Friday, October 03, 2008

Ghost Town



Here's an interesting look at all of the housing foreclosures in Southern California. My sense of this problem is that it's impacting very average Americans who were incredibly reckless with their money. It's strange for me, having been raised by parents and grandparents who wouldn't even take out credit cards for fear of debt, to fully understand gambling on the future like these people did. It's funny: we live in a blue collar Canadian town where everyone drives cheap cars or takes the bus. Every week I drive into an economically-depressed blue collar American town where everyone drives Hummers, SUVs, or luxury cars, and nobody takes the bus. I have to wonder what's going on here?

Whatever happened to the days when there was no shame in being working class?

2 comments:

Brian Dunbar said...

It's funny: we live in a blue collar Canadian town where everyone drives cheap cars or takes the bus. Every week I drive into an economically-depressed blue collar American town where everyone drives Hummers, SUVs, or luxury cars, and nobody takes the bus. I have to wonder what's going on here?

I don't know exactly what town you're talking about but ... is it possible that the places is not as bad as all that? If a lotta people are driving Hummers it's possible they're not doing so bad ...

Rufus said...

It's possible. I'm actually thinking of Buffalo, where they've had a fairly high unemployment rate since the steel industry left. The cliche is that everyone calls it a "dying city" because of the economy and declining population. It could definitely be an exaggeration though. But I also don't know anybody there who works a white collar job. I guess technically I do, but not really.

Then again, Claire's father does a lot of people's finances, and he tends to cringe every time we pass a Hummer on the road because he claims that most of their drivers are in debt up to their eyeballs. And again I think debt is just a lot more accepted than it used to be.

What you'll find is though is that the people who really do make a lot of money tend not to drive the flashier cars. Our in-laws are multimillionaires (sorry to say that, but it's true) but you'd never know it from their clothes, house, cars, or anything really. So I'm skeptical when I see people in fancy cars or flashy clothes.