workers, cleaners, janitors, and ‘‘handymen’’ receive low pay and low social
status; carpenters and masons are well paid and respected.
Difficulty in finding renters for space in central-city office buildings is
accounted for in the same depreciation schedules, yet more so. Corpo-
rations had begun to flee downtowns as early as , separating them-
selves from labor unions while simultaneously finding cheaper land, lower
rents, and fresh buildings with depreciation years in front. The great logic
of build-depreciate-move generated by postwar tax law led, by the end of
the twentieth century, to public admission by mall builders that new shop-
ping centers were typically constructed to last but five years, ten maximum.
Abandonment of malls, as everyone has observed, often proceeds in stages,
with government offices renting some spaces, perhaps also a charitable
flea market or old clothes store, and maybe a Pentecostal church sanctify-
ing a former shoe emporium. Not-so-old malls became derelict, like down-
towns, their massive parking lots—bane of drainage and source of toxic
pollution—living on and on, although now sometimes revived as venues
for illegal nighttime business. Suburban blight is the inevitable, visible ef-
fluvia of suburbanization.
Meanwhile, as downtowns and aging suburbs grew shabbier, rural
places fared little better. First, from the s onward, the most furious
decades of interstate highway construction, many rural roads became in-
eligible for federal support, and many deteriorated in proportion to county
and state governments’ abilities or willingness to assume responsibility.
Farms, rural communities, and woodlands were bulldozed everywhere, but
the blight of neglect or abuse was most obvious in southern Appalachia.
Corporate landholding outside cities and suburbia has usually been lightly
taxed, so when coal companies control from one-half to two-thirds of the
land in a county—the case in Logan, West Virginia; Harlan, Kentucky; and
Wise, Virginia (in )—not only do agricultural fields and country settle-
ments disappear under strip-mine debris, but public services tend to de-
teriorate further. Garbage collection, for instance, was spectacularly absent
in eastern Kentucky—spectacular because during winter and early spring,
along the busy path of I-, naked forests on populated mountain slopes
revealed streams of assorted refuse, including household garbage (from
rotting food to diapers), cans and bottles, scraps of wood and metal, old
auto and truck tires, and rusting, abandoned cars and trucks. Such rural
neighborhoods seldom had sewer systems, either, or inspections of private
septic works. Like as not, drainpipes led from houses to the nearest creek,
where untreated sewage began its course downstream. At the beginning