issues
support pci
Becoming Native to This Place
Report
EXCERPT:
In April 2009—just when people thought things couldn’t get worse in San Bernardino County, California—bulldozers demolished four perfectly good new houses and a dozen others still under construction in Victorville, 100 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles.
The structures’ granite countertops and Jacuzzis had been removed first. Then the walls came down and the remains were unceremoniously scrapped. A woman named Candy Sweet came by the site looking for wood and bartered a six-pack of cold Coronas for some of the splintered two-by-fours.
For a boomtown in one of the fastest-growing counties in the United States, things were suddenly looking pretty bleak. The adobe-colored two-story houses had been built by speculators in a desert region dubbed the “Inland Empire” by developers. The unsold homes faced vandalism and legal liabilities when the town’s average home sales prices dropped from well over $300,000 in 2007 to $120,000 in 2009. These plummeting prices pushed Victorville over the edge, making the city one of the nation’s foreclosure capitals.
After people began to ransack fixtures from the vacant homes, Victorville town officials warned the bank owning the sixteen-home development that it would be on the hook for security and fire calls. The bank, which had inherited the mess from the defaulted developer, assessed the hemorrhaging local real estate market and decided to cut its losses. A work crew was dispatched to rip the houses down and get what they could—money, beer, whatever—for the remains.
From the Post Carbon Institute/Watershed Media Book:
The Post Carbon Reader
Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises
Edited by Richard Heinberg and Daniel Lerch
Overview
Table of Contents
Content available for download
Order the book
about The Post Carbon Reader
How do population, water, energy, food, and climate issues impact one another? What can we do to address one problem without making the others worse? The Post Carbon Reader features essays by some of the world’s most provocative thinkers on the key issues shaping our new century, from renewable energy and urban agriculture to social justice and community resilience. This insightful collection takes a hard-nosed look at the interconnected threats of our global sustainability quandary and presents some of the most promising responses.
Contributors to The Post Carbon Reader are some of the world's leading sustainability thinkers, including Bill McKibben, Richard Heinberg, Stephanie Mills, David Orr, Wes Jackson, Erika Allen, Gloria Flora, and dozens more.
Published by Watershed Media
Forthcoming in October
440 pages, 6 x 9“, 4 b/w photographs, 26 line illustrations
$21.95 paper 978-0-9709500-6-2
Like this report?
Keep the information flowing: Donate to Post Carbon Institute
Stay connected: Receive our monthly e-newsletter
Reposting: See our reposting policy
meet our fellows
what is pci?
