post-subprime and the new suburban wild west

Inspired by reading these two articles today:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/magazine/08Foreclosure-t.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/opinion/08barlow.html

Is the Cleveland article exaggerating the situation a little bit or have things already gotten this crazy in the suburbs? (I've never been to Cleveland but is sounds pretty fucking bad right now.)

I lived in Las Vegas for 3 months and maybe 1/10 doors seemed to be padlocked - (depended on the neighborhood) - but I didn't see much evidence of squatting / the kind of neighborhood chaos suggested. To a certain extent Las Vegas almost seems saved by its own sprawl though - the houses are so far away from each other than it would harder for a bad (post-suburban?) neighborhood to form. There were definitely some HUGE areas of new apartments / planned communities that had just been finished and are either gonna be ghost towns or demolished. Maybe there was squatting going on in those already?

Does anyone have any interesting personal experiences/know any good stories related to this? It's getting horrible and unreal...but sorta objectively totally fascinating as an era in the history of American suburbs?

and also the articles suggest VERY different possibilities for the future, the suburbs as the new williamsburg vs. the suburbs as the new inner city, the second one is obv 10x more realistic, but is the detroit article really as full of it as it seems? maybe not??

you may find these threads interesting. the Atlantic article linked in the first thread predicts this kind of stuff just a little over a year ago.

Death of the Suburbs?
defend the indefensible: MCMANSIONS

that Detroit article is fascinating and inspiring to me for reasons I can't put a finger on. I would love to do something like that.. just.. not in Detroit.

yeah I remember reading that atlantic article, at the time it seemed like this totally theoretical thing. now we're apparently in it hardcore?

which I guess is true for quite a lot of things that were said a year ago

After thinking about it, the whole idea of artists buying property dirt-cheap, and turning it into some kind of crazy ass surreal Burning Man self-sustaining off-the-grid community/art exhibit/neighborhood in some abandoned sector of Detroit seems like one of those things read in a William Gibson book 15 years ago that made the future seem so much cooler than the present.

Maybe that whole cyberpunk thing is going to end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy after all.

it might be wise for these places to study the youngstown, ohio planning model.