Ruin Value

I try to imagine my fair hamlet of Elk Grove, forty years into the future. Kidney failure will have done me in by then but hopefully my son will be around, although likely he'll be completely grey. The year is 2048. Elk Grove has long since passed the seven hundred thousand population mark (at an anemic 4% growth rate), and with growth plans approved by the city council back in 2010 and 2027, its "sphere of influence" extends all the way to the Consumes river and south to the Galt border. The city presently encompasses 320 square miles.

Tremendous effort went into berming the Consumes to allow for construction of the 26,000 home Quail Run development, presumably named after the wildlife that was destroyed to build it. This development began in 2019, with its ceremonious first spade of dirt on display in the fourth model home's lawyer foyer. The rest of the dirt was used to hold back the raging Consumnes river to allow for building on the floodplain. Well, to be honest, the river hasn't added a drop to the Mokelumne in some time, what with the annual Sierra rainfall down 24% since 1900 and what does fall is immediately consumed by the newly minted East Side Water Authority.

This time, however, the new Quail Run will endure. The mistakes of the past have been overwritten. Quail Run will not be destined to become the toxic suburban shitholes that Laguna Ridge and Laugna Vista have become. So the city hired the modernist architectural firm Lanson & Lanson LLC from Boston to build ruin value into the Quail Run's consumption centers (euphemism for future strip malls).

"Our buildings must also speak to the conscience of future generations of Elk Grovians," remarked Clay Lanson, senior partner at the Firm. "We noticed that everything Elk Grove did in the past wouldn't endure the ages, to speak of who we were, what we've done...well, we're changing the old calculus. We'll construct using local, natural materials that can stand the ravages of time. Would a tilt-up, ferrocemented, stucco-cladded large format retail building provide for an aesthetically pleasing ruin nine hundred years from now? Of course it wouldn't. The first ones built back in the heady days of the twenty hundreds are already crumbling.

"When our buildings crumble, they'll have value. Our buildings, our future ruins, will stand as powerful architectural proofs of the great civilization Elk Grove had once been."