Foreclosure Of A Dream

From a Huffington Post slide show of the foreclosure capital of the universe, Las Vegas, comes this slide of what represents (to me,anyway) not the worst of the housing meltdown, but the worst of the housing bubble:


This is a caricature of a home, a housal unit that opens its maw, swallows the vehicular entity and its occupant and closes up...awaiting the next victim. I imagine that the owner painted a upward curving smiley face on the garage door, maybe with a missing tooth too. That would go well with the his-and-her Lexus', adornments to the garage and the housal unit as a whole.

I suspect that this unit would have fetched $363,998 in its prime. A shame that such an architectural marvel is allowed to sit vacant for $121,000. Can you imagine the heat in that upstairs south-facing bedroom without working air conditioning?

To me, this represents the foreclosure of the American dream -- we've foreclosed on nice places to live, on houses built with some degree of charm years ago, now trumped by stucco and foam accouterments and a big blank garage door consuming 2/3rds of the unit facade. Places we used to live in -- medium density, walkable, tree lined -- have held their value during this supposed economic slowdown, but have long since fallen out of favor to shit like this. This is the America we wanted; charmless, soulless, empty, but above all, cheap...and we got it.