George Packer has written a great article, The Ponzi State, in the February 9 New Yorker (the link is to the abstract but the full article requires a payment if you’re not a New Yorker subscriber). Here is an excerpt:
Driving around Florida’s ghost subdivisions, if feel not just that their influence is waning but that they are physically hollowing out. In a place like Lehigh Acres, near Fort Myers, where half the driveways are sprouting weeds, and where garbage piles up in the bushes along the outer streets, it’s already possible to see the slums of the future. More and more of the residents in Hamilton Park will be renters like Lee Gaither. The vacant houses in Country Walk will be boarded up. The St. Augustine grass in the front yards of Tanglewood Preserve will grow three feet high. The open fields with street lights but no houses will become dumps.
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