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10
Jan 2009
Foreclosures are snow fun
Posted by Scott Spielman
at 11:42 AM | Comments
The sound of a snow blower was one of the first things I heard this morning.
It came from across the street where, sure enough, my neighbor Bill was slowly clearing away the first few inches of powder that fell overnight. Just like last time, his route had gotten a little longer because he didn’t stop at his property line but went on to clear away snow from the house next door to his, which is vacant—a rental property that hasn’t seen a new tenant in about two years.
Next door to me there is a similar situation, a house that sits foreclosed. My neighbor on the other side of that property and I have a sort of unspoken agreement: he takes care of the half near his house and I take care of the half near mine. (I say it’s an unspoken agreement because we haven’t actually talked about it and during the last snow fall I was too busy to keep up my end of the ‘bargain.’) Further down the street, though, there is a cluster of three or four foreclosures with sidewalks that become impassable during the freeze/thaw cycle we’ve experienced this winter. The snow and ice there clings to leaves that were never raked up.
The foreclosure crisis brings out the worst in neighborhoods, but it sometimes brings out the best, too. Sure, we could let everything just go to seed but with a little bit of extra effort we can still let people know that our concern for our neighborhoods doesn’t stop at our property line.
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