One strike, you're out: the residue of state deregulatory experiments and neoliberal era criminals in a faded Texas boomtown

Both the savings and loans (S&L) crisis of the late 1980s and the more recent subprime mortgage crisis left physical residues in the built landscape of American cities. With the crises, communities that had been the sites of speculative growth became sites of vacant properties, foreclosed properties, unimproved subdivisions, and razed structures. This paper considers the legacy of one such episode of urban development preceding the S&L crisis along Interstate 30 Garland, Texas, where criminals took advantage of deregulation and lax local planning policies to hastily construct a condominium glut. The central argument of the paper is that regional policies fostering outward growth coupled with federal policies stimulating extreme boom and bust cycles have created brief periods in which American Sunbelt communities experience growth pressures, which harnessed incorrectly have created the danger of a ‘one strike, you're out’ scenario: a single chance to succeed or fail. Video abstract Read the transcript Watch the video on Vimeo