God this makes me so incredibly sad, and angry. I've gone longer than two years between many neighborhood around my cities, and never once has the change been that drastic. The worst is seeing 2009 and seeing the financial collapse starting to affect people, then knowing you'll see 2011 in utter shambles.

I mean, I understand the reasons the banks went forward with foreclosures. It's logical to expect them to boot people when they don't pay, but to have no sympathy for the state the entire economy was in was cruel on its own, and worse is the fact that they know these houses won't be filled when they're foreclosed on, they'll just rot and destroy the neighborhood and community until everything is demolished. Am I deluded in thinking it would have been better for them in the end to allow the homeowners who weren't paying to stay in the houses? At the very least, they were taking care of them and making the neighborhood a nice place, and there was a chance for revitalization for a lot of these places after the economy recovered. I don't know how exactly they'd go about allowing that to happen, but it's gotta be a better solution that what they came up with.