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Views of the recession from different parts of town

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‘Postcards From the Recession: California’s Inland Empire’ Sunday at latimes.com offers novelist Susan Straight’s take on how the rise in foreclosures have shaped life in her neighborhood:

At night, I can hear the soft thumps as the rats land on my roof. They launch themselves from the branches of the apricot tree because they want to get inside my attic, into a house with heat. The house next door, and the one next to that, have been empty since October. Their yards have gone feral, with hundreds of dandelion heads glistening gray in the night. ... Here in the Inland Empire, we joke that our people are canaries but we don’t die. Our foreclosure rate was the highest in the country for many months; Riverside County’s unemployment rate is 12.2%. But we do recession better than many places. We have experience. In the 1980s, we lost Kaiser Steel and many other manufacturers; from 1992-94, the unemployment rate for the Riverside-San Bernardino metro area averaged 10%, with an astonishing 12.1% in July 1992. But this feels different. More desperate.

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The series continues with views from South Los Angeles today and Silver Lake on Tuesday.

-- Lauren Beale

Thoughts? Comments?

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