Mucho Con-Dough

No Condo Dineiro!

Is your neighbourhood a formerly pleasant place which has recently spread it's legs and asphalt to embrace the loving energies of 21st century condo-construction?

If your neighbourhood looks anything like mine, then it is a collection of noble old buildings pockmarked with unrecognizable changelings occupying the space where noble old buildings once stood, but no longer do, suddenly having gone conspicuously and suspiciously AWOL!

"My Definition is this..."

Condos, as defined by Escape From The Abyss!  are essentially cheaply built units of drywall and M.D.F. designed to extract mortgage payments from the parents of young people who wish to build enough equity to hopefully one day move out of their cheaply built unit and into a 'real investment'. 

Soon after they're built, condos become temporary dwellings super-charged with transient energy, equipped to 'entice one thrice' with all the latest in up-to-date stainless steel appliances, and Ikea fixtures. 

These demonic dead zones are designed to get people to give their hard earned money to the banks, often three to four times of what the unit is actually worth, and who in turn give loans to massive building contractors, leaving the rest of their measly wages, to give to their local mega-municipality in the form of 'property taxes'.

The big bad banksters use the interest on the money they charge to compile it with other mortgages, and thus create those terminally toxic weapons of financial mass destruction, aka 'mortgage backed securities'. MBS's and other instruments not unlike them, look really sweet and safe in a growing vibrant economy, or at least one that doesn't disappear up it's own backside for any extended period.

Debt Sentence

After a few years living in these impersonal and inhuman urban box-units, the condo owner (at least in theory) can then fly the coop and live as human beings were intended to, in a living home of their own, one with history and land useful for growing food, flowers, or whatever ones basic needs may be.

Banks spoon-feed and mollycoddle choice developers and then encourage them to build as many of these presto-boxes as possible, with what can be best described as an almost 'chinese-factory like' determination.

Stroke and Broke!

City administrators and politicians love this symbiotic stroke-job because they bring in some much needed of that highly coveted and aforementioned tax revenue, which indefinitely delays the aforementioned officials 'official' tar and feathering… and yet despite this near perfect scheme and finely oiled machine, my city, like yours, is either broke, or damned close to it!

All this tells me one thing… that the money which comes in as taxes is used to pay the bare minimum payment on it's already X-class supernova of debt, delaying the city's inevitable bankruptcy just a teensy-weensy while longer. 

The desperate nature of it's unforgiving figurative financial obligations is causing cities to rubber-stamp the building of these ubiquitous condos. It is then politically justified as being a good way to keep unemployment figures down as the construction industry hires 'X' amount of workers and provides them with handsome salaries. This serves the purpose of keeping the beast satiated for at least one more day, sustaining the workers ability to meet their unforgiving figurative financial obligations, thus delaying their inevitable default and their filing for impersonal personal bankruptcy. 

Nutella Nutshell in 'Da Hood'

scrape this!

Many people now are just scraping by, (and I ain't just talkin' Nutella) and that wholesale pseudo-prosperity will quickly evaporate the moment the condo market begins to dry up.

My analysis is admittedly simplistic, but in a nutshell, I feel that's pretty much what's happening.

We, the residents within communities, are being forced to 'Ben Dover' and accept the neo-noisy and diabolically dusty disruption to our lives, for someones else's greater good?! 

Yes, there have been positives to the 'condo-boom', my neighbourhood has seen an influx of wealthier people, which in turn raises the quality of life down here in the 'da hood'. 

Tipping Point

There will come a point though, when greed will body-slam my community and yours the moment it become saturated with even more oppressively ugly shit-boxes, until that is, demand tapers off, and what then?  

At that point we'll probably begin to see owners renting out their condos to less than scrupulous individuals, either because they can't afford their premiums, or simply because they don't want to live in a cardboard box for the rest of their lives.  

When the Condo Over-Saturation Point (CO-SP) finally arrives (and it will, like all pernicious overkill in our culture) the blowback will be a rapid decline in building, not seen since the capstone was placed atop the great pyramid on the Giza plateau way back in the year 8008 b.c.e. (give or take a few thousand years)

Ancient Condos?

Enjoy the Decline

So enjoy this brief period, known as the halcyon days of deep pocket 'con-dough'. 

After the devaluation of the once mighty dollar by virtue of sustained cheap interest rates, the over non-printing of money (like a QE-15?) expect 'cheap credit' to whither with it. Normal life in major urban areas will probably then come to a grinding and greaseless halt, and pretty fucking quickly too. 

Cheeseburger, Cheeseburger!!!

Condos ultimately, are about as good for our economy as a truckload of cheap cheeseburgers are to a hungry and overweight middle aged man with stratospheric cholesterol levels… great for satiating the tummy tantrums of what may soon be the best fed man in his early grave.

Dirty CT   April 2012


The Late Great 'Ray Condo'/ Way Out There   Enjoy!