Standing on a street corner with a friend watching some men dig a hole the other day, the topic of conversation ended up on an issue which has been occupying me for the last several weeks: the growing numbers of vacant homes across the United States. We were both in agreement that vacant homes are a terrible thing, and we talked about various ways in which the problem could be addressed.

Obviously, vacant homes are a symptom of the economic troubles, which makes them disturbing in and of themselves. But they also depress me, immensely. High vacancy rates tend to drive down property values, which is something that most people seem to care about, and they also break up communities and increase crime. More tragically, when homes are vacant, they start to go downhill, usually very fast. It takes only a few months for mold, mildew, and rot to start setting in, and that’s aside from issues caused by vandalism, deferred maintenance, and storm damage. So, it’s quite simply a tragic waste.

In my personal opinion, when vacancy rates are over, say, five percent, new construction shouldn’t be happening. We should be focusing on refurbishing unoccupied units and getting people into them. If units aren’t selling or are rotting into the ground, maybe they need to be demolished and rebuilt. If people are just sitting on empty homes, they need to be forced to rent them. That goes for vacation homes as well, but that’s an issue I’ve already discussed. But it seems foolish to me to be annexing more land for occupation when unoccupied homes can be found all over the place. I can think of two homes which have been sitting vacant for more than a year within a block of me, and both are starting to look very ragged and unhappy.

While I understand that solving homelessness is not as simple as “here, have a house,” it does make me chafe to see homeless people in American streets when there are empty homes near those streets. It seems like working out some sort of program which gets homeless people into vacant homes could be a win win. The homeless/marginal population could invest energy and effort in fixing the homes up. Neighborhoods could be revitalized. The homes could be sold or rented, but either way, they’d be generating some income or getting off a bank’s books, and someone who needs a home would have one.

Having a stable place to live is key. If you have a home, you have an address, a place to install a phone, a safe place to sleep, an area to shower in. All of those things are going to help you get a job, and help you get your shit together so that you can deal with whatever got you homeless in the first place. Obviously, handing out keys isn’t going to deal with mental illness, but a surprising number of people are homeless because of twists of cruel fate, and a helping hand could make a huge difference.

I also think that we need to be establishing more liberal squatting laws, since banks are apparently happy to sit on houses until they rot if they can’t get their money out of them. I say that if you can successfully squat for a year, making a 10% improvement and paying on utilities, etc etc, you should get to redeem that deed, period, end of discussion. Furthermore, I think that neighborhood watch organizations should be encouraging this practice, to get communities more stable.

If depressed communities really care about blight, getting vacant buildings some occupants, any occupants, should be a major priority. And giving people an opportunity to buy those buildings could build pride of ownership, which would in turn translate into community beautification, and greater connections between residents in communities.

There is no earthly reason to let hundreds of thousands of homes just rot.

This is absolutely horrific. Hamid Karzai, our favourite puppet President, has just signed a bill which legalizes rape in marriage. Additional abridgements of women’s rights are also present in the bill. So much for the American “liberation” of Afghanistan; according to women’s rights advocates, things like this make Afghanistan worse for women today than it was under the Taliban.

MCDH has voted to continue providing abortion services, but it sounds like the meddlesome fundamentalist assholes who are trying to restrict women’s access to health services aren’t going to give it up just yet. I know it’s vindictive of me to say, but I really hope that those pricks someday encounter a situation in which they attempt to obtain a service which is entirely legal and entirely personal and they find themselves blocked by someone else’s small mindedness.

Evidently, the newest yuppie meat trend is goat.  I find it fascinating that yuppies apparently experience no cognitive dissonance when they all go gonzo over some meat product while simultaneously wailing about the environment.

Tristan sent me a link to this excellent story about a much-needed lesson in cultural sensitivity. I’m not a big fan of the whole Burning Man culture, primarily because it is very much white-centered, elitist, and kind of stupid. But a group of white middle class college kids throwing a “Native party” is pretty amazingly offensive, even for Burners, and I’m glad to hear that the Native American community condemned it.

This is a grim time for architecture, which makes it all the more tragic when beautiful old houses are allowed to rot so that they can be destroyed and replaced with ugly, cheaply made boxes. I’m not a fan of rabid preservation like what happens in Mendo, but I do wish that people had a little bit more respect for the past.

You might think that dueling Wyatt Earps in Tombstone is old news, and in a sense, you would be right, except that there’s a new gang in town, and they’re causing all sorts of social unrest and trouble. Only this time, it’s not for something practical or even particularly noble: it’s a ruthless scrimmage for tourist collars.

It wouldn’t be a global summit without some protestors. Of course, when you throw the President of the United States into the mix, things tend to get much more tense, and much more complicated, since we are apparently convinced that our head of state is far more endangered and important than anyone else’s. And, sadly, one of the protestors has died. The most depressing thing about the story? The report that protestors were throwing bottles at the medics trying to save him. What the fuck, people.