The current economic downturn is promoting a symbiotic relationship between the traditionally shunned skateboarding subculture, and the remains of middle class suburbia. Foreclosed homes with unused swimming polls (that can be breeding grounds for the West Nile Virus) are being emptied and meticulously cleaned up by Skaters trying to take advantage of riding in them. It’s interesting that skaters are generally chased away from public areas, seen as a destructive nuisance – but in this case, they’re improving these abandoned environments.
The New York Times reports:
In these boom times for skaters, Mr. Peacock travels with a gas-powered pump, five-gallon buckets, shovels and a push broom, risking trespassing charges in the pursuit of emptying forlorn pools and turning them into de facto skate parks.
…
Skaters are coming to places like Fresno from as far as Germany and Australia. Mr. Peacock said his floor and couch were covered by sleeping bags of visiting skateboarders each weekend.
Some skateboarders use realty tracking sites like realquest.com and realtor.com to find foreclosed houses with pools, while others trawl through satellite images from Google Earth. On the Web site skateandannoy.com, where skaters trade tips about how to find and drain abandoned pools, one poster wrote about the current economic malaise. “God bless Greenspan,” the post read, “patron saint of pool skatin’.”
New York Times: “Skaters Jump In as Foreclosures Drain the Pool”
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