Cleveland blogger Bill Callahan follows another development in the foreclosure crisis hitting Cleveland and other cities in the Midwest. He illustrates the end result of something I wrote about yesterday, the increasing problem of banks and mortgage companies dumping their  properties and walking away, leaving cities to clean up the mess. As homes move down the chain from the homeowner, to the bank, to the speculator, they wind up as little more than neighborhood blight. Note in Callahan’s post just how long this two-family house has been sitting vacant—two years.

So if you have to pass by something like this every day, I somehow doubt that the front-page news of Ben Bernanke’s support for a stimulus plan makes you think, hey, good times are just around the corner. Not on your corner, anyway.