How about this for a plan for sprucing up our nation’s crumbling housing projects: ship lazy black folks out to the subprime suburbs, privatize their apartment buildings and hand them over to real estate developers. That’s what T.A. Frank, a New America Foundation think tank shill, thinks Los Angeles needs to do with Jordan Downs, a notoriously dilapidated and crime-wracked project in Watts: (more…)

High desert living in Victorville offers outstanding opportunities for plentiful, secure employment, home ownership, higher education, safe neighborhoods and nearby desert, lake and mountain recreation. Victorville has 20 parks, two municipal golf courses, highly rated schools, truly affordable housing and so much more…

—City of Victorville Economic Development Dept., 2006

Yes, a lot more… (more…)

Living in an abandoned neighborhood in an exurb way out on the edge of the California desert has its perks. There isn’t much in the way of nightlife in Victorville, California, and food options are limited, but it has one hell of a crime scene, maybe the most happening in THE whole state.

Hunter S. Thompson barreled through here with a head full of acid and a rag drenched in ether pressed against his face on his search for the American Dream. And that’s exactly what Victorville, a desert commuter suburb 100 miles east of LA, has become. (more…)

Everything the real estate industry tells you is a hustle. No industry is more geared toward pumping up the positive and burying anything remotely negative, leaving you — and truth — out in the cold.

The crash has not made real estate agents any more honest, but at least the gap between the industry’s crazed optimism and stark reality has grown so obvious that even the real estate industry can’t hide it anymore.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in Victorville, Calif., an exurb of Los Angeles situated in the high desert where housing bubbled up higher than just about anywhere at the peak of the subprime-lending craze and is still in free fall today. (more…)