The pile of gravel got me
I live in a small town next to a giant pile of gravel lol It’s probably not free. In my case, the owner of the property was planning on putting in a gravel driveway to a old house he was going to fix up but then never did. It’s been abandoned for years, no idea what’s going on now. But he owns the gravel and taking it would be theft. Although I could probably get away with it if I was in a desperate gravel situation.
In the Great Depression, when people would leave their farms, it was common for their neighbors to strip their house to the foundations. However, if that person came back, it was also common for those neighbors to give most of what they took back, and even help rebuild. I think there’s an argument to be made that stealing something that isn’t being used isn’t stealing in a traditional sense, but more ensuring appropriate usage of resources and lessening waste.
Your picture is actually of active, well-used railroad tracks. Old unused tracks are rusty and weed-grown. If the rails are shiny it means that trains pass regularly and knock the rust off. If there’s no weeds it’s because the railroad actively sends out crews to maintain the tracks.
I was just in Japan and even some of their active rail lines have huge 4 ft tall weeds growing in the rail yards
Weed control is a fairly new thing but not an environmentally friendly thing. Maybe Japan doesn’t like spraying pesticide all around.
Used to have a really nice commuter rail that connected to the city, now there’s a six-lane highway that clogs up twice a day.
love driving thru these and seeing the old signs. hate the fuckin 25mph speed traps
One time, I was driving through one of these old towns, and I got pulled over because I didn’t make a complete stop at a stop sign. Admittedly, I was in the wrong, but the judge in town was insane, and coincidentally the father of the sheriff who pulled us over. So the judge tried to have me and the people in the car executed in some crazy deathcoaster contraption unless I agreed to marry his daughter (who bore a striking resemblance to Gus Polinski) but thankfully we managed to get out of there. Also, we got to party with Digital Underground for some reason.
I lived in one of these town for four years. Just before I moved there, they’d made national news for pulling over an ambulance. It was hauling ass taking someone to the hospital, but the local cops felt that issuing a ticket was more important.
The town is also the county seat and regional state patrol center. It’s the highest ratio of law enforcement to citizens in the entire state.
The first day we arrived my wife was pulled over for doing just over 25. Welcome to town!
They still have to follow the rules of the road. In my state legally even running code 3 (lights and sirens) they are only legally allowed to go 5mph over the limit. And if there is an accident the ambulance driver is basically automatically assumed at fault.
It’s the 1970s car friendly town - so car friendly noone wants to go there anymore, because there is nothing than car infrastructure and car pollution. It doesn’t have to be like this, take back your towns folks!
So once upon a time, America was a place where anyone could come to get a good job. In fact, if you were walking down the street in the middle of the day, someone would stop you and say, “Come work here, please.” Practically begging you to get benefits, a pension, and you could buy a house on your salary.
This is because manufacturing was a huge part of the post-WW2 booming American economy, they needed bodies to run the machines, and you didn’t have to know anything or be specially trained, you could just go in and start being productive on day one. Shows like Mad Men, where a bunch of men were sitting around, getting paid to think, that was far more rare than it is today. Most people did something in a factory or warehouse.
Then, international trade became increasingly cheaper. Then countries with poor human rights (ie slaves) were able to undercut companies who were using an American workforce to produce the same product. As execs cut costs to keep up, the workforce became more opinionated, some forming unions, which increased the cost of labor. So beginning in the 60’s and 70’s, they started moving all the manufacturing overseas to areas with cheaper labor. My parents were from Baltimore, they and their parents and everyone they knew had all worked at Bethlehem Steel at Sparrow’s Point (a mill producing steel) almost their entire lives. In the 70’s they started decreasing the workforce, then it got sold to a German company, who moved most of the operations overseas, and by the 90’s my grandparents were basically forced into retirement with a great pension and health insurance, as guaranteed by their union.
Oddly enough this is exactly what happened with the great recession in 2008: overseas companies started offering less-regulated investment opportunities, this put pressure on our own oversight to deregulate - which they did. Then American businesses started packaging more and more risky home loans (called sub-prime loans), and investors were buying them at prime rates because home loans were such a sure thing.
I remember from my life, in a suburb of DC, when a poor family moved into the neighborhood. They had habits that we were not familiar with, to put it politely, and they kinda stuck out like a sore thumb. They only lasted a few months, then got foreclosed on. Basically what had happened was there was pressure on banks for more home loans, so they started offering loans to people who couldn’t normally afford a house, and probably didn’t fully understand the implications of a home loan. The bank probably just told them “Free Money!” and they said ok. But then they couldn’t pay, and this happened so often everyone probably remembers something like this happening around that time.
So anyway, globalization has caused these small towns that used to house workers for a factory to become frozen. Usually around the time the mill closes or massive layoffs happen, workers will move to greener pastures, businesses that relied on them will close, leaving the town in whatever state it’s in. And that’s why you see so many towns exactly like what OP is describing.
