Tuesday, February 11, 2014

over by the airport

i'd post pictures with it, but quite frankly it's too depressing.

i grew up near BTV, which is enough of a close match with the city in which it is almost located that people tend to use "btv" as a synonym for burlington. as in "i have to go into btv for a dentist appointment".

BTV is owned by the city of burlington, even though it is located wholly in the city of south burlington.

back in the 70's airport noise wasn't such a big deal and nice middle class or working class families lived in perfectly nice homes over near the airport.

but then the airport was upgraded and jets got bigger and whole big swaths of south burlington and winooski became pretty close to uninhabitable, but people still live in some of the homes because they;re too stubborn to move or too poor to afford somewhere else, but now the gubmint is bringing BTV the f-35 and i would mind it less if the f-35 was a project that wan't already obsolete, problem-plagued, and super expensive.

and there's an FAA buyback on some of those houses, but dozens and dozens of them just stand empty without so much as blinds on the windows. whole streets of abandoned houses are sad and creepy. whole streets of abandoned houses where your friends and schoolmates used to live even more so.

but it's about the money, you know?

not your money or my money, but the insane greedy profiteering of the defense contractors.

2 comments:

Friko said...

And there was I, thinking Vermont was paradise. We visited once, on a tour of New England and it was very pretty. Perhaps we didn’t really look?

Airports are the pits; we have to travel for hours to reach one. We need to catch a plane to catch a plane.

flask said...

friko, vermont is pretty close to paradise. and we have a lot of lovely parkland that the airport had to develop and preserve in exchange for being allowed to despoil one area.

plus we have to have an airport, you know? it's got to go somewhere.

i don't know what they're going to do with the abandoned streets, but i do know that one set of street abandoned nearby was turned into a very nice dog park and a place where you can park and watch the planes come and go, which is pretty and i understand there's a whole hobby about that.

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