“The wet hedgerows cultivated along the highway to
hide the wet road from the wet houses now hide the wet houses from the wet
road. PICTURE OF THE VILLAGE OF THE FUTURE, reads a dripping billboard with a
picture of a village that will never be built. Randomly selecting a village
that appears to be more or less finished, we pull off the road. It’s an exurb,
without a suburb. GLEANN RIADA, reads the self-important sign in front. It’s a
few dozen houses in a field, attached to nothing but each other, ending with
unoccupied slabs of concrete buried in weeds. You can see the moment the money
stopped flowing from the Irish banks, the developer folded his tent, and the
Polish workers went home. ‘The guys who laid this didn’t even believe it was
supposed to be finished,’ says Ian. The concrete slab, like the completed
houses, is riven by the cracks that you see in a house after a major
earthquake, but in this case are caused by carelessness. Inside, the floors are
littered with trash and debris, the fixtures have been ripped out of the
kitchen, and mold spreads spider-like across the walls. The last time I saw an
interior like this was in New Orleans after Katrina.”—Michael Lewis, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World
(2011)
(Photo showing Michael Lewis at Hudson Union Society
event in 2009, taken by Justin Hoch.)
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