RRC Archives

I think we all need to re-read Ishmael. I am a hypocrite... and so is everyone else, whether you live in the sprawl, or in a totally hip regentrified area of the city, or in the country..... whatever. However, I will probably continue to act like a smug asshole myself. ;

I consider the Highlands to be urban. But the closer you get to the business core, the more dense and therefore the "more urban" it becomes. In the case of Louisville there are several areas of urban blight surrounding the business district. The property is WAY undervalued and underused. Hell, ten years ago you could've bought a gorgeous building on Main Street for less than a half a million. What's known as "Old Louisville" has been allowed to decay and devalue and if you think the suburbs are nicer to look at than that, well, I've got a nice poster of some big-eyed dogs playing poker for you. I've worked on houses out in the 'burbs and I will be very surprised if any of those things are standing in 50 years, much less 150 years like my place. The materials leech poisons, the construction is shoddy and minimal, the insulation is generally inadequate while the HVAC system is too big to operate nominally... the houses in those places are CRAP.

In the past we tried to build for the future. Now we could give a shit about anything but the now.

I agree, I love the house I live in on Highland Ave. Lots of character, very old, but definitely allowed to go to shit. I would love to buy it and eventually restore it though. People tell me I should buy new cus of the problems with old houses, but I fear the larger problems with the expensive but cheaply built new houses.
I once rented a house on the very edge of the suburban sprawl, it was great quiet on top of a hil with an acre or so of land. The sprawl had pushed its way into our view though After one day of a really hard rain in Lexington, we sat on the front porch of the house, kinda pissed about our basement flooding, but the sight from across the street made things not so bad. Every single house on the edge of the sprawl had its siding ripped off and in some cases even the shingles and part of the roof were gone. It made me never want to buy one of those new houses.

I refuse to work on modern houses now. Every time I've gone in to fix something on a new house I have found multiple layers of fucked up shit. Substandard materials (like using 1/8" particle board under siding), complete lack of drip edges at almost every place they're needed, siding you can remove with a quick pull with one hand, concrete that has been cut with so many rocks and sand it's a wonder it doesn't crumble in a breeze, the electrical shit I've seen is frightening to say the least, and I could go on and on with problems I've fixed on new houses and it wouldn't cover the problems I've just seen and not fixed. On top of that, these "cheap" homes are being built by criminals who hire a crew of illegals to work for $7/hour while billing at $50/hr. In my opinion the employers should be locked up with drug sentences surpassing those of drug possession. In construction these days you cannot compete if you run a legal business. It's fucking pathetic. You've got Lou Dobbs screaming about all those brown people invading our country when the fact is it's the rich motherfuckers that support him and the GOP that are the ones responsible for them being here.

Actually that's not placing all the blame where it belongs. Everyone that buys one of these cheap piece of shit houses is supporting the criminals that built it. You are more guilty than the contractor that built it. Ignorance is not innocence.

Evil: I second your opinion about the new stuff that is going up. They are basically balloons. These are future slums, and the future is not distant.

Future slums is right. Poverty is moving into the suburbs in a hurry.