Subdivision Horror Story
In 2009 I was living in a very small town on the outskirts of a slightly bigger town. About a mile from my house was a failed subdivision that I will call Morton Mills. Someone had spent a lot of money on the entryway to Morton Mills. On either side of the drive into the subdivision were big brick terraced structures that had beds in them for flowers (and which were now just filled with pokeberry bushes and reedy grass); a black wrought-iron gate leaning open; matching black wrought-iron letters that were attached to one of the brick structures and that spelled out Morton Mills in a hopeful kind of font. Once you’re through the gate and into the place, though, you realize how desolate it is. It’s hilly, unusually so for this part of Georgia, and so you can look down and see acre after acre – 100 acres in all -- of empty lots marked off, the pvc pipes for the plumbing sticking up through the dirt like bones. The roads wind through these abandoned lots, each with a little sign optimis...