This sort of speaks for itself (these are inflation-adjusted numbers):

(I know, more stuff about the economy).  I thought this was interesting – existing homeless encampents are starting to grow in cities like Sacremento which have high forclosure rates.  In the case of Sacremento, the city is considering establishing ‘permanent’ tent cities with utilities such as plumbing out of concern for cholera and other diseases.  There have been suggestions that the city buy foreclosed properties and put the people there, but since they’re ‘private property’, and the city is cash-strapped in the first place, this seems to be a non-starter.  This reminds me of Rem’s studies of 3rd-world trash cities a little…

Not sure where this video clip comes from, but it doesn’t paint a very rosy picture of Dubai’s future.  I’ve never really understood how these desert extravaganzas could be sustained long-term.

Some commentary from the blog that posted it:

Short of opening a Radio Shack in an Amish town, Dubai is the world’s worst business idea, and there isn’t even any oil. Imagine proposing to build Vegas in a place where sex and drugs and rock and roll are an anathema. This is effectively the proposition that created Dubai – it was a stupid idea before the crash, and now it is dangerous.

People are literally fleeing this place, to date leaving 3000 cars stranded at the airport with keys still in the ignition. And the reason for this is that if you default on your Dubai mortgage, you can end up in a debtors prison. Perhaps Dubai will at least create a new Dickens?

On the same theme, Time just published an incredible set of photos of Detriot.

The Financial Times has a great post about Detroit.  A quick preview:

Detroit may be the archetypal down-and-out rust-belt city, but to call it “dying” masks a more complex reality. Greater Detroit still has three to four million residents, a world-class university next door in Ann Arbor and the bone structure of a great city, as a car-industry consultant with the ear of a poet put it over lunch one day. Why, then, the relentless focus on its failings? Nearly everyone you meet is either weary or angry at seeing their home town made the butt of jokes on late-night television and the subject of anguished political commentary. But no one denies that the region’s property market is abysmal, its finances a mess and its industrial base shrinking at an alarming rate.

Instead, Michiganders, despite being self-deprecating to a fault, make a point their countrymen won’t want to hear: Detroit is no longer the nation’s worst-case scenario, but on its leading edge, the proverbial canary in the coal mine. “It’s like the rest of the country is getting to where Detroit has been,” said Peter De Lorenzo, who writes the acerbic and very funny Autoextremist.com blog. That means that smug mock-horror is no longer the appropriate reaction to the frozen corpse. Instead, get ready for a shock of recognition.

There are also some hauntingly beautiful pictures of detroit over at seedetroit.com.  A few highlights:

I almost want to take a vacation there to do some research…

There’s a transcript of an interesting speech given by Dmitry Orlov to the Long Now Foundation about dealing with social collapse.  It’s mostly a comparison of the implosion of the USSR with the current state of the USA.  His position is a little more alarmist than is probably warranted, but he has some interesting ideas about urban development:

An even simpler approach has been successfully used in Cuba: converting urban parking lots and other empty bits of land to raised-bed agriculture. Instead of continually trucking in vegetables and other food, it is much easier to truck in soil, compost, and mulch just once a season. Raised highways can be closed to traffic (since there is unlikely to be much traffic in any case) and used to catch rainwater for irrigation. Rooftops and balconies can be used for hothouses, henhouses, and a variety of other agricultural uses.

Then, later in the article:

One obvious answer is to repurpose the ever-plentiful vacant office buildings for residential use. Converting offices to dormitories is quite straightforward. Many of them already have kitchens and bathrooms, plenty of partitions and other furniture, and all they are really missing is beds. Putting in beds is just not that difficult. The new, subsistence economy is unlikely to generate the large surpluses that are necessary for sustaining the current large population of office plankton. The businesses that once occupied these offices are not coming back, so we might as well find new and better uses for them.

Slashdot says

The FBI today ratcheted up the clamor to do something more substantive about the monumental growth of copper theft in the US. In a report issued today the FBI said the rising theft of the metal is threatening the critical infrastructure by targeting electrical substations, cellular towers, telephone land lines, railroads, water wells, construction sites, and vacant homes for lucrative profits. Copper thefts from these targets have increased since 2006; and they are currently disrupting the flow of electricity, telecommunications, transportation, water supply, heating, and security and emergency services, and present a risk to both public safety and national security.

Copper theft: not just for contractors any more.