Two Americas: Vacant Cadillac dealership becomes squatters' village, then burns

[KamaAina]

Welcome to Vallejo, CA, an old port city between Oakland and Sacramento and the largest U.S. city to go bankrupt in modern times.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/04/15/BAJ11J14JS.DTL

A fire gutted the defunct Cadillac dealership in Vallejo Thursday, displacing about 50 homeless people who had taken up residence in the showroom and sales offices....

Espiritu was among about a dozen other displaced homeless people who were sitting on the sidewalk across from the dealership after the fire. Some were local residents who lost their homes through foreclosure and, with nowhere else to go, moved into the vacant building, Tweedy said....

Residents had transformed the dealership - which once provided Vallejo's wealthiest residents with luxury autos - into a honeycomb of bedrooms, complete with propane stoves, generators, potted plants, cat litter boxes and even a pool table.

"We had a little community here," said Velvet Farnsworth, 48. "We kept it clean. We took care of it. It was great until the scrappers came."

Kind of sums it all up in a nutshell, doesn't it?

[Newest Reality]

1. A befitting

metaphor for our overall condition, (and potential fates) as well as a tragedy for the people who had found a safe place to squat.

[Melinda]

2. There are no words.

/stunned/ :cry: :cry:

[JVS]

3. Keep on rockin' in the Free World!

[BoWanZi]

4. I'm not sure of the point of the story. The building burned because of an accident, it wasn't arson

So I'm just wondering am I supposed to feel anger or empathy or confusion or what about this story?

I'm sad for the squatters but it wasn't like some angry mean repub came in and burned the place down. It was being left alone until an accident occurred and the place burned down.

[KamaAina]

5. The point is, 50 people were living in a building that once sold luxury cars

illustrative of the shocking decline of our country. And the angry mean repub may not have burned the place down, but he did reduce those people to living in an abandoned building.

[BoWanZi]

7. Ahh, I see what you mean. I'm too much of a realist to care about luxury car aspect of the building

I think that the homeless will go after any unprotected abandoned building. I just don't care much about metaphors and allegories and irony when it comes to the homeless. The reality is just too cold, no pun intended.

[joeybee12]

6. And here we have the definition of irony...knr

[Liberal_in_LA]

8. Lots of vacant dealerships. Looks like the homeless are benefitting.