Developer's Semaphore

Three miles north of my suburban pod they've ceased construction on a new 115-unit enclave called Villa Terrassa. They started in 2006 during the peak-boom and now there's just twenty of them built out, while the remaining 95 are concrete pads overgrown with 4-foot high weeds. Just what any new homeowner wants to live next to for the next four to six years, eh?

This is my view of the Villa everyday as I bike along Franklin and Mack:


This sign once read "...under $300,000" back in 2006. I'm curious what each of those 20 new homeowners paid, and how many of them fell off the foreclosure cliff. If I were upside down a hundred grand I would absolutely walk away.

Absolutely. I was given a property with nothing required from me. I would absolutely walk off and take the credit hit. Come on...I bet I could get a new credit card less than three months later. I bet I could buy a new car less than six months later. I'd simply ride out the foreclosure for a few years until it's a buyer's market again, my credit will be 'restored' to nearly new and I'd have another go at it by 2013.

Pushing aside all this housing crisis horseshit, the worst of it is that I and everyone else who drives/bicycles by this "Villa" has to look at this model home with a banner draped across it. And when the banner gets torn to shreds from this upcoming winter winds, the community will be rewarded with a blank fucking wall for the next seventy seven years. This enclave was never intended to integrate with anything else. The blank walls of its edges means nothing to the developer, it's only supposed to show good from the front. And that's where the sidewalk ends...right into a 4 foot high wooden barricade.

Who is going to walk on that sidewalk, huh? Who? And where would they be going, after negotiating over this wooden fence into that muddy rockway? Only miscreants and rapscallions, that's who, all of whom will be looked down upon by thousands of Elk Grove thru-commuters as less worthy citizens who for one reason or another cannot participate in our society's compulsory automobile ownership program.

And tell me, does the presence of a half a dozen orange and yellow flags do anything redeeming for this "community?" Do these flags make it somehow more livable? Perhaps it's developer's semaphore -- "We fly flags. This is a special place. If you lived here, you'd be special, too."