionable as eggplant.)
I'd listened to a Planet Money podcast while washing dishes and preparing food and had learned about huge swaths of Florida that had been subdivided into lots and outfitted with dense urban street patterns, but they had failed to be further developed and now many of them now lie in ruins. And this isn't even a legacy of the recent housing bubble; it dates to an earlier bubble that took place in the early 1970s. Unsatisified with the photos on the Planet Money website, I went looking myself in Google Maps, starting from the vantage point of satellite looking down on Charlotte County, Florida, and then driving around in Google Street View. Interestingly, many of these failed developments do have a sprinkling of houses in them, most of which look to be fairly new. Evidently speculators from the most recent housing bubble spread out into some of these fossil subdivisions and managed to build a few houses before the bubble collapsed.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?100918 feedback
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