"Abandoned Houses Everywhere" is the first video in what is intended to be a series about the conditions in and around downtown Alliance.  Many houses and businesses in this area are empty, most of them abandoned and quite a few of them are condemned or ruined beyond repair.

At least one blackened and burned house has been standing in that condition for 12 years!

The city has lost many residents recently, and in no small part due to the mortgage crisis of recent years which has caused forclosures around the country.  Alliance has been taken advantage of by predatory lenders, and now the people who need the most help have been betrayed once again by the unethical bailout of Wall Street that preserves the wealth of rich investors while leaving ordinary people in debt.

The video shows some of the worst houses in my neighborhood, but of course there are many more that there was no time to show.  I spent the month of September surveying my neighborhood and found that of about 600 houses in a 6 block diameter area, about 170 houses are unused, abandoned, or condemned.  That's more than 25%!  This is the worst part of town; there are more condemned and abandoned houses throughout the city, but the highest concentration is here.

The video features children from the area riding bikes around town and standing around the condemned or boarded up buildings.  It also features the 1982 song "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.

It is my hope that this series will have a happy ending.  Already in the past two weeks six condemned houses have been torn down.  But that is only the beginning, that still leaves dozens of ruined and condemned houses, not to mention defunct businesses, and in addition the ones that aren't in such bad shape but stand vacant.

Both major parties in both the House and the Senate, and the President are responsible for passing the bailout bill, which many economists say will only make the inevitable recession worse for everyone.  Ron Paul, for example, has pointed out that adding money to the economy will just raise prices as the dollar becomes more worthless, in effect making everybody else pay for the risky investments of a few wealthy bankers. 

We can see what the result is of the current policies, forclosures and empty houses and near-ghost town neighborhoods.

Stay tuned for Part 2.