With every disaster comes benefits for some. Katrina helped boost cable TV ratings, The Iraq war was a blessing for purveyors of arms and mercenaries, and the 2008 Mariners mean we don’t have to reserve tickets in advance and pay those stiff fees as plenty of seats are available at the gate.
The housing disaster also creates beneficiaries. Take my neighborhood, for example. Methamphetamine Lane where the sun don’t shine has never had so many empty houses and several have stood empty for months. A few are the victims of competition in the rental market. The tenants were going through hard times as cheap imports closed down their in-house meth factories, leaving the occupants unable to pay the bills. All they did was watch TV and wonder why none of the presidential candidates were talking about the outsourcing of illegal drugs, which has harmed so many illiterate Americans with the entrepreneurial spirit. But pretty soon the cable guy disconnected the TV and they left for cheaper digs elsewhere. With so many unsold homes around the island, landlords are cutting rates.
Another house was formerly occupied by a man living the American dream. He had arrived in the U.S. years ago, worked hard, saved his money, and purchased a home for twice what it was worth ten years ago, but half of what it would be worth in five years, or so his real estate agent told him. As soon as he moved in he hurt his back, and since he had no health insurance he couldn’t make the house payments. Then he couldn’t sell the house at the price he needed to avoid bankruptcy, so one night he and his family just disappeared. The American dream isn’t what it used to be.
The houses sat empty all winter and spring, entirely unattended. This was a bonanza for my special type of gardening, which I call kleptogardening. Those of us in the kleptogardening brotherhood “borrow” plants from our neighbors without them knowing it, and this practice is much easier when the neighbors have left for good.
Even without sunshine, Methamphatine Lane has been a veritable Eden this spring. With no humans to tame them, plants have crawled out of their planters, jumped across sidewalks and paths, sprouted up in driveways, and generally established roots where they obviously don’t belong. The plants have literally grown wild, thriving without fertilizers or weed killers or green-thumbed caretakers, and are there for the taking. Kleptogardeners don’t even have to be sneaky any more. If caught in the act, it looks like we’re just sprucing up the vacant premises.
The thing about kleptogardeners is that they can’t identify any plant by name, except perhaps a rose, so they just take what’s available. Over the weekend I filled a bare spot in our yard with some green creepy ivy things with silver-edged leaves, various fern-like plants, and things with tiny blue flowers. There were so many growing around the vacant houses that there is no sign that any were taken, and no doubt there will be more where they were uprooted tomorrow.
So next time there’s a crisis, remember there’s always a bright side. When we run out of gas, we can turn all the untamed flowers around the vacant houses into biodiesel. Until then, feel free to take some for your garden.
