Murder is rapidly becoming a common occurrence in America's most dangerous cities, making it one of the fastest growing types of violent crime in some parts of the country.
Worst cities and most dangerous cities in America, per capita; murders listed by city:
Buffalo's overall crime rate dropped last year, but murders, robberies and assaults all increased.
New statistics from the state reveal a 5 percent jump in violent crime last year even though overall crime dropped 4 percent.
The increase in violent crime — there were 3,920 incidents last year — can be traced to, among other things, a spike in homicides. Murders in the city increased from 37 in 2008 to 60 last year.
"Violent crime is what we should be targeting," said Darnell Jackson, an East Side community activist. "And the way to do that is to get kids off the streets."
While murders, assaults and robberies were up last year, the number of burglaries, larcenies and stolen vehicles were down in Buffalo.
Overall, the number of nonviolent, property-related crimes dropped to 14,481 last year, down 6 percent from the year before and the lowest level since 2005.
Interesting Fact: In one day of travel, more than 55 percent of the U.S. population can be reached from Buffalo; approximately 65 percent of Canadians and 70 percent of Canadian manufacturing firms can be accessed within the same span of time. Buffalo is uniquely situated to transport goods by all means, including air, water, rail, and road.
(These slum houses, owned by City Hall, have helped make Ruhland Avenue ground zero in the fight against vacant and abandoned housing and the crime and blight that comes with it.)
(“When I first moved here…. It was a beautiful street and everyone pitched in.” — Dorothy Bobb, head of the block club on Ruhland Avenue where seven out of 10 properties are abandoned)
(Neighbor Paul Graefser has called the city to complain about this city-owned house on Pooley Place, which is full of debris, garbage, an abandonded car and collapsed garage.)
(The City of Buffalo owns these two houses, at left and right of alley, and all but a handful of lots on Ruhland Avenue. The house across the street is one of only a few still occupied.)
(Myo Thant looks at the damaged condition of two vacant houses across the street from his house on Normal Avenue, one of which is owned by the City of Buffalo. Another neighbor described children playing on this property.)
If there’s a forgotten Buffalo neighborhood, a street abandoned and left for dead, it’s Ruhland Avenue. Walk down the quiet, tree-lined avenue, and you might think you’re in rural North Collins instead of the East Side. Walk a little farther and you’ll discover seven out of every 10 properties on Ruhland are vacant and abandoned.
And City Hall owns almost all of them [See Land Banks: A Ruse for Abolishing Private Property]. The two-block-long side street, once home to 50 or 60 families, now has 10 families, five on each block. A few houses, scattered here and there, still stand. But most of Ruhland is vacant lots filled with overgrown grass and weeds.
“This was a nice, nice street,” said Monique Brown, one of the few people still living there. “But now it’s the worst street over here.”
Buffalo’s vacant housing crisis, decades in the making, has exploded in recent years and neighborhoods like Ruhland and nearby Harmonia Street are the poster children in the war against it.
Stroll down Harmonia, where 35 of the 53 properties are owned or targeted to be owned by the city, and you soon discover that vacant lots outnumber people.
And many of the lots, remnants of the homes abandoned and torn down, are often nothing more than dirt strewn with weeds and garbage.
“It’s a mess,” Robert Chapmon said of his street. “We don’t have any neighbors, and the city is neglecting its own properties.”
Buffalo has the third highest vacant housing rate in the nation, and nowhere is the problem more acute than on Ruhland and Harmonia.
But don’t mistake it for an East Side problem. Or even a city problem.
A Buffalo News analysis of property, census and other records found:
One out of every 12 or 13 properties in Buffalo — a total of 7,000 to 8,000 — will soon be owned by City Hall, making it Buffalo’s biggest landowner by far.
Thirty-five percent of the streets in Buffalo have at least one city-owned vacant lot or house.
• Buffalo’s vacant housing rate is the highest in New York and trails only Detroit and New Orleans among the 100 largest cities in the nation.
The vacant housing problem is spreading into Black Rock-Riverside and the city’s first-ring suburbs.
Crime is one of the by products of vacant housing. Six out of every 10 arsons in the city last year occured at abandoned buildings. They also act as a popular dumping ground for dead bodies — seven in 2 years — many of them murder victims.
Crisis explodes
Buffalo’s housing crisis, the result of 50 years of population loss, has rapidly accelerated in recent years.The city is now a community where 23 percent of the housing units are vacant, according to a 2006 census estimate.That translates into about 18,000 houses, or about one of every five properties in the city. The lion’s share are on the East Side and West Side.
The crisis is so big, so widespread, experts say, it may represent the single biggest challenge facing Buffalo’s neighborhoods.
“This is a big one,” said Kathryn A. Foster, director of the University at Buffalo’s Regional Institute. “It’s fair to say the vacant housing issue is a tremendous test for the city.”
And one of the reasons why is because the crisis is spreading, quickly.
“Two-thirds of our city is under grave threat,” said Aaron Bartley, director of People United for Sustainable Housing, or PUSH, a grass-roots group working to rebuild the West Side.
Bartley’s gloomy assessment is backed up by new figures from the U. S. Postal Service, which tracks the number of vacant homes where mail is “undeliverable.”Late last year, the agency identified 18,411 addresses in the city where mail is no longer picked up.
Even worse, the Postal Service data suggests the city’s housing crisis is expanding into Black Rock and Riverside and into first-ring suburbs like Cheektowaga.
“It’s almost like a virus,” said Priscilla Almodovar, New York State’s top affordable-housing official.
In just six years, the city’s vacancy rate increased by 45 percent. And that was during a period when the city demolished at least 2,000 homes.
The owners of these vacant properties vary, but none owns more than the city itself.
By the end of this year, the city will own an estimated 7,000 to 8,000 properties, maybe more. About 60 percent of them are vacant lots.
The city’s property ownership is so great, there are now 44 city streets where City Hall owns more than 20 percent of the properties.
And nowhere is City Hall’s role as Buffalo’s single biggest landowner more evident than on the East Side.
An eerie tranquility
On streets like Playter, Ruhland and Harmonia, the city owns more than half the properties.
“When I first moved here, there were lots of houses,” said Dorothy Bobb, head of the Ruhland Avenue Block Club. “It was a beautiful street and everyone pitched in. Now, it’s all vacant lots.”
Walk down the southern half of Ruhland, off Sycamore Street, and there’s an almost eerie tranquility to the neighborhood. The dead-end street is mostly vacant lots, with a few houses, most of them vacant, scattered here and there.
With the overgrown grass lots and lack of people, there’s a rural quality to Ruhland. A stranger would be hard-pressed to believe he was on the East Side and not Wales or Akron.
“If I owned one of those fields, I’d be cited,” said Jameel Collins as he pointed to a series of city-owned lots. “And if I owned one of those vacant buildings, I’d be in Housing Court.”
On a warm, sunny day in May, the lots were overgrown with grass and weeds. Collins, who grew up in the neighborhood, said he used to mow the lots but stopped when he discovered City Hall owned most of them.
His sister, Monique Brown, is so fed up she wants to move and regrets not doing it sooner. Her son, Jamell A. Wright, 17, was gunned down on Barthel Street in April and died a few days later.
Even now, Brown wonders if moving to a better neighborhood might have saved her son’s life.
“If it was up to me,” she said of the street she calls home, “I’d start all over.”
It’s a common lament. Start over. Start from scratch and rebuild the neighborhood house by house, block by block, street by street.
“My son keeps saying, ‘Let’s get out here, Mom,” said Zina Croom, a longtime resident of nearby Harmonia Street. “And I tell him, ‘Maybe someday you can take your Mom away from here.’ ”
Street changes
Croom and Chapmon, Harmonia residents for more than 20 years, have seen the street change from a neighborhood of homeowners to a neighborhood of renters and, now, a neighborhood dominated by vacant lots and houses.
“If it’s owned by the city, why isn’t the grass cut?” Chapmon said of the lots across from his house. “The city is neglecting its own property.”
On any given day, Croom can look down her street, and the only people she sees are the prostitutes working the corner at Sycamore.
She jokes about the problems she lives with, but it’s clear, as a mother with one teenage son still at home, she has fears. And, unfortunately for Buffalo, they’re not unique to the East Side.
On Pooley Place, a small residential street on the West Side, drug dealing and vandalism are the residue of its six vacant houses.
At one of them, 85 Pooley, a house targeted for demolition, the backyard is piled high with trash and clothes at least four feet deep.
The stench of garbage and dead animals fills the air. And in the middle of it all sits an abandoned car. Behind it, the remnants of a collapsed garage.
Neighbors say the house, which is open, is a playpen for drug dealers and an accident waiting to happen.
“This house is scary,” said Paul Graefser, a neighbor. “We have a lot of young kids on the street. This place is going to hurt someone.”
Karen Podmore, one of the street’s self-appointed watchdogs, said the houses have been a longtime problem and yet City Hall continues to turn a blind eye.
“We’ve been complaining for years about these houses,” Podmore said. “It’s embarrassing. My family comes down here and wonders how I can live in a slum.”
In East Cleveland, some streets are lined with homes abandoned after foreclosures and evictions. Junkies, drug dealers, squatters and the homeless are known to inhabit these buildings, and the area has become extremely dangerous. Some residents refer to it as "Mad Max." - TIME, March 25, 2008
Once rumored to be the largest mall in the United States, the Randell Park Mall is all but closed due to violence, bad maintanance, poor business, and the current mortgage crisis. The vast cavernous atriums remain dark as a handfull of people roam the mall. Most of the shops remain dark, and those few that are open sell jewelry to young rappers who come in to shop. Theft is common place for those shops that remain open, but mostly the massive mall is closed down. - TIME, March 28, 2008
Cleveland-area theaters are trying hard to avoid going the way of Akron's Carousel Dinner Theatre -- out of business -- by working hard at selling tickets. They're shocked by the sudden demise of Akron's Carousel Dinner Theatre, and they're stinging from 20 percent drops in ticket sales for popular holiday shows.
But instead of panicking, Cleveland-area theaters are taking precautionary measures to stay alive and well:
The Cleveland Play House will reduce its main stage offerings from nine shows this season to seven shows this coming season, the first time in decades that number has fallen below eight.
Cleveland Public Theatre will postpone a world premiere of a locally written play to save on the heating bill.
And PlayhouseSquare and the producers of next week's touring Broadway show, "Frost/Nixon" starring Stacy Keach, have discounted tickets a whopping 55 percent to $25.
The theater business across the nation is suffering from the same symptoms as retail, housing and other sectors of economy as the cascading effects of the global financial crisis show no signs of letting up.
That goes for commercial operations like Carousel, which closed Saturday night after sales slumped and banks withdrew longstanding credit, and Broadway theaters in New York, where a dozen shows will close this month for lack of tourist dollars.
And it goes for nonprofit professional regional theaters across the country, some of which have already gone under or stand on the brink of extinction, like North Shore Music Theatre, a suburban Boston institution for 55 years that may shutter as early as Sunday.
Theater, the most popular performing art form in the country, is big business. The Broadway League estimates its producers' shows grossed nearly $2 billion New York and on the road last season.
Nonprofit regional theaters, meanwhile, generated almost as much in fiscal 2007, according to a 2007 study by the Theatre Communications Group.
In Cleveland, theater is one of the biggest contributors to the cultural sector's estimated $1 billion impact on Northeast Ohio, led by PlayhouseSquare, which draws 1 million visitors a year, and its Broadway Series, the most popular performing arts program in the region.
Despite the big bucks and calls for a federal bailout of the arts -- most prominently by Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser last week in the Washington Post -- Cleveland theaters say they're preparing for the worst to preserve the best of what they do.
"Who can we realistically turn to for an emergency infusion of cash?" asked Great Lakes Theater Festival producing artistic director Charles Fee.
"Everybody -- the government, foundations, corporations, individuals -- is in the same boat," he said. "There is no bailout waiting for us. We've got to figure this out on our own."
Cleveland's theaters have two big advantages. They've been through this for most of this decade and many have already downsized and reorganized. And they get a chunk of the cash generated by Cuyahoga County's 30-cents-a-pack cigarette tax for arts. In 2007, the first year of the tax, it generated $18.6 million.
"This community can be really, really thankful for that cigarette tax money," said Gina Vernaci of downtown Cleveland's PlayhouseSquare. "The timing for that could not have been more exquisite. If anything is going to give us a cushion to get through this, it's that."
Despite the cushion, the across-the-board drops in ticket sales for Christmas shows that are supposed to generate cash to support the rest of the season were daunting:
PlayhouseSquare's 46-performance run of "The Radio City Christmas Spectacular," back for the first time in years, fell 17 percent short of projections.
Great Lakes Theater Festival's "A Christmas Carol" was off 16 percent from last year despite new casting, a different director and better reviews.
"A Christmas Story" at the Play House fell 20 percent from 2007 despite restructuring the performance week to play sell-out school matinees and glowing notices for a reinvigorated show.
And just as those losses were being toted up, Carousel, a 35-year institution that drew up to 200,000 a year, went down in a matter of days. It was the second area musical theater to fail in the past year after last February's bankruptcy of Kalliope Stage in Cleveland Heights.
Principal owner Joe Palmer would not discuss details, but sources at Carousel said slow ticket sales were compounded by a demand from a credit card processor for collateral and the withdrawal of a credit line from a bank ...
A. LoPresti & Sons announced on their website that they have ceased operations after 101-years of service.
"Thank you for helping us to provide a century of outstanding service. We regret to inform you that A. LoPresti & Sons, Inc. has ceased operations.
Although we are deeply saddened by this development, we remain proud of the legacy of our family and our company, and can rejoice in celebrating a century of outstanding service. Throughout our history, we have maintained the highest ethical standards and a deep commitment to the Greater Cleveland community. We are thankful for the support of our customers and suppliers, and grateful for the dedication of several generations of employees, who have been our extended family." - Patricia LoPresti, CEO & President
LoPresti & Sons was established in 1908 and delivers fresh produce & frozen foods to businesses & restaurants.
Half of all humanity, including 53 percent of all Americans, live in or in proximity to a coastal city... By 2025, 75 percent of the world's population, approximately 6.2 billion people, including 262 million Americans, will live on or near a coast, as immigrants flock to port communities in search of jobs and other opportunities. - Amy Myers Jaffe, The Coastal Cities Phenomenon, Esquire, October 1, 2006
The 1910 census was the last one in which rural Americans represented a majority of the population; these days, we've become a thoroughly metropolitan nation. Two-thirds of our population lives in the top 100 metropolitan areas , and 84 percent of Americans live in all 363 metros... The top 100 metropolitan areas are home to 68 percent of America's jobs and are the origin of 75 percent of the nation's gross domestic product... People's longing for small towns is an understandable fantasy. Small towns seem like slower, saner havens in an overly connected, frenetic world, places where a blackberry is an ingredient in jam. But metros, not small towns, are where our economy is, where our population is, and where our country's future is. - Jennifer Bradley and Bruce Katz, Village Idiocy: Enough with Small-Town Triumphalism, The New Republic, October 8, 2008
* 9,000 properties in a land area the size of Boston * Minimum bid was $500 * After 4 days, less than 20 percent sold * Potential homeowners frustrated by speculators
In a crowded ballroom next to a bankrupt casino, what remains of the Detroit property market was being picked over by speculators and mostly discarded.
After five hours of calling out a drumbeat of "no bid" for properties listed in an auction book as thick as a city phone directory, the energy of the county auctioneer began to flag.
"OK," he said. "We only have 300 more pages to go."
There was tired laughter from investors ready to roll the dice on a city that has become a symbol of the collapse of the U.S. auto industry, pressures on the industrial middle-class, and intractable problems for the urban poor.
On the auction block in Detroit: almost 9,000 homes and lots in various states of abandonment and decay from the tidy owner-occupied to the burned-out shell claimed by squatters.
Taken together, the properties seized by tax collectors for arrears and put up for sale last week represented an area the size of New York's Central Park. Total vacant land in Detroit now occupies an area almost the size of Boston, according to a Detroit Free Press estimate.
The tax foreclosure auction by Wayne County authorities also stood as one of the most ambitious one-stop attempts to sell off urban property since the real-estate market collapse.
Despite a minimum bid of $500, less than a fifth of the Detroit land was sold after four days.
The county had no estimate of how much was raised by the auction, a second attempt to sell property that had failed to find buyers for the full amount of back taxes in September.
The unsold parcels add to an expanding ghost town within the once-vibrant town known worldwide as the Motor City.
Critics say the poor showing at the auction underscores the limits of using a market-based system to clean up property tax problems. They say the system has enriched a few but failed to deliver a way for Detroit to staunch its dwindling population and could worsen the vacancy crisis.
One proposed alternative would have officials take control of the tax foreclosure process through a land bank program of the kind being used to revitalize the nearby city of Flint.
The stakes in the debate are rising.
The number of Detroit properties in tax foreclosure has more than tripled since 2007 and seems certain to rise further. The lots for sale last week represented arrears from only 2006, well before the worst of the downturn for U.S. automakers.
"We have to keep in mind that GM and Chrysler filed for bankruptcy this year," said Terrance Keith, chief deputy treasurer of Wayne County. "Some people are going to be totally tapped out next year."
Detroit, already stuck with a $300 million budget deficit, is responsible in the meantime for cutting the weeds and responding to fire calls for thousands more abandoned lots.
'WHY AM I COMPETING AGAINST A BANK?'
Many potential homeowners that Detroit desperately needs said they felt penalized by the auction process.
They mostly found themselves outbid by deeper-pocketed investors from California and New York who were in a race to claim the auction book's relatively few livable properties.
Dozens of potential bidders, mostly local residents, were turned away on the first day of the auction by deputies after they failed to meet the morning deadline for registration.
Ross Wallace, a lieutenant in the U.S. Army, turned in his check for $500 and waited on the auction floor in full dress uniform for a chance to buy a Detroit house on the cheap.
Wallace, 27, said he did not want to leave his fiancee and two children with a mortgage before shipping out to Iraq later this year.
"I still have student loans and I'm trying to be responsible. I don't want to leave debt," he said.
Wallace waited for the auction to roll around to Detroit's Boston-Edison district, a once stately area that was home to boxing legend Joe Louis and Motown founder Berry Gordy.
But he was quickly outbid. An unidentified investor at the front of the room who had scooped up several dozen properties took the home Wallace wanted for about $15,000.
"Why am I competing against a bank?" he said later. "It would be common sense to have a separate process for people who want to move back to the city or it's going to stay empty."
Nearby, a Dutch-born local woman, Riet Schumack, 54, knitted patiently through the auction for a chance to bid on a lot in Brightmoor, one of the most blighted neighborhoods.
Schumack, who runs a community garden near her home that employs 14 neighborhood children, said she had been battling through a maze of bureaucracy for years to try to buy an abandoned lot nearby to expand and plant fruit trees.
She learned the lot had been taken back from its previous owner -- an absentee investor with more than 100 abandoned lots in Brightmoor -- only because of her constant calls to city and county officials, she said.
When officials told her she would have to wait for a fourth day to bid on the property, Schumack broke down into tears.
"Anybody with a job is not able to sit here for days. So you are left with the sharks," she said.
Opinions were divided on whether the investors buying lots and homes by the dozen were a sign of better times ahead.
"They weren't here two years ago. So why are they here now? Unless, as speculators, they believe this is the bottom," said Keith of the Wayne County treasurer's office.
Bill Frank, a Detroit realtor trying to buy a small house for a just-married friend, found himself repeatedly outbid.
"Speculators are often not good for a city and, from my experience, they are going to lose a fortune," he said. "But there are no easy answers. It's a declining city."
Freedom in America begins with the ownership and free use of private property. The land. The precious land. Theodore Roosevelt began the ideal of setting aside some of the land as a monument for posterity to behold. It was a good idea. The people, collectively, chose to preserve some of the land, to be owned collectively as public land, by the people. For a century now, public land has increased dramatically while private property has diminished. Federal, state, and local governments now own nearly 40% of all the land area in America. How much public land is needed? How much is enough? Moreover, use of the remaining private land is so heavily regulated that the spark of hope is flickering in the eyes of all land owners. - Henry Lamb, The Precious Land, Henry Lamb Columns in 1999, p. 13
In addition to the extraordinary amount of land owned by the federal government, the state and local governments also own and control surprisingly large amounts of property. One study noted that state governments own 196,924,100 acres of land, comprising 8.7% of all land holdings. As of September 1994, the 13 western states owned about 141.9 million acres. Sadly, federal, state, and local governments own fully 39.8% of all the land in this country. - Nancie Marzulla , President, Defenders of Property Rights, Hearing on the American Outdoors Act, S. 2590, July 20, 2004
The U.S. economy is dying and we are heading for the next Great Depression. The talking heads in the mainstream media love to spin the economic numbers around and around and they love to make it sound like the economy is improving, but the truth is that it doesn't take a genius to see what is happening to the U.S. economic system.
All over the nation many of our greatest cities are being slowly but surely transformed into post-apocalyptic wastelands. All over the mid-Atlantic, all along the Gulf coast, all throughout the "rust belt" and all over the entire state of California cities that once had incredibly vibrant economies are being turned into rotting, post-industrial hellholes. In many U.S. cities, the "real" rate of unemployment is over 30 percent. There are some communities that will start depressing you almost the moment that you drive into them. It is almost as if all of the hope has been sucked right out of those communities.
If you live in one of those American hellholes you know what I am talking about. Sadly, it is not just a few cities that are becoming hellholes. This is happening in the east, in the west, in the north and in the south. America is literally being transformed right in front of our eyes.
If you still live in an area of the United States that is prosperous, do not mock the cities that you are about to read about. The cold, hard reality of the matter is that economic decline and economic despair are spreading rapidly and they will come to your area soon enough. Right now we are still talking about "American hellholes", but if the long-term economic trends that are destroying this nation are not turned around eventually we will just be talking about one gigantic "American hellhole". In the end, no area of the country will completely escape the economic hell that is coming.
Let's take a closer look at what is currently happening in some of the worst areas of the country....
Detroit, Michigan
In the city of Detroit today, there are over 33,000 abandoned houses, 70 schools are being permanently closed down, the mayor wants to bulldoze one-fourth of the city and you can literally buy a house for one dollar in the worst areas.
During the boom days of the 1950s, Detroit was a teeming metropolis of approximately 2 million people, but today the current population is less than half that. The city of Detroit, once a shining example of middle class America, is now a rotting cesspool of economic decline and it actually saw its population decline by 25 percent during the decade that recently ended. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Detroit lost a resident every 22 minutes between the years of 2000 and 2010.
So why are people leaving Detroit so rapidly?
There simply are no jobs.
At the height of the economic downturn, the mayor of Detroit admitted that while the "official" unemployment rate in Detroit was about 27 percent, the "real" unemployment rate in his city was actually somewhere around 50 percent.
Since there are not enough jobs, that also means that not enough tax money is coming in. Detroit is essentially insolvent at this point.
Detroit officials are trying to implement some austerity measures in a desperate attempt to get city finances under control.
For example, the state of Michigan recently granted approval to a plan that would shut down nearly half of the public schools in Detroit. Under the plan, 70 schools will be closed and 72 will continue operating.
It has been estimated that the remaining public schools will have class sizes of up to 60 students.
Detroit Mayor Dave Bing also wants to cut off 20 percent of the entire city from police and trash services in order to save money.
Essentially that would mean abandoning 20 percent of the city of Detroit to the gangs and to the homeless.
In fact, crime has gotten so bad and the citizens are so frustrated by the lack of police assistance that they have resorted to forming their own organizations to fight back. One group, known as "Detroit 300", was formed after a 90-year-old woman on Detroit's northwest side was brutally raped in August.
If you want to see what the future of America looks like, just take a few hours and go driving through Detroit some time. But please only do this during the day. Do not do this at night. Detroit is not a safe place anymore, and you cannot count on the police to help you in a timely manner.
Detroit was once one of the greatest cities in the world.
But today it is an absolute hellhole.
Camden, New Jersey
So is there any place in America that is worse than Detroit?
Well, many would nominate Camden, New Jersey.
Many years ago, Camden was actually thriving and prosperous. But today the city of Camden is known as "the second most dangerous city in America".
In a recent article entitled "City of Ruins", Chris Hedges did an amazing job of documenting the horrific decline of Camden. Hedges estimates that the real rate of unemployment in Camden is somewhere around 30 to 40 percent, and he makes it sound like nobody in their right mind would want to live there now....
Camden is where those discarded as human refuse are dumped, along with the physical refuse of postindustrial America. A sprawling sewage treatment plant on forty acres of riverfront land processes 58 million gallons of wastewater a day for Camden County. The stench of sewage lingers in the streets. There is a huge trash-burning plant that releases noxious clouds, a prison, a massive cement plant and mountains of scrap metal feeding into a giant shredder. The city is scarred with several thousand decaying abandoned row houses; the skeletal remains of windowless brick factories and gutted gas stations; overgrown vacant lots filled with garbage and old tires; neglected, weed-filled cemeteries; and boarded-up store fronts.
Gangs have stepped into the gaping void left by industry. In Camden today, drugs and prostitution are two of the only viable businesses left - especially for those who cannot find employment anywhere else. The following is how Hedges describes the current state of affairs....
There are perhaps a hundred open-air drug markets, most run by gangs like the Bloods, the Latin Kings, Los Nietos and MS-13. Knots of young men in black leather jackets and baggy sweatshirts sell weed and crack to clients, many of whom drive in from the suburbs. The drug trade is one of the city's few thriving businesses. A weapon, police say, is never more than a few feet away, usually stashed behind a trash can, in the grass or on a porch.
But before we all start judging Camden for being such a horrible place to live, it is important to realize that this is happening in communities from coast to coast. All over the United States industries are leaving and deep social decay is setting in.
Even the criminals in Camden are struggling. Things have gotten so bad in Camden, New Jersey that not even the drug dealers are spending their money anymore.
So now the gangs and the drug dealers have more room to operate.
Sadly, this is not just happening in Camden. It is happening all over New Jersey.
Of 315 municipalities the New Jersey State Police union recently surveyed, more than half indicated that they were planning to lay off police officers.
So why doesn't the state government step in and help out?
Well, the state of New Jersey is in such bad shape that they still are facing a $10 billion budget deficit for this year even after cutting a billion dollars from the education budget and laying off thousands of teachers.
New Jersey also has $46 billion in unfunded pension liabilities and $65 billion in unfunded health care liabilities. Nobody is quite sure how New Jersey is even going to come close to meeting those obligations.
Meanwhile, cities like Camden are rotting a little bit more every single day.
New Orleans, Louisiana
New Orleans had a struggling economy even before Hurricane Katrina struck back in 2005. But that event changed everything. It is now almost 6 years later and virtually the entire region is still a disaster zone.
New Orleans permanently lost 29% of its population after Hurricane Katrina. There are many areas of New Orleans that still look as if they have just been bombed.
21.5 percent of all houses in New Orleans, Louisiana are currently standing vacant. Many of those homes will never be inhabited again.
What made things even worse for New Orleans (and for residents all along the Gulf coast) was the horrific BP oil spill last year. The mainstream news does not talk about the oil spill much anymore, but those living in the area have to deal with the effects every single day.
Some of the industries in the Gulf region were really starting to recover from Hurricane Katrina but the BP oil spill put a stop to that.
Before the oil spill, Louisiana produced more fish and seafood than anywhere in the United States except for Alaska. But now the seafood industry has been absolutely devastated. It has been estimated that the cost of the BP oil spill to the fishing industry in Louisiana alone could top 3 billion dollars.
New Orleans keeps trying to bounce back from all of these disasters, but times are tough down there.
Today, New Orleans is the 13th most violent city in America. That is actually an improvement. Before Katrina New Orleans had even more violent crime.
The truth is that other areas along the Gulf coast are doing a lot worse than New Orleans is doing. A ton of big corporate money has flowed into New Orleans. Officials are trying to clean up the city and make it a huge tourist destination once again.
But in the surrounding areas things are not looking so bright. There are areas along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the panhandle of Florida that are some of the most depressing places in the nation.
It is almost as if there are hundreds of thousands of people that time forgot. In some rural areas along the Gulf coast the poverty is absolutely mind blowing. There are very few jobs and there is very little hope. Meanwhile, large numbers of people in the region continue to get sick from the toxic dispersants used to clean up the oil spill.
Let us hope that we don't see another major disaster in the Gulf of Mexico any time soon. As it is, it is going to take decades for that region to fully recover. There are a lot of really good people that live down there, and they deserve our prayers.
Vallejo, California (And Virtually The Rest Of The State Of California)
Almost the entire state of California is an economic disaster zone. Austerity measures are being implemented in city after city as tax revenues have nosedived.
The following is an excerpt from a recent New York Times article that describes the brutal austerity that has been implemented in Vallejo, California....
Vallejo is still in bankruptcy. The police force has shrunk from 153 officers to 92. Calls for any but the most serious crimes go unanswered. Residents who complain about prostitutes or vandals are told to fill out a form. Three of the city’s firehouses were closed. Last summer, a fire ravaged a house in one of the city’s better neighborhoods; one of the firetrucks came from another town, 15 miles away. Is this America’s future?
Sadly, that is what the future of America is going to look like. Public services are being slashed all over the nation due to budget crunches.
Unless there is a major jobs recovery, the situation in California is going to continue to degenerate. The truth is that the state of California needs millions and millions of new jobs just to get back to "normal". For example, near the end of last year it was reported that 24.3 percent of the residents of El Centro, California were unemployed. Not only that, as of the end of last year the number of people unemployed in the state of California was approximately equivalent to the entire populations of Nevada, New Hampshire and Vermont combined.
As a result of all of this, home prices in many areas of California have completely fallen off a cliff. For example, the average home in Merced, California has declined in value by 63 percent over the past four years.
California also had more foreclosure filings that any other U.S. state in 2010. The 546,669 total foreclosure filings during the year means that over 4 percent of all the housing units in the state of California received a foreclosure filing at some point during 2010.
Sadly, things don't look like they are going to turn around in California any time soon. Forbes recently compiled a list entitled "Cities Where The Economy May Get Worse".
Six of the top seven spots were held by cities in California.
California is becoming a very frightening place. When you combine high unemployment with unchecked illegal immigration what you get is rampant poverty.
20 percent of the residents of Los Angeles County are now receiving public aid of one form or another.
In particular, the number of children that are considered to be in need of public assistance is truly scary.
Incredibly, 60 percent of all the students attending California public schools now qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches.
Poverty and illegal immigration have also caused a tremendous health care crisis in the state. The hordes of illegal aliens taking advantage of "free" medical care at hospital emergency rooms have caused dozens of hospitals across the state of California to completely shut down. As a result, the state of California now ranks dead last out of all 50 states in the number of emergency rooms per million people.
The bozos in Sacramento keep passing hundreds of new laws in an attempt to "fix" the state, but the truth is that for the poorest residents of the state all of those new laws don't make a shred of difference.
The following is how Victor Davis Hansen describes what he saw during his recent tour of the "forgotten areas of central California"....
Many of the rural trailer-house compounds I saw appear to the naked eye no different from what I have seen in the Third World . There is a Caribbean look to the junked cars, electric wires crisscrossing between various outbuildings, plastic tarps substituting for replacement shingles, lean-tos cobbled together as auxiliary housing, pit bulls unleashed, and geese, goats, and chickens roaming around the yards. The public hears about all sorts of tough California regulations that stymie business - rigid zoning laws, strict building codes, constant inspections - but apparently none of that applies out here.
Hansen also says that he observed that people in these areas are doing whatever they can to get by....
At crossroads, peddlers in a counter-California economy sell almost anything. Here is what I noticed at an intersection on the west side last week: shovels, rakes, hoes, gas pumps, lawnmowers, edgers, blowers, jackets, gloves, and caps. The merchandise was all new. I doubt whether in high-tax California sales taxes or income taxes were paid on any of these stop-and-go transactions.
In two supermarkets 50 miles apart, I was the only one in line who did not pay with a social-service plastic card (gone are the days when "food stamps" were embarrassing bulky coupons).
Are you frightened yet?
You know what they say - "as goes California, so goes the nation".
What is happening in California now is eventually going to come to your area.
Right now California is also having a huge problem with gangs. Gang violence in America is getting totally out of control. According to authorities, there are now over 1 million members of criminal gangs operating inside the country, and those gangs are responsible for up to 80% of the violent crimes committed in the U.S. each year.
But instead of ramping up to fight crime and fight illegal immigration, police forces all over California are being cut back.
For example, because of extreme budget cuts and police layoffs, Oakland, California Police Chief Anthony Batts has announced that there are a number of crimes that his department simply will no longer respond to due to a lack of resources. The following is a partial list of the crimes that police officers in Oakland will no longer be responding to....
burglary
theft
embezzlement
grand theft
grand theft: dog
identity theft
false information to peace officer
required to register as sex or arson offender
dump waste or offensive matter
loud music
possess forged notes
pass fictitious check
obtain money by false voucher
fraudulent use of access cards
stolen license plate
embezzlement by an employee
extortion
attempted extortion
false personification of other
injure telephone/power line
interfere with power line
unauthorized cable tv connection
vandalism
Not that Oakland wasn't already a mess before all this, but now how long do you think it will be before total chaos and anarchy reigns on the streets of Oakland?
But Oakland is not the only major California city that is facing these kinds of issues.
Things have gotten so bad in Stockton, California that the police union put up a billboard with the following message: "Welcome to the 2nd most dangerous city in California. Stop laying off cops."
Already the police force in Stockton has been stripped down to almost nothing.
Meanwhile, the standard of living in California is going right into the toilet. Housing values are plummeting. Unemployment has risen above 20 percent in many areas of the state. Crime and gang activity is on the rise even as police budgets are being hacked to the bone. The health care system is an absolute disaster. At this point California has the fewest emergency rooms per million people out of all 50 states. While all of this has been going on, the state legislature in Sacramento has been very busy passing hundreds of new laws that are mostly about promoting one radical agenda or another. The state government has become so radically anti-business that it is a wonder that any businesses have remained in the state. It seems like the moving vans never stop as an endless parade of businesses and families leave California as quickly as they can.
But this is not just a "California thing". The truth is that what is happening in California, in Detroit, in Camden and in hundreds of other communities is also going to happen where you live.
The U.S. economy is slowly dying. Only 66.8% of American men had a job last year. That was the lowest level that has ever been recorded in U.S. history.
People are getting desperate. There are ten percent fewer middle class jobs than there were a decade ago and the competition for good jobs has become insane. More than 44 million Americans are now on food stamps and that number grows every single month. Millions more American families fall into poverty every single year.
It is time to face the truth about what is happening to America. Our economy is not growing and becoming stronger. Rather, the cold, hard reality of the matter is that our economy is very sick and it is dying. The seemingly boundless prosperity that we have enjoyed for decade after decade is coming to an end. Our communities are being transformed into absolute hellholes.
Those that are telling you that the U.S. economy will soon be better than ever are lying to you. The U.S. economy is going to go down and it is going to go down hard.
In Atlanta, a neighborhood revitalized in the 1990s as part of the city’s Olympic bid has been scarred again by vacant and abandoned homes, undoing years of progress. In Washington D.C.’s struggling Anacostia community, decades of work to rebuild and reinvest are being lost to blight brought on by foreclosures. In Detroit, speculators inspired by late night infomercials and eBay auctions buy foreclosed properties in bulk over the Internet, creating a class of absentee landlords with little interest in rebuilding neighborhoods.
Abandoned and vacant foreclosed homes rapidly piling up in neighborhoods like these around the country are serving as symbols of the secondary damage caused by the foreclosure crisis — a catastrophe felt on the ground but still unseen by Washington. While Treasury Department officials and lawmakers look the other way, communities with shrinking resources are mostly on their own to deal with the blight and drag on property values caused by staggeringly high numbers of empty homes left behind.
States and cities are racing to try everything they can, including creating land banks to take over the properties and fix them up or tear them down. But in a discouraging sign of things to come, some are so overwhelmed as they struggle to cope with record numbers of distressed homes that they can’t even pursue longer term solutions.
There’s still a huge mismatch between the capacity in devastated communities and the waves of foreclosures ahead: Alt-A loans resetting to higher rates in once-hot markets in California, Nevada, and Florida; empty big-box stores left behind by bankrupt retailers; new foreclosures tied to job losses and disappearing industries; and growing volumes of bank-owned foreclosed houses left in disrepair.
“This is a problem that’s only going to get worse unless it’s addressed,” said Frank Alexander, an Emory University School of Law professor in Atlanta who specializes in housing and community development. “Vacant and abandoned properties can be a terrible drain on a neighborhood, for as long as they exist. And some neighborhoods are never going to rebound from this.”
That job is made even harder by the fact that, during the last eight years, the Department of Housing and Urban Development did little or nothing to promote innovative community development ideas, said Dan Kildee, chairman of the the Genesee County Land Bank in Flint, Mich., and the county’s treasurer. That void means communities are starting from scratch in searching for ways to fix the crisis, he said.
While they struggle, properties are left to decline, or to fall prey to speculators ranging from curious Internet surfers to get-rich-quick companies. Speculators make things worse by playing games with foreclosed properties, “treating them like baseball cards” and then walking away, Kildee said.
In Cleveland, Detroit, and elsewhere, speculators from out of state and even overseas buy bank-owned foreclosed homes on Websites like Craigslist or eBay for pennies on the dollar, then try to quickly flip them for a profit, or to rent them out before abandoning them. Speculators also are starting to scoop up vacant and foreclosed homes in stronger housing markets in places like Florida, where some properties aren’t selling because potential homebuyers are still waiting for prices to fall further or they can’t get loans.
One speculator who bought a handful of Detroit properties at fire-sale prices recently described his interest this way:
“I thought it would be quite good fun to have a look,” Darren Veness, who lives near Brighton, England, told the Associated Press.
Alan Mallach, a housing and community development expert who spent time in Detroit last fall researching its housing crisis, has a different take.
A house that might sell in Detroit for as little as $10,000 still would command rent of $700 a month or more, because the rental market hasn’t collapsed yet, Mallach said. Speculators can collect that rent, while spending very little on minimal repairs, and within three years they’ll get their money back with a nice profit. Then, having taken all they can out of the property, they walk away. The house is “exhausted,” in further decline, and left to sell again for even less or to sit empty.
Speculation has gotten so out of hand that there are some neighborhoods in Detroit where every single house is owned by a speculator, Mallach said.
The problem goes even deeper. In some cities, speculators and vacancies essentially have turned the clock back on previous development successes, noted Harold Simon, executive director of the National Housing Institute. Legitimate investors who took a chance on urban areas to open businesses or to buy properties in neighborhoods like Anacostia suffer from the death spiral of property values. Blocks once enticing to new buyers go downhill as they become pockmarked with foreclosed homes.
In Chicago, once-hot neighborhoods on the city’s North Side have become “condo ghost towns” because of foreclosures — and children are afraid to go out after dark because the empty properties have been taken over by drug dealers and criminals, The Chicago Tribunefound. That reversal of past gains is among the most troubling aspect of the foreclosure fallout, Simon said.
“It’s undermined everything that’s been done before,” he said.
That pattern holds true in Atlanta as well, where “we’ve got some neighborhoods here as bad as anything in Cleveland or Detroit,” said Alexander, the Emory University law professor.
In the early 1990s, Atlanta officials worked hard to rehab an ailing southwest city neighborhood, as part of its Olympics quest. Initially, the effort was a success, drawing new homebuyers to a previously neglected community. Now, however, thanks to mortgage fraud and rampant speculation, “it is undoubtedly as depressed there as it was in 1992 or 1993,” Alexander said. “The number of vacancies, abandoned homes, and squatters has basically wiped out all the progress made between 1995 and 2000.”
Things aren’t likely to get better soon. As TWI reported recently, inventories of bank-owned foreclosed properties, known as REOs, are on the rise. Properties become REOs after they are taken back by banks when they fail to sell at sheriff’s sales or foreclosed auctions. Usually, banks try to quickly resell these properties, but the foreclosure crisis has changed all that, leaving bank REO inventories bloated and at record levels. RealtyTrac, an online foreclosure database, predicts some 3 million foreclosures ahead this year, with volume of bank REOs reaching an unprecedented high of 1.5 million.
Beyond that, banks are holding on to some 700,000 properties they still haven’t listed for sale, RealtyTrac reported last week, meaning many more foreclosed houses are in limbo, and have yet to hit the market. Some banks hire property managers to take care of the homes, but others fail to protect them from being vandalized and falling into decline.
Despite those looming threats,the biggest financial help for cities and states dealing with foreclosed properties to date has been nearly $4 billion included in the mortgage rescue bill passed by Congress last summer, and some $2 billion added in the recent stimulus package. To many, it’s not enough to even begin addressing the scope of the problem.
“It’s like putting out a million acre forest fire with a pick and shovel,” said Mallach, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and the National Housing Institute. “I realize the Obama administration has got a lot on its plate, and Treasury is understaffed. But the administration doesn’t seem to be grappling with this issue at all. A lot more people are going to be losing a lot more houses. We’re going to be seeing millions more vacant properties.”
Minyanville Media, Inc. Originally Published on January 20, 2009
During the Gold Rush of the mid 1800s, towns sprung up in the middle of nowhere to support those looking to strike it rich. Similarly, in suburban America, thousands of malls sprung up over the last 20 years to support those delusional shoppers who thought they could spend their way to prosperity.
When the gold rush ended as abruptly as it began, the towns were abandoned. These ghost towns sat vacant for decades, slowly rotting away under the western sun. As you drive around today, you see more and more “For Lease” signs on retailers and strip malls that fell under the initial onslaught of consumer deleveraging.
As the pace of retailers' collapse accelerates in 2009, larger malls will begin to go dark. Once bustling centers of conspicuous consumption and material decadence, built upon a foundation of consumer debt, they will become ghost malls.
For the last 20 years, the American consumer has carried the burden of the world on its broad shoulders.A heavy yoke, to be sure, but one that steroids made lighter — the steroid of choice for American consumers was debt: home equity loans, cash-out refinancing, credit-card debt, and auto loans.It’s been a wild ride, but it's over.The pseudo-wealth created over the last 20 years has begun to unwind and will increase in speed in 2009.
A permanent psychological change has since occurred. American consumers have lost $30 trillion in value from their homes and investments in the last few years. No amount of fiscal stimulation will reverse this trauma, and the consumer’s subsequent retrenching will be felt from Des Moines to Shanghai. Consumer spending has accounted for 72% of GDP; it will revert to at least the long-term mean of 65%.
David Rosenberg, the brilliant Merrill Lynch economist, describes it thus:
"This is an epic event — the end of a 20-year secular credit expansion that went absolutely parabolic from 2001-2007. Before the US economy can truly begin to expand again, the savings rate must rise to pre-bubble levels of 8%, the US housing stocks must fall to below 8 months' supply, and the household interest coverage ratio must fall from 14% to 10.5%. It's important to note what sort of surgery it is going to require.
"We will probably have to eliminate $2 trillion of household debt to get there; this will happen either through debt being written off, as major financial institutions continue to do, or for consumers themselves to shrink their own balance sheets."
There are at least 1.1 million retail stores in the US, according to the Census Bureau. There are approximately 1,100 malls, not counting thousands of strip centers. These numbers will be considerably lower by 2011.
According to the ICSC, about 150,000 stores will shut down in 2009, in addition to the 150,000 that closed in 2008 and the 135,000 in 2007. Normally, 110,000 to 125,000 new stores open per year. At least 700,000 retail jobs will be lost. Some major retailers have closed or will close include: Circuit City (728 stores); Linens N Things (500 stores); Bombay Company (384 stores); Sharper Image (184 stores); Foot Locker (140 stores); Pacific Sunwear (153). Other large retailers are closing underperforming stores and scaling back expansions plans.
By 2011, at least 15% of the existing retail base will have gone to retail heaven. With the amount of vacant stores likely to reach in excess of 200,000 and vacancy rates for new malls already at 28%, there will be no need for new construction for many years.
Most of the retailers that are closing lease their locations from mall developers like General Growth Properties (GGP), Simon Property Group (SPG), Pennsylvania REIT (PEI) and Vornado Realty Trust (VNO). These developers will be hit by a quadruple whammy in 2009. General Growth Properties added $4 billion of debt in the last 3 years, and is now teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Simon Properties, which owns or operates 320 malls, added $3 billion of debt in the same period. Many smaller developers will be in even direr straits.
Many developers borrowed heavily to finance massive mall expansion. The term of these loans were generally five to seven years. According to real-estate expert Andy Miller, the commercial collapse will be more rapid than the residential collapse:
“[You] may have 10 properties in a commercial pool that ultimately works its way into CDOs. Those loans are huge. You may have a shopping center loan in there for $25 million and an office building loan for $30 million dollars. As a result, if you have a default on just one of those loans, you can effectually wipe out all of the subordinate tranches.
"And that is why, when you see the problems begin to appear on the commercial front, it's going to be a much quicker sort of devolution than we saw on the residential side.In the commercial world, most of the financing that happened outside of the apartment business was done by conduits— and there are no more conduits left — and conduits were doing the stupidest loans you could find.
"They were doing an advertised 80% loan-to-value, which was usually more closely aligned to a 100% loan-to-value. They were dealing with no coverage. They were all non-recourse loans. Many of them were interest-only loans. Those loans are now gone. You can't refinance them, and if you could, the terms would be onerous."
Vacancy rates have reached 9.4% for shopping centers, according to CoStar Group. With virtually no demand, rental income is plunging. With cap rates eroding and operating expenses going up, a perfect storm will hit mall developers in 2009.The negative feedback loop will accelerate as the year progresses and will spiral out of control by late 2009 and early 2010; ghost malls, particularly in the outer suburbs, will be the result.
Billions of dollars in debt will need to be refinanced in the next two years — and there’s no one willing to make those loans. The major mall developers are terrified and have launched full-court press to get their fair share of TARP. Commercial developer CB Richard Ellis (CBG) certainly didn’t sound too optimistic in a recent filing:
“We are highly leveraged and have significant debt service obligations. Although our management believes that the incurrence of long-term indebtedness has been important in the development of our business... the cash flow necessary to service this debt is not available for other general corporate purposes, which may limit our flexibility in planning for, or reacting to, changes in our business and in the commercial real estate services industry... Our level of indebtedness and the operating and financial restrictions in our debt agreements both place constraints on the operation of our business.”
As Americans realize that they don’t need a $5 Starbucks latte, Jimmy Choo shoes, Rolex watches, granite countertops, and stainless-steel appliances, our mall-centric world will end. Anchor retailers like Macy’s, JC Penney and Sears are in for a heap of trouble over the next few years.
With shrinking cash flow, looming debt refinancing, and dim prospects for conspicuous consumption, mall developers are destined for a bleak future. Picture a spaghetti-Western-era Clint Eastwood riding a horse through the middle of your local mall — with maybe a few tumbleweeds blowing past that vacant Sharper Image.
James Quinn is a senior director of strategic planning for a major university. James has held high-level financial positions with a retailer, homebuilder and a university in his 22-year career.
Malls, those ubiquitous shopping meccas that sprang up in the 1950s, are dwindling in number, with many struggling properties reduced to largely vacant shells.
On the low-income east side of Charlotte, N.C., the 1.1-million-square-foot Eastland Mall recently lost a slew of key tenants, including a Dillard's and, next month, a Sears. Sales per square foot at the venue fell to $210 in 2008 from $288 in 2001.
As the recession alters American spending habits, traditional shopping malls like Eastland Mall are deteriorating at an accelerating pace.
The Metcalf South Shopping Center in Overland Park, Kansas, is languishing after plans to redevelop it into an open-air shopping district fizzled. The stretch of shops that connects the two largest tenants — a Sears and a Macy's — stands mostly vacant, patrolled by security guards.
With their maze of walkways and fast-food courts, malls have long been an iconic, if sometimes unsightly, presence in the American retail landscape. A few were made famous by their sheer size, others for the range of shopping and social diversions they provided.
But the long recession is helping to empty out the promenades. Some analysts estimate that the number of so-called "dead malls" — centers debilitated by anemic sales and high vacancy rates — will swell to more than 100 by the end of this year.
In the 12 months ended March 31, U.S. malls collectively posted a 6.5% decline in tenants' same-store sales, according to Green Street Advisors Inc., a real-estate research firm. The recent slump was led by an average 7.3% sales drop at Simon Property Group Inc., the operator with the largest number of mall locations.
The industry's woes are worsening. Thinning customer traffic, and subsequent hits to tenants' sales and profits, prompted Standard & Poor's Corp. last month to lower the credit ratings of the department-store sector. That knocked Macy's Inc. and J.C. Penney Co. into junk territory and pushed others deeper into junk. Sears Holdings Corp., a cornerstone tenant at many malls, is expected to close 23 stores this month and next.
General Growth Properties, which owns more than 200 U.S. malls, filed for bankruptcy protection April 16, due mainly to its failure to refinance billions of dollars of debt coming due. While the real-estate investment trust has said the filing will have no impact on its mall business, analysts say a prolonged bankruptcy proceeding could make retailers nervous about sticking around once their leases expire.
The severity of the recession is turning some malls that were once viewed as viable into potential casualties.
"Any mall that's sitting on life support is probably going to get its plug pulled" as the economy stalls, says Michael Glimcher, chairman and CEO of Glimcher Realty Trust, which owns 23 U.S. properties, including Eastland Mall in Charlotte.
One industry rule of thumb holds that any large, enclosed mall generating sales per square foot of $250 or less — the U.S. average is $381— is in danger of failure.By that measure, Eastland is one of 84 dead malls in a 1,032-mall database compiled by Green Street. (The database focuses heavily on malls owned by publicly traded landlords and doesn't account for several dozen failing malls in private hands.) If retail sales continue to decline at current rates, the dead-mall roster could exceed 100 properties by the end of this year, according to Green Street. That's up from an estimated 40 failing malls in 2006, before the recession began.
"This time around, because of the dramatic changes in consumer spending practices, we're very likely to see more malls in the death spiral than we've ever seen before," says Green Street analyst Jim Sullivan.
Failing malls didn't get into trouble overnight, and most began their descent long before the tough climate. Typically, a mall begins to suffer due to job losses and other pressures in the surrounding neighborhood or because a newer mall opens nearby.The loss of key tenants — such as the wave of department-store closures over the past three years — hastens the demise. Also sapping malls' vibrancy: the increased preference among consumers for big-box stores, such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Target Corp., which rarely operate in malls.
Developers, in fact, have been moving away from the enclosed-mall format in favor of big-box centers anchored by free-standing giants such as Wal-Mart or open-air shopping centers with tiny parks and outdoor cafes sprinkled among fashion stores.Only one enclosed mall has opened in the U.S. since 2006: The Mall at Turtle Creek in Jonesboro, Ark.
These pressures, coupled with landlords' difficulties refinancing debts in the bone-dry capital markets, signal tough years ahead for retail-property owners — even after consumer spending begins to rebound.
"The shopping-center bankruptcies and the REIT bankruptcies are the ticking time bomb that people aren't talking about," says Burt P. Flickinger III, managing director of Strategic Resource Group, a research firm...
For towns and cities that are home to dying malls, the fallout can be devastating. Malls hire hundreds of workers and are significant contributors to the local tax base. In suburbs and small towns, malls often are the only major public spaces and the safest venues for teenagers to shop, hang out and seek part-time work.
Commonly, "the mall will be a meeting place, or, in some cases, like a city center," says Carl Steidtmann, chief economist at Deloitte LLP. The deterioration of a mall can spawn broader problems, he notes. "It can become a crime magnet."
During past economic cycles, dead malls were frequently redeveloped into mixed-use space that includes apartments, offices or parks. Repurposing mall space today will be more difficult.Lenders and investors are moving away from commercial real estate as property values decline and delinquencies rise on debt used to acquire or develop properties. Retail real estate has been hit especially hard, as declining retail sales and store closures hammer mall landlords.
In Charlotte, Eastland's deterioration into a dead mall matches the fate of many others across the U.S...
The New World Order Plan is spiritually based: it is a conflict between God and His forces, on the one hand, and Satan and his demonic forces on the other side. Anyone who does not know Biblical doctrine about God and Satan, and who does not know Scriptural prophecy, cannot comprehend the nature of the struggle facing the world today. - David Bay, Cutting Edge Ministries
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. - Ephesians 6:12
For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence... Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. - President John F. Kennedy, April 27, 1961
The book in which they are embodied was first published in the year 1897 by Philip Stepanov for private circulation among his intimate friends. The first time Nilus published them was in 1901 in a book called The Great Within the Small and reprinted in 1905. A copy of this is in the British Museum bearing the date of its reception, August 10, 1906. All copies that were known to exist in Russia were destroyed in the Kerensky regime, and under his successors the possession of a copy by anyone in Soviet land was a crime sufficient to ensure the owner's of being shot on sight. The fact is in itself sufficient proof of the genuineness of the Protocols. The Jewish journals, of course, say that they are a forgery, leaving it to be understood that Professor Nilus, who embodied them in a work of his own, had concocted them for his own purposes.
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