Real estate bubble bananas

Erik and Kelly of Homegrown Evolution (and authors of The Urban Homestead) shared the story of the delicious banana bounty discovered at a foreclosed and abandoned house in Los Angeles.

There's a house in our neighborhood that's been for sale for over a year. Two months ago the for sale signs disappeared, junk mail littered the front porch and the mow and blow guys stopped showing up, leaving the lawn to go wild. A busted sprinkler head creates a nightly fountain as the houses' infrastructure lapses into a timer operated zombification. We knew the nice young family that used to live here and I hope that they were able to sell somehow, but it doesn't look good.

I started picking up the junk mail to make the place looked lived in. I also remembered that the backyard had both figs and bananas, and ventured beyond the gate to see how the fruit was developing (fyi, picking up fallen fruit is important to keep down the rat population). The figs aren't quite ready but the bananas, the ones the squirrels didn't get, were the tastiest damn bananas I've ever eaten. It turns out that our national real estate bubble has a fruit filled silver lining. I imagine that all across America there are abandoned fruit trees yielding their bounty for a new generation of gleaners. Thank you Angelo Mozilo for creating a literal banana republic!

Real estate bubble bananas

• [Takuan]

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKJ77w6uQCg

• [Phoenicks]

  lol I was confused about why I was reading this story twice in one day. We like ze same blogs my good man

• [Anonymous]

  In Oklahoma where we live there are numerous old farmsteads and abandoned home sites that deliver many gleanings in the way of fruit trees and pecans. With a keen eye and a knowlege of foilage a scouting trip on backroads in late summer will pay off in a bounty come fall!

• [Editz]

  Uh, who is paying the water bill?

• [Anonymous]

  There’s a group of scholars studying “smart decline” and the Transition Town movement is doing “Energy Descent Adaption Plans.”

  One professor from Tufts has been looking at what’s happening in Flint, MI and sees that as properties are abandoned, new gardens happen. Here are my notes from one of his presentations last Fall:

  Went to a session on Monday, November 10, 2008, on “Sustainable Design and (un) Development in Cities” by Justin Hollander of Tufts at Harvard. As a student of the Professors Popper at Rutgers who first proposed the Buffalo Commons, Hollander has been examining the cities that have lost population in the last 50 years or so, asking how people are planning for decline rather than growth. He is part of a small movement called “smart decline.”

  It was a rudimentary presentation mostly dealing with Hollander’s studies of the Rust Belt and Flint, MI. It seems that some of the loss in housing has been replaced by urban agriculture but Hollander didn’t really get that agriculture can be both economically transformative and necessary for survival in a sustainable future. Hollander spoke with favor about the transition now happening in Youngstown, OH and their mayor, Jay Willliams, and the work of the Shrinking Cities Institute at UC Berkeley.

  Planning for decline as well as growth is a wise move but politically difficult. Nobody talked about the present housing and mortgage crisis and how it might relate to these issues which I thought was interesting. I brought up resource issues and Peak Oil, especially as one cause mentioned for population decline was the transition away from rail transport and we may soon be transitioning back from trucks. Lots of blinders here, smart people with extremely narrow vision.

  370 cities lost population from 1950-2000 worldwide
  122 metropolitan areas in the US lost population from 2000-2004

  http://www.shrinkingcities.com – German Federal Cultural Council
  European countries are confronting population loss (and aging)

  Smart decline toolkit to be released soon by Kent State Univ
  http://www.tufts.edu/~jholla03

• [Anonymous]

  Hi!

  I was (one of many, perhaps) the guy who suggested that you provide paging of the entries. I was ecstatic that you implemented it…

  so I have another request: Can you simply page using n entries rather than by day? It’s frustrating to go back “a day earlier” several times only to see the same entries appear again and again!

  If you can allow us to page back and forth efficiently, it would be really nice!

• [Anonymous]

  We’ve got plenty of real estate bubble garlic mustard, dandelion, poison ivy and other weeds if you want them here in Brookfield, IL.