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- My neighbor is delinquent on his property taxes. While I'm worried about him, I'm also selfishly very worried for myself - what if his property gets auctioned off and some developer buys it, knocks down the huge old shop, and puts up some goddamn fancy upscale townhouses? That's exactly what would happen. So I imagine getting some neighbors together as a group to buy the shop and use it for our own purposes - we'll be a neighborhood social club and historical society, we'll host monthly talks on the history of this town, we'll have social events - summer potlucks, a reading club - we'll assemble a museum of historical artifacts from the neighborhood, we'll go for walks and pick up garbage, we'll solve mysteries. We'll have printouts of the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps of the neighborhood, the ones showing that the shop was an auto repair shop with an underground 800-gallon service tank out front in the 19teens, and after that was a woodworking shop, and an upholstery shop at some point. We'll scour the country for photos of the building down the street that was the original neighborhood school, and then was a church, and now is a house. Scholars will come to visit and research. Newspaper articles will be written about us. Eventually we'll all die but the shop will continue in a trust. Or maybe he'll pay up, hopefully.
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