A great indepth piece in this Sunday’s New York Times surveys the Cleveland neighborhood of “Slavic Village”, which has been an epicenter of foreclosures in a county that has lost over 100,000 people in the last decade.

Today, the area can hardly be described as a neighborhood.  A well-kept house in this part of town has plywood over broken windows and doors.  Inside, the shameless removal of utilities like copper piping, electrical wire and boiler heaters have destroyed interior walls and floors.  To call these houses “raped and pillaged” wouldn’t be an understatement.  Squatters use the buildings as temporary dwellings, while speculators treat them as playing cards – with many homes selling for a couple hundred or thousand dollars.

Its a bleak picture.  And because Cleveland has suffered longer than most cities – thanks to a out-dated industrial economy – many other cities look to it now with bloody fingernails wondering if that’s their future too.   As Wheatley pointed out last week, with the third highest foreclosure rate in the country, Atlanta is one of a long list of cities mentioned as looking hesitantly toward Cleveland.  The article even quotes Dan Immergluck, an associate prof at Georgia Tech in urban planning, who states bluntly, “Cleveland is a bellwether…It’s where other cities are heading because of the economic downturn.”

Yikes.  So, could parts of Atlanta really become as bleak as neighborhoods like Slavic Village?

It certainly isn’t beyond the realm of comprehension.  Foreclosure rates are highest in areas of Atlanta already plagued with high unemployment – just take a look at the news coming out of South DeKalb.  Our overbuilt metro area has already provided plenty of vistas of lonely and vacant subdivisions.   If this trend continues and these homes aren’t bought up and maintained, they will quickly become – wait for it – toxic.  No one will want them for fear of the expense of taxes and upkeep.  And demolition ain’t free.   In Slavic Village it costs $8,000 a pop.

But is this really Atlanta’s future?  Well to start, Atlanta’s obvious advantage over Cleveland is its more diverse and vibrant economy.   The city has spent the last 20 years reviving its economy, building an economic base that is still attracting new people to the city.  That can’t be a bad thing, especially with so many empty homes and condos available.  However, in our attempts to make a quick buck, developers have overestimated demand both intown and out in the ‘burbs.   The future of these developments is unknown.  If nobody wants them, who’s going to pay to have them torn down?  And if they’re not torn down, what becomes of them?

We’ll just have to wait and see.

This story popped yesterday when Forbes ranked the nation’s “emptiest” cities and Atlanta came in third behind housing-hedonist Las Vegas and car-dependent Detroit in terms of vacant rental units and single-family homes.  The AJC’s print edition led with the story in this morning’s paper and does a pretty good job at taking apart the data, citing many local experts.

So, why does Atlanta have more available property than almost every other U.S. city?  The AJC article states that some of it has to do with the vastness of the metro-area (28 counties) and our particularly potent combination of an overbuilt market with a high rate of foreclosures.   From that it sounds to me like Atlanta might just be the victim of its own early 21st century popularity.

But probably the most interesting trend cited is that the census data is also showing that the city’s population is still growing.  Sound impossible?  Apparently, more people are moving in together instead of buying their own property.

This trend helps the AJC article end on a high hote… “As the economy stabilizes, [Emory Prof. Frank] Alexander said, demand should rebound quickly, unlike in No. 2 Detroit, where population has been steadily declining.”

And when will that be?  Unfortunately, people much smarter than myself keep talking more and more about a “lost decade”.