This Is Community

You probably know that I'm not at all a fan of this $18,000 credit offered to new home buyers of a new never-lived in housal unit. $8k comes from the Fed, whilst $10k from the state of California. A taxpayer gift for new people who have yet to experience the thrill of going into thirty year debt.

Not a fan. Don't really know why...I wonder if it's because I didn't get any credit having bought twelve years ago instead of twelve days ago. Perhaps I'm just bitter 'cause I got to pay for it instead of receiving it. That might be all that's needed for me to rail against new construction amidst 30,000 other foreclosed homes here in the Sacramento area. Maybe it's misguided. The intention is to keep construction workers constructing and banks lending, the hyperactivity of which led to our current state of affairs.

In North Carolina a developer is going a step further and offering to pay for 6-months if, after you buy, you lose your job due to layoff. The only condition of this offer from Brookside is that you must purchase a home in their Ashton Place community.

Let me tell you what's wrong with this, let me tell you. First of all, the fact that you can have a "community" pre-installed with a new home is pure horseshit. A community isn't something you can have, like upgraded carpet. It's something that develops, that is more than the collection of housal units in some goddamn exurban tract home/strip mall development. Their website makes great claims that Ashton Place is 3/10s of a mile from a targeted commercial intersection and five minutes from Walmart. Five driving minutes, of course. This, this! is what a community passes for in America -- a five minute drive to a strip mall.

To really piss me off, they suggest that simply by being minutes away from historic Wilmington (supposedly a small southern community), nothing else is needed for this community to be called a community. Hop in your car inside your two-car garage, engage no one while driving out, engage no one on during your commute into Wilmington, engage no on while parking there, and enjoy the conveniences and entertainment venues of Wilmington while believing the whole time that you never left any community.

Most of us, apparently, aren't willing to tolerate any diminishment in our overinvested road infrastructure while we accept that our kids are crammed into school trailers (they're taught in trailer parks...), that our town halls and libraries and park facilities and all other civic buildings are pre-fab'ed hulking pieces of shit built with what's left of our public monies after the roads are built and maintained. Indeed, there is no longer any need for civic gathering places, we decreed, after realizing that community is nothing more than motoring between WalMart and our own housal unit. This is community.

It's three thousand miles away, yet I can be sure, almost 100% sure, that Wilmington thinks that luring suburbanites into the city core is a worthwhile goal, and to ensure commuters can get there more quickly they widened streets in low income neighborhoods, eliminated on-street parking to facilitate through traffic, and did every damn thing they could to fuck up their own town to support automotive transport into their town. This is community.