Ghost Towns Across America

Posted by Carol Coletta on August 05, 2008

Bentonville, Arkansas is home to Wal-Mart.  It is also, according to The Wall Street Journal, home to half-built subdivisions that are today very lonesome places.  In this formerly booming community, signs promoting "Elegant Homes" sit on lots "choked with weeds.  The block is as quiet as an old ghost town." 

"Daily life in these developments seems a bit post-cataclysmic.  Children play on elaborate but empty playgrounds.  They walk their dogs past rows of shiny houses that have never been lived in.  Unfinished houses and vacant lots strewn with construction debris clutter the horizon.  Chickens walk past from nearby farms."

Here's the important part for the future:  "...many of the region's new subdivisions, with houses that can't be rented, much less sold, are forelorn monuments to disastrous real-estate forecasting."  Notice:  Forecasting does not make it so.