It’s hard for me to know what the depths of a deep depression would actually look like. More closed businesses, for sure, and more foreclosed homes, and fewer new cars on the street, but what else? More homeless around? More day laborers standing on street corners hoping to get picked for a few hours of manual labor? I assume so, but there are already a fair number of both around Oakland, and it would take a really dramatic increase in order for me to tell the difference.

My neck of the woods is probably not an ideal case study either; the PRB is a lot like the PRC, and Oakland has always had more than its share of visible poverty and blight, so increases in poverty and blight are hard to spot. I assume the changes are most dramatically visible in the recently-built exurbs.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the sprawling suburban developments out in the desert in Southern California and Arizona, but when they build them, they often put an artificial lake in the middle, and then give the development a name like “Lago Vista Hacienda” or something ridiculous like that. In order to fool people into thinking that moving to a suburban development hundreds of miles away from any water was a reasonable thing to do, they had to build fake water sources next to the properties in order to fulfill people’s visceral water-yearnings. (Many of those new “luxury” developments will probably be slums or ghost towns within the next couple of years; some of them practically are already.)

I’m preoccupied with the same things you are, but I don’t feel as if I have anything new to say about those matters, so I’m trying to stick to things I can see with my own eyes or have some first-hand knowledge of, like journalism. Write what you know, as they say…

Before looking for a college, Hannie actually said that it had to be near a river! The Charles should have filled the bill..

We may be looking for water more than for oil in the future. On a cheerier note: I loved Amsterdam when I saw the Grachts (canals) in 1939.

Your current emphases on urbanism and environment in the larger sense are well chosen and are a relief, at least to me, from our daily preoccupations: how long before we recover from what ails this country?

I worked on the decommissioned NAS for about 3 years, and I used to shop at the TJ’s at the South Shore mall (recently renamed, absurdly, “Alameda Towne Centre” [sic]) a block from the lagoons, but I didn’t know anything about them until recently.