M.N. Shand Woodland Preserve: Homes in the High 800s I don’t know much about a lot of things. I don’t know about construction, or housing developments, or zoning regulations. I don’t know how much it costs to bulldoze a forest, to terraform the surface of the Earth, to consult with landscape architects to build terraced pedestals for eight hundred thousand dollar homes. I’ve seen it happen though, just around the corner from my apartment complex. Someone, probably some rich old white guy named John Wieland (credited with inventing McMansionized suburbia in the southeast) must have gone to city hall or something with a big bag with a dollar sign on the outside, and in exchange got a piece of paper with some words on it that more or less gave him permission to do whatever he wanted with one of the last little shreds of wild-ish space around here. I didn’t see that part happen. What I saw was the next part, the part where giant yellow destruction rigs roared around the woods, tearing stuff down, tearing stuff up, moving massive quantities of earth around. Who knows how many insects they displaced? How many different types? How many thousands, maybe millions, maybe more, scrabbling through raw dirt exposed to the baking sun in heaps that get slapped with tools to shape it suitably for human homes. Well, that was probably the plan, anyway. They finished the development half a year ago, but not a single house has gone up. Maybe it has to do with the very active railroad next door? Or maybe it has to do with how many other empty developments there are now, scattered around metro Atlanta? Maybe it’s an inflated housing market, another bubble waiting to pop? Maybe it’s stagnant wages or millennials who don’t want to live and work and die in the same spot over the next 40-50 years? Instead of eight hundred thousand dollar homes, there’s empty streets marked with spray paint glyphs I cannot decipher. There are poles and bundles of cable protruding from the ground, sewer covers that tell you the storm water drains into local waterways, so don’t dump here. There are lumps of dog poop, half-buried styrofoam cups, and single-use plastic water bottles left over from the mercenaries who wrecked this place. There are stop signs that don’t stop anyone, and street signs letting you know the name of the empty, untrafficked stretch of concrete you’re walking on. I walk here a few times a week, towards the end of the day, when the heat is draining out of the world and the sun is collapsing behind a line of trees that haven’t yet been sundered. I come at dusk, hoping to catch sight of some of the refugees that linger around this place, wandering around the scars of what used to be their home. I catch a glimpse of white-tailed deer, scampering at the
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