From bucolic bliss to 'gated ghetto' - latimes.com

From bucolic bliss to 'gated ghetto' - latimes.com

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Quote from article:

"The 427-home Willowalk tract, built by developer D.R. Horton, featured eight distinct "villages" within its block walls. Along with spacious homes, Willowalk boasted four lakes, a community pool and clubhouse. Fanciful street names such as Pink Savory Way and Bee Balm Road added to the bucolic image...
" Home foreclosures have devastated neighborhoods throughout the country, but the transformation from suburban paradise to blighted community has been especially stark in places like Willowalk -- isolated developments on the far fringes of metropolitan areas that found ready buyers when home prices were soaring but then saw an exodus as values crashed...
" Vacant homes are sprinkled throughout Willowalk, betrayed by foot-high grass. Others are rented, including some to families that use government Section 8 vouchers to live in homes with granite countertops and vaulted ceilings...
...
" The contrast between occupied and empty houses is evident on one block, where high grass in weedy clumps gives way to a neatly mowed lawn with handwritten signs pleading "Please do not let your dog poop on our yard."

My comment:
Background: Hemet is one of 2 dozen or so blighted riverside county CA communities which dot the IE( shorthand for Inland Empire),which is a general designation used to demarcate the entire region east of LA and Orange Counties and west/south of the Scal mountains ringing the greater LA coastal basin, and which generally include the western settled portions of riverside and San berdardino counties.


I have been thru this way out exurban former retirement community and even back in 2004-2006 it was not exactly a pleasant place to reside in. Weather is miserable hot, landscape is bone dry/barren scorched earth most times of year, the place is boring as hell with a single main street(Florida Ave)going thru it for entire length of this narrow long town, and it is a monotony of trailer homes interspersed with cheap retail corner malls , cheap eateries and knick-knack ships. The burst of new IE RE developments started in 2006 thru 2007 during height of IE RE boom which of course all came crashing down in late 2007, and resulted in massive IE foreclosures and the attendant blight, which this article only scratches the surface.