{"id":1236,"date":"2008-12-29T12:18:19","date_gmt":"2008-12-29T19:18:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2008\/12\/not-all-suffering-from-this-gnarly-market\/"},"modified":"2008-12-29T12:19:48","modified_gmt":"2008-12-29T19:19:48","slug":"not-all-suffering-from-this-gnarly-market","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2008\/12\/29\/not-all-suffering-from-this-gnarly-market\/","title":{"rendered":"Not All Suffering From This Gnarly Market"},"content":{"rendered":"

from the NY Times<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Skaters Jump In as Foreclosures Drain the Pool<\/h1>\n

<\/p>\n

Jim Wilson\/The New York Times<\/p>\n

A group of friends skating the pool of a foreclosed home this month in Fresno, Calif. Skaters are coming to places like Fresno from as far as Germany and Australia.\u00a0More Photos><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

By\u00a0JESSE McKINLEY<\/a>\u00a0and MALIA WOLLAN<\/p>\n

On a recent morning, a 27-year-old skateboarder who goes by the name Josh Peacock peered into a swimming pool in Fresno, Calif., emptied by his own hands \u2014 and the foreclosure crisis \u2014 and flashed a smile as wide as a half-pipe.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have more pools than we know what to do with,\u201d said Mr. Peacock, who lives in Fresno, the Central Valley city where thousands of homes, many with pools behind them, are in foreclosure. \u201cI can\u2019t even keep track of them all anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0Skaters 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some skateboarders use realty tracking sites like\u00a0realquest.com<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0realtor.com<\/a>\u00a0to find foreclosed houses with pools, while others trawl through satellite images from Google Earth. On the Web site\u00a0skateandannoy.com<\/a>, where skaters trade tips about how to find and drain abandoned pools, one poster wrote about the current economic malaise. \u201cGod bless Greenspan,\u201d the post read, \u201cpatron saint of pool skatin\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are more pools right now than I could possibly skate,\u201d Mr. Morgan said. \u201cIt\u2019s pretty exciting.\u201d Mr. Peacock travels around town in his pickup searching for the addresses of homes he has learned have been foreclosed on, either via the Internet or from a friend who works in real estate. He has also learned to spot a foreclosed house, he said, by looking for \u201cdead grass on the lawn and lockboxes on the front door.\u201d<\/p>\n

[ click to read full article at the NY Times<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from the NY Times Skaters Jump In as Foreclosures Drain the Pool Jim Wilson\/The New York Times A group of friends skating the pool of a foreclosed home this month in Fresno, Calif. Skaters are coming to places like Fresno from as far as Germany and Australia.\u00a0More Photos> By\u00a0JESSE McKINLEY\u00a0and MALIA WOLLAN On a recent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1236\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}