"Neighbors Who Disappear In The Night"

Since the housing bubble burst, one of the themes I've focused on has been how fiscal and monetary policies that result in large-scale bankruptcies, widespread home loss, and a generation of experience-hardened cynics should be anathema to conservatism. Unfortunately, there are still too many self-avowed conservatives -- usually the lapel flag pin types, champions of optimism and upward mobility, ironically -- willing to defend policies that result in this madness:

The streets are empty. Trash rustles down the road past rusted barbecues, abandoned furniture, sagging homes and gardens turned to weed.

This is Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland and a town ravaged by the subprime mortgage crisis roiling the United States.

Faded "for sale" signs sit in front of deserted houses. The residents are gone, either in search of new jobs after the factories shut down, or in shame after being evicted for missing their mortgage payments.

A red, white and blue American flag flies over windows and doors which have been boarded up to keep the drug dealers away.

Thieves have stripped many homes of the plumbing, the doors, the windows, the aluminum siding.

The police station parking lot is full. The officers, who have seen their numbers triple since 2006, are coming back from their rounds. They speak of installing alarms in some of the homes claimed by squatters.

At 9422 Chagrin Street, a hand-scrawled sign attached to a window indicates someone lives there: "Please Used."

After three rings of the bell, Sarah Evans, 60, opens the door with a mixture of curiosity and alarm.

She says she is one of the last people left on the street. And she is on the verge of losing this two-bedroom house in which she has lived for more than 30 years because she simply cannot afford her monthly payments....

Laura Johnston, 50, says that her street -- about 10 minutes away by car -- was alive two years ago. Today, half the houses are abandoned.

"Folks could not afford their payments. They were asked to pay loans which doubled. They could not afford it, some lost their job. Lenders were greedy. They threw them out of their homes," she told AFP.

"I'm very upset. I missed my friend Helen. She disappeared overnight. She did not even say goodbye."

There are plenty of cases like Helen. They are called the neighbors who disappear in the night.

This is the heartland -- not Vegas, Los Angeles, or the west coast of Florida. And it's happening all over the country, from places like Shaker Heights to the leafy suburbs of Atlanta, Boston, and New York. No doubt some titular conservatives can write it all off with some ad hoc variation of faux-Schumpeterian creative destruction. But since home loss strikes at the heart of what many consider the American dream (with obvious longer-term implications for families, kids, and the bonds that hold society together at the local level) this seems less the result of bad monetary policy than some sort of radical social experiment gone horribly awry.

Conservatives have a bitter pill to swallow. You can spin this stuff a million ways (Clinton was reined in by Congress/he inherited Reagan's peace dividend/the economy was already stalling out by 2000, etc) and Heritage can churn out all the policy papers it wants. But if a Democrat wins in November and can take credit for fixing the current mess after one or two terms in office, an apparent pattern of Republicans leaving the economy in shambles and Democrats cleaning things up will have developed over the course of a quarter-century. And it'll take a lot more than lapel flag pins to change that perception.